Virtual Project Teams: Challenges and Solutions

This assignment explores the concept of virtual project teams, analyzing why companies are adopting this model and highlighting key challenges associated with virtual collaboration. It delves into communication complexities, time zone differences, and the impact on team cohesion. The solution proposes strategies to overcome these hurdles, emphasizing clear communication protocols, regular virtual meetings, and fostering a sense of camaraderie among team members.

Project Management
Virtual Project Team
Name of University
Student’s Name
Dated

Virtual Project Team
Question1. Why do you think that companies are deploying Virtual Project Teams?
Solution: The projects now a day are becoming more complex and the construction sites are very
remote in nature, in such cases, relocating the team members who especially works from the
office itself is not required by using the virtual team concept. Team members who may need to
visit the site very rarely maybe once or twice in the whole project lifecycle are not required to be
totally shifted from the base office to remote site locations. It has sometimes found that by
forcing such transfer orders, even though being efficient and good employee record, they had to
leave the organization for personal commitments.
By using virtual team, the best efficient project team members across the globe can be
recruited for any project for getting the best results at a very cheaper rate and the convenient of
the employees to operate not only from their city but from their own home itself to maintain the
work & life balance.
Question2. What do you see as some of the key challenges in working in a Virtual
Environment?
Solution: Even though the virtual team has many advantages of working and being flexible, at
the same time it has many operational issues which are restricting its use as a whole by all the
organizations. Few challenges are:
The main challenge is being faced by the Project Manager to manage the team members
especially with those who are having long geographical distance since the overlap period
of working with the Project Manager and the team members are very small compared to
the traditional project teams who can meet anytime whenever they want to.
In the virtual environment, the communication management becomes very complex and
sometimes it may become tedious when there are some network issues in the system.
The meeting time, the job delivery time etc. are totally dependent on the network system
and its availability will become the high-risk requirement of the project and can lose
much of the project’s time and patience of other team member’s too.

Virtual Project Team
Question3. What would you do to overcome these challenges in order to create a high-
performance team?
Solution: All the drawbacks of having a virtual project team cannot be resolved fully, but few of
them can be managed by organizing the proper method of operation to minimize the
communication gap. Few methods of overcoming the challenges of the virtual project team are:
By developing a ground rule of communicating between the team members (Mattus,
2010)
By arranging official get together at one time at least once in a month between the team
members via video conferencing and arranging the same food menu among all the
members through known fast food centers like KFC, McDonald’s etc.
Always encourage distribution of gifts in case of any anniversaries or occasions.
This is to conclude, that we can do some technical betterment in the network system so that it
remains available 24 hours and increase the personal touch among the team members to reduce
the impact of inability to meet physically to improve the efficiency and cohesiveness among the
team members.
References
Mattus, T. J. (2010). The Challenges of Managing Virtual Project Teams. PMI Global Congress
(pp. 1-7). Milan, Italy: PMI.