This is about starting your remote team. The very first thing we do is to draft the charter.
We then authorize it using the authority of the sponsor. This means that we have a fixed starting point for the project which is very important. If this us not done, people tend to go around in circles and the negotiations always take time.
The next thing that we do is to bring the team together online, to explain the charter to them and get their feedback from it.
Then we take everybody in the team and set up a matrix where we ask everybody to make a one-to-one call to all the other people in the team, to introduce themselves.
They can do things such as looking at their facebook pages showing photographs of their children, using Street View to show where they live and similar personal things, to get a feeling of who the other person is.
Then the first assignment of the team is to draft the team communication rules.
If the team cannot agree for example which application is used to set up team meetings or which application is used for writing notes, then you tend to loose a lot of time just moving from one to the other.
We then hold another meeting with the team to review these rules together. When agreed, we go back to the sponsor and say “We have agreed to these rules. Can we write these into the Charter?”
If you follow this sequence, you have some chance of the team starting up quickly and reasonably under control.
I wish you good luck, Thank you.
Dr. Deasún Ó Conchúir (pronounce) is a Collaboration Consultant at Scatterwork, which supports Project Solutions for Virtual Teams.
Email: deasun@gd.scatterwork.com
Tel: +41 79 692 4735 Talk to me
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