Our motto is “we help companies to leverage the best of virtual teams”. One building block to keep this promise is to ensure our experiences, lessons learnt and commonly accepted best practices are properly reflected in any project. For this, we currently prepare a “Virtual-T Successful Remote Teams Framework”. Our goal is to cover all aspects of successful virtual teams and provide a handbook to achieve it. Here, we simply want to address some small parts.
Delivery: Similar to any other typical project, the customers main interest is the delivery of the team as a whole. In our case (DevOps), this will be a new feature of even a full product, providing the expected functionality in quality, implemented in time and within the given budget. Coming from years of successful offshore/nearshore software projects, this is our heritage and easily covered.
But of course, there are many more aspects to consider.
Cultural fit: When looking further into successful client teams, the team members have to fit to the culture in place at the customer. Those cultural aspects might be official and documented, e.g., company values, or being unspoken but well established and accepted. In comparison, adapting to the customers tools and processes should be the easy, straightforward task. Truly adapting to the behavioral patterns, communication styles etc. is often a more subtle process, requiring motivation and time, on both sides.
Keeping the team together long term: After all this is achieved, it is of high interest to benefit from those efforts and keep the team together and well aligned on the long run. An article by Strategy& covers this well written and to the point: “Keeping your virtual team together over the long term” https://www.strategyand.pwc.com
- Set up daily interactive meetings
- Sustain normality and camaraderie in unconventional ways
- Prioritize virtual face-to-face contact and direct communication
- Meet up in your digital coffee kitchen
- Organize virtual team events
- Allocate time for social interaction and engagement outside of work
All of the above-mentioned aspects shall be covered by our framework and many more. Since this topic is addressed by numerous experts out there, we are happy to receive any input, feedback, or other valuable information. Even anyone wanting to test parts of the Framework is highly welcome. Simply contact us via info@virtual.com.