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Is your team spread out geographically? Do you collaborate with remote groups or divisions, 3rd-party developers, suppliers and vendors? Does you staff telecommute? More and more project managers are finding themselves managing virtual teams -- teams whose members, by choice or by circumstance, are not collocated in the same building. And while there can be significant advantages to virtual teams, there are also daunting problems when the "30-foot rule" of close collaboration is violated. How do you make the transition from collocated teams to distributed teams? After acquiring and using the state of the art in communication, network, and collaboration technology, does your organization still have serious problems in managing teams at a distance? Some organizations do quite well with virtual teams -- what is their secret and can we get in on it?
- CHECKLIST: We have a Vendor Assessment Checklist to help you choose your third-party companies and contract resources carefully.
- TEMPLATE: Our Tracking with Visible Deliverables template provides formats and example project data illustrating effective ways to track project progress --- by explicitly tracking drafts, reviews, and completion of multiple very small deliverables. Embedded Excel files provide both data charts for capturing progress, and graphs automatically generated off the data.
- TEMPLATE: Meeting Evaluation Guidelines provides a simple questionnaire and process to help evaluate meeting effectiveness and suggest goals for improvement. Two formats accommodate formal or informal meeting environments.
- GUIDELINES: When outside partners are employed to execute part or all of a project, the contract with that partner is critical for defining expectations, due dates, and responsibilities. The Partner Contract Guidelines template provides guidelines for typical contents for such contracts. It covers typical terms related to intellectual property ownership, project management responsibilities, division of work on the project, communication and escalation procedures, and more.
- PAPER: The idea of using outside partners to increase what your organization can get done, or get access to a competency your group doesn't have, sounds wonderful. But we can't overlook the difficulty of actually achieving truly synergistic partnerships-and ultimately successful projects-using such team members outside the corporation. If not created and managed properly, these teams actually can seriously threaten a firm's critical time-to-market goals. The paper "Getting Aligned and Staying In Sync for Successful Projects with Outside Partners" provides some ideas for assessing and selecting team members, planning a project considering the specific ramifications of remote members, and managing communication and the project's activities to successful completion.
- PAPER: The paper "Best Practices from Experiences in Facilitating Virtual Meetings" arose from the authors' work facilitating 100 virtual meetings, both for the Navy and other related organizations. These meetings included idea generation, planning, decision-making, issues surfacing, status briefings, environmental scanning, collaborative writing, training, and expert briefings. From this experience the authors identified their set of lessons learned, and honed a set of best practices for addressing these lessons. The lessons and practices cover specifics in areas like effects on virtual meetings when the groups are in different timezones, how to get all parties to follow an effective meeting process, and how to deal with issues with virtual meeting technology.
- GUIDELINE: Our Web Conferencing Planning Activities guideline walks you through the whys and hows of creating a quality online presentation experience for your virtual team or organization.
- BURNING QUESTIONS: For some tips, templates, and advice on choosing an outsourced vendor, see the burning question I want to outsource part of the development. How should I plan this? in the Planning and Scope section of our knowledge base.
- BOOKS: Among our book recommendations for Virtual/Distant Teams are Martha Haywood's Managing Virtual Teams for a great all-around reference; and Virtual Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time, and Organizations With Technology, by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps.
OFFSITE LINKS
- Formulation Development: Even if your world is nowhere close to the pharma/biotech world, the philosophy of "asking the right questions internally" before selecting an outside vendor is one that applies to us all. (Plus, it's downright fun to read about such aspects of developing and delivering the amazing drugs we take for granted...)
- Contract Pharma magazine articles archive. Multiple articles on aspects of outsourcing in pharmaceutical and biotech industries.
- Contract Manufacturing article on the Medical DeviceLink website. Roundtable discussion "How Contract Manufacturing is Reshaping the Device Industry." Includes comments on typical pitfalls and requirements for success in these relationships.
- Co-Development Whitepaper written by PRTM (consulting firm) entitled "The Emerging Model of Co-Development." Discusses their framework for co-development including picking partners, integrating processes, and the enabling infrastructure. Uses examples from Cisco, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Flextronics.
- Virtual Team Articles from the Orion Development Group. See also their downloads section on this site.
- Outsourcing Law Website created by an attorney which includes explanatory information and short papers on aspects of outsourcing deals, processes, and overall guidelines.
- Outsourcing Contract Format. Contract document format for an outsourcing contract. View the outline, or pay to an download annotated, editable document template.
- Pharma Licensing Articles. Site whose main purpose is to facilitate partnering deals between companies. Includes a resource section including articles, such as "Collaborations and Licensing -- Key Legal Issues."
- These additional web links on virtual teams and telecommuting offer articles, links, and book recommendations:
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