BPR SPOTLIGHT -
VIRTUAL TEAMS - click here for more spotlight articles
This article originally appeared
in the March 1997 issue of PDBPR
DISPERSED TEAMS ARE THE PEOPLEWARE
FOR THE 21st CENTURY
AN INTERVIEW WITH
JESSICA LIPNACK AND
JEFFREY STAMPS, CO-AUTHORS, "VIRTUAL TEAMS"
Nothing was more clear at this month's gathering of the International
Association for Product Development than that, however desirable they might be, collocated
development teams are increasingly not feasible in a globalized setting. The big
challenge, then, is how to make teamwork work across distances. After more than 20 years
of helping mobilize flexible, cross-boundary organizations, and with thousands of
interviews to draw from, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps have written a new book, Virtual
Teams: Reaching Across Space, Time and Organizations With Technology, to demystify
this subject. It won't be out till next month. We caught up with them for a preview:
BPR: This book is part of a
trilogy. What are the key messages of the other two, and how does the new book flesh out
the trilogy?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Our 1993
book, The TeamNet Factor, centers on the network as a form of organization. We
show its variations at every size, from small groups, to enterprises, to alliances, to
nations. In that book, we coin the word "teamnet" to put people back into
networks and to emphasize the multi-level (groups within groups) nature of networks. We
show how networks offer practical approaches to solving old problems and launching new
initiatives. We also offer three chapters on methods to develop networks, along with
several chapters that focus specifically on small business networks.
"Our 1994 book, The Age of the Network,
provides an overview of the impact of networks and their strategic importance. There, we
place networks--the signature organization of the Information Age--in the context of
bureaucracy, hierarchy, and small groups, which dominated earlier eras. We show how
companies use networks to their strategic advantage. These nimble, boundary-crossing
configurations also incorporate what is uniquely valuable about each of the earlier forms.
"In Virtual Teams, we look at how
this most fundamental organization--the team--is transforming ('morphing,' in computer
lingo) into an extraordinary new 21st century version. We focus on small groups of people
working across boundaries, supported by the new computer and communications technologies.
Increasingly, this is the reality of everyday work life for many people."
BPR: What exactly is virtual
teamwork? Is this one of those out-on-the-edge subjects, or something mainstream managers
need to understand now?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Well,
here's the out-on-the-edge response: Virtual teams are the peopleware for the 21st
century. And here's the mainstream reality: Most people work with others who are more than
50 feet away from them. MIT's Tom Allen has been doing research on this for more than 20
years. Data indicate that when people are more than 50 feet apart, their likelihood of
collaborating more than once a week is less than 10%. So, as people work in teams,
crossing space, time, and organizational boundaries, they must master the principles of
virtual work."
BPR: What's the basic business
case for virtual teamwork?
Lipnack/Stamps: "The basic
business case is simple. Work in the 21st century is complex, in constant flux, and
global. Organizations that were perfected in the 19th century--bureaucracies--are not
sufficient to deal with the pace of change. The problems that the companies we write about
have solved with virtual teams are the familiar ones: Time-to-market, product quality,
profitability, customer satisfaction, strategic direction."
BPR: Assume I've barely figured
out how to use e-mail: is virtual teamwork something I really need to know about?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Great
question. People confuse virtual teams with technology. We interviewed 75 people for this
book and many said exactly these words without being prompted: 'It's 90% people and 10%
technology.' Some of the best virtual teams that we looked at use very little technology.
E-mail serves the purpose for many efforts. But when a virtual team wants to gain the
productivity advantages that the Internet and intranets provide, then it benefits
enormously from the construction of online virtual workplaces. We detail this in Chapter 8
of the book, "A Web Book for Virtual Teams."
BPR: But many in product
development circles, where cross-functional teamwork is now center stage, believe
collocation is essential. How do you respond?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Tom
Allen's research we mentioned earlier is powerful and should not be ignored by advocates
of 'extreme virtual teams,' those that never get together face-to-face. As humans, we
thrive on spending time together, and these encounters are where trust develops most
rapidly. We encourage virtual teams to meet regularly, particularly at the beginning of
their work, for quick effective planning and relationship building.
"However, it is very important to
understand what Tom Allen is saying. In essence, what his '50-foot rule' indicates is
this: It is impossible to collocate more than about 10 people. Steelcase, which has done
extensive research on workplace performance, uses Allen's research as a design principle.
They make office environments for pods of no more than 10, located within 50 feet of one
another, and then 'augment,' to use Doug Engelbart's elegant verb, their collocation with
technology."
BPR: Some would argue that a
compromise solution is to collocate the core team and let the extended team be virtual. We
saw this recently with a new product team at Square D.
Lipnack/Stamps: "Great
idea but it's not always possible. Sometimes, particularly with complex projects of any
scale, the expertise required far exceeds the number of people who readily can be
collocated. The solution is to collocate the people whom you naturally can bring together
and link them to others. 'Link' is the operative word here. It is not sufficient to
collocate pods of people and expect them to work with others without careful design.
Complex product development projects require complex organizational design and intentional
communication design. The most successful virtual teams we document follow these
principles."
BPR: What pitfalls should I
watch out for and how can I prevent them?
Lipnack/Stamps: "All of
the pitfalls that can trip up a collocated team are dangers to a virtual team, but even
more so. Alan and Deborah Slobodnik, of Options for Change have done the best summary
we've seen of 'team killers.' They include: false consensus, unresolved overt conflict,
underground conflict, closure avoidance, calcified team meetings, uneven participation,
lack of accountability, and forgetting the customer.
"Interventions, of the types they provide,
address these problems. Virtual teams introduce yet another 'team killer'--technology
adoration. Some people think that you can solve virtual team problems by setting up e-mail
lists, opening chat rooms, and mounting desktop conferencing. Wrong. Technology can help
virtual teams but only when used in conjunction with the overall strategy of the
organization."
BPR: I'm a development team
leader: what should I watch out for?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Product
development teams, particularly software development teams, have been among the true
leaders in creating virtual teams. The most famous virtual team created the Internet more
than 25 years ago. Virtual teams have also created dozens of computer languages, including
Ada, which we write about in the book, that are critical to many global processes today.
Frankly, it is hard to identify any product today that is not the work of a virtual team,
whether explicitly recognized or not. Sun Microsystems, which launched 70
boundary-crossing 'SunTeams,' used this simple definition: 'Process improvement through
teamwork for customer satisfaction.' If you reverse-engineer that definition, you will
avoid a lot of problems."
BPR: Can you site concrete
examples of virtual teamwork generating better products quicker and more cheaply?
Lipnack/Stamps: "NCR's
recent mammoth virtual-team triumph, the creation of its WorldMark computer system line,
is a great example. The program involved more than 1000 people in multiple locations, both
internally and externally. It came in ahead of schedule and on budget, thus playing a
significant role in contributing to NCR's remarkable turnaround."
BPR: When is a team too large
for virtual teamwork? How do you manage that problem if you're working with a project
involving masses of players scattered around the globe?
Lipnack/Stamps: "There is
an enormous body of research about the effective size of teams, which generally points to
the obvious--5 to 10 people is the ideal size. Virtual teams enable teams to scale. By
working in small groups, connected across boundaries through commonly shared processes and
commitment to a shared purpose, ever-increasing numbers of people can work together
effectively, as WorldMark proves."
BPR: You say virtual teams are
high-connectivity/low-maintenance organizations. This seems counterintuitive. One more
time: isn't it honestly a lot easier for a team to stay on top of things and maintain
synergy when it's collocated?
Lipnack/Stamps: "We've
found the best collocated teams use principles incorporated by the most successful virtual
teams: a clear purpose, a focus on people, and concentration on the links that connect
them. If collocated teams also take the step of creating virtual workplaces for
themselves, they can actually improve their productivity radically."
BPR: You are advocates of
TeamFlow software, which is based on Toyota's deployment charting method. What is it and
why do you recommend it?
Lipnack/Stamps: "TeamFlow
is the next generation of project management software, optimized for groups that work
across boundaries. It allows a team to see its work--tasks, deliverables, meetings,
decisions, and milestones--in relation to who needs to be involved. It also allows the
team to see its work in relation to the groups that it is a part of, and the sub-groups
that make it up. Very powerful. We've been using it on all our projects for the past seven
years to great effect. It's PC-based, runs over networks, and a Web-based version is on
its way."
BPR: Let's sum up: why is
virtual teamwork something mainstream managers need to understand today?
Lipnack/Stamps: "Look
around you. Does everyone you work with work for the same organization? In the same
location? Probably not. The onrushing explosion in information and communications
technologies makes change in how we team inevitable. Dataquest, which provides technology
research, predicts that personal computer (PC) sales, of which there were none in the
world in the 1960s, will top 100 million annually by the year 2000--one PC for very 60
people on the planet; and, by the same time, more than 60 million people will use cellular
phones--which did not even exist in the 1970s--according to Action Cellular Network.
Voicemail, rare in the 1980s, is now widespread and all but indispensable in most
organizations today.
"Fastest growing of all is the Internet and
the World Wide Web, with its internal offspring, intranets. The number of new daily
Internet connections surpasses anyone's ability to accurately count them. According to
Matrix Information and Directory Services, which has tracked Internet growth for many
years, electronic connections among people and computers expand perhaps on the order of
100% annually.
"Distance-spanning communications tools
open up vast new fertile territory soil for 'working together apart.' For the first time
since nomads moved into towns, work is diffusing rather than concentrating as we move from
predominantly industrial to informational products and services. In all industries and
sectors, people are working across space and time. Virtual teams thrive in big companies
like Hewlett-Packard and Eastman Chemical Company, in smaller ones like Rodale Press and
Buckman Laboratories, and even smaller ones known only to their own markets like Tetra Pak
Converting Technologies and US TeleCenters."
Key Learnings:
Virtual teamwork--linked groups of
geographically dispersed people working collaboratively--is the "peopleware" of
the 21st century.
Virtual teamwork is 90% about people and only
10% about technology.
Virtual teamwork does not eliminate the need
for occasional face-to-face encounters; conversely, if a collocated team takes the step of
creating a virtual workplace for itself, it can increase productivity.
The trick is to collocate the people you can
naturally bring together and carefully map processes and design communication links with
the extended virtual team.
Virtual teams face the same pitfalls as
collocated teams, with one additional team killer--technology adoration.
BPR SPOTLIGHT -
VIRTUAL TEAMS - click here for more spotlight articles |
