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Virtual teams and communication technologies
You will see this come up more and more in your project management career as the world tends to move towards things like virtual teams.
What are virtual teams? First of all they’re people who work on the same project, but they’re not co-located at the same site. So you might have your project here and a person over here working on it, another person over here working from home for example. This is becoming more and more common in today’s society.
The availability of communication technologies such as email, audio conferencing, social media, web-based meetings, and video conferencing has made virtual teams much more feasible. The virtual team model also makes it possible as a project or an organization to do a few things – particularly to reduce cost or increase the expertise within your team. For example you might be able to form teams of people from the same organization who live in different places. You might be able to add a special expertise to a project team, even though that expert isn’t in the area. You might be able to incorporate employees who work from home offices, or include people with mobility limitations or disabilities who cannot get into certain buildings but now they can actually work from a different site.
You might be able to move forward with projects that would have been held up or cancelled due to travel expenses. This is particularly a good thing to note as that becomes more of an issue these days. You might save the expense of offices and all physical equipment needed for employees, as the cost savings involved for virtual teams.
Examples of communication technology
Examples of communication technology that might assist with virtual teams are shared portals, for example a Confluence page or a SharePoint page or a Jira or a Trello kanban board. These sorts of things online where you can share your documents. Video conferencing, where you might have Skype, Zoom, Microsoft teams, Facetime, all of those video conferencing tools that you can use to feel as though you’re in person.
Audio conferencing via telephone and many other methods as well, Discord for example where gamers have been using that for for many years and that’s a powerful tool. And lastly email and chat, where you’ve got Slack or Messenger. These are also quick messaging tools that you can get a quick message across to someone even if they’re not in the same area as you.
And that is virtual teams and the communication technologies that tie them together.
– David McLachlan