Snow Day Assignment - Virtual Project Management

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Assignment 1 Scenario:

You have been made project manager for a web redesign for your corporate
internal (intranet) website. Employees in the division are geographically
dispersed, and your boss told you that your team will come from all parts of
the division. This means that most (maybe all) of the work is going to need to
be performed via a virtual team.

What are the benefits and drawbacks to such an arrangement? How will you help
the team develop a feeling of "we-ness"?

Thinking back to teams that you have worked on before ... what made them
effective or not? Why?
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The drawbacks to working across time and space are simply not being able to interact in-person along with the time difference of spread out geographic locations. The benefits to such an arrangement are an emphasis on written communication over spoken.

To develop a feeling of "we-ness" I would recommend constant written communication and clearly assigned group roles. Additional communication could be done via phone and/or virtual teleconference.

A personal example of a successful team project – thinking back to the keys of past effectiveness:
• Created a timeline with incremental deadlines
• Assigned work fairly – took into account members’ interests and strengths
• Diverse personalities worked well together – we had an online cheerleader who kept our inbox full of updates, a researcher who constantly shared information, a creative person who brought unique ideas to make our project standout, a diligent worker who was always willing to take on additional assignments
• Helped one another – saw success as our team as a whole (i.e. "we-ness"), not individually

Obstacles – How we overcame them:
• Sick team member was bedridden for most of the quarter – we made an extra effort to communicate with her via email and phone
• Stressing for time – helped everyone stay on track by checking in and sharing information
• Fear of presenting – “practice makes perfect,” we made time to rehearse so everyone was comfortable presenting our final findings.

Most importantly we HAD FUN and thought about the AUDIENCE using creative ways to improve the assignment, making everything aesthetically pleasing, adding music and pictures to add ease to heavy information.