Best Practices Of Managing Virtual Software Development Teams

Part I. As a manager of a virtual team, what team characteristics would you be especially concerned about so that the team’s work would be exceptional?

Virtual teams have emerged to mitigate the challenges of managing teams that are distributed across different regions, and are a sustainable component of global business. A project manager managing a virtual team would have to integrate communication strategies, project management techniques including human and social processes in order to support the team, (Kimball, 1997). The author is a project manager assigned to lead a virtual team of 300 volunteers located across the globe to develop recommendations for regulating carbon emissions in the world. As indicated Kimball (1997), this kind of a virtual team usually supports people working in the same professional field and most of the

Robert Jones, Robert Oyung, and Lise Pace, authors of Working Virtually: Challenges of Virtual Teams (2005) state:

Forming the team: For creating VSM it is very important to create a proper cross functional team consisting of supervisory or

Ebrahim, A., Shamsuddin, A. & Taha, Z. (2009). Virtual Teams: A Literature Review. Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Science, 3(3), 2653-2669.

Transcat’s weaknesses are human resources, leadership, and training and development. First, Transcat’s human resource department should develop some incentives and rewards that encourage team leaders and team members to collaborate and help make virtual teams successful. Second, Transcat’s top management should have a meeting to talk about the importance of virtual teams (how they have a direct impact on competitive advantage and success of the company), whether there is buy in from the leaders regarding how important virtual teams are and what they need to do to support this concept, and how they should be modeling the behavior they need to encourage their followers to demonstrate. Lastly, Transcat should develop and provide formal training in regards to mastering virtual teams and ensure team members have access to continued online training and technical support. This will allow team leaders and team members to improve their team skills and experience or refresh their knowledge, which will make them more effective team

Virtual Teams consisted of contractors, and consultants that worked on the many residential, industrial, and commercial projects that Concert was engaged in. We also formed outside teams to help with our IT/Accounting, and various in house software upgrades.

Many organizations have developed collaborative project tools due to the increasing need for multi-site collaboration in the global market (Romano, Chen, & Nunamaker, 2002). Commonly referred to as groupware, online collaborative project management systems were developed to automate regular group meeting activities (Corbitt & Martz, 2003). Groupware can function in different capacities as: content management systems, discussion boards, project management tools, or a combination of all three. This helps groups with members working over multiple geographical cites to collaborate (Raman, 2006). The need for multi-site collaboration and file sharing has recently been identified in Rotary Financial.

The virtual management system would incorporate the use of teleconferencing facilities to provide real time meetings that allows for the discussion between the various sub-project leaders of the sub-let firms. The system will rely heavily on the use of the information communication channels such as the internet, telephone, fax and video and audio conferencing.

Distributed Software Development (DSD) or Global Software Development (GSD) is a phenomenon with significant interest from companies worldwide where the stakeholders from different organizational cultures are engaged in developing software. Within the globalization efforts currently pervading society, the team members of the software project have become globally distributed. Although, the DSD is technologically and organizationally complicated it provides a number of issues to be operated by the information system development group. [1] The distributed environments have become a standard for software development so the coordinating of development teams has become one of the biggest issues faced by the companies today. It is difficult to imagine any substantial development project managed without an underlying software configuration management tool. Teams located at different geographical areas, including offshore, cooperate each other using communication technologies to develop interconnected software modules that are integrated in shared project workspaces. The

A team comprised of international components presents an interesting challenge in regards to management. Various problems can potentially arise in regards to organizing the team, developing rules that govern the team and assigning tasks. One method in which to mitigate all of the above mentioned rules is by setting performance standards for the entire team to adhere (Alexander, 2000). One such standard involves the use of a balanced scorecard. A balanced scorecard allows each individual irrespective of their position within the team to have a core set of standards in which to abide by. These standards will also include the job function and the roles of each member with the job function. The scorecard provides an ideal medium in which to judge performance as well. By viewing the scorecard management can easily pinpoint areas of opportunity and improvement (Blair 2010).

As distributed environments have become the norm for software development, coordinating the efforts of development teams has become one of the biggest challenges faced by the enterprise today. It is hard to imagine any sizable development project managed without an underlying software configuration management tool.Teams situated at different geographical locations, including offshore, collaborate using communication technologies to develop interrelated software modules that are integrated in shared project workspaces. The software design process involves many iterative cycles of development

Global virtual activities are winding up so prevalent than expected after the change in data advances and globalization of associations. While the instant informing encourages speedier correspondence and exchange of data between individuals, the engineers confront a few difficulties while building up the APPs. These issues could go even to the clients of the APP accordingly decimating the trust about the Applications subsequently making them hesitant to utilize it. Featuring these issues may influence the virtual undertaking's chiefs to have more understanding and information in this manner making it simple to deal with them. One of the principle challenges spins around correspondence whereby virtual programming designers need to concoct

In today’s workplace, the use of virtual project teams and virtual workers in general, is increasingly common.

Purists demand strict adoption and may dismiss ideas that are in tune with the existing culture; there is also a risk of them alienating employees and leaders. Agile teams are self-organized, and they rely on team flexibility, autonomy and diversity. What is needed are team members with a good degree of emotional intelligence and adaptability. We want people that value feedback and build an organization that constantly looks for improvements. Select people who are open to change, enjoy challenges and are willing to do what it takes to ensure success, including learning skills outside the current skill set.  Communication should be one of the criteria on which an agile team is built. Poor communication is recognized as the major cause of project failure because it often results in delivery of wrong solution. Effective communicators understand that the goal is to share information and that the information sharing is a two-way street, but we need to understand how different communication methods work and how they should be used together.   When it comes to agile, these are some of the channels used for communication: •