Managing a Geographically Dispersed Team
How best to project manage a team that you may not even see?
Choose team carefully, choose a shared software solution for communication and status updates, manage the team
Choosing team members carefully (Certain personally traits help a remote team member to be effective)
self-motivated
result driven
open and honest
good communications skills
Software
If you can't physically see each other face to face, setup skype meeting once every day or every 2nd day, even if it's only for 5 minutes to share a coffee
Make sure all members see the same requirements, issues, tasks. A tool like ED Enterprise Database facilitates communications via notes and discussions, document sharing, central repository for issues, time tracking, and project tasks
Email communication via gmail or the like is also a must.
Managing the team
Steering Define clear goals, check that all team members know what those goals are, check at regular intervals that the team is following the original goals
Reporting All team members should be updating their status and progress on a tool such as ED, this helps the team see the progress and minimizes a team member not producing results.
Rewarding Give clear positive feedback when things are going as planned. Don't wait until something goes wrong to start giving feedback.
Controlling Check for team updates in the software used for issue and task tracking.
Communications
Hire team member that speak the same language if possible
Time differences - setup meetings at a time possible for all, don't make the same one person always work outside of normal hours to attend online meetings
Sharing information - Make all members feel part of the same team by sending more regular updates than a PM might normally.
Extract from MindTools