Pertaining To Project Management Of A World Wide Team   by Karri Owens

in Shopping / Electronics    (submitted 2012-02-09)

The planet is getting smaller. Well, it's not physically getting smaller but that is another way of saying that global communications have grown to be so fast paced that the world is actually one community in a lot of ways. While using advent of the internet, email, instant messaging and VOIP, it is totally possible to do business with trading partners around the globe without ever leaving your working environment.

For many businesses who are on the cutting edge of new business paradigms, the very idea of a geographically isolated business is becoming obsolete. It's entirely possible to put together a business consortium or possibly a project team made of subject theme experts spread across historical zones and from around the world. In fact, this kind of decentralized management of business projects is now more of the norm than the exception in the twenty first century business environment.

So just as those in marketing, product development and investments previously learned how to maximize a project team that is separated by hundreds or 1000s of miles, the project manager also needs to adapt the project management methodology to support a similar approach to getting business done.

Conventional project management is a systematic approach to going for a project from scope to implementation containing proven successful in 1000s of companies. We have no reason to abandon this beautifully shaped methodology. But as home based business paradigms come to play, we have to adapt even a standard methodology like project management to fit the way business is carried out in this century.

Communications is key to any successful project. This is actually the challenge of utilizing a team from across a great geographical divide. It is fairly easy you may execute the entire project with affiliates you never see. So to facilitate frequent and up to date communications, we must exploit the technology we have at our disposal such as...

Blogs, wiccis and shared working environments. Group sharing environments on the web are becoming more and more common. By setting up a tool set on line in which team members can post status reports, leave emails, update the project management software, file expense reports and grow in touch with each other, you facilitate the kind of communication that keeps the c's moving forward successfully. Blogs, private discussion boards and wiccis are also excellent strategies by which an ongoing "conversation" can be carried out between downline that anyone can check into and get swept up with the content of what has been done and what is being planned for the project.

Controlled email trees. Because project manager, email is surely an obvious way to quickly remain active in team members. However, it can get chaotic continuing to keep up on fast moving email trees. That may be a good reason to trap all emails trees as part of your online project management software so the contributions of everyone on the team can be captured for further review.

IM staff meetings. IM may be expanded so it doesn't just make two participants. You can schedule your weekly staff meetings having an IM conference room and capture your entire proceedings in the IM log thus assuring yourself that nothing that has been said will "fall through the cracks.

By becoming good at using cyberspace as the primary "location" of your respective project team's interaction, you'll be able to literally create a team of highly specialized talent which can be located from anywhere in the world. This vastly expands what you can do to tap the best minds on your work and to streamline the project management process. It will take time to get accustomed to and there will be some missteps in the process. But if you can conquer global team management using internet tools, it will be a valuable skill for successfully executing global projects for the business.

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