Work by Remote

Most IT projects involve geeks. I guess 99 percent of the team is geek.  All I can say is that geeks are just like you and me, only smarter, more skillful, and more serious with their craft. In other words, they’re a joy to work with.

About a couple of years ago, Chief Happiness Officer, Alexander Kjerulf, wrote an article titled how NOT to lead geeks. If you were to make each one positive, here’s how to handle your geek team.The inputs are mine based on my experience in working with them.

1. Give them the right training, and on a regular basis. Training in general is empowering. But for geeks, honing their skills is important to them. And they have the passion to learn new things or be updated on what’s the latest on their chosen field.
2. Give them recognition. Like any other worker, geeks too love to be given a pat on the back for a job well done. If you don’t know how or understand their work very well, Kjerulf suggests that you work with them so that you would know.
3. Give them reasonable work schedule. Geeks are humans, too, and although they can be workaholics, they can still be stressed out. What good is a geek if he’s overworked?
4. Talk to them in plain simple English minus management jargon. As Kjerulf said, geeks hate management-speak.
5. Do not try to outsmart or act smart with them. Admit it, if you’re not a geek or do not understand the stuff geeks do. It gets more work done and faster that way.
6. Be consistent. Probably because in IT, structure and consistency is critical, geeks also want consistent and clear directions, and policies. They hate it when they smell uncertainty and indecisiveness.
7. Connect with them. Often, because managers are not geek themselves, they tend to stay away from their geek team, and just concern themselves with the output or in the user interface, for example, of a website project. Talk to them and discuss with them tasks that are doable and not.
8. Involve them in decision making, especially when it comes to your project. For an IT project, who else understands it better than the geek team. Thus, get their ideas and suggestions and how to go about the project. There should be a collaborative effort.
9. Give them the right tools or equipment to do their tasks well. What can be most frustrating for a geek team are slow computers and lack of software. These may cost you a bit more, but just look at it as in investment where you can generate income too.
10. Recognize the creative side of geeks. Kjerulf puts it aptly, “Programming is a creative process, not an industrial one. Geeks must constantly come up with solutions to new problems and rarely ever solve the same problem twice. Therefore they need leeway and flexibility.”

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What saddens me as a project manager is to see good people go.

This may be a form of review on your project deployment. But it’s a good guide for those who are about to start a new project, too.

In every project, it’s really good to start and end with the same people or team. That way, all of you understands the project, what it entails, what the role of each member is.

You would want for example to have each team member participate in the following:

1. Initiation - Introduce the team to the project, its scope, roles and responsibilities, and deliverables.
2. Planning - Develop plans for creating the final deliverables.
3. Execution - Properly plan the work.
4. Control -Ensure that the project is progressing as planned, to account for any changes, and to make midcourse corrections that are needed to keep the project on schedule and within budget.
5. Closeout - deliverable is accepted by the customer of the project, and the project team documents what it learned that could be of value on the next project.

I got the tips above from an article on Baseline Mag. Read the rest of the article and find out how project managers can transform your business by building a process, tracking performance and helping you build best practices that work for your company.

There’s a saying that goes you cannot love someone you do not know. The same is true for employees. If you do not know them, then you cannot take care of them… well.

The big question now is how do you take care of your remote workforce? I’ve been thinking about that for months now. And here are my thoughts:

1. Establish a relationship with them. To do this is to reach out to them regularly through email, chat, or call. You ask them how they are, how they feel about their client, their tasks, their work.
2. Be there with/for them during the happy and sad occasions, and let them know that they can count on you.
3. Help them do a good job especially that they are working elsewhere. They may not get your instructions correctly, or they may hesitate to clarify things with you. Take the initiative to make things clear.

I believe that it’s important for them to feel part of the organization, a family, especially that they are not working in a usual office situation. They may have reasons to feel a bit left out, or may have the feeling that they’re in between–not really in, but not completely out.

If you really think about it, taking care of remote workers is not much different from taking care of employees in an office. It’s all about people. It’s about relationships.

Photo: Stock.Xchng

First the facts:

According to IDC:

• U.S. mobile workforce expected to grow to 73% of total U.S. workforce in 2011.
• Across the world 30.4% of the workforce will be mobile in 2011.

[Source: IDC, Worldwide mobile worker population 2007-2011 forecast, Doc #209813, December 2007]

According to Nemertes:

• Nemertes estimates that the number of virtual workers has increased by 800% within the last 5 years.
• 60% to 70% of all employees work in locations difference from their supervisors.

The facts show that mobile workforce is no longer a special or isolated case. It is beginning to become the norm. So how do you manage a team that in an office somewhere or working even out of country?

Terrence L. Gargiulo, President of makingstories.net, put out a whitepaper discussing the nature of mobile workforce and outlining ten strategies to deal with it.

1. Focus on building relationships.
2. Streamline communications.
3. Incorporate less didactic forms of communications.
4. Spend more time listening.
5. Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow.
6. Manage deliverables not activities.
7. Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities.
8. Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise.
9. Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers.
10. Leverage technology.

Read the whitepaper now!

For me the key here is not to manage them, but to build relationship with them. Easier said than done, perhaps. But I know it can be done.

*Photo from MorgueFile.com

… is a bit difficult when all of them is telecommuting. We interact only through chat and email. For those who are in my region, we see each other during Christmas parties and monthly meetings.

Thus, sad to say, I don’t really know my team that much except perhaps the basics about their family, their academic background, and some of their concerns.

I thought about personality today, because I read in Tom Vander Well’s blog that he would often start his QA workshop with a brief personality test. His people was probably surprised about that. After all, what’s a personality test got to do with a QA in a call center?

But like, Tom, I like it that his trainings start with a personality test. It’s always good to start with some backgrounder on the people you will be working with. I also believe that personality gives us a reading of a person’s attitude in life, and toward his work.

So, you think I should make my remote team members take a personality test?

In the vernacular, there’s a saying that goes, maraming namatay sa akala. It means that it’s not always wise to assume that a person has understood what you mean, or has gotten your message.

This did in me today.

Early on, I emailed my one team about interlinking. By this I meant that we link other pages of the site or other relevant information in the site to every relevant entry. I even included in that email, examples of interlinking, and some how to’s.

At first, I didn’t even think the samples and how to’s were necessary, thinking that I was dealing with a team who knew about this stuff already.

As I would check their reports, I found out that many of them got it. So I assumed that everyone understood it, too.

I was dead wrong!

All the while I thought this team member got what I meant by interlinking. Then just by a hunch, I checked on the links in her entries, and there I found out that she was not interlinking at all!

I panicked and so checked the outputs of other team members. Good thing, they were doing it correctly. Only one was doing it incorrectly. I called her attention to it, and my fears were confirmed. So now, she would be editing her entries, and we’d be wasting precious time doing rework.

Lessons learned:

• do not assume anything especially when you’re communicating with your team through emails and chat
• make a follow through when communication is virtual in nature
• monitor constantly, not regularly, of how your team is making progress
• I also notice that when you slacken your monitoring, they also slacken their focus

As a project manager, or any other kind of  manager for that matter, this is always the case. You hold responsibility for everything even the shortcomings of your team.

So whenever somebody questions the performance of any member of my team, I feel defensive. That is because I feel that I have been remiss in my role. I have not managed them as well as I should be.

Following the monitoring system that was put in place recently, I can view what  my team members are doing on their supposedly working hours. I see some of them not really putting focus on the task at hand.

Then Boss emailed me, asking what the specific tasks of this particular team member are. Good thing, I just had the virtual planning. As an offshoot of that, I asked each one about what needs to be done in terms of their role in the general scheme of things. Their suggestions/recommendations now form part of what else they needed to do aside from their usual tasks.

Had I not thought of that virtual planning, I’d have come up empty handed when Boss asked me. Perhaps, Boss didn’t really mean to check on me as PM, but it always pays to be on top of things.

As a project manager, I feel I need to do the following on a regular basis:

1. Check on the performance of my team.
2. Find out if they had been doing their tasks, and how.
3. Get their feedback regularly. Find out their difficulties, or the challenges they encounter every day.
4. Brainstorm with them about the latest web research, web marketing, SEO, web development techniques.
5. Make them feel like a stakeholder of the project. That way they own the project, they feel that they own their tasks.

With three projects on hand, I need some superpowers to be effective and efficient on this. After all, the buck always stops here.