IT Support for Virtual Teams

Assignment 3: IT Support for Virtual Teams

Strayer University

CIS 336: Enterprise Architecture

IT Support for Virtual Teams

As more and more organizations expand from meager resources to a global footprint, they find themselves dealing with and managing virtual teams. Creating and managing virtual teams is in sharp contrast to having similar but completely separated organizational structure based on the regions where business is conducted. For example, up until just a few years ago, a large corporation like IBM or Michelin would have a President, Vice Presidents, CEOs, Directors, Managers, etc. for each zone they did business in. Now, with virtualized teams, a manager might be in the US with resources in the US, Europe, and Asia all collaborating and working together. This system presents unique opportunities and unique challenges as well.

From an IT department and IT managers’ perspective, virtualized teams have some advantages, but also some disadvantages. Therefore, every organization must make a careful determination to see if virtualizing teams will work best for their business model of if the traditional regional top-down team model suits them, or a combination of the two. A great benefit of virtualized teams is that with it, the traditional IT manager can have a far-reaching organization that has some very unique benefits not available in the traditional model. First off, for an IT support organization, virtualized teams spread across multiple time zones provide a real “follow the sun” support model. Thus each time zone is covered 24×7 from an operational, development, or support perspective. For example, when the sun is setting in the central time zone, people in Europe are waking-up and by nighttime in CDT, resources in Europe are fully available and actively working to resolve issues across the pond. Such feats were hard to achieve in the traditional team system. The closet non-virtualized system came to this was the shift system still in use in smaller companies or where proximity is a necessity.

Another benefit of virtualized teams is that globally spread teams still adhere to a singular corporate culture and goals. This saves a lot of headache and time while defining the corporate culture and productivity goals. With the traditional regional team model, it is extremely hard to align everyone along the same goals. The main reason for this is the fact that the traditional model does not account for regional consideration. The virtual model accounts for the differences and is agile enough to accommodate them.

Another great benefit of the such virtual team diversity is the fact that with it, companies now have access to a very diverse and rich pool for skillsets and unique / creative ways of solving issues and developing new products / software. With traditional teams, this great benefit of diversity cannot be fully utilized, especially when companies are competing in the market to develop software for global clients. Imagine a nonvirtualized team in India given a task to develop construction management software for clients in the US, or isolated teams providing desktop support to users in another continent.

With virtualized teams becoming an integral part of conducting business, globalized companies are developing collaboration tools to make the task of collaborating with and supporting virtualized teams as if they are literally in the next room as supposed to being in the next continent. For example, Google and Air Liquide worked together to develop a global suite of back office, collaboration, and virtual meeting tools called KITE. Now, Air Liquide managers and virtual team members use collaborative tools such as shared calendars, documents, video conferencing, and virtual meetings.

There are, however, some unique challenges to managing virtual IT teams for management. For example, having a widespread virtualized team can cause issues in managing work and deliverables. The IT manager might have a hard time gauging employee workload and the distribution of the work, especially in a project based environment. Therefore, it takes a unique management style to able to keep a track of all the tasks and dependencies that will fit into the final product.

The manager might also have a hard time determining individual contributions and the letting the employee feel appreciated for those contributions. These could also lead to a low employee morale due to feelings of isolation from the larger organization, and the resulting drop in performance. Google resolved these problems for KITE by incorporating live sharing of workspaces and documents with change audits. However, for the issues of distance and the lack of face-to-face human interaction, in addition to creative technologies, IT managers have to think very carefully while defining the team structure. There are many strategies in regards to this. One of them is to crisscross responsibilities when it comes to roles and management. This compels people to collaborate and share information while completing them owns tasks as well.

The various flavors of HR and cultural policies also create a unique challenge for managers of virtual teams. For example, typically in the USA when an employee has nonexempt status, they work as directed by their manager. That includes periods when employees are on-call for emergencies, such as in incident management for IT operations. While this works just fine in the USA, it is a violation of labor law and corporate policies in almost all of Europe. For example, in France all on-call hours for an employee must be declared at the start of the year, and any intervention while on-call must be authorized in writing by the manager. Imagine how this would cause issues for a French employee in network operations who has to handle an incident on the weekend while it is middle of the night in the USA where his manager lives. These issues can be accounted for by being creative with on-call schedules, broadening the on-call employee base, by cross training employees to support France from other zones. Same goes for the over 9 weeks’ holidays people are entitled to in France.

To summarize it, virtual teams and organizations are being the new norm and organizations must prepare themselves for the challenges associated with managing these diverse teams. There is technology available that can make collaboration and development easier, but there is no substitute for good organizational planning and a corporate culture that accounts for this new reality.

References

KUSCU, M. m., & ARSLAN, H. h. (2016). VIRTUAL LEADERSHIP AT DISTANCE EDUCATION TEAMS. Turkish Online Journal Of Distance Education (TOJDE), 17(3), 136-156.

Meier, H. H., Smith, D. D., & Porter, T. H. (2016). GLOBAL VIRTUAL TEAMS FOR ACCOUNTING MILLENNIALS. Journal For Research In Business Education, 58(1), 48-60

Berry, G. R. (2011). Enhancing Effectiveness on Virtual Teams. Journal Of Business Communication, 48(2), 186-206.