Making Distributed Teams Work

I recently read an article by Matt Asay of Alfresco about their highly virtual organization and some of the fundamentals that make them successful. It is hard to question his credibility in this area - Alfresco is doing a superb job strategically and tactically so something is working. They have defined their market (Enterprise Content Management), structured their business model (commercial open source) and are hitting it out of the park in a number of important metrics (downloads, customers, etc.) Still, I am a bit sceptical about the "all is rosy" picture that he paints.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/05/building_an_onl.html#comments


Here is why I am sceptical. At IQ, our marketing team is split between Massachusetts, USA and Bangalore, India. I have experienced the cost benefits of offshore teams, but I have also had to overcome the downsides of virtual teams. There are a few main obstacles to making teams work: (1) team cohesion, (2) communication friction, and (3) specialized knowledge. Let's explore them:

(1) team cohesion - I believe that communication is a cornerstone of effective teams. When you are spread across the country or around the world, communication is very difficult. It is a challenge to build effective teams when they can only communicate for two or three hours each day via conference call or IM. On-site visits and get-together certainly help but can never really replace hallway conversations.


(2) communication friction - anytime that you have virtual teams, you will inevitably have communication friction. Just being in different timezones and needing to schedule calls around different team's schedules introduces friction. I typically have calls to my virtual team from 7:30am - 10:00am every day. It works, but I would definitely prefer to have them down the hall for ad hoc discussions.

(3) specialized knowledge - where specific market knowledge or market activities are required in a geographic area, virtual teams do not work. My team in India is focused on marketing production (e.g. website creation and management, Flash development, collateral creation, SEO) and campaign execution (e.g. direct mail, SEM, online advertising). Market specific activities such as collateral creation, webinars, etc. require specialized knowledge and have to be done by local (USA based) team members.

Virtual teams can work, but they come with a cost.