VIRTUAL TEAMS – An Inevitable Reality

Created by umair.shah under General Discussion

When we look at the decades of 80s and early 90s, there was bureaucratic/centralized form of organizational structure widely adopted all around. Yet businesses were booming and generated solid revenues. Nonetheless, this traditional cliché couldn’t sustain due to prevailing trends in the IT industry. A lot of new mediums of doing businesses were found, that were dependable and long lasting. Alarmingly in 2000 -2001, the dot com industry trembled down like a castle made of cards. The reason was quite simple; a lot of businesses adopted this format without properly understanding the dynamics of it. The issue originated by not meeting the demand and supply of customers. After the Dot Com boom, the whole industry was re-engineered, made more dependable and secure. But still there was this fear in many people’s minds that this wouldn’t work again. Another very important aspect was people’s hatred towards the change but the penetration was such that no one could literally avoid it. A lot of people started speculating all sorts of irrelevant and sporadic things with the association of cyber technology into businesses. However there were some who realized quite early about the earth breaking potential of the IT.

In the current environment there are a lot of technological advances, rapid changes in global dynamics and extensive competition resulting in downsizing (due to recent global recession) and outsourcing. This trend is widely popular in the developed countries. All of this has given birth to a new phenomenon known as “Virtual Teams”. This may be characterized as a distributed team, where people are geographically disintegrated and work in accordance with various time zones. It requires developers to communicate with their potential clients via internet and sell themselves while remaining competitive and quality oriented.

There are plenty of e-communication mediums available for such mode of operations. However it is important that people could build upon each others’ requirements without becoming a victim of ‘e-tone’ phenomenon. Nevertheless, if the void is expanding in terms of ‘customer-client’ relationship then it’s the duty of the Project Manager to identify the potential loop holes and basis for any discrepancies. A very common issue among the “Virtual Teams” is that people haven’t seen or met each other. It makes the PM’s job more challenging and difficult to develop trust, give group an identity and build up clear structures. Apart from that in today’s competitive environment, time and cost constraints are promoting the concept of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Virtual Projects at a massive pace.

This kind of development has revolutionized the whole business community. It has evolved into a multi-billion industry within a few years. The most interesting fact is that nothing in it is tangible, yet it’s making huge revenues. People are actually realizing their dreams by creating them in a virtual paradigm and then selling them for others to materialize or unleash their imaginations.