PV7 Master your Virtual Project
Channel: Scatterwork
Date: 31/03/2015

Deasún Ó Conchúir from Scatterwork to talk about mastering your virtual project. This scenario is that you or one of your subordinates has been given a significant, real-world, challenging, once-off assignment. We'll call that a project where the team involved are in different places. We'll call it a virtual project.
 
Now if we think about the risks of a project, one of them, even in the best of circumstances, is that the team do not get involved as much as you'd like. They have misunderstandings, they're not available and all that sort of stuff that happens. But when you have a virtual team, the risks shoot up enormously. For example, if somebody's interaction with the rest of the team, who speak a different language in an accent they don't understand very well, it's just through a screen, then the feeling of buy-in is proportionately much, much less. You have a very high project risk. 
 
A project like that really needs a structured way of getting going, so that's what we're offering here. We're using a simulator, a project simulator, which has an interface like this here. It's called SimulTrain. It's been used by about 150,000 people, and it's very much liked. We divide up your people, your team into groups of 3 or 4, and each of them has one instance of the project. They plan the project, then the simulator starts. During the simulation, they get some challenges. For example, equipment doesn't work or somebody reports in ill and they have to change their plan.
 
Every now and then, we stop the simulation and we have a period of what we could call experiential learning. In other words, we look back and say, "Well, why was it so hard to communicate with each other?” Or, "Why did we make the wrong decision there?” “Was it something to do with our team dynamic?" Or, "Did we understand each other?" "What could we do better?"
 
Now we want that the team itself, the real team, ends up feeling much more involved that they would've done if this didn't take place. The way that we do it is that we have 3, 3-hour sessions on 3 consecutive days. You cannot expect a team to suddenly spark into action for the sake of a 1-hour seminar or something like that. It just doesn't work, people have to actually genuinely work together. This balance is far less demanding on resources and time in particular than it would be to do the same sort of thing in a face-to-face environment where people had to travel and stay in hotels and pay for airplanes and all the rest of it that goes with it. The outcome is, at the end, we find that people really do feel more or less as if they were in the same room here, and that reduces the risks on your project absolutely enormously.
 
I invite you to contact us if you're in a scenario like that. You have a real-world, once-off, challenging assignment where your team are in different places and you really want to bring the risks down and get the thing off to a very good start. 
 
I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you.

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