Meeting Current Challenges for Virtually Collocated Teams: Participation, Culture and Integration

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to describe certain challenges for teams who engage in virtually collocated work. Numerous challenges face these teams who are expected to perform as physically collocated teams: to provide deliverables, meet project schedules, and to generate feasible and even innovative problem solutions. And yet all this must be done at a distance. Team members stem from different departments, organizations, countries, and sometimes even competitor companies. Sometimes teams meet face-to-face on a regular basis, sometimes rarely, often not at all. How can team members be expected to be motivated to attend meetings, to develop trust, or even to adopt the technology when social pressures from a distance are weak? Even management and technical support for these teams at the local level may also be weak; managers may consider such teams to be a part-time activity, and local sites may lack gurus, champions, or even compatible hardware.