Working Virtually: Challenges of Virtual Teams

Virtual teams have been used to leverage scarce and distributed resources for many years. Expense reductions, health epidemics, air travel safety, and complex supply chains have only intensified this need. General best practices for leading and participating in virtual teams are well known but why are there still misconceptions about their effectiveness? What drives the notion that “face to face is always better”? How can groups and individuals take the most advantage of virtual teams through the appropriate use of technology? Working Virtually: Challenges of Virtual Teams provides an in-depth, practical perspective on the growing dependence of virtual teams and how to best exploit them. Based on years of direct experience in managing and participating in virtual teams, as well as developing solutions to help virtual teams be more effective, the authors have provided unique insight that can be leveraged to help you get the most of your virtual teams.

Robert Jones works for the Enterprise Architecture Group of HP Corporate IT, where he is the team lead for a group which facilitates cooperation and communication between over 150 enterprise architects from many different countries and organizations. Past assignments included being the chief strategist for Hewlett-Packard's internal desktop management environment, which serves over 120,000 PC clients, as well as being involved in companywide initiatives for collaboration, knowledge management, and mobile commuting. Robert is located in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has spent 15 of his 19 years with Hewlett-Packard. He has been a full-time telecommuter for the last six years, and has worked on a virtual, geographically-dispersed team for the last 10 years.

Rob Oyung is currently an R&D Lab Manager at Hewlett-Packard. He has over 13 years of experience in Information Technology. He has held global management, strategy, and engineering roles in mobility, telecommunications, messaging, collaboration, and IT infrastructure services. Rob has managed and participated on virtual teams for the past 8 years. Rob is located in Palo Alto, California and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Lise Shade Pace works for the Enterprise Architecture Group of HP Corporate IT. She has worked for HP for over fifteen years, and her current areas of focus include Knowledge Management, peer-to-peer computing, and IT infrastructure evolution models. Past assignments have included company wide-initiatives in information management, collaboration and service-centric computing. Lise is a full time telecommuter and has worked on a virtual, geographically distributed team for the past 9 years. Lise is located in Atlanta and is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Oglethorpe University.