Virtual Teams

Resource technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

Building a team that rarely shares a physical location, on purpose and with care.

When to use it

Use it whenever the team is distributed by necessity: remote hires, a specialist who works from a different city, a client-side team member who was never going to relocate. It is a fact of the team's makeup to manage well, not a discretionary choice to opt out of.

When to avoid it

Virtual teaming is not a cost-saving default to reach for whenever colocation is inconvenient. It trades away the incidental communication colocation buys for free — the overheard conversation that surfaces a misunderstanding before it becomes a defect, the five-minute hallway question that would have taken a scheduled call otherwise. If the work genuinely depends on tight, fast-turnaround collaboration and colocation is actually available, don't choose virtual to save an office cost and then be surprised when coordination gets worse.

Steps

1. Name the specific communication colocation would have given you for free — status awareness, quick clarification, informal trust-building — and build a deliberate replacement for each one rather than assuming video calls cover all of it.
2. Set explicit norms: response-time expectations, which channel is for what, and core overlap hours if the team spans time zones, written down rather than left to be inferred.
3. Schedule informal contact on purpose — a virtual team that only ever talks about status never builds the trust that makes raising a problem early feel safe.
4. Over-communicate context in writing: decisions, rationale, and changes that a colocated team would absorb by osmosis have to be stated for a virtual one or they simply don't reach everyone.

What it produces

• Documented communication norms and channels the whole team actually uses
• A team that stays informed and coordinated without relying on incidental, in-person contact

Common pitfalls

• Assuming a chat tool and a weekly call replace what colocation gave for free, then being surprised months later that misunderstandings surface as finished, wrong work instead of as a quick correction.
• Letting time-zone overlap shrink to nothing, so "the team" is really two teams that hand off asynchronously and rarely talk in real time at all.
• Skipping the informal contact because it doesn't look like work — the trust it builds is what makes someone flag a problem in week two instead of hiding it until week eight.

Worked example

A specialty coffee roaster's e-commerce project has a backend developer in Portland and a data analyst in Manila, five time zones apart. The PM sets a two-hour daily overlap window for synchronous questions, requires every decision to be written in the project's shared doc rather than said only on a call, and puts a fifteen-minute unstructured video chat on the calendar every Friday that has no status agenda at all.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §9.4.2.2

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.