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Managing Virtual Team Work in IT Projects: Survey

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 PAPER
MANAGING VIRTUAL TEAM WORK IN IT PROJECTS: SURVEY

Managing Virtual Team Work in IT Projects:

Survey
http://dx.doi.org/10.3991/ijac.v7i4.4018

Hosam El-Sofany1, Hassan Alwadani2, and Amer Alwadani3

1Cairo Higher Institute, Cairo, Egypt
2Arab East Colleges for Graduate Studies, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
3University of Dayton, Ohio State, USA

Abstract—the nature of managing team work has changed In this changing environment, what competence has an
significantly because of changes in organizations and the IT project manager to excel in to be able to take on these
nature of the work they do. Organizations have become challenges? What soft and hard skills do they have to
more distributed across geography and across industries. focus on?
Relationships between people inside an organization and In this paper the above mentioned question are ap-
those previously considered outside (customers, suppliers, proached from the perspective of competences presented
managers of collaborating organizations, other stakehold- in the IPMA competence baseline, or The Eye of Compe-
ers) are becoming more important. Organizations have tences. This study, however, only focuses on the technical
discovered the value of collaborative work. When imple-
and behavioral categories, leaving the contextual category
menting IT projects in a global environment, a popular
untouched [1].
strategy is the establishment of virtual teams. The objective
of this paper is to examine what competence an IT project
manager has to have to lead a virtual IT team successfully.
II. RELATED WORKS
The question is approached from the perspective of compe- In [2] the research was focused on findings from litera-
tences presented in the IPMA (International Project Manage- ture view is used to develop a Project Management Cul-
ment Association) competence baseline, or The Eye of Com- tural Framework. This framework accounts for different
petences. Results from research, as well as a survey con- cultures in international project teams and identifies cul-
ducted, highlighted that both soft and hard skills are needed ture and communication as core issues framed by a project
for the optimal IT project manager to lead a virtual team. management methodology, organizational systems, pro-
To be successful in this area it is not sufficient to be out- cesses and infrastructure as well as the external environ-
standing in technical competences. Soft skills like communi- ment and stakeholders. Additionally, the framework sug-
cation, teamwork and leadership are no less essential. The gests that an appropriate management of inter-cultural
competences scoring highest in the survey were: clarity of teams poses specific challenges to project managers and
objectives, leadership & project management, communica- organizations striving to build successful project teams.
tion, reliability & efficiency, teamwork and quality man-
agement.
In [3], the main outcome is that a combination of soft
and hard is needed to lead virtual teams in IT projects.
Index Terms—Project management, Virtual teams, Software Technical competence is not sufficient to be successful in
teams this field. In most cases there was no significant correla-
tion between two parameters; usually only a slight or no
correlation. The exception was a correlation between a
I. INTRODUCTION sense of isolation and the team never meeting face to face.
Also a correlation was found between some competences
In recent years, companies have increasingly turned to and the role in teams.
virtual teams as a means of connecting and engaging geo-
graphically dispersed workers, lowering the costs associ- In [4], the researchers introduced a study to develop a
ated with global collaboration, and enabling greater speed cross-cultural communication model that can be applied
and adaptability. Virtual teams have the strong advantage by companies that communicate with employees from
of gathering the best people for a specific task independ- different cultures. Their aim is to identify the steps that
ent of their geographical location in a sort of ‘just in time leaders of organizations competing in a global environ-
talent’ approach. ment should consider when communicating to different
cultures. the 4 C’s Global Leadership Model is introduced
The software industry is no exception. It has been im- to demonstrate how organizational leaders can create
pacted by globalization and this trend continues today. innovation in a global environment by managing conflict,
These changes have been coupled with the availability, in communication, creativity , and connectivity.
large numbers, of qualified software engineers located in
low cost economies, who are capable and willing to un- In [5], the author attempted to look at the above-
dertake outsourced and offshore software development. mentioned factors from a human perspective, and the
Virtual teams, while offering many benefits, also pose a result from his study that the greatest challenges faced by
number of challenges. One of these challenges is to devel- virtual teams are direct communication, creating group
op effective global leaders. dynamics and trust. The four key success factors are:

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MANAGING VIRTUAL TEAM WORK IN IT PROJECTS: SURVEY

communication, culture, technical competence and a sense information and documentation, communication, start-up,
of leadership and direction delivered face to face early and closeout.
Case study: the Icelandic situation: Contextual Competences: Project orientation, program
A project in Information Technology: The project con- orientation, portfolio orientation, project program and
sists of four members with the Dutch manager two in portfolio implementation, permanent organization, busi-
Iceland and one in Denmark and one in the UK. Project ness, systems products and technology, personnel man-
duration 6 months. The team was working in the form of agement, health, security, safety and environment, fi-
virtual team from different places and different time. The nance, and legal.
team faced a problem in determining the scope of the In [7], the author states that: “Virtual teams can be de-
project and its objectives and spent more time and space is fined as a group of people with a shared goal who fulfill
not clear. their roles with little or no time spent meeting face to face
Director Dutch decided to direct and important meeting ”.
in Iceland to learn more about the team members from
near and identify goals and objectives and was the launch
of the project.
The virtual team continues the project via Skype in the
remaining period for a period of between 25 to 30 minutes
a day until they reached the main objective of the project
deliver high quality product.
Success factors:
• Organized kick off meeting for the project.
• Clear directions, and the scope was narrowed down.
• The team is using authorized methods, like Scrum. Figure 1. IPMA Eye of Competence [7]
• The team has daily virtual meetings for updates.
• Face to face meetings in every four weeks. Many other definitions exist for distributed/virtual
teams. Most of these define distributed teams as teams
• Invested time in building relationship and trust. where the bulk of the communication is done with the aid
• Issues are brought up and discussed right away. of information technology. Lipnack and Stamps (1997)
• The project manager is working on solutions for the define distributed teams as groups which work across
issues. space, time and organizations, and where communication
is through information technology. Some define distribut-
• Unsuccessful factors:
ed teams as those who never meet whilst others define
• The project owner is very occupied in other assign- them as teams which meet very rarely [8]. Some scholars
ments. also differentiate between globally distributed teams and
• The project owner is not sharing enough knowledge those who work within the borders of one country. Typi-
with the team [5]. cal problems in globally distributed teams may be differ-
ent from those in teams who work within the same bor-
In [6], the author examined the impact of the workforce ders, i.e. language problems, different cultural back-
on Human Resource Management either locally or inter- grounds and large distances [8, 9].
nationally also it revealed the various factors driving glob-
alization in the workforce and the issues and challenges Global virtual teams are different from intra-national
that confront the Human Resource Management in the virtual teams in that they are not only separated by time
global markets, and also the benefits of globalization Hu- and space, but differ in national, cultural, and linguistic
man Resource Information System (HRIS) to the Human attributes. According to Wheatley and Wilemon (1999), a
Resource (HR) department. global team is defined as a team that is comprised of indi-
viduals located in many different countries or geographic
Distributed/virtual project teams areas. Team members differ in their functionality, which
In the IPMA competence baseline ICB 3.0 (2006), a adds complexity to the group dynamics. The main idea
team is defined as a "group of people who work together behind this concept is that people are both geographically
to realize specific objectives." However, it does not define and functionally dispersed. Conversely, traditional teams
virtual teams separately. The IPMA Eye of Competence is consist of people that work collaboratively, but usually
divided in three categories listed here below, as shown in these are located in one location and may or may not be
Figure 1. functionally different. In global virtual teams, the barriers
Behavioral Competences: Leadership, engagement and can be larger because of national differences [10].
motivation, self-control, assertiveness, relaxation, open- A virtual team (also known as a geographically dis-
ness, creativity, results of orientation, efficiency, consulta- persed team or GDT) is a group of individuals who work
tion, negotiation, conflict and crisis, reliability, value across time, space and organizational boundaries with
appreciation, and ethics. links strengthened by webs of communication technology.
Technical Competences: Project management success, Other issues that emerged in the pilot survey regarded the
interested parties, project requirements and objectives, risk wording of the questions as some of them turned out to be
and opportunity, quality, project organization, teamwork, too complicated.
problem resolution, project structures, scope and delivera- Virtual team leaders: The challenges that virtual team
bles, time and project phases, resources, cost and finance, leaders face are immense. Many report that they feel as if
procurement and contracts, changes, control and reports, they are the “glue” that holds their teams together. They

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have to establish trust in an environment with little or no 1. IT development is very rapid. As a consequence, any
face-to-face contact or feedback. These challenges neces- prediction of IT projects and technologies are quite
sitate the development of an additional set of competen- difficult.
cies that complement the skills for leading traditional 2. There is no yardstick or standard to measure the eco-
teams [11]. nomic viability of IT projects and activities [13].
Ingason and Jónasson (2009) argue that the project
manager should have hard skills and technical skills as During the 90s, the trend was for software companies to
well as soft skills like those that relate to leadership, moti- outsource software development to a third party or subsid-
vation, group dynamics, interpersonal communication, iaries based in Ireland, and India [13].
culture, and ethics, to manage the project effectively. In recent years, however, the focus has shifted away
Further, soft skills will help in managing people from from Ireland and Israel to Eastern Europe, Latin America,
diverse cultures and managing conflicts among the team- and the Far East, where China and India are the most
members. Finally, they prove that although technical abil- popular locations. The number of organizations globaliz-
ity is an important skill for the project manager, a strong ing their information systems development continues to
focus should be given to leadership strategy and skills. rise. This means that globally distributed software devel-
Soft skills are subjective and may or may not be true. opment is set to continue to have a significant impact on
They are often associated with personal attributes and the way the software industry operates for the foreseeable
character. Some examples include: future [14]
Technical skills alone are not sufficient for the success
• Strong communication skills
of any IT project in today’s distributed and complex
• Time management workplace. IT projects are dispersed all over the globe and
• Organizational skills now the project manager must acquire the soft skills and
• Good with children leadership ability to lead the project in order to achieve the
measurable organizational objectives [16].
• Reliable, responsible, committed
Research on critical success factors in IT project man-
Hard skills are specific, teachable abilities that are based agement by Thite (1999) focuses on the importance of
in fact. Some examples include: non-technical factors, such as leadership. He describes the
• Project requirements & objectives are clear three dimensions, i.e. the self, the subordinate and superior
• Language. perspective of successful leadership characteristics in IT
project management. He argues that leadership is tangible
• Scope & deliverables are well defined and characterized by organizational catalysts, intellectual
• Quality stimulation, behavioral charisma and contingent reward
• Conflict & crisis handling behaviors for enhanced leadership effectiveness [16].
The challenges faced by virtual managers are different III. CONTRIBUTION
from their non-virtual counterparts because they must deal
with feelings of isolation as well as communication diffi- The purpose of the survey was to try to discover what
culties. Trust, a critical factor for effective virtual work- competence IT project managers have to have to lead a
ing, is harder to build, while technology is both an aid and virtual team successfully, e.g. what type of hard and soft
barrier to effective communication. Psychological issues skills are needed. The guidelines for competence are taken
around cultural diversity emerge as virtual workers be- from the IPMA Eye of Competence, i.e. the technical and
come distanced from their organization [12]. behavioral sectors. However, the contextual was not in-
cluded.
The outcome presented in [12] is confirmed that com-
munications, building and maintaining trust, selecting the We have designed and implemented a questionnaire.
right people, developing the team and an outcome-based The questionnaire was divided into three parts. The first
approach to performance management are all important part focused on background information, such as gender,
for effective virtual work processes. Of these, communica- experience with international projects and international
tion and trust were most critical with effective virtual training. Most of the questions in this section were tradi-
managers excelling in these areas. tional background questions, but to maintain anonymity it
was necessary to limit this section.
A. Leading IT projects/software development and In the second part, questions were asked about the last
globalization project that the individual participated in and included
IT technologies change at a rapid pace and the IT pro- questions like the role in the team, team size, the number
ject manager can rarely be expected to learn the technical of organizations in the project, the number of locations
aspects. However, an IT project manager must have the and the maximum time difference between locations,
ability to recruit and form the team to manage the project. frequency of communication, communication media,
He should have effective leadership ability i.e. vision and implementation of the start up/kick off and also whether
the ability to influence both the stakeholders and the pro- some team building was done. Finally, participants were
ject team. asked whether they had noticed problems in the last pro-
ject. They got a list of 14 items that are often referred to as
There is a distinct difference between an IT and non-IT a problem in distributed teams.
project like engineering, construction, manufacturing, etc.
An IT project is never standardized and comprises a varie- The third and last section focused on the project man-
ty of activities defined as follows: ager competences. Participants were asked to prioritize
and rate the technical and behavioral competence accord-
ing to importance. The participants were also asked to

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MANAGING VIRTUAL TEAM WORK IN IT PROJECTS: SURVEY

select from a list what they considered to be the main

challenges of working in a virtual team.

IV. RESULTS
The main outcome from the survey is that a combina-
tion of soft and hard is needed to lead virtual teams in IT
projects. Technical competence is not sufficient to be
successful in this field. In most cases there was no signifi-
cant correlation between two parameters; usually only a
slight or no correlation. The exception was a correlation
between a sense of isolation and the team never meeting
face to face. Also a correlation was found between some
competences and the role in teams.
A. Survey finding
We selected 31 participants, 24 were male and 7 fe-
Figure 2. Problems that occurred in the projects
male. Educational level was high; 14 participants had
cross-cultural training and 17 had no cross-cultural train-
ing. The average of VT projects that the participants par-
ticipated from 6-10 VT projects. There were only Five
nationalities: Saudis, Egyptian, Gordian, Pakistani, Indian
.but the locations were five, i.e. the Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
the US, Pakistan, UK and Indian.
74% percent of the participants were regular team
members in their project; the rest, or 26%, were project
managers. The average team size was around 12 members,
with the most common size being 4-6 individuals. 65% of
the projects had 9 or more members. Average project time
was 6 months but the most common time was 6-12
months. Most of the projects had 2 languages or 54.2%
and no project had more than four languages. The average
number of organizations involved was 2. In most of the
projects, three organizations were involved or 39%. The
average number of project locations was 2.5; most had
two or three locations. On average, the largest time zone
difference was 4 hours; most common were 2 hours dif-
ferences.
Most of the teams had little direct communication, face Figure 3. Elements that participant found challenging
to face, with 10% never meeting and 90% meeting once
during a project’s duration. Phone calls or Skype calls,
Mails, Team Viewer, video calls were often the main
mode of communication. The frequency of team meeting
was rather high: 94% had team meetings weekly on inter-
net and some of projects meets on daily.
B. Problems occurred in the projects
Figure 2, presents the main problems encountered in the
project teams. Lack of clear objectives for the project and
technical problems were the most common problems, but
time difference, different public holidays, and recognizing
the need for support was also reported. Very few encoun-
tered problems due to no commitment, cultural differ-
ences, lack of trust or lack of leadership. No one encoun-
tered problems due to religious views.
The elements that participant found challenging with
working in virtual team are displayed in Figure 3.
There was a significant correlation between those par-
ticipants who reported a sense of isolation and the team
never meeting face to face, or 62.5% of the participants. Figure 4. Correlation between importance of behavioral competence
and role in team
The ranking of behavioral competence when the partic-
ipants were asked to rate each separately is shown in Fig-
ure 4.

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MANAGING VIRTUAL TEAM WORK IN IT PROJECTS: SURVEY

The rating of the technical competence, i.e. when par- The categorization of soft and hard skills does not re-
ticipants were asked to rate each separately is shown in flect the technical and behavioral competences directly in
Figure 5. the Eye of Competences. Among the ten competences that
Below on Figure 6 the ten competences that scored respondents of the survey ranked the highest, three are
highest in participant rating are listed. The Table 1 shows defined in the Eye as technical, but would fall under soft
how these competences are categorized into technical and competences in the definition used in this paper, i.e. pro-
behavioral competences on the one hand, and hard and ject management, communication and teamwork.
soft skills on the other hand. The decision to let participants rate the competence ra-
Figure 7, shows the result from the survey, division be- ther than prioritize them may have reduced the possibility
tween technical and behavioral competences on the one of seeing marked differences between competences. A
hand, and hard and soft skills on the other hand shown in better method would have been to use the pilot survey to
Figure 8. get top competences and let the participants in the main
survey prioritize them. Lack of trust scores lower than in
V. DISCUSSION most studies on virtual teams. One possible explanation is
that the participants of this study all work in the IT pro-
This paper has studied the project manager competenc- jects, although in distributed teams.
es needed to lead an IT project in a distributed environ-
ment. It has looked at what combination of behavioral and
TABLE I.
technical competence might be needed. First, this topic SHOWING CATEGORIZATION ON TECHNICAL/BEHAVIORAL AND
was discussed from the perspective of existing literature, SOFT/HARD COMPETENCES
and then from the outcome of the survey that was con-
ducted within a IT projects, which is a project driven
company using virtual teams.

Figure 5. Correlation between importance of technical competence and

role in team

Figure 7. Top 10 divided by Technical or Behavioral Competences

Figure 6. Rating of the top teen competences Figure 8. Top 10 divided by Hard or Soft competences

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MANAGING VIRTUAL TEAM WORK IN IT PROJECTS: SURVEY

The fact that competences such as requirements, objec- [5] (Ásgeir Haukur Gu!mundsson What are the success factors for
tives, scope and deliverables are scoring high is consistent project leaders in virtual teams? 2012
with other studies. The authors in [12] summarized it in [6] (Oyeyemi Kayode Impact of Globalization on Human Resource
Management,” Science Journal of Business Management, Volume
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robust and clear view of exactly what outcomes are re-
[7] A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowlwdge PMBOK
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zone differences and language difference challenging is Institute Inc.
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Competence, one that focuses on virtual work processes, Organization Science, 473-492. http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/
since globalization is spreading at a fast rate, and compa- orsc.11.5.473.15200
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[10] Zakaria, N., Amelinckx, A., & Wilemon, D. (2004, March).
VI. CONCLUSION Working Together Apart? Building a Knowledge-Sharing Culture
From both the survey’s findings and the literature re- for Global Virtual Teams. Creativity and Innovation Management,
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To summarize, the most important competence for leading
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• Reliability/Efficiency [17] http://ipma.ch/resources/ipma-publications/ipma-competence-
baseline/
• Teamwork
• Quality Management AUTHORS
Dr. Hosam F. El-Sofany received his Ph.D. and his M.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT Sc. degree in Computer Science. He is currently an Assis-
The authors acknowledge the academic support re- tant Professor of CS at Cairo Higher Institute, and Direc-
ceived from Arab East Colleges for Graduate Studies and tor of Educity Center for Learning and Scientific Re-
from Educity center for Learning and Scientific Research, search, Cairo, Egypt. He has a strong technical back-
as well as from Cairo Higher Institute for Computer Sci- ground including the development of Web-based and
ence, Engineering and Managements. Mobile-based educational systems. His research interest
include: E-Learning, M-Learning, XML Databases, Data-
REFERENCES bases Systems, and Semantic Web. Dr. El-Sofany’s e-mail
is: [email protected].
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America Student Conference 2012)

iJAC ‒ Volume 7, Issue 4, 2014 33

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