Leadership - Project Management in Virtual Business

Leading and managing teams in a geographically distributed work environment presents a unique set of challenges. We are witnessing the start of the twilight years of hierarchical management, massive corporate buildings and employee relocation requirements.  These Industrial Era command-and-control functions are increasingly being readdressed by firms as they seek to streamline processes and improve efficiencies, meet tightening budgets, and find and retain top talent.

Management and leadership have to evolve to match the changing business environment.  Management by objective (MBO) becomes much more impactful, assuming the objectives can be readily measured and are relevant to the firm's overall goals and strategy. As firms move along the path of distributed environments, project management tools become the axis upon which every other activity hinges. Project management tools allow companies to manage and measure employee productivity and contributions in the new business environment.

There are a number of project management tools available in the market today: Microsoft's Office Project (www.microsoft.com), Clarizen's Online Project Management Software (www.clarizen.com) and Liquidplanner's Online Project Manager (www.liquidplanner.com). These software tools go beyond the ability to build a gantt chart.  They provide information on dependencies and co-dependencies. They can be administered to push project update requests to the task owner. They even incorporate collaborative capabilities allowing contractors outside of the firm to see the status of their pieces of the project. 

The beauty of the online tools, offered as SaaS, is their ability to support a virtual work environment with ease. They eliminate the need for daily conference calls that span numerous time zones.  Online project management tools stop the email overload. Online tools enable workers to work toward goals and objectives. By tying the online project management tools to human resources, performance evaluations become fast and easy.

Business structures are changing. Consequently, the way of managing and leading geographically dispersed employees must also change. Successful companies absolutely must embrace Web 2.0 solutions if they want to remain competitive. Project management skills, coupled with robust online tools, will be part of the new business management paradigm.

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