Imposing a Common Deadline on Remote Teams

It’s rare to find a project without a deadline. Due dates and deadlines drive the entire project management process. I’m not talking about the dates for each task (which is wise to avoid), but about dates that drive task priorities.

Projects can have a single completion date and important milestone dates for progress payments, client reviews, feature releases, etc. These are the dates. The important ones. Where we get paid.

Managing and meeting project dates and deadlines can be challenging, even for teams that work together daily. We recognize the communication difficulties faced by distributed teams and the critical need to manage content effectively. Usually, getting the dates right is the most vital part.

Distributed teams have a much more difficult time meeting due dates and deadlines.

• Haystack Syndrome: The volume of data, both important and unimportant, from multiple sources overwhelms team members, making it impossible for anyone to form an accurate picture of the true progress. How can the most critical information affecting the deadline be found? Project teams spend a lot of time sifting through data to identify what matters most. When team members are far apart, even finding the data is a challenge.
• Reliability: Project managers need to ensure that their entire team has the correct information that affects delivery and deadlines. Team members in distributed teams sometimes withhold information, obscure the real situation, or delay providing negative information, hoping the situation will improve. This is particularly true when working in cross-cultural teams, where delivering bad news can create problems for a local team.
• Inconsistent vision: Most people work in their own bubble of tasks, unaware of the project's big picture and how their work fits. What is important is not always recognized.

Managers of remote teams are often frustrated by their inability to get traction on meeting deadlines. The challenge is to get the entire team focused on a common set of objectives – including dates. If you’re not present in the work area, the number of options is fairly limited.

Project managers need a tool that provides a:

• Single consistent window for seeing progress across all task elements and locations, in real time
• Shared view of project status
• Shared view of the obstacles
• Shared understanding of the work to be done to overcome those obstacles

One of my clients became a victim of its own success, struggling to meet critical delivery due dates for a new product that had much higher demand than forecast. The company had components from five different suppliers tested by two subcontractors. Part of the solution we helped implement was a visual project board. It helped the local team, but remote collaboration was critical. We developed and implemented a date-driven visual project board web app that enabled every team member at remote suppliers to view the project’s status, identify critical information, and collaborate (without losing face) to accelerate progress. Getting everyone on board with the same deadlines was critical to the project’s success, which ultimately improved product flow and delivery reliability. They also found 5 times greater capacity, a quadrupled output, and a 23% reduction in lead time. Most importantly, the delivery dates were achieved, and they got paid. A lot.

How to get productive work from distributed teams is in Remote Control.