How 'Close' is Your Team?

A second seminar in the  "IT-Enabled Enterprise Collaboration - Where, When and Why?" at the Babson College Center for Information Management Studies was also noteworthy.  Karen Sobel Lojeski, a Professor at SUNY Stony Brook introduced the concept of "Virtual Distance."  Lojeski developed a measure of the virtual distance among team members and found that it was a strong predictor of key outcomes related both to team member attitude and project success.

Lojeski identified 11 distance measures that group into three factors:

• Physical distance factors include how close the team members are located, how many time zones separate members, and how far apart the members are organizationally. 
• Operational distance factors measure team size, the degree to which the team works face-to-face, the degree to which team members multitask, and the types of collaboration tools and technical support available to team members.
• Affinity distance factors measure the degree to which team members share cultural values, feel interdependent, have other relationships (through other projects or socially), and are at the same level within the organization.

She noted that most of these measures can be collected objectively.  Only a few were subjective perceived measures.  This made it easy to develop a "virtual dstance index," which can be shown on a spider chart.

This allows an organization to easily assess the virtual distance among members of different teams, identify teams that are at risk and take remedial action. 

Teams with relatively low virtual distance were:

• more likely to deliver a project on-time and on-budget
• more trusting
• more innovative
• had higher job satisfaction
• perceived that their leaders were more effective

I liked Lojeski's measurement framework, because it rang true when evaluating KMA-client teams and their relative success.  For example, we ran into problems on a recent project where we had to integrate a contract QA resource with our development team and QA staff, the client's developers, and the business users.  While everyone was physically co-located at the client facility, the coordination was still quite difficult.  In another recent project, our developers worked closely with the client's IT staff (both local to Boston), but the business users were located all over the country.  It was difficult to get feedback from the business users in a timely manner and the project suffered.  We also had a client that moved its IT staff from downtown Boston to a suburb 45 minutes away.  Even though they invested in sophisticated video conferencing equipment, the gulf between the two groups grew, making it more difficult for us to work with both groups.

Moving forward I will be more cognizant of the virtual distance among team members in new projects.  I will take steps to reduce them where possible by scheduling more face to face time with clients, being aware of competing time demands for our consultants, and trying to strengthen relationships between KMA and its clients.  I will also be on the lookout for high virtual distance among client team members and try to add the resources needed to make these higher risk projects successful.

To read more about virtual distance, try Lojeski's book, "Uniting the Virtual Workforce," or this working paper--Making Virtual Distance Work in the Digital Age.