Jessica Lipnack is a CEO of NetAge, Inc., a consultancy focused on global collaboration strategies, methods, and tools. She is co-author, with Jeffrey Stamps, of six books, including Virtual Teams (John Wiley & Sons, 2000). Lipnack offers teleconferencing advice in Line56's article, Suffering from Teleconference Boredom? How about showing a little human compassion with five steps to relieving dial-up drudgery (June 17, 2003). Most is just simple common sense, except the shockingly simple advice:

"hold all real-time meetings from within your team's virtual room"

Yes, even the face-to-face ones. Why? Because you'll benefit from the enforced "best practices" built into the virtual meeting room's design, and you'll have all the materials you'll need at your disposal. Sounds like good advice to me.

11:06:38 AM    

Success in a Virtual World, A blueprint for building an e-Workplace To Better Manage Your Remote Workforce (July 22, 2003), by Pam Stanford, Director of IBM On Demand Workplace Solutions  is an editorial piece from Line 56.

"The solution that addresses the challenges of telecommuting for both employees and managers is a comprehensive e-workplace program. An e-workplace is a virtual workplace that provides employees with access to information and a broad set of Internet-based collaborative technologies, such as e-meetings, e-learning and instant messaging designed to make all employees more nimble." (empahasis added)

The central idea of the article is that the right tools are required, especially team-based tools.

As an example of the cost savings potential, the article sites IBM's estimated $10,000 per employee that gives up their dedicated office space, and the $50 million per year in reclaimed travel and productivity costs due to e-meetings.

4 tips are given for managing virtual teams:

1. establish a purpose & measurable objectives for each team member
2. measure the output, not the process
3. balance the need for virtual vs. face-to-face meetings
4. use presence awareness to show your virtual office door is open

10:56:22 AM