Improving Effectiveness of Multi-Location Teams - “How do you know they’re working?”

This 2 hour instructor-led webinar overviews a workshop designed for people who work in or who manage teams located in multiple locations throughout their country, their continent, or the world. The content was developed by the instructor over many years working in and managing international teams. The structure of the workshop evolved from the Localisation Project Management workshop that has been delivered internationally for 10 years. The focus is on simple messages and techniques so that participants can improve their performance as soon as they return to the workplace.

What is it about?
Today, many teams are distributed throughout the world. Sharing a common place of work with all one’s co-workers and managers seems to be the exception rather than the rule. New management processes and practices have evolved to deal with this new reality. New technologies have enabled distributed resources to collaborate much more easily. However, how is team effectiveness maintained in this environment? If you’re a manager, how do you know your team is working well? If you have a manager, how do you know if you’re delivering exactly what he or she wants? If you depend on peers, how can you ensure that you get and give deliverables at the right time in the right way? Maybe “the system” will take care of it all (once the bugs have been cleared up)? If you have a system that works, are you using it as effectively as possible?

The workshop is divided into 4 modules as outlined below. The instructor will present each module in 20 – 25 minutes, illustrating the points with examples from his experience. Questions can be addressed during the modules, and/or at the end when a general Q&A can be held.

1. Starting
• Introduction and background
• Goal(s) setting
• Communicating the goal(s)
• Lessons Learned*

2. Doing
• Activating the team
• Monitoring activities
• Course correcting
• Lessons Learned*

3. Finishing
• Maintaining understanding of the goal(s)
• Data vs information
• Context of team members
• Multiple activities
• Multiple “masters”
• Achieving the goal(s)
• How do you know?
• Who to tell, how to tell?
• Lessons Learned*

4. Improving
• Reviewing
• What is the point?
• Making the time
• How and What to review
• Improving
• How can we improve
• Actions not excuses
• “Fool me once…”
• Root cause analysis
• Structure vs Behaviour
• Infrastructure vs Performance
• Monitored vs unfettered
• Metrics
• Lessons Learned*

What will I get out of it?
Participants will get an outline of a simple effective framework to help them manage and work in multi-location teams more successfully. The workshop is best suited to people who have between 1 and 5 years experience working in multi-location teams.

The sessions are run in a highly interactive manner. Participants are encouraged to ask questions during the workshop. However not all questions can be dealt with fully in the time permitted, and sometimes participants only think of questions and issues after the event is over. Therefore, participants can email the instructor up to 12 months after the webinar date with questions and requests.