We're proud to announce our newest addition to our Dream Team and now guest blogger. Craig Landes is the #1 contributor on Startup Nation, an online community for entrepreneurs (Check out his profile here). Craig wrote a great, short article for us about virtual teams. Thanks Craig!
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What do we mean by the term, "virtual?" Is it the metaphysics of the nature of reality? No, nothing so complicated as that. The word "virtual" simply replaces the expression "the same as if."
We might think that virtual assistants, virtual teams, or virtual worlds all are brand new concepts, never before seen in human history. But really, whenever we use a representative "to act as if" they're fully vested with authority or knowledge, we're dealing with the idea of virtuality.
Think about an online forum, where you physically are located in front of a computer keyboard in the real world. You then have a screen name, and you might even have a tiny picture icon—an avatar—that represents you as a virtual being inside a virtual chat room. People interact with your screen personality and picture "as if" you really and physically were someplace.
The essential aspect of virtuality is separation. All of us have both a body and a brain. Yet those physical aspects contain or store knowledge, a third component. We can exchange or move knowledge and information around as an abstraction, but we can't always exchange or move bodies around so simply.
Consider the transportation and lodging costs alone, where it comes to moving both bodies and knowledge from one place to another. Suppose we have a financial expert in California, and an engineer in New York. Our goal is to learn the costs of a new bridge, but we have our offices in Chicago.
Setting aside the plane tickets, hotel rooms, food, and car rentals, there also is the time involved on the part of each expert. To travel to Chicago, spend time in a physical meeting, then travel back home would effectively remove that time for use by anyone else. And so we pay the bill for that time because we're virtually using it.
The other option is for us to travel first to California to learn about pricing, then to New York to see plans for the bridge: That, or the other way around. Think of the wasted time, in addition to the costs.
All these costs and problems are directly associated with moving both the physical source of information, and the information itself. Modern technology now offers a way to move only the information, separating the body from the knowledge.
Three Basic Benefits
One of the most important benefits of a virtual team is diversity of knowledge. People with many different types of knowledge now can be spread out all over the globe. Online meetings, remote computer access, wireless technology, and conferencing systems offer a way for participants to join a complex discussion from anywhere.
With no travel and lodging costs, and no transitional blocks of empty time, experts who would be unwilling to be inconvenienced now can provide their informational part of a process, then continue on with other business. Because they're involved only for the specific knowledge event, they can charge only for that time, not the additional travel times.
The second major advantage to virtual teamwork is time itself. For example; we can form separate groups for development, planning, structure, and marketing, locating each group in time zones separated by six or so hours around the planet.
One group works a typical business day, then closes down and hands off the project to the next time zone. That group also works a natural business day before handing off to the next time zone, and so forth. The end result is a 24-hour virtual business day.
This type of tag-team hand-off provides a way for a small company of only a few employees to effectively compete with multinational enterprises. In fact, the high-speed decision-making process in the smaller companies actually provides a competitive edge over the committee-burdened enterprise, when it comes to winning bids.
A third, fundamental advantage of this type of electronic teamwork is access. Most expert consultants are working on many different projects, helping a variety of clients. They aren't always available by telephone, but can use email to provide access within a 1-day timeframe.
Diversity in geographic location, time shifting, and the conveniences of communication all add up to being able to put together a very complex skill set at a much more affordable price than in the past. When a consultant needs only to spend one hour in an online meeting, he or she is more willing to do so than to contemplate several days out of town, air travel nightmares, and the loss of other productive time.
By: Craig Landes
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