The Future of Virtual Teams: Collaboration in 3D Web

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A new report from Forrester Research is encouraging businesses to consider virtual worlds as a necessary next step in helping collaboration among team members and businesses. Reports such as this strengthen our conviction that, just as the Internet revolutionized the way we communicate and collaborate with each other, virtual worlds and the 3D world wide web will soon have the same transformational effects on the way we communicate and collaborate.

Overcoming Virtual Team Challenges: After Action Review

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Fittingly, “Leading Virtually” has been operating as a virtual team over the past several weeks. I am currently in New York City, while each of the other team members are located in various parts of New York State and Pennsylvania. The whole team has not had a chance to get together for some time as everyone works on their own… Read more →

Lessons from the Military for Collaboration in Virtual Teams

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When the rest of the LeadingVirtually.com team asked me to contribute to this blog, I was initially at a loss as to what I should write about. There was not much, I thought, I could say about virtual teams. As an officer in the Korean military, I thought, “I am a military man who is trained to fight.” My team… Read more →

Motivation in Virtual Teams: Lessons from Virtual Worlds

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Last week I read a report called Leadership in Games and at Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMOGs), put out by an organization called Seriosity (condensed report, full report). Their study investigated the lessons that MMOGs might have for leadership in the workplace, with the suggestion that experience in MMOGs or virtual worlds crosses… Read more →

Culture Matters in Virtual Teams

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Leaders of virtual teams often talk about having to deal with cultural challenges in their teams. Yet, they have been offered little to help them think systematically about how to adjust their leadership when dealing with such challenges. Things are beginning to change, however. During the recently held International Conference on Information Systems in Montreal, I had the pleasure of… Read more →

Controls in Virtual Teams: The Case of Boeing

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A recent Wall Street Journal article “Boeing Scrambles to Repair Problems with New Plane” (December 7, 2007) underscored the importance of controls in virtual teams. Controls are mechanisms used by companies to ensure that the individuals working on their projects act in accordance with their plans. When Boeing embarked on the production of its new 787, it did two things… Read more →

A Mashup for Virtual Team Collaboration

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In my last post I suggested that simply copying and pasting the real world into a virtual environment is likely not enough to optimize virtual world collaboration. Sun Microsystems is a company that seems to understand this and is utilizing the company’s virtual world in an interesting way. Rather than make everything a carbon-copy of the real world, Sun is… Read more →

Building Trust in Virtual Teams

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People in organizations have known for a long time that trust is an important antecedent of effective teamwork. So it would make sense for this to hold true not only in face to face groups, but also for virtual teams. This week the Leading Virtually team came across a posting by Bridge the Distance offering help in building trust in… Read more →

Difficulty in the Trenches of Virtual Teamwork

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Last week, a friend (I’ll call him Al) was telling me about the challenges he’s facing in his virtual team. This team was assembled for a specific long-term project to reformulate information-sharing processes across groups in his financial services company. Team members were recruited because they are high performers and have expertise in their functional areas, so the official team… Read more →

Time to Think Differently About Collaboration in Virtual Worlds

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I demonstrated Second Life a few days back to an MBA class on e-business. There seemed to be some confusion about what something like Second Life is for or what people can do there, and for that matter, why they would want to. This confusion seems to exist even among businesses that are building a presence in Second Life. Some… Read more →