Operational Excellence

Dealing with Multiple Locations and Outsourcing

Virtual organizations are often a given in outsourcing environments, especially those that are offshore. Offshore outsourcing also means that communications originate in multiple locations. The first step in dealing with multiple locations is finding ways to deal with different time zones. Project management can become more complicated when team meetings occur at obscure times for certain members of the community. Dealing with unanticipated problems can be more challenging

when assembling the entire team may not be feasible because of time differences. The second challenge in running organizations in multiple locations is culture. Differing cultural norms can especially cause problems during off-hour virtual sessions. For example, European work culture does not often support having meetings outside work hours. In some countries, work hours may be regulated by the government or powerful unions. A further complication in outsourcing is that the virtual team members may be employed by different companies. For instance, part of the community may include a vendor who has assigned staff resources to the effort. Thus, these outsourced team members belong to the community of the project yet also work for another organization. The relationship between an outside consultant and the internal team is not straightforward and varies among projects. For example, some outsourced technical resources may be permanently assigned to

the project, so while they actually work for another firm, they behave and take daily direction as if they were an employee of the focal business. Yet, in other relationships, outsourced resources work closely under the auspices of the outsourced “ project manager,” who acts as a buffer between the firm and the vendor. Such COP formations vary. Still other outsourcing arrangements involve team members the firm does not actually know unless outsourced staff is called in to solve a problem. This situation exists when organizations outsource complete systems, so that the expectation is based more on the results than on the interaction. Notwithstanding the arrangement or level of integration, a COP must exist, and its behavior in all three of these examples varies in participation, but all are driven in a virtual relationship more by dynamic business events than by preplanned activities. If we look closely at COP approaches to operations, it is necessary to create an extension of dynamism in a virtual team community. The extension reflects the reliance on dynamic transactions, which creates temporary team formations based on demographic similarity needs. This means that virtual teams will often be formed based on specific interests of people within the same departments. Table 7.4 shows the expansion of dynamism in a virtual setting of COPs. Thus, the advent of modern-day IT outsourcing has complicated the way COPs function. IT outsourcing has simultaneously brought

attention to the importance of COP and knowledge management in general. It also further supports the reality of technology dynamism as more of a norm in human communication in the twenty first

century.

Revisiting Social Discourse

In Chapter 4, I covered the importance of social discourse and the use of language as a distinct component of how technology changes COP. That section introduced three components that linked talk and action, according to the schema of Grant et al. (1998): Identity, skills and emotion. Figure 7.2 shows this relationship again. The expansion of virtual team communications further emphasizes the importance of discourse and the need to rethink how these three components relate to each other in a virtual context.

Identity

I spoke about the “ cultures of practice” due to expansion of contacts from technology capacities. This certainly holds true with virtual teams. However, identities can be transactional— in ways such that an individual may be a member of multiple COP environments and have different identities in each. This fact emphasizes the multitasking aspect of the linear development modules discussed throughout this book. Ultimately, social discourse will dynamically change based on the COP to which an individual belongs, and that individual needs to be able to “ inventory” these multiple roles and responsibilities. Such roles and responsibilities themselves will transform, due to the dynamic nature of technology-driven projects. Individuals will thus have multiple identities and must be able to manage those identities across different COPs and in different contexts within those COPs.

This requires individual maturities that must be able to cope with the “ other” and understand the relativistic nature of multiple cultures and the way discourse transforms into action.

Skills

I mentioned the importance of persuasion as a skill to transform talk into action. Having the ability to persuade others across virtual teams is critical. Often, skills are misrepresented as technical abilities that give people a right of passage. Across multiple cultures, individuals in teams must be able to recognize norms and understand how to communicate with others to get tangible results on their projects. It is difficult to make such determinations about individuals that one has never met face to face. Furthermore, virtual meetings may not provide the necessary background required to properly understand a person’ s skill sets, both “ hard” and “ soft.” The soft skills analysis is more important as the individual’ s technical credentials become assumed. We see such assumptions when individuals transition into management positions. Ascertaining technical knowledge at the staff level is easier— almost like an inventory analysis of technical requirements. However, assessing an individual’ s soft skills is much more challenging. Virtual teams will need to create more complex and broadened inventories of their team’ s skill sets, as well as establish better criteria on how to measure soft skills. Soft skills will require individuals to have better “ multicultural” abilities, so that team members can be better equipped to deal with multinational and cross-cultural issues.

Emotion

Like persuasion, emotion involves an individual’ s ability to motivate others and to create positive energy. Many of those who successfully use emotion are more likely to have done so in a physical context than a virtual one. Transferring positive emotion in a virtual world can be analogous to what organizations experienced in the e-commerce world, in which organizations needed to rebrand themselves across the Web in such a way that their image was reflected virtually to their customers. Marketing had to be accomplished without exposure to the buyer during purchase decisions. Virtual COPs are similar: Representation must be what the individual takes away, without seeing the results physically. This certainly offers a new dimension for managing teams. This means that the development requirements for virtual members must include advanced abstract thinking so that the

individual can better forecast virtual team reactions to what will be said, as opposed to reacting while the conversation is being conducted or thinking about what to do after virtual meetings. In Chapter 4, I presented Marshak’ s (1998) work on types of talk that lead to action: tool-talk, frame-talk, and mythopoetic-talk. Virtual teams require modification to the sequence of talk; that is, the use of talk is altered. Let us first look at Figure 7.3, representing Marshak’ s model. To be effective, virtual teams must follow this sequence from the outside inward. That is, the virtual team must focus on mythopoetic-talk in the center as opposed to an outer ring. This means that ideogenic issues must precede interpretation in a virtual world. Thus, tool-talk, which in the physical world lies at the center of types of tools, is now moved to the outside rectangle. In other words, instrumental actions lag those of ideology and interpretation. This is restructured in Figure 7.4.

Mythopoetic-talk is at the foundation of grounding ideas in a virtual COP. It would only make sense that a COP-driven talk requires ideogenic behavior before migrating to instrumental outcomes. Remember that ideogenic talk allows for concepts of intuition and ideas for concrete application especially relevant among multiple cultures and societies. So, we again see that virtual teams require changes in the sequence of how learning occurs. This change in sequence places more emphasis on the need for an individual to be more developmentally mature— with respect to thinking, handling differences, and thinking abstractly. This new “ abstract individual” must be able to reflect before action and reflect in action to be functionally competent in virtual team participation. Because ROD is relevant, it is important to determine how virtual teams affect the ROD maturity arc first presented in Figure 4.10 and redisplayed in Figure 7.5.

Figure 7.6 represents the virtual team extension to the ROD arc. The changes to the cells are shown in italics. Note that there are no changes to operational knowledge because this stage focuses solely

on self-knowledge learned from authoritative sources. However, as the individual matures, there is greater need to deal with uncertainty. This includes the uncertainty that conditions in a COP may

be temporary, and thus knowledge may need to vary from meeting to meeting. Furthermore, while operational realities may be more transactional, it does not necessarily mean that adopted changes are not permanent. Most important is the reality that permanence in general may no longer be a characteristic of how the organization operates; this further emphasizes ROD as a way of life. As a result of this extreme complexity in operations, there is an accelerated requirement for executives to become involved earlier in the development process. Specifically, by stage two (department/unit view of the other), executives must be engaged in virtual team management considerations. Ultimately, the virtual team ROD arc demonstrates that virtual teams are more complex and therefore need members who are more mature to ensure the success of outsourcing and other virtual constructs. It also explains why virtual teams have struggled, likely because their members are not ready for the complex participation necessary for adequate outcomes. We must also remember that maturity growth is likely not parallel in its linear progression. This was previously shown in Figure 4.12.

This arc demonstrates the challenge managers face in gauging the readiness of their staff to cope with virtual team engagement. On the other hand, the model also provides an effective measurement schema that can be used to determine where members should be deployed and their required roles and responsibilities. Finally, the model allows management to prepare staff for the training and development they need as part of the organizational learning approach to dealing with ROD.