Virtual Team Management

Virtual teams are teams of people who usually collaborate electronically, because virtual team members are physically separated by time and / or space. For example virtual team can include specialists from different countries and geographic sites that are involved in common projects and have to communicate and co-operate, share their work skills, job performance and information in order to achieve common goals together. Such virtual teams appear in modern reality, when international business activity is developing intensively and a lot of reasons may cause necessity of allocated labor. For example: a lot of companies establish offices in foreign countries, and enterprise-wide projects or initiatives may require world-wide cooperation of different specialists. Modern business requires mobility from businessmen, often such people have to travel around the world and they should manage their business, interact with subordinates and colleagues from different locations. Another possible reason is aim to reduce costs - businessmen from developed countries try to reduce their costs and involve in their projects staff sources from other countries (outsourcing). Virtual teams can include people working not from office, but from their homes located in different cities, states, etc. so expenses associated with lodging, leasing or owning a building, buying of office equipment and so on may be reduced or eliminated. Besides virtual team advantage is that people can be recruited for their competencies and skills, not just physical location.

Of course virtual team efficient collaboration requires proper technological support. Modern technology facilitates virtual team cooperation and often it is enough for employee to have PC and Internet connection to join the virtual team. Of course specificity of business makes adjustments into hardware and software requirements, however usually virtual teams require special software for task and time management within the team that allows Team coordinator to plan, assign, track and report team members' tasks.

VIP Task Manager is convenient software tool that immediately informs team members that new tasks are assigned to them, when, in what order and how these tasks should be done, and then allows employees to report to their managers about tasks performance and share their results in real time. Managers can easily plan tasks' priority, status, duration, start and finish dates, due dates, reminders, etc, give additional instructions to team members and then easily track job and project performance. VIP Task Manager allows documents sharing, creating of printable reports, reports in formats of MS Excel and html (that can be posted on company web-site). VIP Tasks Manager facilitates team collaboration, makes it fast and convenient, allows all team members to share their performance, discuss issues and helps to achieve common goals according to plan.