Post-geographic world and different types of virtual teams

We live in the time when many developed countries have entered the era of "post-industrial" economy. That means information becomes the most valuable and important recourse. Besides, intensively developing transport, computer and telecommunication technologies drive humanity into "post-geographic" era. New technologies eliminate time and space barriers, transforming world into one big village. People from all over the world can immediately see and hear each other, easily communicate with each other, study same information, exchange their viewpoints, and of course work together. Technological progress has generated new form of co-working - virtual teams. Also they are called Geographically Dispersed Team (GDT). Such team members are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent performance goals, share their performance and are mutually accountable, but they are located in separate places of the world. They collaborate with each other via networks of modern technologies. Such flexible form of team work is a great opportunity for modern business, because it allows recruiting best employees that may be located anywhere in the world. Moreover there are many advantages like reducing of costs related to office maintenance, giving more personal flexibility to employees, employees tend to be more productive - less commuting and travel time and so on. According to management specialists' opinion virtual teams has the same effectiveness as traditional co-located teams (in separate cases even higher effectiveness than co-located teams).

Management specialists define 7 types of virtual teams:

Naturally virtual team collaboration should be supported by good technological instruments (software and hardware). On earlier stages of virtual team development people collaborated with a help of phones, faxes, telegraph, post, etc. Today the best environment of collaboration is Internet, and the best hardware instrument is PC. There is a lot of software products intended for intercourse in World Wide Web. However virtual team activity requires good tasks and goals planning. Virtual teams should work in results-oriented way, because employees' accountability should be based on measurable outcomes. That means each team member has to be clearly informed about tasks and goals he/she was assigned by virtual team coordinator, should have ability to report about progress and should be notified about common project performance.

VIP Task Manager is groupware which is intended for team tasks and time management. It allows multiple users access common database via Internet (or LAN) to plan, track, edit and report tasks. Managers can plan and track employees tasks with a help of Task Tree view and Scheduler (Calendar view). Team members can use Task List view to manage tasks that were assigned to them. VIP Task Manager gives possibility to plan tasks by big number of custom and standard attributes such as task's start and finish date, due date, duration, priority, etc.

Employees' performance can be easily tracked with a help of tasks statuses and percent of tasks completion. Flexible system of notifications can make any team member immediately informed regarding any events that can happen within VIP Task Manager system (if new tasks were assigned, if some tasks are complete, if task's due date was changed and so on).

With a help of VIP Task Manager people can share their documents, report and share their job results, observe common project progress, interact to achieve common goals, discuss and solve issues. To share the same VIP Task Manager database via Internet the computer/server where this database will be deployed should have static IP-address. In this case users located anywhere in the world will be able to connect this server and access VIP Task Manager's database.