Virtual team success factors, activities monitoring.

The basic factors of virtual team success are qualified individuals, commitment of team members and communication among them. These factors are the foundation of any group activity. The factors that can make a project given to a good team successful are clearly defined goals, access to resources, and a supportive environment. So team leader should build a business plan to include the team vision, purposes and goals. Another important factor of virtual team success is a high level of trust between team members.To be sure in your employees get to know the people as best as you can. Use email, phone interviews and video conferencing to get a better feel for them. Check employees' work references and employment history. Use team building methods to develop trust among the team. If it is possible (if team is not too much allocated geographically) allow the team members to get to know each other by arranging occasional face to face meetings. Otherwise use webcams and video conferencing. Make team members feel responsible for their part of common work. Results orientation is the method that will help to make people focused. Create work rules, performance metric (make tasks performance measurable), make team members clearly understand their tasks and priorities, set a timelines and let people know how they fit into the project. Monitor activities and progress, reward and recognize people for their accomplishments, make common work progress visible. Do not allow team members to disappear from your field of vision and do not distance yourself from the team, make everyone feel you keep the eye on them, be attentive to team members' issues and be in touch to solve these issues. In order to get a complete picture of activities and project performance require regular information updates from all team members. Have a calendar for each team member so that everyone can view their schedule. Let people communicate and consult each others, identify critical players to support the project (select people who can contribute their competencies to the project). Regularly discuss the negative and positive moments with your team.

With a help of flexible notifications system VIP Task Manager can make any team member immediately aware of any events happened within the collaborative environment (if new tasks were assigned, if some tasks are completed, if some task attributes were changed and so on). You are able to analyze work performance with a help of various charts, create, print and store reports in the formats of MS Excel and HTML, so they can be easily posted on web-page and the whole team can see them.