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Enabling Virtual Team Relationships – Part II

Preparing for the team meeting

Read Part I of our story for the background information.

Alice needs to prepare for the initial team meeting, which will be held in 2 weeks. The meeting will be in the NYC office and will be two and a half days in length. Everyone is arriving on Monday evening at 5 PM.

Prior to the meeting, Alice sent out a survey to each team member to have them answer questions about themselves so that she could use it in an activity. This included questions such as where they were born, whether they were married and how many children they had, sports they liked to play, etc.  The goal of the “Getting to Know You” activity – to be introduced on Monday evening – was to have the team members talk with each other and get the answers to the questions asked. For example, Ali, though located in Saudi Arabia, was born in London. The question on the survey asked: “Who was born in London?”

A number of other activities – designed for the team members to begin to get to know each other and learn about each other on a personal level – were planned for throughout the two and a half days.

Alice has decided the high level overview agenda will be as follows:

Date

Description

Monday evening

Cocktails/networking and dinner (socializing)

Introduce activity – “Getting to Know You”

Tuesday

  • Introductions
  • Team building activity
  • Presentation by sponsor: project details
    (objectives, alignment to strategic goals, etc.)
  • Discussion of how team will work together:
    • Team charter
    • Team communications
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Team operating norms
    • Team meetings
    • Use of technology
    • Problem solving/decision making/managing conflicts on the team
  • Team building activity over lunch
  • Sharing and discussion of the project charter and the project scope statement
  • Development of stakeholder list
  • Begin schedule development
  • Team building activity

Tuesday evening

Team dinner with sponsor

Time to socialize and continue to build relationships among team members (and work on “Getting to Know You” activity)

Wednesday

  • Team building activity
  • Continue schedule development
  • Risk identification and planning
  • Quality control/planning
  • Overall stakeholder communications
  • Change management planning
  • Wrap up initial “Getting to Know You” team building activity
  • Close out team meeting

Alice has a number of goals for this initial team meeting. They included:

  • Enabling for the team to socialize and get to know each other on a personal basis through time to just talk with each other and through to a variety of team building activities
  • Enabling for the team to learn about the project from the sponsor so they could understand the vision and how the project was aligned to the strategy of the organization
  • Having the team develop processes and procedures for how they will work together and solve conflict and resolve problems that may arise
  • Having the team develop the schedule and other project components such as overall communications with stakeholders, risk identification and planning, how changes will be managed, etc.

This meeting was especially important because Alice was not sure she would be able to get the team together again in one location given tight the cost involved in bringing them all on site.

Part III: The first team meeting

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