Managing Global
and Distributed Teams:
Training Pack

For years, your organization has perfected project management, and you got pretty good at it. Then one day, you decided to execute a project using a distributed team. Eleven time zones, three languages, five countries. It was a disaster, or at best, well below your organizational standards of performance. This training pack is ideal for organizations that have their own internal training resources, and that want to get better at managing global teams.

Skip to the Details: How To Orderlobal teams are now officially the way of things. Everything about such projects or operations is more difficult than face-to-face teams — including figuring out how to declare victory when failure is what actually happened.

Revised and Updated for 2008!
Dozens of new insights and examples to make your virtual or global team operations more effective than ever!This Training Pack includes a complete slide presentation (more than 80 slides) and an accompanying script. It's ideal for organizations that want to deploy an internal training session rapidly and economically, using internal resources. The script is over 20,000 words, which is almost twice the size of Who Moved My Cheese.

What's a global team? You'll find various definitions if you surf around a bit, but the main features of a global team are what make them so difficult to manage — the people are dispersed geographically, they meet infrequently or never, and they come from different cultures. And these three factors conspire to make what's usually easy, difficult — and what's usually difficult, impossible.

This is a package that helps you train your staff, to raise the general level of skills in sponsoring, leading, and working as part of a global or distributed team. It includes:

• A copy of 303 Tips for Virtual and Global Teams, packed with tips for making your organization more sophisticated and effective in fielding global and distributed teams.
• A PowerPoint® slide set that you can use to conduct training sessions in-house.
• A script for the slide set to guide you as you develop what you'll say during the presentation.

The presentation iself covers these topics:

1. The nature of global and dispersed teams
2. Building and maintaining trust
3. Planning communications
4. Dealing with dispersion
5. Accounting for socio-cultural differences
6. Accounting for language differences
7. Allocating the work with dispersion in mind
8. Dealing with voicemail and email
9. Using the telephone effectively
10. Making face-to-face meetings count
11. Celebrating achievements
12. Leading telemeetings
13. Participating in telemeetings