The virtual Project Manager

Today you will find everything on cloud.  We will find people working for a same software development team yet around the clock from different  geographies.  This setup works well for either big or large organizations bring benefits of costs based on the geographical economies of resources.  However it is the general tendency in the international businesses is that majority of these projects are administrated locally – the central administration is involved in making strategies, defining targets,  and paying for different clients based on contract agreements they made. How nice it would be If you can hire talents (eg: 1 Sri Lankan, 1 Scandinavian, 1 Brazil, 1 Russian, 1 Vietnamese, 1 South African, 1 Fiji)around the world let them work together and pay them as you do from home ? Such approach would even reduce costs of local administration, time for making contacts and contract, get best talents, etc … However such a model is not that easy in practice as there will be lot of dilemmas and challenges related trustworthiness and integrity. 

If one could overcome such challenges, he could be a great virtual project manager.  By principles this should be possible now. There may be people doing this. But I never have met such. It is not a new practice that interviews,recruitment, training and development, daily status meetings, etc are  possible over internet from diverse geographies. Even in some countries like Netherlands, they also have gone to the level so that they could have legitimate AGMs over internet. Internet based question papers, internet based video conferences, are now providing a real time experience not more different from the old physical face to face to face interviews/meetings by any mean. A project manager could even record the interviews and have better chances to compare and make better decisions. The point here is even if you recruit locally or even if you recruit globally the challenge is not very different, but infact global recruitment has better choices. I know that there is always a big argument about the employee turnover in a virtual project and no project manager will want froggy employees who jumps out in the middle or else who sell the trade secrets. However as i said before the same challenge is always everywhere at the same level for any project manager even if he limit the recruitment to the locals. Therefore the threat is equally everywhere but people who go international are having better choices. Having said that it should be worth rather than guessing, you jump in to the solution. If you try so, you will find lot of support from the cloud. For me cloud is cheap. You only pay for the service what you consume - most likely a monthly bill. No water Bills, No infrastructure maintenance costs, No power bills, No system administration staff, a reliable service you get 24*7 which will ease your administration efforts.

What do you find in cloud for you to manage your software project effectively?  Simply 

1.       Software as a service

2.       Infrastructure as a service

3.       Platform as a service

What else you want to go virtual?  Simply nothing... If you got money  just give a try to be complete virtual. There are lot of opportunities. More importantly everything is already on cloud if you could find a bunch of talented folks like to contribute remotely : may be from home or doesn’t matter from anywhere ;-) as if long as they work for you.

 Pictures speak thousands. So borrowed the pictures cheaply from Google.

Charaka Danansooriya