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Virtual working need broadband connection with modest latency and near-continuous availability. Thankfully though the limiting characteristic is not the broadband speed - online meeting applications keep going even when only a few hundred kb/s are available. Not spots, islands and contention Now in principle, network operators report high percentage coverage of populated areas. But in reality, most countries suffer extensive not-spots. 3G services are focused in city centres and regulators have yet to allocate adequate spectrum. As recently reported extensively, around 700MHz of UHF spectrum is needed now by operators and while much has been identified, only a fraction has actually been allocated. The result is that demand exceeds supply and users suffer extensive contention, degrading any ability to sustain data connection. Luckily, hotels, cafes and other providers of wi-fi have now substantially stopped charging by the day. The result is that workers can get free or low-cost access just about whenever it’s needed, at least somewhere in town. Trains too are beginning to use mobile networks for mobile access, providing wi-fi access inside the carriage to users and while connection suffers contention, it works. So between mobile networks and wi-fi ‘islands’, connection is available. So it’s a mixed state. Our consultant participating while mobile across Jordan is good but today, such ubiquity is pretty much restricted to voice. Computers and applications For technology to afford workers function, they need applications. Workers need the ‘normal’ office packages but virtual workers need shared workspaces to replace the Sharepoints and the CRMs of the headquarters domain. Dropbox is possibly the most widely accepted shared file-space today and yet many corporate IT ‘police’ forbid such connection and sharing, citing security worries. Our EMEA project team suffered just this. Some team members could only receive working documents via email and since most of us receive hundreds of emails a day, it’s a real challenge to manage team material production and distribution. Collaboration is a challenge. But if workers adopt Web 2.0 technology, it can work. Social media allows teams to micro-blog, keeping one another up-to-date and applications such as GitHub allow issues to be shared and resolved. Methods Now, in our EMEA team case, consulting methods had to be settled on once the job was won. The clients were based in the Green Zone in Baghdad and few of the consultants were prepared to go there - so the conventional delivery of documents and the richness of face-to-face workshops were not going to work. This meant that new approaches were needed that would accommodate the infrequent lean connectivity available. And it happens that the world of software engineering has a method well suited to just this environment - Agile. The essence of Agile is the break-down of the project deliverables into multiple ‘stories’, the production of a deliverable during a ‘sprint’, its review at a ‘stand up’ and its subsequent revision and acceptance before repeating all again for the next ‘story’ in the project. Agile breaks the project into fortnightly periods. In the EMEA case, we broke the project into weeks. One of the biggest issues when operating in virtual teams is the building of trust. When face-to-face, trust is built through action but also through the basic liking and understanding between workers that comes from looking a colleague in the eye. In virtuality, trust comes only through action. Team members must do what they say they’ll do when they say they’ll do it. And trust won’t be built when conventional plans are developed with project phases lasting months before deliverables appear. Our variant of Agile helps build trust by demanding that team members produced smaller deliverables sooner. Action is simply measurable. So methods must be adjusted to accommodate virtual working and the nuances of dispersed teams. And the people People are defined by their individual and substantially unchanging characteristics: their personality, intelligence, competency, beliefs, attitudes and motives. The people are used to working in a particular way. They have beliefs about the success of the established method. The job they do motivated them, providing skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and the necessary feedback. Now, people have a new, very different way of doing their jobs. Change means un-learning what they knew and re-learning new skills. Suddenly visual cues are absent - after all you can’t see your colleague - and shared working environments, email and micro-blogging prevail. Impressions are managed differently, more by performance than anything and all parties can multi-communicate - the idea that they can be on an audio-visual conference with a super-group, while communicating privately with others. People have competencies. When methods and technologies change, these competencies must be developed. Firms must therefore not only invest in technology - providing the connectivity, computers and applications - but must also invest in the people. Staff often take time to embrace the audiovisual workshops and to adjust their own style to this form of communication. Some may struggle to adjust to the pressure of the week bursts of activity and all must feel that the environment is sufficiently risk free to allow the experimentation needed to learn anew. Firms often assume that by implementing technology, change will just happen. This is not the case. Perhaps the youth of today, who grew up with the Cloud and social media, will embrace change, but those more established in their ways may reject, resist or work round the change or even leave the organisation. Conclusions There is a duality here - the social system in which people work together to achieve objectives and the technological system that facilitates this working. The social places pressure on the technological, modifying what people will use and how they use it and the technological modifies the social, affording the users of new approaches to old problems - if they chose to accept it. Technology affords connectivity and tools, encouraging virtuality and social systems mingle with the technology to afford new methods. Today, connectivity is adequate for virtual working but only if team members are fixed or nomadic, using fixed or nomadic broadband connection. Until mobile networks offer a richer communications, they will struggle through their slower information processing to convince participants of the presence of others, hence replacing face-to-face. Companies can wait and let the technology and colleagues force change - or they can plan change and train staff for the sort of virtuality they want. But just like in our EMEA team, change is inevitable and the technology is sufficiently mature to allow much to be achieved. • EMEA 2013 • 37