Life can be serendipitous at times. Most of the projects I have managed in my career as a new product development program manager have been virtual in nature and made up of geographically distributed teams. However, about five years after my last virtual project, I received an email requesting that I step in as the project manager for a project aimed at creating a secure cell phone for the government. The team, I was told, consisted of members of two organizations that had never worked together before, the software security group and the mobile devices group. Further, I was told that the team was highly distributed across the globe, with development centers in two locations in India, three locations in the United States, and one location in each of the countries of Ireland, Israel, and Germany.

The timing of the request is what was serendipitous. We had just begun the writing process for this book and were working through the primary differences between traditional and virtual projects. As I assumed my new virtual project manager role, the differences immediately began to emerge. So too did the various techniques for managing those differences. Personally managing a virtual, multinational, multicultural project while writing a book on the very same topic provided a wonderful opportunity to establish a practice-based foundation for the information found in the chapters that follow.

Part I stresses the importance of taking on the management of virtual projects with your eyes open. A keen awareness of the virtual project environment and the factors that create that environment are more than helpful to a project manager, they are completely necessary to help create a new worldview. A virtual project environment is one that is characterized by separation of time and distance, by the inclusion of multiple national and potentially company cultures, and by a complete reliance on technology to facilitate team communication and collaboration. Part I brings forth the forces that drive the continuous increase in virtual organizations and projects, and the key differences between traditional and virtual projects that project managers must be aware of and use to their advantage.

All project managers must be prepared to assume two critical roles: being the manager of the project and being the leader of the project team. On a virtual project, there is often a shift in the balance of effort between these two roles. This shift in effort is caused by the distributed nature of the team, which demands significant focus on team leadership in addition to one's core project management responsibilities. Part II brings forth the key aspects of these two roles during the early stages of a virtual project. In particular, we describe crucial aspects of planning a virtual project (Chapter 2) while at the same time forming and building a high-performance virtual team (Chapter 3).

Part III continues the discussion on the two roles of the virtual project manager with focus on project execution (Chapter 4) and sustained virtual team leadership (Chapter 5). Attention then shifts to the importance of establishing a strong project network that connects the virtual team and enables the distribution of work, responsibility, and accountability on the part of those performing the work and empowerment to make necessary decisions locally (Chapter 6).

The final section of the book, Part IV, delves into a number of organizational factors that have to be established for a firm to experience sustained success in managing virtual projects. As a firm expands its project management activities to include international participants, the organization and its project teams become multicultural entities. Chapter 7 describes how national culture and company culture must converge to create the project culture and how virtual project managers must adjust their leadership tactics to account for multicultural factors.

Unlike co-located teams, virtual team members have to communicate and collaborate in a nearly exclusive asynchronous manner, and do so through the use of technology. Chapter 8 focuses on the primary role of technology for distributed project teams. We describe the various types of technology that are available to the virtual project manager today and then suggest a method for developing a strategy for choosing a suite of technological tools that will help the team overcome the challenges created by separation in time and distance.

Much of the pressure to succeed in managing virtual projects is unfairly placed on project managers. To address this situation, Chapter 9 presents the critical organizational factors that must be addressed to create a sustainable environment for virtual project success. These include instituting effective organization and team structures that foster collaboration and empowerment, changing recognition and reward systems to reinforce new behaviors and practices, and investing in new skills development for people thrust into the role of the virtual project manager.

Finally, a number of assessments are included throughout the book. Each assessment can serve as a survey, checklist, or tool to baseline and improve an organization's virtual project management and team leadership capabilities. The virtual project readiness assessment included in the Appendix will help an organization evaluate their readiness to enter the virtual project management arena, or to create a capability gap analysis and change transformation plan to increase their virtual project maturity. Virtual project readiness is assessed from organizational, team, and personal perspectives.

On behalf of the co-authors, our heartfelt thanks to the future readers of this book. I hope you find it both enjoyable and useful in your virtual project endeavors.

RUSS MARTINELLI