Virtual Consulting

Most of you know my work outside of Treasure Valley Consultants’ Network is as a trainer and performance improvement specialist. Diane Gayeski, PhD is a practitioner in the field of human performance technology (HPT) and wrote a wonderful article for Performance Xpress on Virtual Consulting: Effective Partnerships Across Time and Space.

Although her article was targeted to practitioners of HPT, the discussion of virtual consulting is broad enough to apply to anyone who consults in just about any field.  Most consultants I know do a majority of their business outside of the city they reside in.  Being able to manage projects virtually without having to be present at the client’s location is must if you expect to be successful as a consultant.

According to Guyeski, virtual consulting affords many opportunities:

• Overcome obstacles of time and distance through virtual consulting. These days it is not all uncommon for companies to seek consultants through web searches to find professionals that are a good fit to solve a specific problem(s).
• If your working relationship is spread out over distance and many time zones, you actually expand the total number of working hours in a day.
• As odd as it may seem, in virtual consulting you may never meet the person you are working with in-person.  No visual cues from either party can overcome biases based on appearance.
• More importantly, you save costs on real estate and travel. Working without an office and/or traveling to a client’s location reduces expenditures significantly.

However, there are some obstacles that need to be overcome if you intend to take on a virtual consulting approach:

• Lack of face-to-face contact can create an environment of mistrust and apathy.
• Cultural misunderstandings occur especially if you are working with clients overseas with different world views than your own.
• Technology fails – it will happen. Always have alternative means to communicate with your clients.

To help you leverage virtual consulting, there are many tools on the web that can facilitate your efforts and make collaboration easy:

• Bascamp - web-based hosted project manager with discussion features, file sharing, etc.
• Zoho Projects - a suite of web-based applications that help business owners manage projects and much more.
• WorkZone – web-based collaboration tool to share documents and record approvals.
• Google Docs – if document sharing is all you need to do, Google Docs has just rolled out a new folder sharing feature.

If you have some favorite online project management tools of your own, let us know.

Take some time to review Dr. Gayeski’s article to begin formulating how you’ll manage your own virtual projects. She offers great tips on how to implement strategies.  Also, sample some of the tools provided here. Take them for a test drive to find the ones that work best for you. Some will have more features than you’ll need, but it’s better to have too much than too little to manage your projects and communicate with the people you are working with.