CHAPTER 10
Applying Complexity Thinking to Large, Dispersed, Culturally Diverse Project Teams

	Project Profile
Complexity Dimensions	Independent	Moderately Complex	Highly Complex
Team Composition and Performance	Strong project leadership Team staffed internally, has worked together in the past, and has a track record of reliable estimates Formal, proven PM, BA, and SE methodology with QA and QC processes defined and operational	Competent project leadership Team staffed with internal and external resources; internal staff has worked together in the past and has a track record of reliable estimates Contract for external resources is straightforward; contractor performance is known Semi-formal methodology with QA/QC processes defined	Project manager inexperienced in leading complex projects Complex team structure of varying competencies (e.g., contractor, virtual, culturally diverse, outsourced) Complex contracts; contractor performance unknown Diverse methodologies

In this chapter we first explore the nature of project complexity when managing a large, geographically dispersed, diverse team involving complex contractual agreements and multiple methodologies. We then recommend management techniques for project leaders to consider for managing the complexities of the team while establishing an environment of adaptability, innovation, and creativity.

WHAT MAKES LARGE, DIVERSE PROJECT TEAMS COMPLEX?

Complex projects almost always involve multiple layers and types of teams. Applying the most appropriate practices, tools, and techniques to multiple parties at the right time is in itself a complex endeavor. Successful teams are the result of many elements coming together, including team leadership, structure, composition, culture, location, collaboration, communication, coordination, and evolution.

TEAMS AS COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

All human groups and organizations are complex adaptive systems; teams are complex adaptive systems within the larger organization (which is also a complex adaptive system). As a project manager of a new, complex project, you cannot predict how your team members will react to each other, to the project requirements, and to their place within the organization.

Team members who have worked together in the past may bring biases or resentments toward one another. Team members who have not yet worked together are likely to reserve judgment and hold back interactions until they learn about each other. This concept, referred to as interactional uncertainty,¹theorizes that if there is uncertainty in a relationship, the participants will tend to withhold information and calculate the effects of sharing information. The project manager must guide the team through the inevitable early stages of team growth toward the certainty that leads to trust. Then, team members can focus their energies on positive interactions.

When working with multiple teams, the project manager faces the additional challenge of integrating interdependent solution components that have been designed and constructed by different teams. Moreover, different teams use dissimilar procedures, practices, and tools, resulting in work products of varying quality and consistency.

THE ART OF TEAM LEADERSHIP

Toward the end of the last century, Fortune magazine postulated that project management would be the profession of choice in the coming decades. Fortune cited trends toward global initiatives, virtual teams, mergers and acquisitions, downsizing and reengineering, and alliances and partnerships—all linking companies in new ways.

In 1999, the Project Management Institute (PMI) discussed the essential skills needed in the 21st century to optimize the power of teams. PMI found that cross-cultural training and awareness, interpersonal skills, team development and leadership, and language facility are becoming conditions for professional success. To manage 21st century complex project teams, these characteristics are not just nice to have; they are vital.

HOW TO LEAD LARGE, GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSED, CULTURALLY DIVERSE PROJECT TEAMS

To lead complex layers of teams, project managers must understand the potential power of teams; team leadership; and team collaboration, communication, and coordination.

TEAM POTENTIAL

Teams are a critical asset used to improve performance in all kinds of organizations. Yet today’s business leaders consistently overlook opportunities to exploit their potential, confusing teams with teamwork, empowerment, or participative management.² We simply cannot meet 21st century challenges, from business transformation to innovation to global competition, without understanding and leveraging the power and wisdom of teams.

Leverage the Power of Teams

It is essential for leaders of complex projects to understand the power of teams. Success stories abound: Motorola surpassed the Japanese in the battle to dominate the cell phone market by using teams as a competitive advantage; 3M uses teams to reach its goal of generating half of each year’s revenues from the previous five years’ innovations.

High-performing teams are all around us: U.S. Navy Seals, tiger teams established to perform a special mission or tackle a difficult problem, paramedic teams, firefighter teams, surgical teams, symphony orchestras, and professional sports teams. These teams demonstrate their accomplishments, insights, and enthusiasm on a daily basis and are a persuasive testament to the power of teams. Clearly, we must learn how to form, develop, and sustain high-performing teams if we are to deliver on complex projects.

Harness the Wisdom of teams

For complex problems, a team is much more effective than a single person. Warren Bennis talks about teams as great groups, stating: “The genius of Great Groups is that they get remarkable people—strong individual achievers—to work together to get results.” Along the way, members of these groups provide support and camaraderie for each other. Bennis describes the defining characteristics of great groups:³

• At the heart of every great group is a shared dream.

• They manage conflict by abandoning individual egos to the pursuit of the dream.

• They are protected from the “suits.”

• They have a real or invented enemy.

• They view themselves as winning underdogs.

• Members pay a personal price.

• Great groups make strong leaders.

• Great groups are the product of meticulous recruiting.

• Real artists ship (i.e., deliver the goods).

For the project manager who is struggling to understand how to build high-performing teams, a must-read is The Wisdom of Teams, by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith.⁴ The authors talked with hundreds of people in more than 50 teams in 30 companies to discover what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and how to enhance their effectiveness. Among their findings are elements of both common and uncommon sense:

• Commitment to performance goals and common purpose is more important to team success than team-building.

• Opportunities for teams exist in all parts of the organization.

• Formal hierarchy is actually good for teams (and vice versa).

• Successful team leaders do not fit an ideal profile and are not necessarily the most senior people on the team.

• Real teams are the most common characteristic of successful change efforts at all levels.

• Top management teams are often difficult to sustain.

• Despite the increased number of teams, team performance potential is largely unrecognized and underutilized.

• Team “endings” can be as important to manage as team beginnings.

• Teams produce a unique blend of performance and personal learning results.

Wisdom lies in recognizing a team’s unique potential to deliver results. Project leaders strive to understand the benefits of teams and learn how to optimize team performance by developing individual members, fostering team cohesiveness, and rewarding team results. Katzenbach and Smith argue that teams are the primary building blocks of strong company performance. Project managers at all levels cannot afford to ignore the power and wisdom of teams as we strive to meet the competitive challenges of the 21st century.⁵

TEAM LEADERSHIP

We offer a diverse set of suggestions for exceptional team leadership:

• Accept no substitute for experience at the helm

• Build a great team

• Get the “right stuff” on your team

• Establish a great team structure

• Empower your team members

• Build a culture of discipline

• Lead, don’t manage, contractor teams

• Use virtual teams as a strategic advantage

• Encourage innovation through edge-of-chaos leadership

• Manage agile teams with a light touch.

Accept No Substitute for Experience at the Helm

The need for effective team leadership can no longer be overlooked. Technology, techniques, and tools are not the reason projects fail: Projects fail because of people. Team leadership differs significantly from traditional management, just as teams differ from operational work groups.

As discussed in Part II, complex projects are not for the novice. Complex projects are more often than not charged with bringing about the change needed for the organization to remain competitive; indeed, they are sometimes about the organization’s very survival. We need only look at the number of companies that have disappeared to know that the competitive environment is fierce. Insist on securing seasoned, experienced, expert, and influential project managers to lead complex projects.

Because complex projects usually have a large, dispersed, complex team structure, the project manager leads through others more than manages the project. Team leadership is more of an art than a science and is fraught with trial, error, and experience. Expertise in communications, problem-solving, and conflict resolution is essential. Leaders of complex projects derive their power and influence not so much from a position of authority in the organizational hierarchy but as a result of their ability to build relationships. These leaders must be:

• Held in high regard

• Considered to be experts

• Known to have important and relevant information

• Well-connected with a powerful network

• Considered indispensable.

Project managers of complex projects need to understand the difference between traditional project management and adaptive project management (as discussed in Part II) so that they are able to apply the varied managerial techniques appropriately. They become situational project leaders who know the difference between command and control versus collaboration and teamwork—and when to apply each approach for the best results.

Leaders of large, dispersed, diverse teams must have an understanding of the dynamics of team development and how teams work. Leaders of successful teams develop specialized skills that they use to build and sustain high performance. Traditional managers and technical experts cannot necessarily become effective team leaders without appropriate team leadership training and coaching.

Make a concerted effort to develop team-leadership skills and dedicate efforts to transitioning team members into a cohesive team with shared values, beliefs, and cultural foundation. The best teams are collaborative and share the leadership role, depending on the precise needs of the project at any given time. The situational team leader understands that varying leadership styles are appropriate depending on the different stages of team development. Table 10-1, Five-Stage Team Development Model, presents David Kolb’s approach to team leadership, which suggests that the situational team leader seamlessly adapts his or her leadership style as the team evolves.

TABLE 10-1. Five-Stage Team Development Model

Development Phase	Team Leader Style
Building	Facilitator
Learning	Mediator
Trusting	Coach
Working	Consultant
Flowing	Collaborator

Source: David C. Kolb, Team Leadership, © 1999 by Lore International Institute. Reprinted with permission.

Aaron Shenhar, professor of management and founder of the project management program at Stevens Institute of Technology, summarizes the strategic role of the complex project leader as follows:

Build a Great Team

As we strive to build high-performing project teams, it is wise to examine the characteristics of great teams outside the business environment (e.g., professional sports teams, heart transplant teams, special operations teams, paramedic teams, fire fighters). What do they all have in common? High-performing teams are small but mighty—diverse, expert, highly trained, and highly practiced. They invest heavily in honing their skills, and they have a coach (an involved sponsor) who removes barriers to success and is available just down the hall 24/7. In addition, they share a common vision, mission, and objectives, and they are passionate. They are co-located and clearly understand their roles and responsibilities, yet each member can cover for the others if need be.

As complex adaptive social systems, some teams will reach and sustain high performance, continually evolving and adapting. Others might be in this stage on a sporadic basis or in subsets of the team.

Outstanding teams can achieve significantly higher performance, leading to more innovative solutions. However, this superior performance does not come easily: It takes time for a team to develop from a newly formed group into a high-performing team. Decisions are made slowly to allow for input from all valued experts; team decisions are generally much more creative than those made by a single individual. Clearly, organizations need to invest in their teams through training, coaching, and team rewards.

Get the “Right Stuff” on Your Team

When you select team members, do so not only based on their knowledge and skills, but also because they are passionate, strategic thinkers who thrive in a challenging, collaborative environment.

Conventional wisdom tells us to determine what needs to be done first and then to select the appropriate person who has the knowledge and skills required to do it. However, in his book Good to Great, Jim Collins emphatically tells us: first who … then what. Rather than setting a direction, a vision, and a strategy for your project and then getting people committed and aligned, Collins and his research team found that great companies did just the opposite: They first selected the people who had the “right stuff” and then collaboratively set their course.

Establish a Great Team Structure

In Part II we talked about the concept of the core project leadership team. For large, complex projects, we recommend structuring the effort like a program consisting of multiple projects of varying levels of complexity. When structuring your program, establish a core program leadership team and multiple core project leadership teams that are small (four to six people, preferably only four), dedicated full-time to the project, co-located (preferably in a workroom), highly trained, and multi-skilled (typically a full-time project manager, business analyst, lead IT architect/developer, and business visionary). These core teams will augment their efforts by bringing in subject matter experts and forming subteams as needed.

Jim Highsmith, Director, Agile Project Management Practice, and Fellow, Business Technology Council at Cutter Consortium, identifies the components of large, adaptive project teams:¹⁰

• Hub organizational structure. Like the core team structure introduced in Chapter 4, the hub organizational structure reflects aspects of both hierarchical and network structures. This model may comprise several customer teams, numerous feature teams, an architecture team, a verification and validation team, and a project management team. Teams take on all possible configurations: virtual, co-located, or a combination.

• Self-organization extensions. As the number of teams within the project expands, the organizational structure transitions from a team framework to a project framework within which multiple teams operate. Creating a self-organizing team framework involves (1) getting the right leaders, (2) communicating the work breakdown and integration strategies, (3) encouraging interaction and information flow between teams, and (4) framing project-wide decision-making. Obviously, as more teams are formed, complexity increases. Managing inter-team dependencies is critical; teams need to fully understand their boundaries and their interdependencies.

• Team self-discipline. Behaviors required of teams when working in this structure include: (1) accept accountability for team results, (2) engage collaboratively with other teams, (3) work within the project organization framework, and (4) balance project goals with team goals.

The composition of great teams is important. Research has shown that successful teams have a “… diverse membership—not of race and gender, but of old blood and new. New team members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the experience of the entire industry. Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other, whereas the members of successful teams were interconnected … across a giant cluster of artists and scientists. Pay special attention to team composition, striking a balance between diversity and cohesion. Diversity is needed for new collaborations, while cohesion comes from repeat collaborations.”¹¹

Empower Your Team Members

The complex project manager delegates by deciding which roles and responsibilities to keep and which to entrust to others. The goal is to achieve shared, distributed leadership. In addition, the project manager determines which procedures to standardize across sub-teams and which to allow others to tailor. For example, the overall program may follow one cycle while allowing sub-teams to follow other cycles. The program may use a variant of the waterfall model, with highly structured phases and decision gates, but allow individual projects to use agile techniques to achieve their individual objectives.

Build a culture of Discipline

Taking advice once again from Jim Collins, it is important to build a culture of discipline.¹² It is a commonly held misconception that the imposition of standards and discipline discourages creativity. A project team is like a start-up company. To truly innovate, the team needs to value creativity, imagination, and risk-taking. However, to maintain a sense of control over a large team, we often impose structure, insist on planning, and institutionalize coordination systems of meetings and reports.

The risk of requiring too much rigor is that the team becomes bureaucratic. Collins calls this the “entrepreneurial death spiral.” He contends that “… bureaucracy is imposed to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline—a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.” The goal is to learn how to use rigor and discipline to enable creativity.

Lead, Don’t Manage, Contractor Teams

Traditional fixed-price contracts assume requirements stability and are prescriptive in nature, which is appropriate for well-understood, predictable projects. However, when the project must adapt as more is learned and business needs change, typical contracts are less appropriate. For complex, adaptive projects, the goal is to move away from long, detailed contracts toward relationship-based partnerships. Seek out contractors that focus on people, innovation, and research and development. Consider establishing a co-located design center where contractor and internal teams work collaboratively to help define and develop the problem and solution. Establish contracts that fix time and budget but allow scope to fluctuate under a predetermined, controlled process.

Nonetheless, some contract terms may be helpful. Consider adding terms for managing the contractor team that encourage collaboration and flexibility (e.g., joint planning sessions, integrated project schedules, earned value management, control-gate reviews, award fees, penalties). Document and communicate expectations and establish clear evaluation criteria. Develop and use a team operating agreement. Conduct regular progress evaluations and periodic reviews of contract terms and conditions.

Use Virtual Teams as a Strategic Advantage

Virtual teams whose members are geographically dispersed, multicultural, and cross-functional, yet work on highly interdependent tasks, present unique leadership challenges. Leaders of all teams, whether dispersed or co-located, have responsibilities they must fulfill, including communicating the vision, establishing expectations and an achievable strategy to reach the vision, and creating a positive team environment. It can be difficult to carry out these responsibilities at a distance. Arvind Malhotra, Ann Majchrzak, and Benson Rosen conducted research and identified six practices of effective leaders of virtual teams:¹⁴

1. Establish and maintain trust through the use of communication technology
2. Ensure that distributed diversity is understood and appreciated
3. Manage virtual work-life cycles (meetings)
4. Monitor team progress using technology
5. Enhance the visibility of virtual members within the team and outside in the organization
6. Enable individual members of the virtual team to benefit from the team.

For complex projects involving virtual team members, communication and collaboration are the lifeblood of the team. Communication manners, methods, and frequencies are crucial factors in determining the success or failure of virtual teams, so develop a communication strategy early in the project. Remember that there is no substitute for face-to-face sessions when the team is in early formative stages or in crisis. Make the effort to travel to the virtual team location to collaborate and build strong relationships that can then be sustained virtually. If your sponsor indicates that travel is too expensive, explain that you can’t afford not to establish a trusting relation-ship—and it can only be done in person.

In today’s electronically borderless world, technology is an enabler for us to keep in close touch, manage interdependencies, and resolve issues. Audio conferencing, web meetings, and email are the rule of the day for progress reporting and quick decision-making. Paper-based communication takes on enormous importance when virtual teams are involved. Learn the art of keeping adequate documentation without overburdening the team. Formal procedures and processes are necessary to set and maintain expectations.

According to Michelle LaBrosse, founder of Cheetah Learning, the challenge is not finding the right tools: “… the biggest barriers are often around communications and work culture. Ground rules that focus on them can increase your team’s productivity and let you reap the rewards of the virtual workforce.” LaBrosse goes on to list several best practices for working with virtual teams:¹⁵

• Build trust. Trust is built when you bring your team together for training or team-building, and then continues to grow when leaders set and the team meets clear expectations consistently.

• Manage results, not activity. In the virtual environment, when you can’t see what people are doing, the key is to manage results. Set expectations and monitor results, not daily activities.

• Schedule regular communication. It is important to establish a regular time for reporting progress and managing issues.

• Create communication that saves time, not that kills it. With the empowerment created by email comes the weight of managing it. Having to respond to hundreds of emails every day can become a barrier to effectiveness. Clearly, email is a critical tool in our work environments. The project leader’s job is to ensure that the team’s email communication is as efficient and productive as possible.

• Create standards that build a culture of discipline. With a virtual team, you need to focus on creating a sense of cohesion and pride in being part of the team and the larger enterprise. Make sure your teams know your quality standards and expectations to avoid rework, disappointments, and ultimately, delays.

• Define rules of responsiveness. Whether your team is working remotely or is co-located, it is necessary to define rules of responsiveness. How quickly are people expected to return an email or a phone call? What is your protocol when people are out of the office or on vacation? If you’re in a customer service environment, it’s important to have clear expectations regarding how to respond to all customer inquiries.

By implementing these commonsense practices, virtual teams can be more productive than traditional teams. Manage your virtual teams well and they will become a strategic advantage.

Encourage Innovation through Edge-of-Chaos Leadership

Large project teams are complex adaptive systems, and as such, they are constantly self-organizing, evolving, and adapting to changes in their environment within and outside the project. The role of the complex project manager is more about team leadership than project management. Using complexity thinking, the project manager does not intervene when project teams are adapting to changes and appear to be in chaos. As we have seen, our traditional approaches—predicting, goal-setting, planning, monitoring, and controlling—may inhibit the team from organizing itself into a dynamic, creative group that then determines (or better yet, lets emerge) the optimal team organization and the most innovative solution. The wise project manager gets out of the way of a dynamic, self-organizing team of experts by encouraging experimentation and questioning, providing inspiration, and striving to create an environment where each member can be authentic and can arrive at decisions without any predetermined biases.

Using complexity thinking, the project manager tolerates opposite views by balancing them to such a degree that they become complementary rather than cancel each other out. In addition, heuristic rules will emerge as the group gels and becomes a cohesive team. The project manager strives to unite team members in a common goal to be different, unique, and creative, constantly examining contradictions and inconsistencies. No options or alternatives are excluded from consideration, no one optimal solution is believed to exist, and uncertainty in decision-making is widely tolerated.¹⁶

Warren Bennis notes that leaders of great groups encourage dissent and diversity in pursuit of the shared vision, understanding the difference between healthy dissent and self-serving obstructionism—a critical trait in leading edge-of-chaos teams. Leaders of great groups can discern what people in the group need. Bennis identifies four behavioral traits of these leaders:¹⁷

• Provide direction and meaning

• Generate and sustain trust

• Display a bias toward action, risk-taking, and curiosity

• Are purveyors of hope.

Edge-of-chaos management will likely make traditional project managers quite uncomfortable at first. But as you experiment with it, use it, and witness the power of teams when they are encouraged to adapt and evolve, you will become passionate about honing your ability to become a situational project leader of complex teams, adapting your style to the needs of the team.

Manage Agile Teams with a Light Touch

As the iterative and agile methodologies mature, project managers need to develop new approaches to team leadership. Sanjiv Augustine offers several principles and practices for managing teams that are using iterative, incremental development and adaptable methods:¹⁸

• Foster alignment and cooperation

• Encourage emergence and self-organization

• Institute learning and adaptation.

Agile project management practices include:

• Organic teams. Enable connections and adaptation through close relationships on small, flexible teams.

• Guiding vision. Keep the team aligned and directed with a shared mental model.

• Simple rules. Establish a set of simple, generative process rules for the team.

• Open information. Provide free and open access to information.

• Light touch. Apply intelligent control to foster emergent order and maximal value.

• Adaptive leadership. Steer the project by continuously monitoring, learning, and adapting.

TEAM COLLABORATION, COMMUNICATION, AND COORDINATION

For effective team collaboration, communication, and coordination, we recommend the following practices:

• Use a standard formal methodology

• Insist on collaborative planning

• Acquire state-of-the-art collaboration tools.

Use a Standard Formal Methodology

The Standish Group found that 46 percent of successful projects used a formal project management methodology. For complex projects, using a standard methodology—while encouraging each team to tailor it as needed—goes a long way toward eliminating unknown cross-team dependencies.

Do not overly burden the various teams with standards, but do insist on those that are needed to provide a realistic view of the overall project and to manage cross-team dependencies. Enforce the use of standard collaboration procedures, practices, and tools. Be firm about establishing decision checkpoints that involve all core project team members at critical junctures.

Insist on Collaborative Planning

Involve all core team members in the project planning process and seek feedback often to continually improve the performance of the team. Use face-to-face working sessions during planning meetings, especially for scoping, scheduling, identifying risks and dependencies, and conducting critical control-gate reviews. When preparing your project budget, be sure to include adequate time and budget to bring core team members together for these critical sessions.

Acquire State-of-the-Art Collaboration Tools

Secure best-in-class software tools to enable collaboration and document-sharing. Two general types of collaboration tools are available: professional service automation (PSA), which is designed to optimize service engagements; and enterprise project management (EPM) tool suites, which are used to manage multiple projects. In addition, provide your team members with personal communication and telecommunications tools so that they feel closely tied and connected. If these tools are an unconventional expense item for projects in your organizational culture, educate your project sponsor on the criticality of collaboration, stressing the need to manage the cross-project interdependencies that are known at the start of the project as well as those that will emerge along the way.

TABLE 10-2. Approaches for Managing Large, Dispersed, Culturally Diverse Project Teams

Managing Large, Dispersed, Culturally Diverse Project Teams
Complexities	Management Approaches
Many complex adaptive teams Human behaviors impossible to predict Multi-layered, interdependent teams - Geographically dispersed - Culturally diverse - Virtual - Multi-skilled Dissimilar procedures, practices, and tools leading to integration issues Risk management inadequacies and inconsistencies, leading to unknown events Integration of interdependent components produced by different teams	Adaptive Establish an experienced leadership team. Leverage the power of teams Build great teams Use edge-of-chaos management when appropriate Empower agile teams instilled with a culture of discipline Use virtual teams as a strategic asset Insist on face-to-face meetings for key planning and decision-making Conventional Manage contractor teams Insist on standard procedures and tools when appropriate Establish a culture of collaboration and open communication

NOTES

1. Christian Jensen, Staffan Johansson, and Mikael Lofstrom, “Project Relationships—A Model for Analyzing Interactional Uncertainty,” International Journal of Project Management (2006), vol. 24, no. 1.

2. Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), 20-21.

3. Warren Bennis, “The Secrets of Great Groups,” Leader to Leader Institute (1997). Online at http://pfdf.org/leaderbooks/121/winter97/bennis.html (accessed October 2007).

4. Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), 2-6.

5. Ibid., 24-26.

6. Jim Johnson, My Life is Failure: 100 Things You Should Know to be a Successful Project Leader (West Yarmouth, MA: The Standish Group International, 2006), 10.

7. Aaron Shenhar et al., “Toward a NASA-Specific Project Management Framework,” Engineering Management Journal (2005), vol. 17, no. 4.

8. Jim Johnson, My Life is Failure: 100 Things You Should Know to be a Successful Project Leader (West Yarmouth, MA: The Standish Group International, 2006), 12.

9. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001), 50-64.

10. Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004), 235-251.

11. Peggy King, “Dream Teams Thrive on Mix of Old and New Blood,” Kellogg School of Management News and Information (2002). Online at http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/news/whatsnew/Uzziresearch2005.htm (accessed February 2008).

12. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2001), 120-143.

13. Ibid.

14. Arvind Malhotra, Ann Majchrzak, and Benson Rosen, “Leading Virtual Teams,” Academy of Management (2007), vol. 21, no. 1. Online at http://aom.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,5,10;journal,4,8;linkingpublicationresults,1:120012,1 (accessed February 2008).

15. Michelle LaBrosse, “Virtual Velocity: Effective Project Management Gives Virtual Teams the Edge.” Online at http://www.projecttimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=141&Itemid=30 (accessed March 2008).

16. Vladimir Dimitrov, “Thinking and Working in Complexity.” Online at http://www.zulrmry.com/VladimirDimitrov/pages/think.html (accessed January 2008).

17. Warren Bennis, “The Secrets of Great Groups,” Leader to Leader Institute (1997). Online at http://pfdf.org/leaderbooks/121/winter97/bennis.html (accessed October 2007).

18. Sanjiv Augustine, Managing Agile Projects (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, 2005), 25, 43-186.

19. Thoughtworks, “Transforming a Global Development Team: A Case Study.” Online at http://www.thoughtworks.com/our-clients/case-studies/global-team-transformation.html (accessed March 2008).

20. Jim Johnson, My Life is Failure: 100 Things You Should Know to be a Successful Project Leader (West Yarmouth, MA: The Standish Group International, 2006), 13.

21. Ibid., 15.

22. http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/240180.cfm