If your top-performers surprise you by leaving your team, it might be the time to renew human resource investment and consider on-demand virtual teams.
The on-demand economy can be tough.
You need to be ready to act quickly to meet immediate user needs or they’ll walk away.
- Projects become granular.
- Large organizations bubble up under the pressure of personalized products and services.
- For startups, the room to make mistakes is even smaller.
- Staff adapt, evolve, and are ready to jump at the next better opportunity that crosses their path.
In a way, the digital transformation underway puts organizations in a constant state of flux or crisis. However, every crisis hides a solution.
Image credits: pixabay.com
VIRTUAL TEAMS ON-DEMAND DEFINED
What exactly are virtual teams on demand? And why they hold the solution to losing your staff in critical project stages?
Such teams are an effective answer to one of the most common product manager nightmares. Managers have to deal with project failure because of people who quit due to change and novelty or plain fickleness.
On-demand virtual teams are digital groups of quickly assembled, highly skilled professionals who are ready to:
- Come together in a nick of time
- Complete a project with success, and
- Disassemble as the project goal comes to fruition.
Virtual Teams as a Service
In the vocabulary of the Internet of Service, on-demand virtual teams are called virtual teams-as-a-service (VTaaS).
VTaaS consist of the right individuals with the right skills to help the surprised project manager find a solution to the problem of one or more fleeing team members.
“This is a common problem of the people I’ve worked with”, says Manuel Pistner, the CEO of FlashHub.
“It happens more often than you think. You get used to losing one or two people on your team. When something like that occurs out of the blue, you usually find an answer in hiring HR help, ask a colleague to recommend a person, or search online freelance platforms.
You can fix teams falling apart with relatively small losses 15 to 20 percent of the time. But when a fully coherent team built for a very long time dissolves, consequences can be serious, if not devastating.
Think of a team that leaves you before the project launch, for example. It can be a torment to compile a new one that can respond to all project requirements.
As we are all well aware, the product development process includes a practical learning curve that doesn’t usually come as an instant remedy.”
Flash Teams: Rapid Deployment Units for Virtual Projects
People have different reasons to leave a job and say goodbye to a team.
As a product manager, such actions can leave you with hundreds of question marks and with a bunch of new problems to solve.
However, team challenges have an opportune side, too. Digital organizations constantly link to technology. There lies the solution to this crumbling team conundrum.
Emerging technologies and scientific research produce responsive virtual teams on-demand.
On-demand teams can jump in and out of a project much faster, with fewer costs, and fewer headaches for the product manager.
Virtual teams-as-a-service are almost identical to rapid deployment force teams that act in peace.
We call these fast-forward thinking virtual collaboration squads flash teams.
We build flash teams on the service principle, by carefully recruiting expert individuals.
Image credits: unsplash.com
If you find an analogy between rapid software development and virtual teams, you are spot on.
On-demand virtual teams don’t include only developers, but also people with skills in a variety of areas. However, they are sufficiently flexible and scalable to mimic the rapid iteration feedback loop.
Flash teams can absorb new members when needed and eliminate the excess when the need for them disappears.
Why On-Demand Teams Use People-oriented Principles
In flash teams, project beginnings and ends happen with less pain. Team members join and take on as much of the project tasks as necessary, without making impossible promises on both sides.
As you can imagine, many product managers are thrilled to use human capital services in a shot glass.
It’s like finding an open buffet with an abundant variety of meals and pay for what you eat only.
This recruitment method can solve not only a loss of a complete expert team but also optimize the project budget.
Use the flexibility to balance budget overruns by cutting down unnecessary long-term contracts.
Flash teams provide refreshing team cohesion:
- On one hand, people come together to work collaboratively with more inspiration and passion for the task they like.
- On the other, managers don’t lose their heads in dead ends or unpleasant staff surprises.
How to Switch to On-Demand Recruitment
Virtual teams on-demand are a part of the future of the transformed workforce. They help with a typical problem of failing teams – changing member goals.
- First, common goals keep people together. Therefore, even if your whole team leaves you in a crucial moment, you have a backup solution. If your project goals are clearly defined, you will be able to promptly assemble a flash team and forge ahead to achieve the goal.
- Next, flash teams actually pick up the best of the two worlds – people and technology. They glue the two binding blocks – goals and skills together.
- Finally, with on-demand flash teams, you shift your thinking toward a fluid product development process. Such a process can help you avoid common pitfalls of changing team goals and priorities.
Eventually, you will get used to it. Then, when the whole team leaves your project, major losses will equal to just another stressful day at work.
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