I hear your arguments in favor of video conferences for managing projects with remote stakeholders. Video meeting technology continues to improve, but it misses some fundamental factors for a project’s success.
At Save the Children, we were having a problem with adoption of new systems in our field offices around the world. We had surveyed everyone and thought we had the needs clear. We had great online training programs, and our global network had improved dramatically over the past few years. But we lacked connection.
”What,” you ask? ”I thought you just said the network connections were great?”
I did, but the people connections were lacking. We had not taken the time to build relationships with our field staff, and that takes face-to-face meetings. We needed to meet and talk at the same table, across the the same lunch.
So we changed our approach and set objectives to visit each field office. We also made it one of our metrics. What was the result? We developed joint ownership of projects, from needs assessment thru rollout. We knew each other and had built the trust to move things forward as ours.
The interesting thing was once we established relationships face-to-face, we could catch up with each other via video conference, because we knew each other first. |