In order for a project to be truly successful, you'll need to have the best possible team around you, to have all the necessary skills for every task and also the confidence that you can rely on them to get the job done. However, having the best possible team around you doesn't necessarily mean that they'll always be literally around you.

It's not at all unusual for projects to be carried out in diverse locations, and this distance must never be allowed to distract or delay the project; it's just one more obstacle amongst many that a project manager has to be able to find his or her way around.

The first thing to make clear, by far the most critical, is that managing a team in remote locations doesn't just mean doing your normal management job, but someone else. There are issues unique to managing remotely that have to be addressed if the distance isn't to impede the project.

Quality communication

Whenever your team aren't in the same building as you, it becomes more important than ever to have effective means of communication. This serves a number of purposes: it allows you to keep up-to-date with progress and any problems that might develop; it makes it easier to communicate changes and new instructions; it enables the whole team to adapt immediately to any new developments or altered circumstances; and it permits the team to remain, well, a team.

This last point is worth expanding on - to succeed in your project you need a team, all pulling together, rather than just a collection of individuals. When team members aren't spending time together regularly, distance becomes an emotional as well as a physical issue. Yet by simply maintaining good communications between individuals, you can support everyone's emotional involvement in the team and the project.

And there are a number of methods with which to maintain effective communications. Ensuring that everyone has mobile phone contact may seem obvious, but it's easily overlooked. However, there's more to good communications than merely talking, as important as that is; providing IT solutions, such as instant messaging software and sharing work over a private network, gives you and your team the means to work together, however far apart you may be.

Clarity of role

For team members working side by side on a project, duties and responsibilities can often be clearly visible and tangible. But put a distance between them, and this may disappear. As project manager, it's incumbent on you to make sure that everyone understands the requirements and limits of what they need to do - failure to do this brings a risk of work overlapping and being wasted, or of key tasks not being completed, with confusion over who should be taking responsibility.

Identifying unequivocally and communicating these requirements and limits play a key role in guaranteeing that the project is completed successfully, on time and within budget. But it also has a second part to play: by removing the threat of overlaps and gaps in the project schedule, you're preventing a build-up of pressure that can be very harmful to team spirit.

Keeping your team together

And that spirit is vital to any team, whether working on a large or small project, close together or far apart, or indeed any kind of team - sporting teams, orchestras, groups of volunteers digging wells for impoverished communities; lose the spirit, and you lose the cohesion, the motivation, the readiness to share and cooperate, and your project will end up seriously weakened or delayed, or even killed off altogether. Yet developing and maintaining that spirit, even with team members widely scattered, isn't so difficult. Using those communication tools we discussed earlier, you can keep everyone involved in the project, prevent any unwarranted pressure building up, and put a stop to any feeling of isolation before it has a chance to grow. Out of sight ought never to mean out of mind.

No project can possibly succeed without people to drive it forward, and how you manage your team can be the difference between that success and costly failure. Of course, having a substantial distance between team members can make for more difficult management - yet, because of that distance, management is all the more important. It would certainly be worth considering a short training course to help you get to grips with project team management issues, and to overcome any obstacles that may be thrown in your way during the course of a project. After all, every project needs to reach a successful conclusion, and giving your team every chance of making that happen can only be good for all concerned.