With the recent shift to increased remote working, project management teams faced significant adjustments to get the work done efficiently and with the usual high quality. While the benefits of remote working are quite clear, managing remote project teams comes with its own set of challenges. Though, when the right structure, technologies, and processes are in place, organizations have a great opportunity to fast adapt the work model and thrive further.

Remote working has been a relevant topic explored by organizations for a while; however, at scale, as forced by the recent events, is unusual and will affect organizations for many years. When remote working is appropriately done, it can increase productivity, innovation and help the organization embrace even a more efficient project execution approach. If it is done poorly, it raises inefficiencies, harms work relationships, and discourages employees. So there is a lot at stake!

Effective Project Management is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to remote teams. Managing the implementation of complex projects involving multiple locations, workstreams, and teams can be exciting, requiring exceptional coordination and skill. Remote project management also brings a unique set of challenges. Without regular status meetings or meetings at work, which most teams perform daily in the office, project transparency naturally decreases, and complexity in the overall project execution increases.

Successful remote project implementation requires a practical framework using adequate technologies, establishing clear goals, providing team members autonomy, and delivering progress. While the project necessities will vary for each company, project scope, and team, having a consistent approach will enable companies to deliver high-quality projects on time, within budget successfully.

Working with remote project management strategies, no matter what methodology is chosen, it is vital to keep the following components on top of mind:

• Creating shared objectives based on project specifics
• Scoping out and prioritizing project specifics is crucial
• Establishing effective project kickoff calls
• Soften the chaos of remote project tasks
• Prioritize to build remote teams with clear and effective communication at all levels
• Achieve early timelines and deadlines for project milestones
• Track every significant task and deadline in a central tool
• Keep teammates accountable with quick status updates
• Document every decision
• Manage budget properly and mitigate risks early
• Systematically provide team engagement
• Praise achievements and project progress
• Keep the lines of communication open

Over the years, our experience demonstrated that keeping this on the top of your mind will help manage any remote project successfully and increase your team’s ability and momentum to correct course faster when necessary.

• Remote work differs from regular office work. In remote work, teams will need clarity and freedom to work when it’s best for everyone
• Having a strong project management structure will help team members develop the right habits and create alignment and accountability through trivial status updates
• Remote work embedded in micromanagement and control will fail – balance supervision with trustworthiness
• Develop clear and obvious governance on project documentation and share information openly. Keep all communication integrated, where cross-functional teams can collaborateSoften the chaos of remote project tasks
• Allow your team to embrace change always and be inspired by doing so

With the right technologies, tools, and processes in place, remote project work will consistently deliver real and valuable outcomes.

Team members will thrive in an environment that promotes adaptability, confidence, and autonomy.

Our team is regularly utilizing these methodologies and techniques for remote project management success, and it is an incredible journey.

Hopefully, this Article can inspire other organizations and managers to build a remote project that fits their culture.

Aurynion founder Michael Guethlein builds every client interaction from the founding values of the company: integrity, prudence, courage and trust. And, perhaps most importantly, respect. This approach affords him and his team the ability to truly understand a client’s issues — from their point of view — to drive functional outcomes that yield maximum value.

Question: Why did you found Aurynion?

Answer: I founded Aurynion in 2012 with the vision of bringing together a network of professionals and business partners who truly understand business needs — from the client’s perspective. I always thought I was an entrepreneur at heart and after working for 15 years at a global management consulting and services company leading and managing projects to support companies in their overall strategic planning, M&A, business analysis, outsourcing and performance optimization, I knew I had the experience to start my own firm.

When the time was right, I founded Aurynion, and I vowed to build this company with one main goal in mind: to truly partner my clients. The name Aurynion means “Positively Charged Guidance.” It consists of two words: “ion,” the positively charged part of an atom; and “auryn,” which traces its roots back to an ancient word meaning “guidance”.

Answer: Aurynion focuses in three primary areas: Business Growth, Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) and Business Optimization. Our business growth practice focuses on achieving sustainable company growth. Our team works with the client to develop a strategic operational foundation with performance measures and actionable plans to realize goals while minimizing risk and effort.

Our M&A practice provides overall strategy, during-the-deal planning and implementation and post-transaction integration to create and increase value for your company through the whole M&A cycle.

Business Optimization helps companies determine what is working and what isn’t working inside their organizations. We identify and recommend improvements and opportunities for consolidation, eliminating redundancies and improving overall efficiency and performance.

Question: What piece of advice would you give to others?

An innovative and research-driven Life Science organization sought significant revenue growth and a new organizational setup to transform and eliminate non-value-added activities. With the expected new organizational design, the company looked for opportunities to reduce costs, identify growth drivers, strengthen short-term performance, and improve long-term organizational health. The organization looked for a partner to support this large-scale organizational transformation program across multiple project workstreams.

Impact:

During this project, we managed an end-to-end organizational transformation and design project, including the implementation of a consolidated work plan.

As part of the project, we established individual workstreams and several governance meetings with the executive management team.

Overall, we implemented the new organizational strategy splitting the organization of more than 20,000 employees into three vertically integrated business units and adjusting the operational structure.

A new business partner approach with HR, Legal, and other vital business functions proved an excellent approach for the new organization to avoid disruption during this early phase of the disintegration. Following the new design, we developed and adjusted guiding principles, governance setup, and structured communication plans. In our collaboration with global Human Resources Teams and the newly assigned Business Partners, we also fast-paced the employee data cleaning process and defined new roles during the selection and alignment process.

Best practices:

We identified the following best practices during this initiative:

• Excel in driving individual stream activities and deliverables
• Focus on project governance and change activities
• Achieve buy-in from key stakeholders
• Build a Business Partner Approach to avoid business disruption

A medium-sized IT-Service Company encountered many organizational and internal process issues preventing them from achieving their strategic of recent years goals to provide strong customer orientation.

The organization encountered several issues in its Business Development, Sales, and Operations departments while attempting to take on new business.

The Management Team was deeply involved in the day-to-day business operations and managing operational crises rather than advancing the company’s overall strategy and concentrating on business development and sales expansion.

The organization’s executives reached out to Aurynion for support in assessing their business operation and processes and finding improvements, prioritizing the optimization areas, and developing robust action plans and a roadmap to implement the approved changes.

Our Methodology:

As an initial step, we conducted several interviews with management using a structured interview methodology to assess key activities with several business functions. We also conducted individual key team members interviews to identify and assess the company’s strengths and improvement areas. During our in-depth review of the business, we identified and prioritized improvement areas, and their benefit potential through data, best practices and interviews. Using these results, we developed the “to-be” situation to achieve project goals:

• Redesigned Account Management activities to achieve greater product diversification and increased cross-selling opportunities
• Optimized client segmentation structure to redirect the limited resources towards key clients and to increase customer retention and satisfaction
• Defined and clarified roles and responsibilities.
• Improved Governance and Project Risk Management in daily operations
• Identified complexity reduction and transparency increase in relevant business areas, e.g., Customer Service, Business Development, Commercial, etc.
• Developed a realistic and detailed activity and implementation roadmap, including action plans

Impact:

Our solid methodologies and the delivered solution was a successful achievement for their client base. The key client accounts saw a much faster response to their service inquiries due to increased customer service quality and process improvements.

A different and more individualized focus on key clients created higher customer satisfaction, customer intimacy, and an increase in the company’s revenues.

New client onboarding could be done much faster, and the revenue stream was realized earlier than before. Internally, internal crises have decreased, and employees were more engaged due to clear roles & responsibilities and tasks they have to accomplish.

Finally, employee satisfaction and retention have increased due to overall improvements in the organization.

If you ask for a solid definition for business development, you will often get varying and contradictory responses. Some will opine that “Business development is sales”, others might say, “it is all about partnerships”, few business folks would center business development for “boosting revenue and growth”. Thus, most of the time these discussions lack a concise explanation and are not based on an overall framework.

The two major foundation stones for building the right business development strategy include:

• Attracting new customers
• Maintaining existing customers

Implementing the right business development strategy needs a well laid-out process:

Applying the right business development strategy has multiple benefits which are enlisted below:

• Enhancing customer communication
• Increasing brand value
• Strengthening business and raises revenue
• Enabling recurring business leading to successful partnerships and improved employee engagement

Therefore, a business development strategy must be well thought out, sound, appropriate and realistic.

“Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization through customers and markets focusing on establishing innovative partnerships and by educating your workforce”:

• Create long-term value

Create opportunities that persist over the long term, like keeping the channel open so that value can flow in indefinitely.

• Define customers and markets

Identifying the right set of customers and markets is defined by demographics, lifestyle and buying habits. Analyzing your target market to reach prospective customers is one important gateway to unlocking long term value proposition.

• Establish innovative partnerships

Successful business rarely provide all services themselves. Relationship with partners, customers, employees, the press are all critical elements to the success of any business.

• Educate your workforce

Your product or service offering needs to communicate a clear competitive advantage. This calls for educating your employees effectively.

For a successful Business Development Strategy, all three components (namely: sales, strategy and marketing) must align to enable effective outcomes and to foster creative thinking.