My experiences: Working in a virtual team

The COMET NWP team has had to do virtual meetings to create the new, operationally oriented NWP Training Series (formerly "course"). The kickoff meeting to finalize topics and establish training series, course, and lesson goals was done virtually after a survey of Science Operations Officers (SOOs, responsible for weather forecast office training) gave us plenty of topics to work with, and a list of SOOs to invite to the virtual kickoff. All we had were phones and GoToMeeting. The meeting itself and several follow-up meetings to set up goals and learning objectives for each lesson in the courses of the training series went pretty smoothly. We even discussed guidelines on what makes for a good presentation for the lessons. All this took place even without seeing the participants. What came after did not, however.

After a year and 1/2 of working through this process, we've learned a few things. One is to consistently stay on the participants as they transition from being meeting participants to subject matter experts (SMEs). Initially, we had a weekly conference call where people "could" participate if they were running into a problem or had questions about the content they were developing. Needless to say, there was very little participation in a voluntary call. We should have worked with them individually through virtual conferencing as they began to develop their lesson scripts. This would have helped them stay within agreed-upon goals and learning objectives. Things went pretty far afield from what we'd agreed to in some cases, which resulted in more work later.

We did not adhere to the original deadlines, nor did we follow up with people when they passed. There was a system to track projects set up which wound up being ignored because it was too difficult to work with our SMEs on lesson documents. We've since found Google Docs to be very good for document sharing (but it doesn't have very good project tracking, if any).

We'll be "sitting down" (virtually) with the participants in this first project to have a post-mortem. It's clear already what we'd like to change; we are looking forward to our meeting participants, subsequently SMEs, telling us what they think (hopefully in a nice way ) about ways in which the initial process can be improved from their perspective.