Project Planning For Remote Teams: 5 Considerations

Planning a project remotely comes with some unique challenges. Everyone loves the flexibility of working from home, but the flip side is that it can be more difficult to collaborate, schedule meetings, and keep up with who is working on what.

In this article, I'll cover how to plan projects remotely and what considerations you'll need to be aware of as you do so in order to ensure your project is a success.

What Is Project Planning?

Project planning is the act of creating a roadmap for how you’ll complete your project. It should include the scope of work to be completed, the key project objectives, and schedules.

It helps to keep all project team members and stakeholders moving toward successful project completion by providing clear direction and expectations.

Consult project team members and key stakeholders (to varying degrees, depending on their role in the project) on the plan before kicking off any work or plugging information into your project planning tool.

By using the right project planning techniques, you’re more likely to have buy-in and less likely to need to make significant changes to the project plan as the project gets underway.

How To Plan Projects Remotely

When working with remote team members, the most important thing you’ll need to discuss is how work will be completed and how you will communicate with each other.

This is especially important for teams that are distributed across different time zones. Scheduling virtual meetings at times that work for everyone (i.e. are during ‘work hours’) helps maintain a work-life balance for everyone on the team, including you as the project manager.

Use remote project management software, virtual whiteboards, video conferencing, and other tools for team collaboration to help the distance between team members feel shorter and facilitate things like developers pairing or user acceptance testing and QA. Make sure to plan for these needs before kicking off the project.

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5 Considerations For Planning Projects Remotely

Keep these five considerations for managing projects remotely in mind—this will help you increase the likelihood of completing your project successfully with a happy and cohesive project team.

1. Working hours for your distributed team members

Depending on how your remote team is structured, you might have people in time zones that vary by 1-12 hours. As the project team is forming, consider time zones and how you will set up any meetings.

As a project management consultant, I live in Philadelphia but currently work with clients in New York, California, Canada, Australia, Prague, and Chicago. This means I sometimes need to be flexible about meeting and working hours to accommodate my project teams.

When working with new clients or new team members, I always ask about preferred meeting times before starting a new project. I keep this information in a sheet that I start when planning and kicking off new work, and I keep it updated over the course of the project or engagement.

Regardless of preferences, I always ask permission before scheduling meetings for team members outside their regular business hours. This is a good thing to discuss when planning a project so you know how flexible people’s schedules are and when.

This makes planning meetings and project check-ins easier. If it is truly impossible to convene a meeting due to time zones, you can also communicate asynchronously using project management tools.

2. Communication styles and preferences

Ask people how they prefer to communicate—some remote teams are meeting heavy while others prefer sharing issues and updates in other ways.

While it’s easy to go knock on someone’s door or share a quick update during the day when everyone is working together in person, remote teams need to put extra effort into planning their communication. This goes for both in-house and agency teams who work with external clients.

While everyone’s communication preferences should be considered, the client’s preferences may need to be given higher priority, as they are the ones paying the bill for the work. For example, if they are heavy Slack or Microsoft Teams users, you'll need to communicate with them in that channel to ensure they get what they need and the project keeps moving at a good pace.

Also, see how much asynchronous communication the team can tolerate. Slack is often regarded as a tool used to get immediate responses from project team members, but that isn’t always possible.

Have conversations during the planning process about leveraging features like pausing notifications and using status updates to indicate availability. Setting expectations around their use can help team members work more efficiently together and minimize disruptions.

3. Tools and resources the team needs to complete project work

Early in the planning process, discuss the use of project management software, communication tools, video conferencing, file sharing, virtual whiteboards, productivity apps, and any other tools and resources you'll use.

Remote project management may require additional tools to replace things generally found in an office (like a whiteboard). Team members may also request additional monitors or other technology to allow them to work more effectively.

Understand your budget for these things or how to request them before kicking off a project. For example, knowing that you can pay for a Zoom account for your team can help avoid limiting the number of meeting attendees or capping them at 40 minutes (although time limits are not always a bad thing).

To determine the budget you need for tools and resources, meet with your team to develop a wish list before the project kicks off—you can then get some estimates by looking at software pricing pages and sourcing required equipment or hardware. More on resource management for remote teams here.

Another thing to consider when evaluating tools is integrations. Some tools work together out of the box, while others need customizations or API setup. Depending on the skill set and makeup of your team, it may be easier to use tools that have integrations natively built in.

4. Ways to manage feedback and performance through the project

One challenge that some teams report with remote work is managing performance and creating opportunities for advancement.

While some feel that face time is essential to grow your career, I don’t think this is always true. What is important is staying visible, participating actively, and knowing how to frame your successes and opportunities.

As a project manager overseeing remote project teams, you might chat with the people managers or HR at your organization about the plan for managing performance on the project and dealing with any performance issues.

While it might be easier for smaller performance issues like team members failing to complete weekly time tracking or update the project management tools to fall through the cracks, your role as the project manager is to help keep on top of team performance.

Set up a dashboard or report to alert you to project issues like overdue tasks, dependencies not being handed off, or project progress falling behind a certain threshold. Finding ways to give fair and concise real-time feedback and recognize people performing above and beyond expectations will serve you well.

You can also keep a separate Google doc or note somewhere (like a private Google Drive folder) to track performance-related issues and kudos to ensure people get the feedback and recognition they deserve throughout the project life cycle.

Author's Tip

As a personal note, I feel strongly that difficult or emotional conversations like coaching or working through a disagreement should be handled face to face as much as possible.

 

This allows people to see each other’s emotions and hear the tone of voice, ask questions, and come to a resolution in real-time. Often the back and forth of email and the loss of tone can make these types of conversations more difficult and issues more challenging to resolve.

5. Team bonding

Having a cohesive team that works well together is vital to remote collaboration and project success. When planning for a new project and bringing remote teams together, make sure to create opportunities for remote workers to get to know each other. It’s possible that your team is working together for the first time, and it might make the work less challenging and more fun.

This doesn’t have to take the form of cheesy and dated icebreakers. Try sending out a survey before project planning starts (once you know who will be on the team) and reporting on what the team has in common. For example, it might be fun to know that 75% of the team members are night owls or that 58% of the team doesn’t function before 2 cups of morning coffee.

Another thing you might want to do as the project manager is build time into the remote plan to allow the team some scheduled opportunities to get together without the shop talk.

One of my clients has a half-hour most weeks where the teams get together to play a game over Zoom or discuss a hot topic (like artificial intelligence or the newest blockbuster movie). Having time for people to get to know each other and connect outside of the heads-down project time is a great project team management strategy.

What's Next?

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