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Facilitating virtual teams-teams separated by time or distance-is a practice only recently developed. With new collaboration technologies, it is now possible to lead projects where team members collaborate using only technology links for communication. As these technologies are new, little information exists to guide facilitators as to best practices for conducting virtual facilitation. This article describes virtual facilitation environments and reports on lessons learned from one set of academic studies that investigated the practice of same-time and different-time virtual facilitation. Best practices are derived from these lessons and presented here as well.
The art of facilitating teams-both large and small-in a single meeting facility is long practiced and well established. There are several well-known methodologies and many tools, tips, tricks, and conventions for maximizing this facilitation process. However, the art of facilitating virtual teams-teams separated by time or space-is not yet at all well established. The literature is minimal. Szerdy and McCall (1997) have provided several useful guidelines for leading Group Support Systems2 (GSS) sessions. Romano et al. (1999) provided some facilitation guidance for different time meetings and several suggestions for software developers to improve technology.
Beise, Neiderman, and Beranek (1999) interviewed 34 practicing facilitators to surface opinions about what they expect virtual facilitation to be like. Only 15 of the 34 had, at the time of the interviews, actually participated in virtual meetings. However, this is not surprising as, until very recently, technology-other than video conferencing-has not existed to support virtual facilitated meetings. Today, technology to support virtual meetings is exploding. David Woolley (1999) lists 146 products3 for conferencing on the World Wide Web and his list is ever growing. This growth in tools demands maturation in the processes for using these tools to lead meetings.
We began facilitating virtual meetings, both same time and different time, about four years ago to support work we were doing with the US Navy Third Fleet in San Diego. To date, we have facilitated about 100 virtual meetings, both for the Navy and other related organizations. These meetings have included idea generation, planning, decision making, issues surfacing, status briefings, environmental scanning, collaborative writing, training, and expert briefings. From our experience, we have surfaced an ever growing set of lessons learned and honed a set...