Developing a Virtual Delivery Capability

• Partnerships with other organizations
• Relationships with individuals who have particular skills
• Relationships with recruiters who have special knowledge of experienced people in your arena (they can quickly identify individuals for screening)

Managing Quality and Risk

In all three of these approaches, special efforts need to be made to ensure the quality of service delivery, especially when working with partners for the first time. The good news is that as experience and confidence grows between the organization and its partners, less time and effort are required to ensure the high quality delivery you ultimately demand.

One common method of reducing delivery risk and maintaining control is to rapidly identify partners who have project management experience, who are closely aligned with the organization's values, and in whom the organization is willing to invest time and energy. Early on, these people can take on project management roles and form the "core" of your organization's Virtual Delivery Capability.

From the beginning, every organization that decides to utilize a virtual delivery staffing model must also decide how much and what type of control it needs to maintain over the work of its partners. When partners are implementing a specific methodology developed by the organization, there should be a high level of control over their work to ensure consistent delivery. When methodologies are not fully defined or are in the development stage, partners can be very helpful in formalizing critical methodologies, so allow them some leeway. For projects that rely heavily on the personal expertise of the person doing the work, even less control is required.

Thus, not all projects require the same uniformity of delivery and control. And in fact, it is important to accept that your partners will bring new ideas and approaches to their engagements, and that this input represents opportunities for your organization to enhance its own methodologies so it does not grow stale. But for an organization to grow and evolve in this way, it must have an internal culture that welcomes this mode of innovation.

The Virtual Staffing Pool
Regardless of which approach is used to accomplish the VDC goal, the key to a successful strategy is to identify the "pool" of partners that have the capability to fill the organization's staffing needs. Staffing needs should be broken down into categories based on skills and experiences required; a pool of candidates should be identified in each category. Because people will not always be available to work on a project when you call them, the size of the pool has to allow for that inevitability. Expect that the size of the pool in each category will be small at first and grow along with the organization.

As the organization grows and expands, it is very common that the size of the pool lags behind the real time needs of the organization. This suggests that the organization needs to develop "recruiting" as a core competency in order for the VDC strategy to work most effectively over the long term. As confidence in the recruiting process (the ability to find good people) jumps, the confidence of the organization to staff larger projects and thus generate more revenue also increases.

Toward a New Identity Paradigm
An organization using a virtual staffing model for meeting the needs of its marketplace also needs to change the way it thinks about itself. For example, let's take an organization of five W-2 employees that regularly has an additional 15 partners working on projects at various times during the year. When asked, "How big is your organization?" the answer should be, "We have 20 people in the field." Thus, when presenting the organization's capabilities to the outside world, the skills and experiences of an organization's partners become synonymous with the skills and experiences of the organization itself. To the client, there is no need to distinguish between the status of staffers unless specifically asked.

The Three Approaches

• Partnerships With Other Organizations :

This approach can be the most difficult to establish but is also the fastest route to development of a Virtual Delivery Capability— if you can make it work. The challenges typically relate to issues of culture, values, control, ego and money. Different organizations have different cultures and ways of interfacing with clients: They treat their employees differently, they communicate differently, they both have leadership "teams," etc. And they both think they are adding a lot of value to the relationship—that's where money issues come into play. If you're determined however, it is still possible to develop agreements and understandings between organizations—all best done in writing with as much specificity as feasible. The most successful partnerships, however, will be those that develop out of shared experiences on actual projects—in other words, don't spend too much time "designing" the partnership "in theory." Instead, identify potential partnerships, develop an understanding of their capabilities vis-