Overcoming the Challenges of Remote Management

Successfully managing a team of consultants, all working remotely, boils down to just one thing: location, location, location. Consultants are most effective when they are on location, working one-on-one with organizations. When it came to an eRiding project for CompuMentor, local consultants had an edge over foreign consultants in terms of insider knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and an ability to deal with complex and difficult logistics. As the manager of those local consultants, I had to overcome the challenges of remote management.

From January 2005 to January 2006, CompuMentor invited me to work on a project with the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, to field a team of eRiders (roving consultants who travel to nonprofits and provide technology assistance on specific projects). The part of the project we were involved in required helping Mott grantees around the world set up and maintain good data on the organizations to which they re-granted Mott funds, and to ensure that they understood and could comply with the list-checking requirements of the USA PATRIOT Act, an anti-terrorism law that prevents the distribution of funds to individuals and organizations believed to be involved in terrorist activities.

List-checking, according to this Mott Foundation FAQ on TechSoup, refers to the process of comparing grantee lists -- those organizations to whom Mott monies are re-granted  -- with terrorist watch lists from the United Nations, European Union, and the U.S. government. Software applications help to facilitate the list-checking process and Mott recommends its grantees use Bridger Insight Web v6.0

Over a three-month period, I hired and managed 12 eRiders to support 26 organizations in 17 countries with their list checking. I relied on these local consultants to provide high-quality assistance, to be responsive to their clients' needs, and to communicate regularly with me and the other team leaders. We did all this spanning 15 time zones.

Coordinating long distance took some creativity and flexibility on the part of our Brazilian eRider, Magaly Pazello. The training tool, the supporting documentation, and the online training sessions were all in English, but that proved problematic for one of her clients, an organization whose staff spoke no English. Pazello used email, instant messenger software, and VoIP calls with the CompuMentor project manager to identify which training materials to translate into Portuguese.

Using the translated materials, Pazello trained the client, and left behind documentation the nonprofit could use on its own. But because Pazello is such a good consultant, her skills are very much in demand. This made it a challenge to track her down, communicate with her regularly, and follow her progress. Luckily, our battery of Web 2.0 tools helped us deal with the situation. (Read TechSoup's articles What Is Web 2.0 Anyway? and Eight Tools to Keep Your Team Connected find out about more tools and tips.)

Basic Troubleshooting Happens First

Sometimes eRiding is about more than just technology. eRiders become adept at diagnosing management, fundraising, accounting, and personnel issues and connecting organizations to solutions to these problems. Take Gyula Vamosi, an eRider from Hungary who traveled to Zagreb, Croatia to work with a new Mott Foundation grantee. The clients had never administered grants before, so they didn't have an established and appropriate data-collection, storage, and retrieval system to follow the grants and the organizations whose projects the grants funded. They struggled to connect their field offices via dial-up and manage the massive amounts of data they collected. 

Vamosi recognized that the USA PATRIOT Act compliance was the least of the organization's concerns. He first helped the organization diagnose its equipment and systems shortfalls, develop an inventory of its technology, and create a wish list for new systems. They sent the simple, yet well-prepared technology plan to their program officer at the Mott Foundation and requested a grant to fund the technology. 

After that, Vamosi helped the organization begin list checking, making sure that its field offices could access the data. But it was only after he was able to solve the organization's basic computer functions that Gyula delved into the actual list-checking requirements.

Proximity is Key

Even when eRiders and clients do not share a common language, proximity is important. In addition to his local clients, Bulgarian eRider Vladimir Petkov had one client in Romania. He took a long train ride to Bucharest to meet with the organization, documenting his travels in his blog and in the TechSoup article A Day in the Life of an eRider. As Petkov writes, making it to Bucharest was only part of the challenge.

Our team was able to use Petkov's proximity to Romania to its advantage. Because we sent him, we did not need to hire and train an additional eRider to cover just this one client, and we were still able to use someone in the region. 

Petkov wasn't the only eRider who traveled to reach his client. Two other eRiders were assigned to cover the Ukraine and Russia. When one of them fell behind because of other work commitments, we were able to call on Leonid Komarov, an eRider covering the Ukraine, to go to Moscow as well.  It was an easy trip for him, and knowing the language made the work go smoothly. In fact, Komarov was such a gung-ho eRider that he volunteered to travel just about anywhere!

Location, location, location translates into localization, allowing the knowledge of an eRider team to best help clients, using appropriate local knowledge and cultural sensitivity. Thanks to the dedication of the eRiders -- and a variety of software applications and Web 2.0 tools -- the job got done.