October 29th BOLD Meeting in Review
The In’s and Out’s of Virtual Teams: What does it take to make it work?
Host: Genomic Health, Redwood City
A team of presenters, Debbie Tranowski, Vice President of Clinical Operations and Program Management with Revance Therapeutics, a Silicon Valley biotech start-up, and Cinda Voegtli, Founder and CEO of the ProjectConnections.com online support service for managers and teams, shared their decades of experience leading and managing virtual teams – including their experience with cross-functional, international drug development teams. (see their bio's below)
Here were the main topics:
- Tips for bringing together (literally and figuratively) people from different locations and organizations—early, strongly, effectively—to kick off a new project.
- How to get different people and groups to agree on the best way to plan and manage the work together and avoid conflicts on roles, status, and deadlines.
- Techniques for running virtual team meetings that benefit the project without losing hours on the phone.
- How to use easy tracking and communication to ensure the right work is getting done at the right time, no matter where team members are located.
To download the slides presented, click here. (this is a ~730K file)
Handouts included general definitions of Virtual Teams and a paper authored by Cinda Voegtli, titled "Getting Aligned and Staying in Sync for Successful Projects with Outside Partners and Other Virtual Team Members". Click here to download Cinda's paper (~260K)
About the Presentors:
Cinda Voegtli is Founder and CEO of the ProjectConnections.com online support service for managers and teams, with over 250,000 members around the world and hundreds of resources for projects. Cinda has over 20 years of development and management experience including communications and medical systems, IT application and infrastructure, facilities construction, biotech drug development, web applications, and industrial automation. . She has held director and VP-level positions directly managing development, QA, and marketing for large portfolios of projects; and created project methodologies and team processes in a variety of environments (start-ups, rapidly-growing companies, and large corporations), all with their own flavor of virtual team configurations and challenges. She is a Past President of the worldwide IEEE Engineering Management Society and an author and speaker on project management - with a practical focus on how teams can best work together (no matter where they happen to physically work) to make sure a company’s critical business objectives are met.
Debbie Tranowski is Vice President of Clinical Operations and Program Management with Revance Therapeutics, a Silicon Valley biotech start-up. Debbie has over 20 years of biopharmaceutical drug development experience in start-up to large pharmaceutical companies encompassing biologics, vaccines and small molecules. Debbie has led cross-functional, international drug development teams from IND to NDA submission and commercialization (Flumist® -MedImmune, Increlex® - Tercica, and most recently, Paromomycin IM Injection - Institute for OneWorld Health. Debbie deals daily with virtual teams including multi-site operations, manufacturing partners, outside services vendors, and scattered clinical trial participants. She has created and directed project management organizations in both startup and established biotech firms, and developed contractual and operational approaches for effective virtual project teams for a variety of situations.
