BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS

Setting up a virtual organisation brings a number of benefits to Reuters. The ability to draw in people from dispersed companies, cultures and countries is one such important benefit. Bring them in instantly, use them directly to tackle the problem, and move on. The virtual organisation acts as a 'just-in-time' skills pool, which shrinks and grows, and can even change its skill sets, to match the workload and requirements. "We need to break down functional barriers, and mix disciplines. We need to cross geographical barriers to communicate and promote usability across all Reuters operations world-wide", side Garrison.

As the consultancy based operations were broken down and changed to project based teams, all the team members play a number of different roles on different projects. For example, Ian, Joanne, and Carolyn work on both Customer-Centred Design Process and User Interface Desing Manual Projects at the same time. "I don't want to replicate skills in different projects", said Garrison, "I need to mix and match the best people that I want."

Besides, through the virtual team members, resources can be shared. For example, through Microsoft's United States product-research laboratories, customer performance support team members from Microsoft provided a software tool not released to the market yet.

For the virtual team members, skills and knowledge can be learned and shared with others from different companies in the world, "Every consultancy can work on their strengths, and their weaknesses can be picked by someone else strong in that area." said Wendy Aldred, usability expert in Admiral.

However, "the virtual team does not come cheap", said Garrison. Reuters paid about 8-15% more for Usability Group's staff costs in general. Also, due to the fact that different people come from different working environments and need to work together in the virtual space, cultural barrier is the first thing that Reuters had to face. As Carolyn O'Flaerty from Logical explained, "It's very important that members of the virtual team are in the office for a certain amount of time because you develop realtionships with them that helps to establish good working relationships". Secondly, tight monitoring of the team performance is important to the success of the virtual concept as team members are separeted geographically.

This example illustrates the evolution of a virtual team and the impact it has made on the organisational design in Reuters' Usability Group. Every employee is actually a member of the virtual team. They work as peers instead of in a hierarchical structure. A person can be a team leader in one project and a team member in another project at the same time.