Virtual Team Management

Enspire Learning and SAP partnered in the creation of an extensive, six-part project management course focused on virtual team management.

Challenge

SAP is the world’s largest enterprise software company with offices on five continents. With a staff of 35,000, SAP recognized the need to train their project managers on leading virtual teams that spanned time zones, cultures, and levels of experience. SAP needed to reinforce the principles and practices of managing a disparate, remotely-located staff in an effective tone that wasn’t overly didactic or culturally insensitive. Also, SAP does not mandate training – so to produce any level of course completion or knowledge retention, the training needed to be highly engaging, entertaining, and valuable for the learners.

Approach

SAP chose Enspire to build a curriculum of six virtual team management modules and simulations. The collaboration began with a two-day meeting at SAP headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Each module focused on a key learning objective, including: how to conduct virtual meetings, how to build trust among team members, and how to facilitate communication between team members of different cultures. Enspire used a scenario-based, narrative approach with central characters present throughout all modules. The learners meet Gus, a peer character and fellow virtual team manager, and Linda, an experienced mentor character, in the first module of the series and continue to interact with them throughout the five remaining modules. Each module ends in an interactive spreadsheet simulation where the learners must balance features of a virtual project with quality and worker morale. Enspire and SAP included prompt and extensive feedback with the goal of changing attitudes and behaviors.

Outcome

In 2005, the six modules were integrated into SAP’s custom learning portal. The series of modules presented a unified and learner-centric user-experience. The modules were well-received by SAP University and have led to other Enspire-SAP partnerships. By the end of 2005, nearly 1,000 SAP employees had enrolled in the virtual team management curriculum – driving measurable cost benefit. The SAP e-learning project was awarded a Gold Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Award in 2005 – one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon an e-learning course.