Адаптиране и балансиране елементите на организационната инфраструктура при проектиране на виртуални екипи = Designing virtual teams: Adaption and balancing of organizational infrastructure elements

Six fundamental interrelated elements have been researched: corporate strategy and culture; technology, communication, social and human structure, work process and knowledge structure. They must be adequately balanced and integrated within the organizational infrastructure so as to create real conditions for the design of virtual teams. Key organizational prerequisites and elements related to the design and operation of highly effective virtual teams from a structural, management and process perspective are explored. The main purpose is to find a common theoretical and methodological basis in the process of implementing virtual teams in organizational practice. Key words: virtual team, organizational infrastructure, forms of virtuality, new paradigm, corporate strategy and culture, social and human structure, work process and knowledge structure, managing change

Network Configuration in App Design: The Effects of Simplex and Multiplex Networks on Team Performance

Members of mobile app design teams collaborate with each other to accomplish tasks and/or to socialize. However, how network configuration of instrumental and expressive interactions affects team creativity, efficiency, and satisfaction has not yet been studied. Accounting for both simplex and multiplex social networks in teams, this study develops a research model examining the mechanisms by which the centralization of different types of networks impacts team performance. To test our research hypotheses, we collected data from 62 student teams working on an app design class project. We found that the centralization of the instrumental-expressive multiplex network reduces teams’ information elaboration and similarity perception; the centralization of the instrumental simplex network is beneficial to information elaboration; and team information elaboration positively influences team creativity, efficiency, and satisfaction. We also found that team similarity perception negatively affects team creativity and positively affects team satisfaction. To alleviate concerns about the potential simultaneity bias between network configuration and information elaboration or similarity perception, we replicated the results based on a cross-lagged analysis with additional data collected from 48 design teams at two points: at team establishment and at project completion. This paper contributes to the literature on software development by examining the mechanisms via which the configuration of multiplex and simplex networks affects team performance

An Integrated Support to Collaborative Semantic Annotation

Everybody experiences every day the need to manage a huge amount of heterogeneous shared resources, causing information overload and fragmentation problems. Collaborative annotation tools are the most common way to address these issues, but collaboratively tagging resources is usually perceived as a boring and time consuming activity and a possible source of conflicts. To face this challenge, collaborative systems should effectively support users in the resource annotation activity and in the definition of a shared view. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation and the evaluation of a set of mechanisms (personal annotations over shared resources and tag suggestions) that provide users with the mentioned support. The goal of the evaluation was to (1) assess the improvement with respect to the situation without support; (2) evaluate the satisfaction of the users, with respect to both the final choice of annotations and possible conflicts; (3) evaluate the usefulness of the support mechanisms in terms of actual usage and user perception. The experiment consisted in a simulated collaborative work scenario, where small groups of users annotated a few resources and then answered a questionnaire. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed support mechanisms can reduce both overload and possible disagreement

The characterisation of engineering activity through email communication and content dynamics, for support of engineering project management

Significant challenge exists in the effective monitoring and management of engineering design and development projects. Due to traits such as contextual variation and scale, detailed understanding of engineering projects and activity are difficult to form, with monitoring hence reliant on interpretation of managerial personnel and adherence to defined performance indicators. This paper presents a novel approach to the quantitative monitoring and analysis of engineering activity through computational topic identification and analysis of low-level communication data. Through three metrics of communication activity, this approach enables detailed detection and tracking of activity associated with specific project work areas. By application to 11,832 emails within two industry email corpora, this work identifies four distinct patterns in activity, and derives seven characteristics of communication activity within engineering design and development. Patterns identified are associated with background discussion, focused working, and the appearance of issues, supporting detailed managerial understanding. Characteristics identified relate to through-process norms against which a manager may compare and assess. Such project-specific information extends the ability of managers to understand the activity within their specific project scenario. Through detailed description of activity and its characteristics, in tandem with existing toolsets, a manager may be supported in their interpretation and decision-making processes.</jats:p