An investigation of episodes of global interactivity: What collaborative processes effect the success of distributed project management?

The emergence and widespread use of collaborative technologies for distributed project management has created opportunities for offshore outsourcing and collaborative product development. Most tools and techniques for project management focus on categorizations, milestones and short term deadlines, resource allocation, size and risk calculations at a time when long term inter-organizational relationships and sourcing strategies are becoming more dynamic, geographically dispersed. As a result, the nature of project management is changing. This paper investigates collaborative interactions among globally distributed participants through a grounded theory analysis of interactions between participants in globally distributed teams. Following an analysis of interactions on the distributed virtual teams this paper delineates the collaborative processes that affect the success of distributed projects. This has implications for the successful management of distributed projects

Virtual teams: A literature review

In the competitive market, virtual teams represent a growing response to the need for fasting time-to-market, low-cost and rapid solutions to complex organizational problems. Virtual teams enable organizations to pool the talents and expertise of employees and non-employees by eliminating time and space barriers. Nowadays, companies are heavily investing in virtual team to enhance their performance and competitiveness. Despite virtual teams growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of team. Hence the study offers an extensive literature review with definitions of virtual teams and a structured analysis of the present body of knowledge of virtual teams. First, we distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams, different types of virtual teams to identify where current knowledge applies. Second, we distinguish what is needed for effective virtual team considering the people, process and technology point of view and underlying characteristics of virtual teams and challenges they entail. Finally, we have identified and extended 12 key factors that need to be considered, and describes a methodology focused on supporting virtual team working, with a new approach that has not been specifically addressed in the existing literature and some guide line for future research extracted.Virtual team, Literature review, Effective virtual team,

On the Importance of National Culture for the Design of Information Systems

In this contribution a literature review is conducted to illustrate how national culture influences phases of the design of information systems. For this purpose, we review the literature in order to identify reliable and commonly approved findings as well as still open remaining questions. Fundamentally, our literature review is a comprehensive framework that sets typical dimensions of system design as well as main types of cultural research in relation to each other. The existing research results in the area of national culture are classified along the levels of system design and attributed to typical phases of the design of information systems. It thus becomes apparent that in the domain of culture and information system design it is often only the design subject or the design object that is addressed. Contributions that connect both levels rarely exist. In our review, only a limited number of publications could be identified that covered concrete phases of the development providing system design, implementation, as well as verification and validation. From a theoretical perspective, there is an obvious dominance of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions that well address single topics of the design, such as user interface and inter cultural problems in development teams. Other domains, however (e.g., technology and architecture), are inadequately explained. Further, a predominantly phenomenological focus becomes obvious. The observed cultural phenomena and the connected interpretations are usable in a limited way for concrete development initiatives. The contribution ends with the vision of a theory for the culturally sensitive design of socio-technical information systems that absorbs current scientific knowledge and unites it in a structured approach

Creativity in a 24h-long virtual design team

Creativity has traditionally constituted an important topic in organizations and its importance seems to have increased as we have been moving from traditional, physically collocated to virtual, geographically dispersed team configurations. Our study aims to bridge this gap by examining the case of creativity in virtual design teams (VDTs)—that is, virtual teams in the context of engineering design. We see design as a collaborative activity and use it as the empirical context in this study. We report on the findings from a case study with a temporary, 24h-long, VDT, which examined the relationship between creativity and virtuality. We employed multiple data collection methods, capturing most of the 24h, (i.e. interviews, non-participant observation, videos, design outputs, written communications), and analysed our data thematically following an interpretive approach and by using the ‘team’ as our unit of analysis. Our study extends prior knowledge on creativity in virtual teams by (a) positioning creativity within the VDT lifecycle; and by (b) elucidating the relationship between creativity and the unique characteristics of virtuality. We infer that boundaries, language, geographical dispersion, subgrouping, and computer-mediated communication are associated with creativity in the VDT context; and explain how they influence it