The influence of product complexity on team performance within NPD

This paper explores the influence of product complexity on team performance. A longitudinal case study of a Masters course European Global Product Realisation, where 4 universities collaborate on product development projects is used to study the phenomenon. 4 different projects are explored, where in 2 of them teams worked on the full product development process for a particular product and 2 projects where several teams worked on a single product, thus the focus was on developing specific modules of the same product, due to its complexity

Managing teamwork in a highly distributed project

Today\u27s large projects often are geographically dispersed which means that people and teams may spread across different production locations and time zones. Geographically dispersed projects generate specific problems for management in directing the project as well as, tracking teams and their progress. The authors have had industrial experiences in how to support the project management using modern intranet technologies in connection with legacy database systems. The approach is specifically based on a mature teamwork proces

Remote real-time collaboration through synchronous exchange of digitised human-workpiece interactions

In this highly globalised manufacturing ecosystem, product design and verification activities, production and inspection processes, and technical support services are spread across global supply chains and customer networks. Therefore, collaborative infrastructures that enable global teams to collaborate with each other in real-time in performing complex manufacturing-related tasks is highly desirable. This work demonstrates the design and implementation of a remote real-time collaboration platform by using human motion capture technology powered by infrared light based depth imaging sensors and a synchronous data transfer protocol from computer networks. The unique functionality of the proposed platform is the sharing of physical contexts during a collaboration session by not only exchanging human actions but also the effects of those actions on the workpieces and the task environment. Results show that this platform could enable teams to remotely work on a common engineering problem at the same time and also get immediate feedback from each other making it valuable for collaborative design, inspection and verifications tasks in the factories of the future. An additional benefit of the implemented platform is its use of low cost off the shelf equipment thereby making it accessible to SMEs that are connected to larger organisations via complex supply chains

From Traditional to Virtual Organization: Implications for Work Unit Boundaries

Boundary and virtual organisation theory were used to study the implications of organisation level virtualisation for work units. A single case study in a geographically dispersed public sector organisation revealed multiple implications of the coexistence of traditional and virtual work units. Different quality ICT access for traditional and virtual work units was found to result in conflicting expectations about the speed of information sharing. Exclusive reliance on time-based performance measures to control the allocation of staff to virtual work units compromised knowledge sharing, whilst virtual team arrangements and poor formal knowledge capture simultaneously increased workers’ dependence on informal exchanges. Although the fragmentation of knowledge that resulted from the virtual work arrangements threatened operational performance, there was no evidence of mitigating initiatives. The research contributes to the currently limited understanding of the virtualisation process by proposing an empirically derived framework for analysing the challenges emerging from the coexistence of traditional and virtual work units. The proposed framework correlates the networking, restructuring and organisational learning aspects of the virtualisation process with their implications for interfaces, permeability and boundedness of work units. The findings are also of interest to practitioners in traditional organisations seeking to exploit the potential of virtual organisation