Requirements for a virtual collocation environment

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2002

ÐIn a field study conducted at a leading Fortune 100 company, we examined how having development teams reside in their own large room (an arrangement called radical collocation) affected system development. The collocated projects had significantly higher productivity and shorter schedules than both the industry benchmarks and the performance of past similar projects within the firm. The teams reported high satisfaction about their process and both customers and project sponsors were similarly highly satisfied. The analysis of questionnaire, interview, and observational data from these teams showed that being ªat hand,º both visible and available, helped them coordinate their work better and learn from each other. Radical collocation seems to be one of the factors leading to high productivity in these teams.

Computers in Human Behavior, 2007

We report a simulation study of virtual team meetings. Participants role-played companies collaborating on a design problem while supported by a range of IT tools, such as videoconferencing and shared applications. Meetings were analysed to investigate how sharing computing facilities, operating the technology, and company status, influenced communications. Significantly more talk occurred in larger teams where participants shared I.T. facilities BUT this extra talk was restricted to talk within a single location. No extra talk was shared across the virtual team via the communications link. Where facilities were shared, technology controllers dominated cross-site talk. To encourage free communication across distributed virtual teams we recommend providing each participant with their own communications facility even if this is technologically less advanced than if technology support were shared.

In this paper, we describe a collaborative system specifically designed to address problems faced by distributed (or virtual) teams. TeamSCOPE (Team Software for a Collaborative Project Environment) is a web-based work environment that has emerged from a research project studying the communication needs of internationally distributed engineering design teams. The paper begins by outlining some of the needs of virtual teams. An integrative framework that focuses on facilitation of group members' awareness of group activities, communications and resources is proposed. These needs and awareness requirements are then translated into a set of collaborative system design goals which have guided the implementation of TeamSCOPE. The features of TeamSCOPE are briefly reviewed, and some preliminary observations from early users are provided. We conclude by noting some of the new features planned for TeamSCOPE based on our early trials.

Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2009

Globalization and technological advances are driving organizations to extend the boundaries of new product development (NPD) teams from traditional colocated settings to dispersed or virtual settings. Virtual NPD teams have a wide array of information and communication technologies (ICTs) at their disposal. ICTs allow team members to communicate and collaborate as they cope with the opportunities and challenges of cross-boundary work. The purpose of this paper is to explore ICT use by members of virtual NPD teams. This study presents an exploratory test and integration of two competing perspectives of media use in virtual teams: media capacity theories and social dynamic media theories. Specifically, this paper examines the role of task type, organizational context, and ICT type as critical contingency variables affecting ICT use. It also examines how different patterns of ICT use relate to individual perceptions of team performance. The findings from this study of 184 members of virtual NPD teams in three global firms suggest that communication via ICTs in virtual NPD teams is contingent on a range of factors.

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, 2009

Collaboration within the product lifecycle can be defined as an integrated and informationdriven approach that includes people, procedure and technology. In such processes, experts from different areas related to the product collaborate with each other, in different phases of the lifecycle. For example, in the usage phase, according to new maintenance strategies such as predict and prevent (PaP), maintenance teams formed by designers and maintenance experts have to work together to formulate the diagnosis of a certain product, preventing its downtime or breakdown. However, such task can be challenging because of the dynamics of the situation. In some cases the available time for collaboration can be limited and the performance of a product can quickly change. Therefore, in order to overcome such challenges, we present a system model to support collaboration in such a situation. This system supports the provision of product data streams, during the whole lifecycle on real-time and adapts the collaboration tools proposed by teams.

… Quality and Productivity: Theory, practice and …, 1994

2019

New collaborative practices and technologies increasingly blur the traditional boundaries between co-located and remote collaboration. Using technologies such as connected interactive whiteboards and mobile devices, team meetings are increasingly partially distributed with co-located and remote members. Collaboration tools such as Slack also invite users to transcend the dichotomy of synchronous and asynchronous team work. In a first attempt to frame this new kind of collaborative practices, Neumayr et al. (2018) have formulated their framework of “Hybrid Collaboration” to enable the description and analysis of current hybrid collaboration practices. Still, there is a considerable knowledge gap in the field of hybrid collaboration although it is daily common practice. This one-day workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working on empirical research methodologies and currently existing practical use cases of hybrid collaboration while ultimately striving for...

Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2017), 2017

Informal communication between work team members is critical for collaborative tasks, building relationships and coordinating group activities. Achieving informal communication and collaboration is particularly challenging in in offshore outsourced projects. Supporting informal communication is difficult for most collaboration technologies. One approach is the adoption of mobile remote presence technologies (MRP). Such systems comprise a video conferencing system mounted on a user-controlled, mobile robotic base. This paper seeks to design the deployment of an MRP system in an offshore-outsourced software development team (located between Germany and India). The design process involved observing the use a MRP system in a distributed team in Germany. We observed the influence of the mobile remote presence system on types and frequency of team interaction over a 12-month period. It supported a wide range of collaborative interaction, including planned and unplanned meetings and social interactions. After an adjustment period of several weeks, local and remote users worked almost as if they were co-located. The paper concludes with plans for deploying the mobile remote presence system in an offshore outsourced team, which include an extended adjustment period and daily scheduled meetings to ensure usage and enable a range of interaction types.