An Investigation of Episodes of Global Interactivity: What Collaborative Processes affect the Success of Distributed Projects?

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.