The Potential of Group Decision Support Tools in the Coherent Management of Complex Projects

As the connectivity of the business environment increases, as a result of rapid technological development, project teams are becoming more geographically dispersed. Given that team members may be positioned on different parts of the globe, multi-cultural issues may become more prominent, providing further complications for the project manager. Project planning and decision-making, therefore, becomes yet more complex and intricate. A diverse range of factors, both tangible and intangible, including global IT limitations and differing local working practices (or cultures), needs to be considered. Many of these factors will be interdependent, creating a complicated intertwined net of causes and effects. Managing the complexity inherent within this high-dimensional ‘project space’ provides considerable challenges for the project manager and team members alike in ensuring timely and quality production of project deliverables. Group decision support tools (GDS) provide a structured and, generally, transparent way of managing the complexity associated with the modern business environment. This paper argues that group decision support tools represent a valuable addition to the project manager’s toolbox in that they facilitate the management of project complexity and encourage coherence in the project team. In addition, the role that virtual community applications may play in facilitating the operation of dispersed project teams (in encouraging creativity as well as providing an extensive audit trail, for example) will be discussed. It will be argued that such communities are likely to be the form in which most temporary organisations, or teams, will embody themselves during the next few decades.