Coordination and Control of Globally Distributed Software Projects Defended on Thursday, 10 October 2002

Recently, software development and implementation projects have globalized at a rapid pace. Companies in North America, Europe, and the Far East are beginning to integrate international IT to support operations across the globe. Offshore outsourcing of IT services has become a prevalent strategy to tap into emerging resource bases of countries like India, Phillipines, Eastern Europe. However, global distributedness has introduced a number of gaps: distance, time zone difference, socio-cultural diversity, differences of infrastructure, and governance differences. These gaps create challenges for the way software projects are coordinated and controlled. This research investigates the impact of gaps on coordination and control modes. It develops these ideas through an extensivee theoretical basis and two qualitative case studies to further our understanding of globally distributed software projects, and extend our capability to manage these.

Keywords

coordination, control, multi-site distributed collaboration, case-studies, theory, methodology, contingencies, polycontextual boundary-spanning, Electronic Media News Teleworking, communications groupware, global software projects


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