Managing global design teams

Geographically distributed design teams have become crucial, yet a significant number fail to accomplish their objectives. The reason is that long distances and cultural differences compromise working relationships, communications, trust, accountability, organization, individual contribution, and thus productivity. This paper analyzes eight such teams in the high-tech industry and discusses the most common issues/problems that surround them. These are categorized as technological, organizational and personal. An expert panel assigns a score to the problems and provides a set of recommendations that can improve productivity and minimize failure in such virtual teams.