The virtual design team

Abstract

aced with increasingly competitive global markets and tight-fisted taxpayers, many private and public organizations now reengineer their organizations to improve their products or services and to reduce time between receipt of a new order and delivery of a requested product or service to a satisfied customer. When managers change existing work processes to reduce schedules dramatically, interdependent activities that were previously performed sequentially must then be performed concurrently. Organization theory predicts that coordination of concurrent interdependent activities is significantly more difficult and costly than coordination of the same activities performed sequentially. Yet traditional organization theory can predict neither the magnitude nor the specific actors and activities that require incremental coordination, even though coordination load and rework can grow exponentially as there is greater concurrency of complex, interdependent activities performed in parallel.