Managing transnational product development project teams
Flavio Liviero, Paulo Carlos Kaminski
Abstract
When developing global products, many multinational companies search for mutual cooperation among their units around the world. Such cooperation entails the existence of transnational project teams, whose members are culturally diverse and geographically dispersed. Such circumstance introduces a greater degree of complexity to project management, especially concerning communication among the project staff and coordination of activities. Within the project management context, alternatives to improve communication and coordination throughout multicultural and dispersed project team members will be proposed along this article, especially for companies that have a centralized research and development model. Such proposals are the results of a bibliographic research combined with a study of the practices adopted at Scania, a global company with headquarters in Sweden and operations in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Australia.