Title: Hybrid project management solutions with multi-geographical teams

Authors: Catarina Bragança; Rui M. Lima; Leandro Pereira; Tiago Mateus

Addresses: Universidade do Minho, Guimarães, Portugal ' Algoritmi Center, Department of Production and Systems, School of Engineering, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal ' BRU-Business Research Unit, ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, WINNING LAB, Lisbon, Portugal ' Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

Abstract: Delivering a project has several challenges to be addressed, and to mitigate them, multiple approaches have arisen and suggested as best practices to stakeholders' satisfaction. This research presents a proposal to manage communication inside a virtual project team, adapting concepts from traditional and agile approaches into a hybrid framework, created using the action research spiral approach to evaluate the performance. It was possible to implement three action-research cycles, considering the spiral approach, starting will a diagnosis of the team, followed by action planning and implementation in a two month cycle, finishing with evaluation of the results and collection of feedbacks and potentials improvements. This paper describes all the process, tools and communication structure implemented in a product development project team of an industrial company for a period of six months. The results show that the team became project oriented, increasing trust among members and the alignment of dependencies between areas.

Keywords: project management; communication management; stakeholder management; virtual project teams; VPT; hybrid project management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLC.2023.129200

International Journal of Learning and Change, 2023 Vol.15 No.2, pp.125 - 148

Received: 30 Nov 2020
Accepted: 17 Feb 2021
Published online: 01 Mar 2023 *

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