Virtual project productivity - a management issue

Projects that operate in a virtual mode remain to be risky. Despite improving technology they fail more often and are less productive. This paper focuses on team collaboration and virtual project management in the search for solutions and argues that new research environments are needed to achieve results with higher external validity. One under-researched element of virtual project management is the link between the project team and its environment. This especially has an impact on the continuous (re-) structuration of the project and its team members. The paper discusses a living laboratory environment in which real-life situations are used to study technical and organisational scenarios to go beyond traditional close system control group experiment for the longitudinal study of virtual project team collaboration. As an example of research results from the living laboratory the paper presents a set of coordination routines, how they evolve within the team over time, and their impact on productivity. Such routines can serve as best practices for virtual project management.