On the analysis of global team performance

Abstract

Motivated by the need to achieve high profitability, many projects are delivered through teams distributed between a home country and one or more global development countries. As globalization becomes more widespread, problems with productivity and quality have surfaced. To maximize the benefit of utilizing a global team, a quantitative analysis is required to relate the global team performance to the underlying factors affecting the team. Starting from a general model that relates project size, effort, duration, and productivity, we show how effort and duration changes affect productivity. Using this model we show how to address the combined impact of multiple globalization factors, each causing changes in effort and duration, on productivity. Then, we focus on analyzing the individual effects of globalization factors on performance, such as under-communication due to time zone differences, work hour slippage due to working time alignment issues (different vacation periods, holidays, and regular working hours), and additional effort due to language barriers. For each of those factors, we further quantify the additional effort and time needed in global project delivery. Combining these results, we estimate the potential team productivity, and the change in cost of delivering a project as a function of the globalization factors and project characteristics. © 2012 IEEE.