DISCIPLINE

Discipline- a 'sphere of knowledge' that an individual has chosen to specialise in. (wikipedia)
Projects with multiple disciplines involved are very hard to control. This is mostly due to the varied sources of information that are available from the different disciplines to achieve one common goal.
Therefore the best solution is to allow the team members to stay in their own individual disciplines but still be interdependent to and consult with the other team members for delegation and making sure that they are all working towards the same goal.

Project management methods and tools are increasingly relevant as today’s globalized organizations accomplish more of their goals using cross-functional, and often cross-cultural, geographically dispersed, project teams. The increased diversity of skills, knowledge, cultures, and perspectives of these project teams can potentially have both positive and negative influences on group processes and outcomes. (Beise, 2004)

Peterson & Stohr identify virtual teams (a.k.a. Geographically Dispersed Team) as a “group of individuals who work across time, space and organizational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technology. They have complementary skills and are committed to a common purpose, have interdependent performance goals, and share an approach to work for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” [3]
(http://www.managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/defntion.pdf
Free Management Library: Copyright 1997-2008, Authenticity Consulting, LLC. )

We have been using electronic mediums to communicate throughout our week to collaborate our ideas. In most academic papers, it would list the benefits of virtual collaboration but would still comment on the difficulties that may arise in comparison to face-to-face and on-site collaboration.

Task complexity can be viewed from four perspectives: How a team structures it activities (eg. pooled, sequential, reciprocal or intense), how dynamic the tasks are (ie. Characterized by high uncertainty and a high need to exchange and monitor information), how dependant team members are to those tasks, and how dependant team members are on other team members (Riopelle et al., 2003). (Chiocchio, 2007)

When tasks are complex synchronous meetings are much more useful such as video conferencing or document editing, and when the tasks are less complex and more independent, electronic asynchronous communication such as email are more appropriate. As we begin our project, we have allocated tasks that use both asynchronous and synchronous communication depending on the degree of complexity the task has and whether the task could be independent.
We have used the email and blogs to communicate our ideas and when we get closer an d closer to writing documents collectively, we decide to use more synchronous communication to allow for time-efficiency.


Peterson, Stohr (2000). Definition of Virtual Teams, Virtual Teams Toolkit, from Free Management Library: Copyright 1997-2008, Authenticity Consulting, LLC. Retrieved March 26, 2008. http://www.managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/defntion.pdf

François Chiocchio (2007). Project team performance: a study of electronic task and coordination communication. Project Management Journal, 38(1), p.97-109. Retrieved April 2, 2008, from ABI/INFORM Global database.

Catherine M. Beise. (2004). IT project management and virtual teams. Proceedings of the 2004 SIGMIS conference on Computer personnel research: Careers, culture, and ethics in a networked environment. p.129 – 133. Retrieved March 26, 2008, from ACM Digital Library.