Supporting globally distributed engineering design teams with communication technologies

This paper reviews the literature in the fields of concurrent engineering, small group and computer and mediated communication, as well as cross cultural communication. It presents preliminary findings from a study of engineering design teams involved in geographically distributed, collaborative design projects. The study, now underway, examines globally distributed teams from Michigan State University, National University of Singapore, and University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. We examine the impacts of communication technologies on performance and team member satisfaction. Differences in the abilities of the various communication technologies to support these teams are found. Findings include a negative assessment of Internet video conferencing for teams with large time zone differences. Email is found to be useful for bridging time and language barriers. Additionally, issues for the management of globally distributed teams are discussed (1).