The scale and evolution of coordination needs in large-scale distributed projects: implications for the future generation of collaborative tools

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the development of a new class of coordination tools that focus on automatically providing individuals a rich context for facilitating the coordination of their work. Despite their valuable contributions, current coordination tools have mostly been designed without taking into account scalability aspects beyond the small-group level. The increasing pervasiveness of large-scale projects suggests that those mechanisms need to scale dramatically to adequately support such work settings. In this paper, we used data from five distinct large-scale projects from three different companies to study the scale, range, and volatility of the coordination requirements that emerged over time within those projects. Our results showed that coordination requirements tend to be quite volatile, vary significantly in their magnitude across project members and a significant proportion of the coordination requirements cut across organizational and geographical boundaries. Furthermore, new coordination requirements represent, on average, a third of the coordination requirements faced by a project member on a monthly basis. The implications of these results for the design of collaborative tools are discussed.