O papel das interfaces no sucesso de projetos utilizando equipes virtuais.

Abstract

THE INTERFACE ROLE ON VIRTUAL TEAM PROJECT SUCCESS International projects are a natural consequence of the diversity of competitive advantages among different countries. Considering the huge development of Information Tecnology and the overwhelming global market expansion, such projects start employing Virtual Teams in order to make remote project team interaction possible. Such interaction is composed of various technical, human and organizational Interface elements. This study intends to investigate the association between interface elements present on the local-remote interaction of virtual teams and the perceived success of the international Information Technology (IT) projects which depend on those virtual interface in order to achieve their goals. Our focus on IT projects relies on the fact that IT companies have the means and expertise needed to pioneer Virtual Teams usage, and we are confident that they will set the model for other companies to employ similar project implementation in the near future. A field study was done with Brazilian IT companies matching the caracteristics required. Data has been collected thru questionaries and statistic techniques were used on data analysis. As a result, many significant associations have been found between Interface elements and the Project Success. Further, the study find out classic project management elements among the most important associations found. We also considered the effect of control variables, such as Team Size and Project Complexity, and we found some effect into the association between Interfaces and Success. Those results generated recommendations for International Project Managers.