The Effects of Teams’ Co-location on Project Performance

Abstract

This paper aims to present an analysis between teams’ co-location and project performance. In order to achieve product development project success many decisions shall be made before the project kick-off. One of these decisions is to whether co-locate or not the project team. But, what are the effects of teams’ co-location on project performance? The paper provides a literature review about teams’ co-location, its advantages and disadvantages, virtual teams and project performance parameters. A table is then proposed to be used as a guide to determine the degree of success of projects. This paper also presents a case study where 3 pairs of similar New Product Development (NPD) projects were analyzed. In each pair of cases, the first NPD occurred using a co-located team and, in the second case, a virtual team (not co-located team) was adopted. The project performance parameters for each case were identified using the proposed table from which we concluded that co-located teams appears to deliver better performance at least in the “internal project efficiency” parameters. Further research involving a larger sample of cases is still necessary to confirm these conclusions.