Models for Structuring Teams and Work in Globally Collaborative Projects

The demands of globalization and availability of advanced work collaboration technology have created new opportunities for designing team and work structures in multinational organizations. Greater work efficiency, higher productivity, better market penetration opportunities, and lower development costs are achievable goals/outcomes with welldesigned organizational structures that are congruent with a company's purpose, culture, and capabilities. This paper describes several common project organizational design models for structuring teams and work in collaborative work environments. We describe the characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, and implementation effectiveness of each model. Our goal is to codify the context that underlies these models to strengthen systemic thinking about team and work organization in globally collaborative project environments.