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Images such as Gantt, WBS, PERT, and CPM have always played an important role in project management. In recent years, new types of images have emerged in complex development projects. The purpose of this paper is to make an inquiry into how project management activities are supported by these alternative images, and suggest reasons why the more traditional images appear to be inadequate during turbulent and complex circumstances. In conclusion, we find that the alternative images are a means to managing integration activities and critical dependencies in a project. Typically, they emphasize common understanding and comprehensibility over formalism and rigour. These alternative images seem to be resonant with how our mental cognitive apparatus conceives coordination, thus making it easier to manage complex development tasks.

This paper presents an approach for Distributed Software Development (DSD) that is based on two fundaments. The first one is an integration centric engineering process, which aims at managing technical and social dependencies in DSD projects. The second fundament is a strategy for operationalizing the coordination of the engineering process. The purpose of this strategy is to provide global information system support for coordination and, simultaneously achieve a shared meaning about what should be coordinated and how. The approach has been successfully used at Ericsson, a major supplier of telecommunication systems worldwide. We discuss the effects of applying the approach in the coordination of extraordinary complex projects developing nodes in the 3 rd generation of mobile systems. Although many obstacles have to be addressed, the results show that the approach is a viable way to manage DSD during very demanding circumstances.

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