Evolution of Communication Skills in Virtual Product Development Process: Experience From EGPR

Abstract

More than a decade of continuous international collaboration of several European universities in teaching new product development in virtual environment gives unique opportunity to investigate evolution and development of communication techniques for NPD collaboration in virtual environment. This chapter provides theoretical and practical view on different aspects: technical evolution of ICT tools, development and fostering of communication flow, personal aspects of IT communication, with important emphasis on building of trust within virtual teams. The reader can extract from this chapter guidelines for work in collaborative virtual environment, to run effectively either small projects, meetings and lectures or even more complex projects, distributed among several dislocated teams. The chronological overview of the continuous virtual communication in the last 15 years gives also fair suggestions about future evolution for the next decade. Keywords: virtual development, new product development, IT communication, virtual team, collaborative virtual environment, projectHarnessing Knowledge, Innovation and Competence in Engineering of Mission Critical Systems 2 exchange, creativity and performance of virtual teams. Faulty or inadequate verbal and non-verbal information exchange hampers team creativity, leads to frustration, misunderstanding and even to conflicts among team members [13]. Therefore, one of the key challenges of virtual teams is effective communication [14].Sivasubramaniam et al. [15] found that internal communication, external communication, group cohesiveness and goal clarity (as team process variables) are paramount for the success of NPD team. Internal communication refers to frequency and openness of information exchange among team members, while external communication refers to the degree of information exchange with people outside the team and taking advantage of external resources. Group cohesiveness refers to level of interpersonal bonds. Group cohesiveness is more influential in case of intense and interconnected activities, as is the case of NPD. Goal clarity refers to the goal consensus within NPD team. It has been shown that specific and challenging goals are superior to ambiguous and easy goals [6].In this chapter we will give the overview on evolution of ICT tools and protocols that were used from the very beginning of EGPR course in 2001 when videoconferencing systems were only scarcely used in academic environment, particularly and even less commonly for regular lectures and courses that take place in virtual world until the year 2015, when the era of MOOCs, open access video lectures and ubiquity of information dominate the academic world.EGPR teams are hybrid teams, since their sub-teams are sometimes colocated and have even common history from other projects during study period. Nevertheless, all the EGPR teams are taken into consideration as they were completely virtual. Evolution of Communication Skills in Virtual Product Development Process: Experience… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10...