Emerging organisations: metateams in major IT projects

During the last decade, teams working on information technology (IT) development and implementation projects have experienced significant transformations. Nowadays, many members of project teams are working in new and complex organisational arrangements seeded with conflicts. Their firms, pushed by the competitive race and/or regulators, want to implement new IT solutions at frantic speeds while often maintaining old management practices without recognising the new paradigm’s unique needs and nature. This paper focuses in one of these new organisations, the metateam. Metateams are emergent temporal virtual organizations engaged in complex multimillion dollar IT projects. These confederations of networked teams can build IT solutions of high complexity by integrating and capitalizing on expertise from different fields across firms and national borders. However, achieving effective interteam collaboration presents significant challenges. The failure to make sense of the new paradigm r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ECIS
• Authors: Walter D. Fernández, Alan Underwood
• Keywords: Complex Organisational Arrangements, ECIS 2003, Information Technology, It Projects, Paradigm’s Unique Needs