A Company Global Virtual Project Team Communication Breakdown Case Study

As the rapid Globalization development more and more companies are becoming the Global companies and take the use of in-shore, off-shore and virtual team development to achieve the best technical resources and reduce the cost of software development. However as virtual software development was born with some disadvantages and the time and budget used to research problems are limited, lots of projects were either failed or not completed as planned.A Company, a leading global provider of customer contact and enterprise workforce optimization solutions, having been founded 35 years ago now it has over 5000 clients over the world and support over 1 million contact centers, with around 1/10 billion concurrent running transactions per day, most of them are either self-used contact centers or outsourced contact centers, serving the finance, telecommunication, transportation, retail, government and many other industries to support the business like customer service, call for receivables and funds, advertising, etc.. An analysis of the FORTUNE Magazine revealed that 80 percent of the Fortune 50 companies and 75 percent of Global Fortune 100 companies are using A Company solutions in their contact centers. It has the distributed Global R&D teams in United States, Europe, and India. On Oct 24th of year 2008 CDC (China development center) established in Dalian Software Park, as part of the Global development teams, engaged in Global project development and testing.As the typical Global Company most of A company's projects adopt the collaboration across distributed virtual teams. They work virtually for eliminating the time and space boundaries and barriers which not only help the organization flexibly adapt to rapid changing global environment, but also to solve problems, reduce the cost and improve the resource usages. However on the other side, lack of the face to face communication for those virtual teams will cause the communication breakdowns-they may fail to interact with each other, share knowledge and build up the shared meaning. Such communication problems would have the side effect on project's progress or even cause the failure.The purpose of this paper is through the analysis of root cause for A Company's communication breakdown and propose the solutions, providing the case study for the success of Global virtual project teams and the globalization of Chinese software companies.