virtual teams

One ear on the phone while checking e-mails and revising a text at the same time - that’s life today in many offices all over the world. Constant digital change makes great demands of companies and their staff. People are expected to be available 24/7 while multi-tasking and coping with high noise levels in open-plan offices as well as dealing with constant disruptions in the work process. Together with working on-call or on-demand, these are just some of the challenges and tasks that have to be managed. How can staff continue to be efficient and productive despite all these and more changes to the working world? Are companies prepared for the demands of the digital age? Which adjustments will they have to make to protect staff from excessive demands on the one hand, while boosting efficiency and productivity on the other?

Manufacturing companies are operating in a turbulent environment, which leads to a higher need for factory replanning. Typically, factory planning activities are carried out as projects. All projects are competing for limited resources. An appropriate coordination between the individual projects and coordination with the daily business increases efficiency and effectiveness. This paper presents multi-project management as a possible approach to the sharing of resources in factory planning.

For practitioners and researchers in the field of organizational networks virtual structures are of paramount importance. However the issue of purity of these virtual structures has not been sufficiently dealt with. The dissemination of hybrid forms of learning („blended learning“), of distribution („brick & click“) and work (“split location work”) signals that virtual organizational structures are also based on a hybrid design. This article outlines the variety of architectures of such semi-virtual structures as well as the challenges related to their implementation.