Individual vs Co-located groups

Individual vs Co-located groups








Module -2 IND Co-Location vs Virtual Groups

Submitted by – Aniruddha Pathania

Submitted on – 2015-09-19















There are two approaches to a project team. The first is a co-located group and the second is a virtual group. According to Kerzner, earlier project management used to be in a face to face environment where the team meetings and conferences used to be in a room and face to face. Co – located teams as the name suggests are teams where members need to be physically present. Co – located groups are a more traditional way of team projects. Nowadays its due to the dynamic nature of business, it’s difficult to have co-located groups for projects. Many projects need more team members because of its size and complexity and thus it’s difficult to do such projects with co-located groups and teams. Due to this difficulty, organizations prefer virtual teams/ groups for big and complex projects. Virtual groups/ teams do not require the team members to be physically present for conferences and meetings. Many organizations prefer virtual groups over co-located groups due to the changing environment.
Ale Ebrahim, N., Ahmed, S. & Taha, Z. (2009) define Virtual teams as “a small temporary groups of geographically, organizationally and/ or time dispersed knowledge workers who coordinate their work predominantly with electronic information and communication technologies in order to accomplish one or more organization tasks"
Advantages
The following are the advantages of virtual groups-
No geographical bounds - According to Kerzner, virtual teams can have members from different companies and countries (p.425). Virtual teams members are not bound by geographical limits and can communicate across time and space. Organizations can use talent from different countries without having them at their own location.
Time saving – Virtual groups save organizations a lot of time. Members do not have to travel for conferences and meetings...

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