Structuring organization architecture: towards a better understanding of distributed projects as an interplay between coordination and agility

The distributed project architecture is based on the coordination process by structuring activities and virtual teams. This architecture approaches the agile organization through sensitivity and organizational sustainability via the Task-Technology fit to construct a virtual product development organization. The design structure matrix is used to model the commitment of teams’ projects under trust for assessing coordination and communication in virtual project teams. An illustrative example from the Huawei project is provided to verify the proposed model. Results indicate that common expertise drives two-way communication among teams, and trust and commitment are the main sources of increasing the window of overlap and so the communication frequency. Task-technology fit is critical to increase the communication among virtual teams to strengthen their coordination. They also demonstrate that organizational agility reflects an efficient approach to encounter the product development project challenges such as geographical dispersion, time zone and cultural differences, project quality and duration.