Abstract

Virtual projects are becoming common with global competition, market development, and not least the financial crisis forcing organizations to reduce their costs drastically. Organizations therefore have to place high importance on ways to carry out virtual projects and consider appropriate practices for performing these projects. This paper compares best practices with practiced practices for virtual projects and discusses ways to bridge the gap between them. We have studied eleven virtual projects in five Danish organizations and compared them with a predefined list of best practices compiled from the literature. The research questions are What are the practiced practices compared with the best practices? and What can we learn from this comparison?. Our findings show that the best practices are followed to a certain extent in virtual projects, but also demonstrate a severe lack of diffusion and adoption, which means that the best practice knowledge has not permeated sufficiently to the practice. Furthermore, the appropriate application of information and communication technology (ICT) remains a big challenge, and finally project managers are not sufficiently trained in organizing and conducting virtual projects. The overall implications for research and practice are to acknowledge virtual project management as a distinct discipline from traditional project management and to address the development of this discipline.

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