A global virtual team model to improve software development collaboration project

Increasingly, universities across the globe are involved in collaborations at both national and international levels. In a nutshell, the collaborations are intended to expose students and academia to different environments, to facilitate enhanced teaching and learning, and research activities. However, many of the collaborative initiatives have not been successful, particularly at international level. This can be attributed to many factors, which are either unknown or too complex to address by the drivers of collaborations in many universities and countries. As a result, various approaches such as physical exchange of materials and humans (students, professors, and other university staff) have been adopted over the years, yet the success rate has not improved. The objective of this research was to develop a model, which can be used to guide an understanding of how to employ global virtual teams for university’s collaborations. The qualitative methods from the perspectives of the interpretive stance and inductive approach were employed. Data were gathered from literature, and an existing collaboration, which involves universities from three different continents, Africa, Europe and North America. The data were analysed following the hermeneutics technique, from the interpretivist perspective. From the analysis, we found three sets of factors: human sphere, collaborative activity and technology artefacts as the main facilitators and influence on universities collaborations. Based on the findings, a global virtual team model was developed, which can be useful in guiding and advancing the way in which team members interact and enable activities of collaborations between universities, and company as well.