CHALLENGES FOR DISTRIBUTED WORK PRACTICES POSED BY THE INTRODUCTION OF FUNCTIONAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Product-development-driven companies work in an increasingly globalized world, implying a need for involved parties to share resources, technologies, risks and profit to a greater extent, especially within FPD. This type of collaboration radically intensifies the demand on various-sized crossfunctional teams working over organizational, geographical, functional and cultural borders. Currently, the concept of integrated product development (IPD) (Prasad, 1997) is well understood in the engineering design research community. Differences (in focus and degree) between IPD and FPD are introduced in Table 1.

Clearly, these issues challenge distributed collaborative work. Imagine selling collaboration ability to a global design team engaged in FPD. The demands on CWE methods and tools are increasing in terms of functionality, availability, usability, security, interoperability, personalization and knowledge availability.