On the Role of Boundary Spanners as Team Coordination Mechanisms in Organizationally Distributed Projects

Software projects are still facing with challenges of team coordination across global boundaries. Boundary spanner is an important organic coordination mechanism that is not much explored in GSD literature. This paper presents a finding from four case studies of how a boundary spanner resolve coordination gaps in organizationally distributed teams. The qualitative data were collected from 16 interviews from different types of global software projects. Boundary spanners have common characteristics of a coordinator, such as team member recognition, multiple perspective expertise, decision-making ability and work time flexibility. Task negotiation, conflict resolution, task information navigation and boundary object set-up are common activities to support team coordination. We also discussed a compound effect of other organizational roles and the impact of context factors on boundary spanner's activities.