Communication Patterns over the Project Life Cycle--Evidence from a Virtual Project Exercise

Well functioning communication is vital to the success of projects, especially in virtual or distributed environments. To study how communication evolves over time we studied how students from three different Finnish universities communicated via virtual learning environment (VLE) tool during a joint three month project work exercise, where students worked with real clients. We analyzed over 1000 discussion list messages and came up with seven categories that represent the topics discussed in message board discussions. Most of the messages were task-related, and therefore, there were fewer than expected messages that served social or community building purpose. Most of the messages were sent during the middle phase of the project. In later stages of the project the communication became close to pure information sharing as the percentage of these kinds of messages increased