The increasing competitive pressure from globalisation is forcing organisations to be more flexible and work more effectively. Today's teleworking applications can go a long way in offering a solution, especially in the management of big software development projects distributed among several design centres. However, these applications cannot totally replace all co-ordination tasks, team building and access to experts.

To achieve efficient, cost-effective distributed software development involving several sites and organisational cultures, TECODIS developed and tested a platform capable of supporting remote synchronous personan-to-person communications. The trials demonstrated clearly that telework can improve industrial software production by reducing project lead-time, whilst keeping cost and quality under control.

The field trials also revealed that some participants were very concerned about the possible impact of teleworking on changes to organisational structure, employment contracts and working conditions. The importance of this message can not be overemphasised as it came from an organisation that was already familiar with telework and was common to all cultures. It is therefore clear that the introduction of teleworking into an organisation, in particular the communication strategy, needs to be planned carefully to ensure that people do not feel threatened by teleworking. TECODIS has produced a very useful set of guidelines and recommendations on how to do this, based on the expereinces from its distributed software development trials.