About the Complexity of Teamwork and Collaboration Processes

Organizations across the globe are increasingly using teams to accomplish significant work and projects. Much of this work is also accomplished using technology tools to support their communication and collaborative efforts. As companies become increasingly multinational and distributed geographically, theformation of virtual teams has become a common practice. Workflow management systems are a specific type of systems that can be used to capture collaboration and group works processes and thus supports the creation of teamwork and enable collaboration. In some cases, collaboration and group work processes can become highly complex. High complexity in a process may result in bad understandability and more errors, defects, and exceptions leading processes to need more time to develop, test, and maintain. Therefore, excessive complexity should be avoided. The major goal of this paper is to discuss the need and requirementsfor the development of a measure to analyze the complexity of processes.