The world famous marketing master Elliott Ettenberg indicated in his new book ¡§ The Next Economy¡¨(2003), customer has become corporate main focus in new economy era. Increasing product added value and improving customer relations have been corporate prime objective. This has been obvious in Taiwan industry. With dramatic environment changes and aggressive market competition, performance improvement and sales team enhancement have been one of the most important topics in business administration. For electronic companies aiming to enter global market, an operation flow of quickly responding to market demand and customer satisfaction, especially in order taking, design and development, manufacturing, quality assurance, testing, packing, transportation, price and service, has been a major subject to be tackled under global competition and rapidly changing business environment. For a long time, many companies face the problem of numerous functional departments not being able to integrate, thus, customers are obliged to receive various and fragmental message. Functional departments often got shortcomings such as limited knowledge, incomprehensive thoughts and even departmental egoism. They normally don¡¦t emphasize on teamwork with other departments and are not able to provide valuable opinions. Their decision perspectives would be restricted, instead of being comprehensive. In addition, organization hierarchy often results in slow problem-solving responses. They also lack of customer-oriented concepts. Their staff is more loyal to the department than to projects or customers. One of the effective and often seen solutions is to set up a cross-product or cross-functional account team. For efficient operation of such project organization, some companies would set up a project office to assist or monitor the progress of projects. Project management is one of the rapidly growing territories in business administration. Through in-depth interviews and literature retrospective study, this research attempts to understand the operation model of project office in view of customer and service orientation; via empirical observations, interviews and analysis of subject project office real operation, the research tempts to tackle major issues on project office operation. From a broad view, the management of a project office is part of project management, but its characteristics and management model is different from project deployment. This research expects to establish an operation and management model of project office and provide appropriate recommendations as reference to its practical operation.

Software development work undertaken by virtual teams dispersed across time, space, and organizational boundaries is referred as Global Software Development (GSD) with emphasis on “globalization”. In GSD, teams within same organization (off-shore) or different organizations (outsource) from multiple geographic locations are involved. GSD is becoming a norm and more software projects are undertaken in GSD setting due to the benefits associated with it. However, there remain many challenges that can adversely affect the ability to realize those benefits. One of the challenges is to overcome the problems faced during integration of the functional components developed by different teams at different geographic locations. Incompatibilities and hidden issues surface during functional components integration which is very costly to fix at this stage and can lead to delay, lower product quality or even failure of a GSD project. In this regard, this study investigates integration problems that occurred due to different reasons during different phases/stages of GSD, along with successful integration practices with their relative importance. The study produces lists of failure and success factors, and then further prioritized that failure and success factors lists through Delphi experts. Failure and success factors present an extensive knowledge of integration problems and practical solutions. In addition, their relative importance highlights the severity and importance of each failure and success factor. The results of this study not only help to understand integration issues and solution, but provide a platform to develop a solid strategy at early stage of GSD.