SAR Journal. Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 111-117, ISSN 2619-9955, DOI: 10.18421/SAR33-04, September 2020. SAR Journal – Volume 3 / Number 3 / 2020. 111 Distributed Project Team Key Performance Indicators Natalia Krasnokutska, Tetiana Podoprykhina National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute", 21 Frunze Str., Kharkiv, Ukraine Abstract – Distributed projects provide major benefits in terms of tapping team members’ competencies around a globe, but still they represent a significant challenge for coordinating and monitoring teams’ performance. This paper investigates distributed projects with a specific focus on performance metrics. As the result of the research, the list of suggested Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are given to manage distributed project team as well as described the process to define project KPIs and maintain them. Keywords – Project management, distributed project team performance, KPIs, project metrics. 1. Introduction While we look at the software development industry, we would like to highlight that today, due to the pandemic; almost all project teams have moved to distributed team organization and work remotely [1], [2], and [3]. It would be beneficial, in our opinion, to investigate the results and effect on team performance by keeping the distributed team setup and evaluate the effectiveness of such project teams. In general, despite the fact that a number of transformations from the classical type of project team to the distributed team organization in the companies are forced now, otherwise the distributed team organization forms advantage, which allows DOI: 10.18421/SAR33-04 https://doi.org/10.18421/SAR33-04 Corresponding author: Tetiana Podoprykhina, National Technical University "Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute", 21 Frunze Str., Kharkiv, Ukraine. Email: krasnokutskaya.natalia@gmail.com Received: 30 August 2020. Revised: 14 September 2020. Accepted: 21 September 2020. Published: 29 September 2020. © 2020 Natalia Krasnokutska & Tetiana Podoprykhina; published by UIKTEN. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. The article is published with Open Access at www.sarjournal.com responding to the changes in the environment outside of the project rapidly [4]. In fact, even before Covid 19, the software development industry used to grow globally when companies involved employees from subcontractors, third parties or had their own remote developers around world. In practice, distributed projects deal with the same problems as classic project teams, which include problems related to the quality management, project scope, schedule and price. Geographical remoteness of the team members of the distributed team only complicates standard problems that happen in project team [5], [6], [7], and [8]. In our opinion, these problems are of different kind and caused by different reasons. For example, the lack of private / interpersonal communication between team members, as well as no scheduled slots for informal talks inside team, undermines trust and support inside team that is quite natural when there is a distance between team members, and there is a lack of previous experience of interaction, which results that team members‘ conversations are in one place. As a result, the before-mentioned problems slow down the distributed team performance improvement. Therefore, we believe that the systematic monitoring of the distributed project team performance as well as the project status tracking is especially important. In order to establish the correct processes and practice that lead to project success it is important to define the correct team performance indicators and project metrics. The goal of this article is to find out and provide common distributed project team KPIs in order to manage team and help to make a step forward improving its performance, which is particularly important in the industries such as software development where practitioners are increasingly trying to enhance the measuring process by fine-tuning the measurements and optimizing the internal practices to produce project added value. In addition, in our opinion, team performance KPIs are needed not only by project managers, who need access to high-level and high quality information, but it is also crucial to have them for top managers, whose goal is to optimize the value of their team‘s activities on strategic level and get support in decision-making process [9].