A Communications-Based Technique for Interdisciplinary Design Team Management

Many design failures are attributable to commonly understood mechanisms, suggesting that they are not due to a real lack of expertise within an interdisciplinary design team but rather to communication errors at key decision points. We present a technique for interdisciplinary design team management which focuses on information processing and communication between team members. A cognitive model of communication-related failure mechanisms of design groups is developed. Strategies for defining and assigning subtasks among individuals or subgroups which are based on the communica- tions model are described. A technique for evaluating the expec- ted effectiveness of a design team configuration is presented. The cognitive model and task definition and assignment strate- gies are integrated into a tool which is traditionally used to evaluate only the physical design artifact itself, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA). By determining communication failure mechanisms and how they can affect the design artifact, we are able to develop strategies which minimize their impact and an analytic tool to determine design team effectiveness. An illustrative application to the problem of design of a program for computer-assisted instruction is presented.