A COMMUNICATIONS-BASED TECHNIQUE FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY DESIGN TEAM MANAGEMENT

Many design failures are attributable to commonly understood mechanism s, suggesting that they are not due to a real lack of expertise within an interdisciplinary design team but rather to communication errors a t key decision points. We present a technique for interdisciplinary de sign team management which focuses on information processing and commu nication between team members. A cognitive model of communication-rela ted failure mechanisms of design groups is developed. Strategies for d efining and assigning subtasks among individuals or subgroups which ar e based on the communications model are described. A technique for eva luating the expected effectiveness of a design team configuration is p resented. The cognitive model and task definition and assignment strat egies are integrated into a tool which is traditionally used to evalua te 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 strate gies which minimize their impact and an analytic tool to determine des ign team effectiveness. An illustrative application to the problem of design of a program for computer-assisted instruction is presented.