CASE-STUDIES OF COORDINATION ACTIVITIES AND PROBLEMS IN COLLABORATIVEDESIGN

The design and engineering of large, complex electromechanical artifac ts for use in space requires the integration of many engineering group s, spread across the components of the artifact and across the custome r and suppliers. And within each engineering group there is a need to integrate the many diverse skills required, such as electrical, mechan ical, thermal, software and materials. This paper describes the result s of a study conducted form the Summer of 1992 through the Fall of 199 3 at a medium sized aerospace company. The study had two goals. The fi rst goal was to identify project delays that were due to poor coordina tion and integration. The second goal was to identify the activities w hich occupy engineers at the company and to rank the activities by the level of frustration and wasted effort encountered in performing them . The first goal was accomplished by studying 25 problem cases, compil ed and classified into six problem categories: information acquisition (24% of cases), information access (32% of cases), knowledge access ( 4% of cases), decision interdependence (8% of cases), activity managem ent (12% of cases) and agent access (16% of cases). The delays associa ted with information acquisition, information access and knowledge acc ess range from 1 day to as much as a year, they range from 1 day to a week for the other categories. The second goal, to identify the activi ties by the frustration and wasted effort encountered, was accomplishe d by conducting a survey, circulated to 30 engineers across five diffe rent departments. The participants were required to track the time spe nt in seven different activities over an actual 5 day week. They also estimated the time they would spend on these activities in a typical w eek on a percentage basis. The percentages of time spent were; informa tion gathering (13.7%-actual; 12.2%-typical), problem, solving/thinkin g (28.0%-actual; 29.8%-typical), documentation (23.5%-actual; 19.5%-ty pical), planning (7.8%-actual; 8.5%-typical), negotiating (7.6%-actual ; 9.8%-typical), support and consulting (17.1%-actual; 18.1%-typical) and other (2.3%-actual; 2.1%-typical). The participants also rated the activities from 1 (most frustrating) to 7 (least frustrating). The av erage scores, beginning with the most frustrating, were 3.33-informati on gathering, 3.48-negotiation, 3.56-documentation, 3.67-support/consu lting, 3.9-planning, 4.52-problem solving/thinking and 6.67-other.