Sensitization to the Distributed Development Process

As a result of increased globalization, development projects have become more complex and less transparent. The increasing number of global teams drives the need to focus on their very specific needs. The leader and the members of global engineering teams have limited time and knowledge within their day-to-day business, to focus on the challenges of global design, to identify problems and to seek their solutions. The first step towards improving this situation is to become aware of the changed design environment. This leads to the use or adaptation of well-known methods or tools to support the distributed design process, and eventually to the development of new methodologies and tools. The intent of this paper is to present a concept for a workshop with industry participants, designed to raise their awareness of the problems of global teaming in design. To highlight the distributed character of the workshop, it was conducted semi-synchronously in two locations. The participants tackled a case study to enable them to gain individual experience in managing distributed projects and to identify specific problems using various design methods and communication media. These findings could flow directly into their day-to-day business. Moreover, both the two universities involved, as well as the industrial participants, derived possible future research topics from the workshop.     «

As a result of increased globalization, development projects have become more complex and less transparent. The increasing number of global teams drives the need to focus on their very specific needs. The leader and the members of global engineering teams have limited time and knowledge within their day-to-day business, to focus on the challenges of global design, to identify problems and to seek their solutions. The first step towards improving this situation is to become aware of the changed d...     »