Collaborative Creation of Engineering Artifacts by Geographically-Distributed Teams

Abstract

It is common practice today for engineering development projects to be partitioned across multiple, geographically-distributed work locations, often in multiple times zones, and at times, in different countries. Underlying this practice is an implied assumption that the tools and services provided by such the electronic collaboration infrastructure (e.g., electronic mail, audio and video teleconferencing, group on-line editing, sharable file repositories, etc.) used to interconnect the people at these various sites is adequate for supporting such geographically-distributed teams, facilitating their inter-personal communications and collaboration. The goal is for collaborative work to be accomplished with little or no physical travel between these geographically-distributed work sites. In this paper, we describe research conducted to test the validity of this hypothesis, within the domain of projects intended to develop complex, software-intensive systems, of the sort used by the aerospace and energy industries.We discovered important limitations in such electronic collaboration infrastructures, which limit their ability to support such geographically-distributed collaborative development. Specifically, we found that (for large-scale complex systems development) there is evidence that such mechanisms are effective for geographically-distributed review of engineering artifacts, but that they are not effective for geographically-distributed creation of such artifacts. Understanding this distinction is therefore crucial for effective project management. Such an understanding also identifies topics for future research and development: the need to create more effective mechanisms to support the geographically-distributed creation of complex engineering artifacts. To this end, we present findings from our research on how collaborative generation of engineering artifacts occurs, what are the specific challenges that arise from various modes of geographically-distributed project implementation, and why (within the considered problem domain) current electronic collaboration infrastructure tools are not effective to support this geographically-distributed engineering creation. We conclude by postulating mechanisms and methods that are beginning to contribute to the development of effective tools for geographically-distributed creation of complex engineering artifacts.