The management of electronics engineering design teams: linking tactics to changing conditions

Abstract

This paper reports on a multi-method study of design team management in a leading UK electronics company, focusing on how project leaders support collaboration between design engineers, the management issues they confront when working with a design team, and the influence these issues have on the team's perceptions and design process. The first part of the study examines the perceptions of project leaders as to the way in which they manage design projects. The second part of the study examines the experiences of design engineers over the 33-week duration of a complete project phase. This provides a bottom-up, engineers' view of the range of issues described by project leaders in the first part of the study. Analysis of these findings from both engineering and psychological perspectives points to design coordination and team integration as two prominent and recurrent management dilemmas, and demonstrates that successful team management requires project leaders continuously to steer an acceptable path through these dilemmas. We suggest that these problems are most successfully addressed by the adoption of a flexible, dynamic approach to team coordination in which moment-to-moment demands are met by appropriate management responses.