Engineering Teamwork Research Articles

Teaching Teamwork in Engineering and Computer Science

Teaching Teamwork in Engineering and Computer Science

Teamwork Distribution: Local vs. Global Software Engineering Project Development Teamwork

Deliverable and course project become the preferred mean to measure learner competency and attainment of intended learning outcomes in IT-fields. Proper setup and evaluation for teamwork projects remains a key challenge for e-learning systems. This study investigates the possibility to improve the early prediction of academic software engineering project failure by treating teamwork differently according to the distribution of teamwork participants. Two configurations of teamwork distribution are considered. In the first configuration, a teamwork may include international participants, but all team participants are affiliated to the same institution, namely local teamwork. In the second configuration, a teamwork may include participants from different institutions, namely global teamwork. Software engineering projects are approached from two distinct perspectives. First, obeying the best practices during the system development life cycle (SDLC), namely, process perspective. Second, characteristics of the final deliverable deployed at each milestone of the SDLC, namely product perspective. A publicly released dataset collected by a designated e-learning environment is leveraged to validate the proposed approach. Results indicate a noticeable variance among local and global distributions. These results puts evidence that the reasons behind software engineering teamwork project failures may vary depending on the distribution of the teamwork, local vs. global. Consequently, it advise to customize e-learning systems differently according to the teamwork distribution.

Developing Creativity Through Enhanced Communication and Teamwork in Engineering

Developing Creativity Through Enhanced Communication and Teamwork in Engineering

Exploring the gap between the student expectations and the reality of teamwork in undergraduate software engineering group projects

Software engineering group projects aim to provide a nurturing environment for learning about teamwork in software engineering. Since social and teamwork issues have been consistently identified as serious problems in such projects, we aim to better understand the breakdown between the expectations teams have at the start of a group project and their experiences at the end of the project. In this paper, we investigate how 35 teams of undergraduate students approach software engineering group project courses, and how their previous experience with collaborative software development matches their expectations for group work. We then analyse the retrospective documents delivered by the same teams at the end of a 27-week software engineering group project course, mirroring the expectations at the start of the project with the realities described by the end of it.

COMPARITIVE STUDY OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE OF ENGINEERING STUDENT TEAMS AND TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Abstract – Design-and-build competitions are integral to effective higher engineering education. Yet, there is not much research investigating if the organizational structures of engineering student teams and team effectiveness follow any trends. 
 This paper delves into the possibility of this correlation by measuring parameters that contribute to effective teams. This research provides data that is used to judge best practices for engineering student teams. The findings from this paper can then be used as a basis for action when the students find a need for organization development in the future. Additionally, this analysis provides insight into teamwork in engineering. This could benefit 4th year design (a.k.a capstone) projects as well as innovative companies with similar settings. 
 The core contributors to a team's effectiveness are leadership, direction, planning, knowledge transfer, and meetings for engineering student teams. Although parameters like communication and team culture are important, student teams generally have no problems in these areas. By comparing three organizational structures, it is concluded that in general engineering student teams are best when they follow a holocratic or flatter organizational structure as opposed to a strictly flat organizational structure.

Developing Creativity, Communication, and Teamwork in Engineering

Future engineers will need to address problems through multiple lenses and consider solutions that stray from the most efficient linear consideration. A new trend has begun during the past decade to bring students from the liberal arts and sciences in with engineering to learn together in problem-solving teams rather than teaching strictly within the disciplinary context. To prepare future generations, the expanding of expectations though experimentation with new curricula that intersects a variety of educational areas with a goal to enhance student competency in creativity, communication skills, and teamwork is essential. Described are the findings from a study funded by the National Science Foundation to explore learning of electrical engineering students through a collaboration between engineering and music curriculum. The varied processes of problem-solving involved in each discipline brought an awareness of possibilities to the students. Students discovered options for problem-solving that included: (a) pursuing options beyond a normal framework or structure within their own discipline, i.e. considering creative alternatives that might generate an improved outcome; (b) deliberation of notions beyond their own that influenced the direction of the problem-solving process; and (c) recognition that effective communication requires consideration of another’s beliefs, understandings and intentions, as well as flexibility within these considerations.

CAD Education of College Students with Engineering Practice and Team Work

With research direction refinement and information globalization, knowledge economy puts forward higher requirements to high-level talents. University education is very important to cultivate high-level talents. For students of mechanical-related majors, the cultivation of college students’ comprehensive application ability has become an important problem to be solved urgently. In view of current CAD comprehensive training of college students, environment for engineering reality is provided difficultly. This paper sets the development of “Standard Parts Library of Rolling Bear Based on SolidWorks” as an example to illustrate that mechanical engineering students make teamwork and collaboration to complete the standard library research and development and cultivate their CAD comprehensive ability in research project. Through the application of practice, we find that the proposed training method can not only be applied to senior students, but also to lower grade college students, and it also creates a new educational model in cooperative environment.

SHORT DESIGN PROJECTS FOR AN INTRODUCTORY THERMOFLUIDS ENGINEERING COURSE

The Faculty of Engineering at Dalhousie University offers a common introductory course that covers the basic principles of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics in a unified manner. This introductory course is a mandatory part of the curriculum for all engineering programs offered at Dalhousie. In this course, students are required to perform six laboratory experiments, and since 2012 students have also completed short, four-week design projects.The short design project helps students to acquire more of the graduate attributes defined by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB), including design, communication, and team work skills. They also provide students with a well-deserved break from purely theoretical work in lectures and tutorials, and a chance to develop some hands-on abilities.This paper describes the lessons learned from the last three design projects, which were focused on modifications to a Ranque-Hilsch vortex tube, design of a pop-pop boat, and design of a double pipe heat exchanger. The primary challenges have been the limited engineering design experience possessed by students in their third semester of studies, the heavy workload that second-year engineering students already have, and the relatively large class size. Even though there are clear challenges related to integrating a design project into a large second-year class, the results seem to indicate that these design projects provide a positive learning experience for the students.

Perceived Self-Efficacy in the Context of Teamwork and Entrepreneurship in Engineering and Social Sciences College Students

The purpose of the present study is to compare the profiles of perceived self-efficacy in teamwork and entrepreneurship between Engineering and Social Sciences university students. The total sample consists of 1,181 participants; 592 from the Engineering field and 589 from the Social Sciences programs, with an average age of 18.43 years (SD = 0.95) and 18.38 years (SD = 0.86) respectively. A quantitative approach with a descriptive and transversal survey design was used. All the participants completed the Self-efficacy Teamwork and Entrepreneurship Scale. The results of the one-way multivariate analysis of variance, followed by the one-way univariate analysis of variance, showed that the Social Sciences students reported statistically significant (p .05).

FOSTERING TEAMWORK SKILLS USING COLLABORATION SOFTWARE IN ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION

The ability to work in a professional team is an essential social competence of engineers, who must collaborate on common tasks, with shared goals. Social competence has many aspects that are difficult to define and evaluate. Based on a theoretical framework of social competence, we identify several specific attributes and indicators that can be used to develop and evaluate social competencies related to teamwork in professional engineering. The specific attributes are professional project management, team interaction and professional documentation. These attributes are fostered in several ways. Team communication and coordination is fostered through explicit team roles (e.g. moderator, secretary, project manager, etc.), explicit requirements for project planning and scheduling, requiring professional documentation, and using computer tools to support these collaborative activities. These strategies develop competencies in communication, teamwork, presenting and understanding information, and using collaboration tool. At a higher level, these competencies contribute to each team member understanding the roles and contributions of the other team members, developing a shared understanding of the team’s position, and negotiating within the team and with external parties to reach sound decisions and conclusions. This paper describes and compares experiences using collaboration software tools to support teamwork activities in undergraduate design projects at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Western University. Collaboration tools include Microsoft Project, Microsoft SharePoint, Sakai, and wikis. The paper discusses the selection of appropriate tools, the formalization of their use, and methods used to evaluate student competence.

The Development of an Agent-Based Modeling Framework for Simulating Engineering Team Work

Team working is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. A team's performance levels are determined by complex interactions between the attributes of its individual members, the communication and dynamics between members, the working environment, and the team's work tasks. As organizations evolve, so too does the nature of team working. During the past two decades, product development in engineering organizations has increasingly been undertaken by multidisciplinary integrated product teams. Such increasing complexity means that the nature of research methods for studying teams must also evolve. Accordingly, this paper proposes an agent-based modeling approach for simulating team working within an engineering environment, informed by research conducted in two engineering organizations. The model includes a number of variables at an individual level (competency, motivation, availability, response rate), team level (communication, shared mental models, trust), and task level (difficulty, workflow), which jointly determine team performance (quality, time to complete the task, time spent working on the task). In addition to describing the model's development, the paper also reports the results of various simulation runs that were conducted in response to realistic team working scenarios, together with its validation. Finally, the paper discusses the model's practical applications as a tool for facilitating organizational decision making with respect to optimizing team working.

Value Engineering Application in Highway Projects

Problem statement: Each year, a major part of revenues spent on Investing in sector development plans and State infrastructures filled with clear reduce costs and done on time Projects leading to high savings budget plans executive and will be return on Investment. Approach: On transportation projects, Value Engineering (VE) teamwork by involving construction, design and maintenance staff review the construction project features and look for ways to improve quality, control costs and time. Also this study briefly described VE and quality, cost schedule planning, application of VE, cost parameters, relationship of value, function, cost and worth. Results: VE, highway construction was survived and opportunities for better, less expensive means of completing the construction projects were analyzed. The intention is to progress project quality and productivity, foster innovation, optimize design elements, also ensure overall economical costs. Conclusion: This study achieved to the model Value Engineering in Highway Construction (VEHC) which cause decrease time, decrease cost and increase quality in highway it has been.

Leadership and teamwork in engineering

Leadership and teamwork in engineering

BM_Virtual Enterprise Architecture Reference Model for Concurrent Engineering: An experiment

In order to test the potential of Virtual Enterprise (VE) organizational principles for Concurrent Engineering (CE) team work organization, an experiment applying the BM_Virtual Enterprise Architecture Reference Model (BM_VEARM) is organized. Three CE teams are asked to create a web site. The teams have been organized as follows: 1) CE distributed team (virtual team according to literature); 2) CE agile team (agile organization according to BM_VEARM) and 3) CE virtual team (virtual organization according to BM_VEARM), in order to complete the required task. The main objective of the experiment is to show that the three organization models of CE teams work effectively, and analyse the performance according to previously defined criteria. In this paper the results in terms of product quality are presented. The experiment has shown that better product quality, for the product quality aspects analysed, is achieved in cases when VE organization is applied.

Problem solving and engineering design, introducing bachelor students to engineering practice at K. U. Leuven

A present-day engineer has a large scientific knowledge; he is a team-player, eloquent communicator and life-long learner. At the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the course ‘Problem Solving and Engineering Design’ introduces engineering students from the first semester onwards into real engineering practice and teamwork. Working in small groups, the students integrate basic principles of all regular scientific courses to solve real-life engineering problems. This makes the coursework more interesting and helps the students to master the abstract theories presented in lectures. Through the increasing complexity of the assignments, the students are gradually confronted with technical and social competencies such as a systematic approach to problem solving and engineering design, teamwork, project management and communication skills. ‘Problem Solving and Engineering Design’ has been implemented in the bachelor of engineering since September 2003. The current paper describes the course objectives, the way the course is implemented to support project-based learning and the feedback obtained from the didactic team and the students.

DISTRIBUTED ENGINEERING TEAMS AND THEIR ORGANIZATIONAL ASPECTS

In the present, the trend of local engineering team work to become global and the trend of developing products in a distributed fashion are of great interest for the industry. The organizational aspects of doing distributed engineering are presented in both trends. Two aspects that are fundamental in the organization of distributed work are the cultural and the technological ones. This paper deals mainly with those aspects and presents some advising on how to overcome the challenges when organizing distributed teams for international engineering projects.

Slow-Speed Balancing of a 310 Mw Lp Turbine Saves $250,000

During an overhaul, nondestructive engineering inspection revealed root section cracking of several L-O blades of a 310 MW LP turbine. Replacement of 25 blades and reliability modifications of the shroud were performed. A subsequent balance check on the company's slow-speed balance machine showed a large unbalance: amplitudes of 50 mils at 190 rpm. This paper discusses the circumstances surrounding the slow-speed balance solution of an unusually large balance weight In excess of 10 pounds, and shows how this was accomplished utilizing engineering, maintenance and balance personnel teamwork. The resulting success allowed the unit to be returned to service on schedule without further re-blading, resulting in operational and maintenance-avoided costs of over one quarter of a million dollars.

How Plant Engineering Teamwork

How Plant Engineering Teamwork

How Plant Engineering Teamwork

How Plant Engineering Teamwork