ITS Conference Paper

Supporting Globally Distributed Engineering Design Teams With Communication Technologies

Carleen Maitland
Charles Steinfield
Chyng-Yang Jang

Abstract

This paper reviews the literature in the fields of concurrent engineering, small group and computer mediated communication, as well as cross cultural communication. It presents preliminary findings from a study of engineering design teams involved in geographically distributed, collaborative design projects. The study, now underway, examines globally distributed teams from Michigan State University, National University of Singapore, and University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. We examine the impacts of communication technologies on performance and team member satisfaction. Differences in the abilities of the various communication technologies to support these teams are found. Findings include a negative assessment of Internet video conferencing for teams with large time zone differences. Email is found to be useful tool for bridging time and language barriers. Additionally, issues for the management of globally distributed teams are discussed 1.

Table of Contents

Introduction

In the present competitive environment where time-to-market cycles are shrinking, firms have identified the engineering design process as one area which can be modified to reduce product development time. This need has resulted in a process known as concurrent engineering in which the importance of coordinating and integrating design activities is emphasized [1]. The increased emphasis on integration and coordination creates challenges for geographically distributed work sites which are often separated by large distances, cross many time zones, and may involve several distinct cultures. Communication technologies are used to facilitate this process but at the same time create additional challenges for engineering design teams. Overall, issues involve new engineering design procedures, required group collaboration, cross cultural communication, and an increase in computer mediated communication (CMC).

Research is needed to understand the relationship between the communication technologies used to support geographically distributed engineering design teams and performance variables such as design quality and team satisfaction. Relevant questions include whether or not telecommunications technologies adequately support these teams. It is also necessary to know whether or not emerging technologies such as Internet based video conferencing and electronic white board tools are useful and if so how.

To explore these issues we performed an experiment in which we examine globally distributed teams from Michigan State University (USA), National University of Singapore, and University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. Teams are compromised of engineers from each university and both electrical and mechanical engineering disciplines are represented. During a four month time period, the engineers completed an industry sponsored design project while using both standard and emerging communication technologies.

Literature

A range of new collaborative work and computer-assisted design technologies have been developed to augment group work. Design teams employ tools such as video conferencing, electronic white boards, email, file sharing, and interactive computer aided design software. The impact of these technologies on the telework and group collaboration has created a rich area for research [2, 3]. One field of research in this area is concerned with assessing the effectiveness of these new tools when used for globally distributed, collaborative engineering design projects. The overall goal of this research is to identify work processes for engineering teams that will make the most effective use of these technologies, resulting in improved efficiency and quality of designs.

Concurrent Engineering

Work processes for engineers began to receive much attention in the late 1970's, as a reaction to competitive pressures from Japanese firms [4]. The result of this attention has been the development and adoption of concurrent engineering processes. Concurrent engineering is a procedure which facilitates the consideration of requirements of all functional areas throughout the entire design process. Benefits of implementing concurrent design processes include reduced time-to-market cycles, higher quality products, and reductions in the amount of downstream re-work [4, 5]. Results of studies undertaken to identify the optimal method for implementing concurrent engineering consistently recommend the use of cross functional design teams [5,6,7,4,8,9]. The specific benefits attributable to the use of these teams are the ability to facilitate communication between team members and the breaking down of cross-functional cultural barriers [8].

In order for cross functional design teams to operate effectively it is necessary to have overlap in the design work between the functional areas. This overlap, also known as process concurrency, has been identified as one of the variables affecting cost and quality of the design as well as project team satisfaction [10]. Process concurrency is determined by a number of factors including the characteristic of the design project, the willingness of team members to release incomplete information, and their ability to use incomplete information. For the release and use of incomplete information to occur, a tolerance for ambiguity must be accepted by the group and a proper reward mechanism must be in place.

Small Group and Computer Mediated Communication

Communication among team members is enhanced by concurrent engineering processes. However, with geographically distributed teams the increased need to use distance and time spanning communication technologies will present additional problems which will affect their ability create high quality designs.

One area in which group work will be affected by the increased need for communication technologies is related to the types of functions they perform. Groups can be observed performing three types of functions: a production function, a member support function and a group well-being function. Technological changes, which are usually aimed at modifying the group's production function, say by increasing efficiency, may have unintended effects on the group well-being and member support functions as well. These effects are results of the depersonalizing nature of technological devices [11]. As a result of their reliance on computer mediated communication tools, the engineering design teams in our study may experience difficulty in forming and maintaining a sense of team work which in turn could affect their ability to collaborate.

In addition to the functions which groups perform, another group work variable that will be affected by time and computer mediated factors is the synchrony between group members, which is also referred to as social entrainment [11]. Social entrainment occurs within a group as a result of both endogenous factors (how well members work together) and exogenous factors (deadlines and other project requirements). Entrainment affects productivity as well as communication patterns. Over time, group members' communication patterns become entrained to one another as they work together. These entrainment processes are influenced by the use of technological tools and in the case of our research time zone differences will be a factor as well. The consequences of communication technologies for entrainment are described in the following:

"some technological tools reduce the redundancy of cues, because they eliminate some of the channels or modalities (e.g. nonverbal and paraverbal channels) through which the cues that structure these entrainment processes flow. Those technological tools disrupt the attainment of synchrony or entrainment between communication partners. "(McGrath, 1990, p.56)

In addition to effects on group work of communication technologies in general, there will be effects that are attributable to each distinct communication medium. The technologies used in this research can be seen as one of two types: distance-spanning/time synchronous modes, here referring to telephone, video conferencing and white board; or time-bridging (asynchronous) mode, here referring to voice mail, email, fax, and FTP. Behavioral issues which may cause problems for the smooth functioning of group work when using synchronous communication modes include turn taking, and in the case of on-line text chat associated with the video conferencing, loss of information due to the typing requirement. Issues associated with use of the asynchronous modes include unpredictable lags in feedback as well as a reduction in the normative force which drives people to respond to one another. There is also a reduction in the normative constraints on length and number of messages, the normative constraint on the range of topics of messages and a loss of the normative requirement for connectedness between one message and the next. It must also be recognized that the benefits of certain technologies are not always mutual. Asynchronous communication is liberating for the sender in terms of who/when/where but for the receiver the result is a less orderly, more chaotic, flow of information which increases uncertainty. It can also result in an overload of information for the receiver, frustration from lack of response to one's contributions, and confusion about source and sequence of other's communications (Galegher, 1987)2 Luckily, however, some of these effects can be reduced through the establishment of group norms such as turn around time on reading email.

Cultural Differences and Group Processes

Cross cultural factors can have consequences for the effectiveness of collaboration in geographically distributed teams [1]. Culture is a difficult concept for researchers to operationalize. Its definition is debated but can be defined as the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another [12, p.5]. It refers to the broad combination of social norms and expectations through and among which we lead our lives. The effect that cultural differences have on group work is debated. The phenomenon of globalization has led to the development of a "culture free" hypothesis which promotes the idea that organizations and their management practices are converging on a Western style thus making cultural factors in the work place, and hence for work groups, insignificant. Others, specifically Hofstede [12]and Ady [13], argue that this hypothesis overemphasizes the homogenizing affects of global industries. These authors believe that although certain aspects of various cultures are becoming more similar the differences are still quite significant.

An important cross cultural communication variable which will interact with the use of communication technologies is that of contextuality. Hall [14, p.7] describes context as "the information that surrounds an event and is inextricably bound up with the meaning of that event." Communication and context combine to produce meaning and their importance vary depending on culture. This categorization has been used to label various cultures as either high or low context, depending on the value of context to meaning. Japanese, Arab and Mediterranean cultures have been labeled as high-context due to their extensive networks and close personal relationships. Low-context Americans, German, Swiss and Scandinavians on the other hand require more context specific information in their communications as their types of relationships do not make this information inherent to the communication event itself. In addition to the differences in importance of contextuality to various cultures, the use of communication technologies such as email will eliminate many of the channels through which contextual information is transmitted. The combination of these two factors may combine to create a negative effect associated with computer mediated cross cultural communication [15].

The combination of research in these three areas, concurrent engineering, small group and computer mediated communication and cross cultural communication, provide a foundation for our work. Overall, the results of research in these three areas demonstrate that communication technologies will impact geographically distributed engineering design teams in the following ways:

The following sections describe the design of the study and some preliminary findings which address these issues.

Research Design

The overall goal of this research is to identify whether or not telecommunications technologies adequately support globally distributed engineering design teams. To this end, students from three universities representing the U.S., Germany and Singapore were recruited for participation in the study. The project was administered from the U.S. where the research staff is located.

Teams

Funding for the project allowed for the examination of 6 teams which were to be divided into 3 pairs of control and treatment groups. Each pair of teams was to work on a project for a duration of nearly 4 months. The American students, who were all mechanical engineers, signed up for an undergraduate senior-level design course and were provided descriptions of three projects. They broke into groups of four on each of the three projects. Once in these project groups, the members paired off into teams of two. Each team of two was then assigned a Singaporean team member and a German team member, resulting in 6 international teams of 4 students each. The Singaporean and German students were electrical and industrial engineers, thus creating truly cross functional design teams. From each project, on which there were two teams each, one team was randomly assigned to a treatment condition. The treatment in this case was availability of augmented communication technologies.

Communication Technologies

The communication technologies available to the teams were divided into groups of standard technologies and augmented technologies. The standard technologies were those considered to be most commonly available in the engineering field. The augmented technologies included those in the standard group, with the addition of Internet based video conferencing tools and electronic white boards3. Our choice of an Internet based system was based on the cost in terms of both hardware and software as well as communication costs. Using the Internet for these sessions eliminated the need for ISDN lines and their usage sensitive charges. The inexpensive nature of the technologies used makes these research results applicable to firms with a wide range of communication technology budgets.

A list of the available technologies for each group are shown in the following table.

Table 1: Available Technologies Augmented TechnologyStandard Technology phonephone voicemailvoicemail faxfax emailemail FTPFTP IPhone  Iphone w/ White Board  CUSeeMe  CUSeeMe w/ White Board 

Measurement

Four types of instruments are used in this study. The first is the pretest. The pretest was administered at the beginning of the project to insure the relative equivalency of the groups. The second instrument was the daily diary form. The diary instrument took the form of a web based questionnaire. The students were instructed to fill out the form for each communication event to assess the ease of use, understandability, and progress made using a particular communication medium.

In addition to gathering data from the research subjects via questionnaire, each student performed an in-depth interview approximately half way through the study period. Finally, to gauge the performance of the project a mid-term review was made. Each week the American project administrators held a design review meeting with each team. Additionally, the American students on each team made a mid-term presentation to the faculty/project administrators. Their performance based on the weekly meetings as well as their presentation were gauged by the project administrators via a pen-and-paper questionnaire.

Findings

Trends in Media Use

Time series data gathered from the daily diary form show that the preferred mode of communication was email, and this preference changed little during the course of the project. As expected from the above discussion of social entrainment, the frequency of communication increased during specific phases of the project for both the augmented and standard communication technology teams. The increase at week 5 was due to a deadline for the initial project description and plan. During week 7 the American students were on Spring Break. In weeks 9 and 10 the students were required to submit a mid term report and make a presentation. An interesting pattern emerged in the augmented teams' media use. The figures 1-2 below show that increases in phone and face-to-face communication events were followed by increases in email use. This can be explained by the goal setting and planning taking place during these synchronous communication events which would then be followed by communication via email in which team members would be reporting their progress on agreed upon tasks.

Figure 1: Time Series Plot of Media Usage

Figure 2: Time Series Plot of Media Usage

One might expect the converse, that an increase in email would occur prior to a synchronous event, due to the use of email to coordinate meeting times. However, this pattern of usage did not emerge due to variation in the teams' methods of establishing meeting times. Some groups had prearranged times for synchronous communication which eliminated the need for those 'coordinating emails.' Other teams merely picked up the phone and called without a set time, while others did use email to coordinate on an ad hoc basis.

Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Communication

Although the overall preference for email was not surprising, the constancy of it was. The above charts demonstrate that when near a deadline the teams' reliance on email continued. This is unexpected because usually when under time pressure people require immediate feedback. This logic would predict an increase in the use of synchronous media, in this case either face-to-face, phone, or video conferencing modalities. However, with the time zone differences which separate the team members, it was difficult for them to communicate in a synchronous mode. For this reason, despite the need for immediate response the teams continued to rely on email.

Email and Cross Cultural Communication

The frequent use of email in the project is a reflection of the students' communication patterns in their daily lives outside the project. Students, who have continually changing schedules, appreciate the convenience of this medium. Prior to the project, two thirds of the students reported they used email on a daily basis. For the American students, access to email is available at a wide variety of locations and for some this also included access from home. The international students, on the other hand, indicated their access to email was restricted solely to their work environment. Email also provided an advantage over other communication media for those students whose first language was not English. Overall, email ranked second on ease of use (see Figure 3), which was higher than even the telephone. It also ranked higher than the telephone on measures indicating the extent to which team members understood one another while communicating via this medium. In terms of making progress on the project, email lagged behind face-to-face and telephone.

The students' assessment of the effect of the intercultural nature of the teams was gathered through interviews. Before joining the project many of the students had significant cross cultural experience in terms of travel and employment. Over half of the students indicated they had traveled to a country in which the native language was not their own, and just under half also had foreign work experience. When asked about the impact of the cross cultural factors for the outcome of the project the American, German and Singaporean students alike indicated they felt the cross cultural factors had no important effect on the project. Small problems with language, either written or spoken, were overcome easily. Students indicated no additional frustration due to the small amount of extra effort this created. Additionally, several of the students felt the ability to interact with people from different cultures made the project more interesting.

When trying to assess whether or not intercultural factors had an impact on the teams' outcomes, the students were asked if there were any misunderstandings between the team members. Several of the students responded that there had been misunderstandings, but not stemming from differences in national culture but rather from functional culture. The ability of the mechanical engineers to understand the electrical engineers' technical jargon was a bigger barrier to successful communication than even the national culture or language differences.

Video Conferencing

As demonstrated by both sets of figures presented above, the students found video conferencing to be difficult to use and were generally dissatisfied with its performance. Only one student had previous experience using video conferencing and learning about its use, including which parameters to adjust, was considered burdensome by some of the students. Through interviews and the diary forms, the students indicated that their video conferencing sessions were less productive than interactions using other media (see Figure 4). The reduced productivity was due to the additional time necessary to establish the connection and subsequently maintain it. Frustration also came from the unreliability of the medium. A high quality connection could change at any time, which would result in switching to another medium. The switching of media disrupted the flow of the meeting, in addition to being a waste of time.

In response to questions about the usefulness of a hypothetical video conferencing system which was reliable and easy to use, the students' attitudes were mixed. Some of the students felt being able to see one another was an important factor in their ability to function as a team while others believed it was unnecessary to see their project partners. As demonstrated in Figure 5, the results of the mid term review show the use of the video conferencing did not increase the quality of the augmented teams' designs4.

Figure 3: Subjects' Assessment of Media by Outcome Variables
(Average Score ranges from 0-4)

Figure 4: Subjects' Assessment of Media by Outcome Variables
(Average Score ranges from 0-4)

Figure 5: Mid Term Performance for Teams 1-4
(Average Score ranges from 0-5)

Project Management

Two findings relevant for project management emerged from interviews with the students. The first is concerned with the centralization of authority. The students in the United States, due to their formal participation in a course and collocation with the project administrators, were in close contact with their supervisors. The students in Germany and Singapore felt the need for a higher level of supervision by, or connection with, a central authority. As supervisors at their own locations were unaware of the issues being resolved in the other locations, it was difficult for them to fulfill the role of mentor and supervisor for these students5. The time differences between the three participating locations made it infeasible to have all project members at a single meeting with one supervisor.

The second project management finding was that students felt greater satisfaction with projects that had a higher level of overlap. Some projects will inherently require more coordination between functional groups than others. For these geographically distributed teams the necessity of communication resulted in more frequent communication which led to a greater sense of teamwork and cooperation. This is consistent with the findings from the concurrent engineering literature.

Discussion

The issue of time zone differences, which created windows in which the geographically distributed students were able to communicate via synchronous media, has implications for the potential usefulness of video conferencing, whether Internet based or otherwise. On the project, in order for the teams in the U.S. to communicate with those in Singapore, video conferencing and other synchronous media usage had to occur at a time during the night for one of the parties (the time difference is 13 hours). Previous domestic research in which the use of Internet based video conferencing occurred identified the barriers which are related to quality. In their review of an American Internet based collaborative engineering project Cutosky et. al. [16] state "To be used regularly, online teleconferencing tools must become as convenient as their competition: telephones, faxes, and email." The research presented in this paper certainly supports this finding for the context in which time zone differences are not severe. It is important to recognize however that synchronous video meetings are more feasible with international teams in similar time zones. For example, project teams with members in Canada, the U.S., Mexico and Chile would only be separated by a maximum of four hours which would allow full project team meetings via video and other synchronous media.

In addition to investigating the usefulness of video conferencing, this study provides an assessment of a variety of synchronous and asynchronous communication tools. The findings show that different media have different strengths and weaknesses. These results confirm the need for a variety of communication media for supporting globally distributed engineering design teams.

Conclusions

The results of the above research find that communication technologies can adequately support geographically distributed engineering design teams. To do so it is necessary to provide a variety of synchronous and asynchronous media as their effectiveness varies with time and task. The availability of Internet based video conferencing did not improve design quality. Issues for the future of use of Internet based video conferencing include quality, reliability and the problems associated with synchronous communication across time zones.

As technologies develop their potential use by globally distributed design teams needs to be assessed. Suggestions for future research include an investigation of the benefits of virtual design environments for use by these teams. The development of this technology may provide for globally distributed teams another valuable tool for moderating the effects of time and distance.

Notes

  1. Support for this research was provided by EDS. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of the CASE Center for Computer-Aided Engineering & Manufacturing at Michigan State University. The project management efforts of Dr. Erik Goodman, Tim Hinds and Matt Foster were essential for the completion of this study.
  2. Cited in McGrath, 1990.
  3. The selection of Vocal Tec's Internet Phone and Enhanced CU-SeeMe Internet conferencing software for inclusion in this study was made after extensive comparisons with broadly available packages. Internet Phone was used for point-to-point conferencing due to its superior audio and video quality in this mode. CU-SeeMe was used for multipoint conferencing as Internet Phone did not adequately support this feature.
  4. The higher level of performance of teams 2 and 3 is due to the presence on each of these teams of a member with a greater number of years of work experience than the average student in the study.
  5. This result was also reported in the report of an Internet based collaborative engineering project known as MADEFAST. In the report the authors discuss the difficulty and increased discussion time needed to work on a distributed team, which by its nature is difficult to provide a central authority for [16].

References

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[13] J. C. Ady, "Minimizing Threats to the Validity of Cross-Cultural Organizational Research," in Communicating in Multinational Organizations, R. L. Wiseman and R. Shuter, Eds. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994, pp. 31-42.

[14] E. T. Hall and M. R. Hall, Hidden Differences: Doing Business with the Japanese. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987.

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[16] M. R. Cutkosky, J. M. Tenenbaum, and J. Glicksman, "Madefast: Collaborative Engineering Over the Internet," Communications of the ACM, vol. 39, pp. 78-87, 1996.
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