Problems relating to team formation is common across many industrial sectors, including education, sport and general business. For Team Leaders, team member selection can be a critical challenge due to the complexity in creating a wellbalanced productive unit. It is beyond manual implementation to build near optimal teams as pools of employees grow. An essential requirement is teamwork skill, especially in engineering workgroups where the project member is expected to know how to collaborate with peers. In this paper, we use a social network analysis approach to represent social links between prospective team members and use the Belbin Team Roles as the main characteristic of prospective members. In our case study, based on an undergraduate computer engineering course, students expressed their preferences for working with three peers at the beginning of the course for an assessment. This information was used to distinguish groups within the social network using network analysis algorithms. We compared the network analysis results versus groups formed by a Teacher. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of project teams, from a social network analysis approach, to making team formation recommendations into a socio-technical system.

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