Analysis of Virtual Communication Within Engineering Design Teams and its Impact on Team Effectiveness

Abstract

Online communication and collaboration tools are changing the way teams design products. The tools also generate a rich data source from which to study trends in communication. This paper focuses on how engineering teams utilize Slack, a popular team messaging software platform. We aim to better understand communication and coordination in product design teams via analysis of team social network dynamics, unique patterns of chat-like messaging (emoji usage), and the evolution of communication topics over time. Our study analyzes the online interactions of 32 teams, sent during a 3-month senior undergraduate product design course. These 400,000+ messages represent the team communications from 4 years of teams, with 17–20 students per team. We find that 1) Slack communications resulted in high density network maps, 2) network analysis of teams reveals that leaders have more central positions in the network, 3) strong teams have lower average centrality among members, equivalent to less public channel membership per person, 4) stronger teams use emojis at a higher rate, and 5) emojis are used most by leaders and highly connected members. These findings represent preliminary foundations for best practices in online messaging, which may lead to more effective collaboration in product design.

Design process of live-action video instructions

“…Tools from network science provides a new perspective on studying design teams, design tasks and design spaces (Adolphe et al, 2020;Leenders et al, 2016;Parraguez & Maier, 2016). To measure the design space explored by engineers during the design sessions, we created a graph to represent the entire design space produced by all the designers through the concepts they mentioned.…”

Engineering Education in Canada in the Wake of Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Graduate attributes such as communication and team works have also been met in the online setting in many engineering courses by students' using online communication and collaboration tools. Adolphe et al [16] suggests messaging platforms such as Slack as effective tools that can aid optimization of engineering design, communication, and collaboration in an online setting. Nevertheless, it might not be as effective in assessing GAs such as design and/or investigation involving hand-on and laboratory work.…”