Teamwork in Engineering as a Socio-technical System

This presentation will introduce recent research on the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of performance under conditions of complexity. Teams and their environments are instrumented to reveal phenomena in real time: demands, behaviors, activities, interactions, and outcomes across social and technical boundaries. Data-driven experiments are matched with modeling, simulation, systemic analytics, and interactive visualization. These methods are developed, tested, and deployed for practical use by joint industry-university teams. Engineering projects are viewed as socio-technical systems if we include not only the delivered systems but also the developers as “humans in the loop.” People do work, make mistakes, process information, learn, and interact as part of organizations. They also allocate attention based on embedded behaviors within their individual capacities. Organizations with architecture and culture exhibit emergent behaviors (e.g. exception handling, quality, etc.). Much team research exists at the micro scale—examining the interplay of individuals, their skills, personalities, and biases as part of small teams. Emerging research at the macro scale is using big data to draw conclusions at the population level. This presentation details work focused on the meso scale—the team of teams working on systems of systems. This layer of focus corresponds to the most common scale and scope of influence encountered by teams working on complex engineering projects.