Managing Teams for Integrated Design Solutions

Design integration in the architecture, engineering and construction sector requires a multiplicity of skills, knowledge and experience. Design practice requires management tools and skills besides the design skills and the domain knowledge. Teams and design teams have been extensively studied, and it is widely accepted that the team management practices are contingent on the nature of collaboration. This research specifically investigates the critical success factors for managing teams for integrated design and delivery solutions (IDDS), which aims to involve virtual collaborative environments and various stakeholders and supply chain players such as architects, consultants, contractors, and suppliers across the project lifecycle. Since IDDS is a recent development, the associated teamwork factors and challenges are not currently well understood, especially for the design development phases. Therefore, there is an immediate need to investigate the teamwork requirements and challenges for successfully meeting the IDDS objectives. This paper reports the preliminary findings from an ongoing research that investigates this gap. This investigation builds on the rich literature on teamwork and organizational studies, design management and construction supply chain integration to identify the critical success factors necessary for an IDDS team. For teams to be efficient, team members need to have well developed mental models of each other, as well as the mental models for the task, process, context, and competence of the team. In particular, our question is what are the critical task, process, context and competence factors specific to the IDDS teams that involve multiple players representing the construction supply chain?