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Building Bridges

A Study of Coordination in Projects

Libby Marie HemphillAugust 2009

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Thank You

• Stephanie Teasley, Michael Cohen, Barry Fishman, Curtis LeBaron

• National Science Foundation

• WAB Project Team

• Bleary Theorists

• Brian Hilligoss, Jina Huh, and David Ribes

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Today’s Talk

• 20-30 minutes of material about a research project

• Collaboration - how do we get work done together?

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Coordination

“managing dependencies between activities” (Malone and Crowston, 1994)

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Related Work

• collaboration requires compromise and presents challenges of communication and coordination not found in individual work (Sonnenwald, 2007)

• effortful coordination increases collaboration success (Cummings & Kiesler, 2003)

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What’s missing?

How do teams get coordination work done?

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Projects

temporary endeavors to create a product or service (Duncan, 1996)

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Photo Credit: Andreas Teske, UNC Chapel Hill Photo Credit (for all bridge photos): “Mark”

9The Woods Avenue Bridge Project team

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Use data from the Woods Avenue Bridge Project case study to understand what about the project or the team involved made it possible for them to accomplish coordination.

Goal: Develop a theoretical concept that helps us understand how teams accomplish coordination work

My dissertation

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Photo Credit (for both on this slide): “Materials Research Lab”

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Not just any sidewalk

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new design for a bridge with sidewalks that would let the lab and MDOT get the data they needed without blowing the budget or schedule

WAB Team’s Sidewalk Problem

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Developing Adaptive Capacity

• Shared artifacts,

• A social network with high centrality and embeddedness,

• Positive relational engagement,

• Multimembership, and

• Affect

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Developing Adaptive Capacity

• Shared artifacts,

• A social network with high centrality and embeddedness,

• Positive relational engagement,

• Multimembership, and

• Affect

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Adaptive capacity

accumulated abilities of a group to adjust their work to manage uncertain and unpredictable changes in their environment (see Parsons, 1964; Smit, et al., 2001; Staber & Sydow, 2002)

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Data Sources

• Documents

• Progress meeting minutes

• Contracts

• Research Reports

• Interviews

• 11 members of the project team

• 3 other engineers

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Meeting affiliation network

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Co-participation in progress meetings

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• Tim and Mark could develop knowledge about each other and share information with one another.

• That knowledge reduces uncertainty and improves coordination (Jones & Lichtenstein, 2008; Eccles, 1981)

Social ties

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Data Sources

• Documents

• Progress meeting minutes

• Contracts

• Research Reports

• Interviews

• 11 members of the project team

• 3 other engineers

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[Program managers] don’t get much recognition for a successful program; [I’m] not sure he gains a lot by sticking his head out. Whenever you talk about a new technology there are many risks; [he] had to take a guess that it works, and if it works [he doesn’t] get much. (Dr. Wang, MRL Director, 11/08)

Perspective taking

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Perspective taking

Cooperation was just great. I think there was (sic) more concessions made on the university’s part than on the contractor’s part because his schedule really was never affected. (Tim, Project Manager, 10/05)

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Compromising

it wouldn’t, you know, totally, … be detrimental to the overall construction. Okay. So, we decided, “All right, go ahead with this plan. It’s okay, but if we really want to make this system work, as it’s intended to work in the future, this cannot happen.” So, it was kind of a give and take between the contractor, MDOT and us [in the materials lab]. (Mark, graduate student, 02/07)

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Positive relational engagement

• “Just great!”

• “We really want to make this system work.”

• “The program manager is sticking his head out.”

• “Researchers had to compromise.”

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Developing adaptive capacity

These repeated positive interactions and approach to engaging one another could also account for some of the adaptive capacity the team developed.

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Developing Adaptive Capacity

• Shared artifacts,

• A social network with high centrality and embeddedness,

• Positive relational engagement,

• Multimembership, and

• Affect

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Adaptive capacity enables coordination work 32

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• Refined concept of adaptive capacity

• Clear set of implications for policy and practice

Future Work

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Summary

• Collaboration

• Projects

• How do projects get coordination work done?

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Adaptive Capacity: Bending without breaking

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Thank You

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Supplemental Slides

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Methods and Data Sources400+ pages of documentsInterviews with 11 people

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AnalysisUsing meeting minutes to develop social network graphs

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What’s special about the WAB Project Team?

• Complementary expertise

• Shared goal, different constraints

• Positive affect about the shared goal

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Assembling a team with Positive Relational Engagement

• Part of my plan for future work

• Re-analyze data from earlier projects to look for PRE or not-PRE

• How does PRE play a role in Post Docs with distributed teams?

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How would you test that theory?

• Re-examine data from two other projects - one where they got work done, one where they did not

• Current project explores what happens when teams add new members - do teams who possess adaptive capacity more easily incorporate their new members?

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Why this case?

• Focus on coordination

• Construction projects provide many opportunities to study coordination in a single case.

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What about technology?

• Design to afford components of adaptive capacity

• Example: making it easier and more effective to share artifacts

• Example: make multimemberships apparent in social networking tools