Barriers to Hinder Collaboration Within Product Development Teams and Their Solutions from Designer’s Perspective

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

To be successful in the market, industries have kept trying to introduce new products that satisfy users’ expectations. Under this circumstance, companies have realized and emphasized the importance of collaborative environment where different team members closely work together to meet the diverse expectations of the users. Many practitioners and researchers believe that high-level cross-functional integration can create an advantage of better product quality and shorter development time. However, although the collaborative teams have been developed with great optimism, it seems that diverse team members have confronted inevitable conflicts each other, and this often resulted in a big loss of company revenues considering the development time and cost. Based on the current situations, this research was focused on figuring out barriers within collaborative product development teams and developing a practical tool that can help improve the collaborative works between different team members.
In order to understand current barriers in collaborative product development teams, literature review was first conducted and this was followed by a semi-structured interview with six designers. In the literature, different thought world, team disagreement, fairness, and team organization form were mainly mentioned as the main causes of conflicts, and, in the interview with designers, five common causes of conflicts were identified; different communication tools, different personality and preferences, political issues, lack of manager’s leadership, and separated working space. Most causes of conflicts between designers, engineers, and marketers were similarly found between the literature review and the interviews. However, newly emerging conflicts within different designers were also discovered according to the results of the interviews. This seems because that the designer’s area has been getting broaden and specialized. Especially, many conflicts occurred between product and UX designers by their duplicated work areas and prejudice.
Based on the results, an idea workshop for developing a collaborative tool was carried out with graduate students studying industrial design. Finally, a collaborative toolkit was developed into two different ways. One is a conversation tool through which every team member including designers, managers, marketers, and engineers can start to discuss the conflicts within their team and come up with solutions for effective collaborative works, and the other is a common sense tool for creating and sharing common sense between product and UX designers. An expert interview and a focus group interview were followed to see the effectiveness and usability of the toolkit as final output.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• CONTENTS
• 1. INTRODUCTION 1
• 1.1 Background 1
• 1.2 Research Goals 3
• 1.3 Thesis Outline 4
• 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 6
• 2.1 The definition of collaborative product development team 6
• 2.2 Case studies of collaborative product development 6
• 2.3 Factors that affect collaborative product development team 8
• 2.3.1 Different ‘Thought Worlds’ 8
• 2.3.2 Team disagreement 8
• 2.3.3 Fairness 9
• 2.3.4 Organizational factor 9
• 2.4 Other studies for collaborative environment 10
• 2.4.1 Personal differences impacting on team performance 10
• 2.4.2 Relationship between different team members 10
• 2.4.3 The assigned role of each team member 12
• 2.4.4. Positive and negative aspects of different inclinations 12
• 2.4.5 Understanding communication tools 13
• 2.4.6 Collaborative development tools 13
• 2.5 Conclusions 16
• 3. IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS IN CURRENT DESIGN PRACTICE 17
• 3.1 Introduction 17
• 3.2 Method 17
• 3.2.1 Participants 17
• 3.2.2 Materials 18
• 3.2.3 Procedure 22
• 3.3 Results 24
• 3.3.1 Analysis method 24
• 3.3.2 Major problems in each development process 24
• 3.3.3 Conflicts between different teams in collaborative product development 27
• 3.3.4 The causes of conflict between different team members 29
• 3.3.5 5 causes of conflicts 31
• 3.3.6 Suggestions for resolving the conflicts 34
• 3.4 Conclusions 36
• 4. DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS 37
• 4.1 Introduction 37
• 4.2 The result of idea workshop 39
• 4.3 The direction of tool development 39
• 4.4 A conversation toolkit for general conflicts 41
• 4.4.1 Tasks of major team members for each product development process 41
• 4.4.2 Common causes of conflict card 42
• 4.4.3 Suggestions for the conflicts 43
• 4.4.4 Conflicts between different teams and different designers 44
• 4.4.5 The use of a conversation toolkit 46
• 4.5 Additional study for newly emerging conflicts 47
• 4.5.1 Different characteristics of product and UX designers 47
• 4.5.2 UX designer’s specialties 47
• 4.5.3 Product designer’s specialties 48
• 4.5.4 The importance of close relationship between product and UX designers. 49
• 4.5.5 Product and UX designers’ roles in different products 49
• 4.5.6 Product and UX designers’ assigned roles in each development process 51
• 4.6 A common sense toolkit for newly emerging conflicts 53
• 4.6.1 Slide#1 Different Specialties of different team members in product development 55
• 4.6.2 Slide#2 The main causes of conflicts between product and UX designers 56
• 4.6.3 Slide#3 Clear differences between product and UX designers’ roles 57
• 4.6.4 Slide#4 The flexibility of their roles in different products 58
• 4.6.5 Slide#5 Assigned roles in each product development process 59
• 4.6.6 Slide#6 The importance of the relationship between product and UX designers 60
• 5. THE VALIDATION OF THE TOOLKIT 61
• 5.1 Expert Review 61
• 5.2 Focus Group Interview 62
• 5.3 Results 63
• 6. Conclusions 65
• References 68