Modeling Team Member Characteristics for the Formation of a Multifunctional Team in Concurrent Engineering

Abstract

In concurrent engineering, project tasks generally involve the establishment of multifunctional design teams in order to simultaneously consider various activities throughout the entire product life cycle. Team members from different functional departments of the company interact in every phase of development tasks to design the products and processes concurrently. To ensure a successful multifunctional team, it is important to understand the characteristics of team members. Three fundamental descriptors of team members are developed in this research. The first is to represent the multifunctional knowledge of team members due to the need of concurrent engineering. Second, to build a successful project team, teamwork capability of team members is needed by taking their experience, communication skills, and flexibility in job assignment into account. Multifunctional knowledge and teamwork capability ratings are captured from each member using analytic hierarchy process. Third, since the team members work closely, their collegiality directly affects team performance, regardless of their knowledge. Thus, the working relationship model is developed to provide such a metric. Personality profiling using Myers-Briggs type indicator serves as the basis of assessing each team member's abilities to work with others. Finally, we complete this paper by providing a step-by-step procedure with an example for selecting the best multifunctional team using the three ratings. This research helps establish an efficient multifunctional team because every team member will be capable of communicating to each other within the team due to their multifunctional knowledge, teamwork skills, as well as an established good working relationship.