{"id":36744,"date":"2018-02-28T08:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/?p=36744"},"modified":"2018-03-01T09:01:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T14:01:02","slug":"working-together-engineering-no-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/2018\/02\/working-together-engineering-no-way.html","title":{"rendered":"Working Together in Engineering? No Way!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does an engineer share workloads or work concurrently in a team? My observation is that most engineers are PART of teams, but don\u2019t necessarily WORK in teams. By nature, an engineer is trained to be a highly effective innovator who first works with tools on his own, challenging complex issues and then when done, gets feedback from team members which he\/she then inserts into his\/her concepts or designs.<\/p>\n

The process is still very sequential at many companies out there and most of the engineers I meet tell me that they believe there must be one leader who manages a project and its complexity, since it takes more time to inform and keep people up to speed versus quickly doing things themselves.<\/p>\n

A few years ago I read an interesting book from Michael Schrage called \u201cNO MORE TEAMS, Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration<\/strong><\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Much of what Michael Schrage describes still applies today, supported by more modern tools and a changing world filled with social connections and interaction like the tools on LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype.<\/p>\n

The introduction of the book gives you a good insight on why it might be interesting for you too:
\n\u201cFor organizations that care about innovation,\u00a0individual creativity isn’t enough anymore — people\u00a0need to be in creative, collaborative\u00a0relationships. But without the knowledge and tools for\u00a0building these relationships, innovation expert Michael\u00a0Schrage argues, one will not be successful in the offices of today and even less so in the\u00a0“virtual” offices of tomorrow.\u00a0No More\u00a0Teams\u00a0gives readers the tools and\u00a0techniques to go beyond the lazy clich\u00e9s of\u00a0“teamwork” to the practical benefits of\u00a0collaboration.<\/p>\n

While visiting a SOLIDWORKS customer site, I found Skype for Business is often the number-two application in use, besides the engineering tools. The engineers were frequently chatting with other users, sharing some thoughts and concepts and screens and then continuing work in their SOLIDWORKS CAD and SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional environment.<\/p>\n

This company, which develops large machines for automotive companies, is under extreme time and cost pressure to deliver a huge number of projects while still having to find innovative ways to solve its customer\u2019s problems. These engineers are FORCED to collaborate, since on their own they cannot win this battle against time.<\/p>\n

Interesting, by nature engineers do not collaborate, unless they find no alternative and are forced to do so. Many other companies I meet these days have not yet realized that change in their daily work process. Their sequential steps that the engineers at these companies complete, controlling all aspects of the product and the one engineer being the only one understanding the complete project, makes these engineers \u201cmasters of disasters\u201d in my mind. I am not saying they cannot do this on their own, or be the best they can be; I am just saying they are losing out on the power of 1 + 1 = 3.<\/p>\n

My colleagues Michael Sterns and Ralf Otto shared various interesting videos that sum up what I witnessed at the company that really collaborated on projects. Real collaboration directly on a huge assembly is supported by SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional and SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD. The only thing that is missing from this video is the process of chatting and sharing on Skype that I described before.<\/p>\n

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