Conversation in Engineering Teams - Turning experiences into actions

Abstract: Companies that are working with product development in general, and the manufacturing industry in particular, act on the global market. The complexity of collaboration in such an environment triggers this work. A user-centred approach is perceived as a key concern for companies’ innovation practices, while engineering teams and higher education typically focus mainly on technical problem-solving. Knowledge management has in relation to the above been recognized in literature and practice as undoubtedly beneficial for organisations. Knowledge is a competitive advantage to most organisations today that needs more attention to make it actionable. Typically, factual knowledge has a transparent management approach, whereas experience sharing is highly prioritised but not straightforward to manage. Experiences need to be extracted from activities, reflected on, and then contextualized again if they are going to benefit another project. Indeed, the concept of knowledge-driven development incorporates experiences. Itis difficult to manage experiences in technical projects, however, because both creation and use are embedded in the daily work. The purpose of this thesis is thus to investigate experience sharing in early product development work and from that contribute to improved capture and formalisation of experiences. This thesis relies on empirical data mainly gathered in a manufacturing company working with transport systems, active in a business-to-business environment. The work evolved towards focus on two types of projects between which experiences need to be shared. Also individuals’ personal orientation and roles in teams was examined in a student project setting. The contribution of this thesis is the description and analysis of experience sharing within and between teams in the given context and the proposal of an approach to support reflection upon practice in innovation projects. The importance of a continuous learning process is stressed, but so is also the capability of directed knowledge conversations. A demonstrator supporting such activities has been developed and partly tested. Not only the outline of the demonstrator, called the experience compass, but also the rationale are presented. A set of question relates to the compass and those have been evaluated as a sound base for experience sharing of company representatives. Finally, a knowledge inventory perspective is suggested to evaluate project success not only by key performance indicators such as project launch, new features implementation, but also through identification of and closing of knowledge gaps. Keywords Knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing, experiences, experience sharing, collaboration, knowledge conversation, knowledge management, engineering design, personal orientation, goal-oriented, insight-oriented