Building agile design teams

One of the most common problem in many organizations that have reached considerable dimension and complexity is the lack of communication and collaboration between the different departments. When considering companies producing highly engineered and complex products the design communication problems can lead to cost overruns, schedule slippage, and quality problems. Using a structured multi matrix approach to analyze the existing project component staffing and team interaction we are able to identify firstly understaffed critical components interfaces, secondly instances of missing critical team interfaces and, last but not least, thirdly we are able to generate an improved team member allocation, to build an agile design team. To demonstrate the model’s practical utility we discuss a case study of a company operating in the automotive sector.