Communication, information and knowledge processes observed during engineering design reviews

Engineering design review meetings are unique opportunities for all the parties involved to share information about the product and its related engineering processes. For product development teams, the knowledge and information transfer processes that take place during a design review are critically important; key design decisions, design experiences and associated rationale are made explicit. Useful work has been carried out on the design review process, but little has been said about the content of the activity itself. To this effect, an extensive research programme based on case studies in the aerospace engineering domain has been carried out. The research methodology adopted by the authors is based on an "action research" approach which allowed a naturalistic observation of engineering teams. A unique set of tools and methods used to analyse and characterise the design reviews recorded during the case studies is briefly presented in this paper. This meeting analysis "toolbox" includes a Transcript Coding Scheme, a Meeting Capture Template and an Information Mapping Technique. The work reported here focuses on the results generated by these new analytical approaches. They have been compiled according to three complementary perspectives: communication processes, information processes, and knowledge loss. The observations and interpretations made using the aforementioned set of meeting analysis tools have fostered a practical strategy for the knowledge intensive capture of design review contents. These pragmatic findings and their implications in terms of future research activities are discussed in the concluding sections of this paper.