Why Shared Understanding Matters -Engineering a Collaboration Process for Shared Understanding to Improve Collaboration Effectiveness in Heterogeneous Teams

Abstrac

A strategy for building shared understanding in requirements engineering activities

The requirements allow the development team to clearly understand the needs that the customer intends to be solved by the system, in this sense, understanding the context, capturing, negotiating, specifying, verifying, validating, and prioritizing the requirements may seem a relatively simple task, but there is a need to have a correct communication, and throughout this process, many changes and reprocesses occur due to misinterpretation or lack of information, in addition to considering that in the teams that perform these activities participate people from different disciplines, business units, cultures, with different levels of experience and therefore, each one will have different ways of perceiving the tasks, the key problems, which give meaning to the requirements according to their situation and knowledge, without having a joint base of homogeneous understanding within the team. Therefore, this work proposes a strategy for the construction of a shared understanding in the activities of requirements engineering, where its completeness, usefulness, and ease of use were validated, through an experiment executed as part of the development process of a software tool for the management of information and data processing of an agricultural and livestock association in Cauca. Using the conceptual, methodological, and validation cycle of the multi-cycle action research methodology, it was concluded that the strategy is complete and useful, but it is not easy to use, because its definition contains several elements that are difficult to handle, and it lacks adequate support to support and facilitate its application.Facultad de Informátic

A process to improve collaborative work through shared understanding in problem-solving activities

Collaborative work is becoming increasingly complex and assertive communication is necessary to solve problems in collaborative activities, where the actors must coordinate so that the group works effectively and efficiently. However, achieving true collaboration is not an easy task, there are many factors that influence its achievement, where many of these have been investigated, but the analysis of critical cognitive factors is very scarce, and more those that allow good communication and consequently good coordination. One of them is shared understanding since when working collaboratively there must be common knowledge and understanding, which works as a joint reference base to work effectively and efficiently. Therefore, this work seeks to define a process to improve collaborative work through the construction, monitoring, and assistance of shared understanding. The process has had several versions and each of them has been validated in different contexts, obtaining different types of results, both in terms of its specification and formalization, as well as in terms of its use related to ease of use, feasibility, and usefulness in the construction of shared understanding, which has allowed improving the aspects that have been identified. Through a final validation in a case study, it was determined that the process does improve collaborative work, however, it is still necessary to have technological support elements and it is necessary to lighten the elements that compose it to make it more agile to use.Facultad de Informátic

Collaboration through shared understanding in the early design stage

The complexity of the collaborative design process is related to the nature of the product and the processes, and also involves the social interplay that ultimately generates design. This fundamentally, affects the way people work, in the purposeful action of designing together. Low levels of collaboration are identified especially at early design stages, where the collective design creation is hindered by the lack of ability of the team to build shared understanding, embracing a multitude of expertise in the task. In this context, the research focused on how the concept of shared understanding can potentially support better collaboration at early design stages. This is based on a deeper understanding of collaborative design as a dynamic system of social interplay, in which the process to build shared understanding for concerted actions can be described as a system that combines mediated coupling and coordinated perception, in a context where division of labour exist. Based on a literature review, lean approaches that claim to support shared understanding between project participants are investigated. This paper contributes in discussing how shared understanding, as a process, can be the basis of the collaborative act, and how components of this process can be addressed through lean approaches

Towards Shared Understanding on Common Ground, Boundary Objects and Other Related Concepts

Since Aristotle, it has repeatedly been stressed that for engaging in meaningful discussion or debate, the discussion parties must share, besides a language, also knowledge, information, values and goals. What do we know today about this issue? How can that knowledge be used and advanced? The purpose of this paper is to consolidate our understanding on the many concepts that refer to preconditions for communication and collaboration in construction projects. The underlying research is conceptual by nature, and it is underpinned by a literature review. The findings show that currently there is a wide variety of terms and theoretical approaches that refer to the discussed phenomena. This situation invites for a conceptual synthesis and empirical research for its validation

Questioning in Distributed Product Development Teams: Supporting Shared Understanding

Distributed teams are an increasingly common feature of New Product Development (NPD). Key to the success of these teams is the development of both short and longerterm shared understanding. Lack of shared understanding has been recognized as a significant challenge, particularly in the context globally distributed NPD activities. Poor shared understanding can ultimately result in delays and rework. One major antecedent of shared understanding development is question asking. This work uses a quasiexperimental study to test the impact of questioning support on different types of distributed teams, both homogeneous and heterogeneous. This extends theoretical insight into the development of shared understanding and contributes one of few empirical studies directly comparing the response characteristics of different team types. From a managerial perspective this work has implications for how distributed NPD teams can be more effectively supported, as well as how shared understanding development can be facilitated in the NPD process