Engineering Collaboration in Distributed Teams: Management and Smart Use

The course starts with key definitions and an introduction to collaboration in knowledge intensive businesses and organisations, and covers the following main themes: Industrial collaboration challenges, collaboration between small and large companies, collaboration management and leadership, holistic collaboration concepts, collaboration modelling, human factors, trust and security, roles, training, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, collaboration technologies, collaborative performance including effectiveness and efficiency, ROI approaches and collaboration diagnostics, collaboration strategies, technology trends, user interfaces and technology limitations. The course encourages the use of multiple perspectives for improved consistency; strategy / organisation / end user requirements / solution / service concept.

Knowledge:
After completing the course, the students shall have been introduced to research results demonstrating why collaboration is important for engineers, what should be done to improve communication and collaboration in typical engineering organisations, how collaboration should be considered critical for competitiveness and business performance for knowledge- and coordination intensive businesses, and finally how common challenges should be addressed.

Skills:
After completing the course, the students shall - through exercises and the project assignment - have acquired essential skills related to leading collaborative performance improvement projects and initiatives - including how to evaluate, prepare for, introduce and use new collaboration technologies in distributed teams.

General competence:
After completing the course, the students shall be able to provide professional advice on how to identify collaboration barriers and systematically improve collaboration in knowledge intensive businesses.

Lectures, exercises and team assignments using analytics frameworks and collaboration tools. Project teams are established at the beginning of the semester. The lectures may be grouped in a few larger blocks during the semester, and a schedule for this will be set up at the beginning of the semester. The lectures and exercises are offered in English when students who do not speak Norwegian take the course. If the teaching is given in English the Examination papers will be given in English only. Students are free to choose Norwegian or English for written assessments.