Teamwork in design - a case study on how digital visual planning software addresses barriers to efficient project communication

Developing new factories is effectively a design task. In this paper a case study on barriers to efficient project communication is presented. Preceding research has shown that production systems design projects can be more efficiently executed and that as many as 95% of all problems in collaborations are due to a lack of communication. The study was designed to grasp project communication barriers from three projects and developed a visual planning tool. The findings show that digital planning software supports mainly in the categories of Egocentrism and Mistrust, Equivocality and Ambiguity and less in Interaction Capability, Asynchronisity and Noise and Information-sharing Behaviour. Recommendations for future research is to connect the project communication support to quantitative project performance aswell as the acceptance of technology in production systems design.