“Analyzing Awareness, Decision, and Outcome Sequences of Project Design Groups: A Platform for Instrumentation of Workshop-based Experiments”

Abstract: Activity dependencies gain importance as engineering programs become more complex and global. We treat the planning of engineering programs and projects as a collaborative exercise by teams to design their shared project. An Awareness-Decision model and sensors for measurement were developed to correlate attentions and actions to outcomes during project design. A cloud-based platform allows teams to model projects and to simulate a project’s cost and duration. This approach enables efficient deployment of experiments with global project design groups. During experimental sessions, we captured attention allocation, project change and performance data across 38 groups at three global sites to explore their decision-making process and exploration of the cost-duration-tradespace. In this set of experiments, the groups that were stimulated to pay more attention to dependencies did not show a correlation with improved outcomes. Employing several sequence analyses, including return time distribution, proximity walk, element focus, and vision distribution, we attempted to draw insights on awareness and attention to dependence and overall outcomes. Based on our analysis results, we give recommendations for research to more completely expose the role of attention to dependence during project design.