A design approach to team coordination

Abstract

Team coordination over long time scales has been analyzed through two dominant perspectives: the contingency approach and the discursive approach. While they produced extensive theoretical contributions, these two perspectives are not well-suited to understand team coordination in changing and uncertain situations such as innovation projects. In this paper, we propose a design approach to coordination, which we define as the joint inquiry and construction by teams of their common ground. We instantiated our conceptual model into a tool called the Team Alignment Map, which allows team members to design their interdependencies. We evaluated the effectiveness of the tool within 22 innovation projects in two different settings. Our findings suggest that the tool facilitated the creation of shared understanding between team members, and allowed them to coordinate flexibly and welcome the shifting requirements of their projects. These findings suggest that conceptualizing coordination as a design process is well-suited to innovation projects.