Team dynamics during the delivery of a large-scale, engineered system

TL;DR

This study analyzes team dynamics in delivering a large-scale engineered system, revealing how collaboration size, skill diversity, and team cohesion evolve with workload and task complexity.

Contribution

Introduces a novel dataset on team collaboration in large-scale system delivery and uncovers patterns of team formation, complexity, and dynamics during project execution.

Findings

Large tasks often require extensive collaboration, making them harder to manage.

Team cohesion emerges and contracts in response to workload fluctuations.

Large teams form and dissolve in tandem with task demands.

Abstract

Coordinated collective action refers to the synchronized action of agents towards achieving a predefined set of goals. Such activity is at the core of a wide range of social challenges, from organizational dynamics to team performance. Focusing on the latter, a novel dataset that captures the planned efforts to deliver a large-scale, engineered system is introduced. In detail, this dataset is composed of a total of 271 unique individuals, responsible for the delivery of a total of 721 tasks spread across a period of 745 days. The focus of this analysis is on the collaboration network between individuals, captured by their co-assignment in the delivery of particular tasks, and their dynamical patterns. Results indicate that the delivery of some tasks depends on disproportionately large collaborations, making them intrinsically harder to manage compared to tasks which depend on small, or no, collaborations. Similarly, some tasks require a disproportionately diverse set of skills to be completed, further enhancing their intrinsic complexity. Shifting focus to the topology of the contribution network, an abrupt emergence, and subsequent contraction, of a single large cluster is observed. This phenomenon corresponds to the emergence of an increasingly large and cohesive team, and its subsequent decomposition. In addition, the evolution of this cluster tightly follows the number of active tasks, suggesting that large teams are a natural way to respond to increased workload. These findings provide new insight on the underlying team dynamics that govern coordinated collective activity in general, and in the context of project delivery specifically.