Communication and Teamwork
Design Is a Social Activity
Technical work fails more often from miscommunication than from bad mathematics. Candidates should understand the standard artifacts and the behaviors that make teams effective.
Artifacts: requirements documents, interface control documents, drawings with tolerances, bill of materials, test reports, design review packages, and change logs. Each exists to remove ambiguity between people. A drawing without tolerances, or a requirement without a test, is an incomplete communication.
Reviews: a design review is a structured examination by people who did not do the work. Its value depends on reviewers being able to criticize the design without the author defending it personally. Distinguish a preliminary design review (are we on the right path?) from a critical design review (is it ready to build?).
Team dynamics: roles and responsibilities must be explicit; interfaces between subsystems are the highest-risk seams; decisions and their rationale should be recorded so future members understand why, not just what.
Traps
- Assuming silence means agreement. Unresolved dissent resurfaces later at higher cost.
- Groupthink: converging quickly on the first plausible idea because the senior person favors it. Techniques like anonymous idea submission and devil's advocacy counter it.
- Confusing documentation volume with communication quality. A 200-page document nobody reads communicates nothing.
- Interface neglect: each subsystem passes its own tests, but the combined system fails where they meet.
- Blame framing after a failure suppresses the honest reporting you need next time.
Rule of Thumb
Write the decision, the alternatives considered, and the reason. A short decision record - context, options, choice, rationale - prevents the team from relitigating settled questions and preserves knowledge when people leave.
Worked example: Two subteams each meet their mass budget, but the assembled unit is 8% over. The root cause is usually an unowned interface (shared fasteners, cabling, mounting hardware) counted by neither. Fix: assign every interface to a named owner and include interface mass in a single system-level budget.