Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
However, such teams do not always work well, and it is frequent to observe
personal incompatibilities develop between team members, often creating the need
to replace individuals. As previously mentioned, communication among team
members is a key factor. Aside from personality traits which can inexorably lead
to conflicts, the main pitfalls have to do with team coordination, namely the
need to:
•
Clearly establish roles/responsibilities in the team;
•
State the expertise each member adds to the team;
•
Have team members frequently describe their individual work in (also frequent)
team meetings.
One of the important aspects of multidisciplinary team interaction is language.
Here we consider essentially technical terminology. It is vital to ensure that all team
members are aware of specific technical terminology used by others. Also, some
consensus must be reached regarding adoption of technical terms which might vary
among scientific areas. It can be mitigated by frequent meetings and formally setting
the terminology to be used by the team.
4.2
Tasking and Scheduling
Stating that tasking and scheduling is important in this type of development projects
is redundant. However, having multidisciplinary teams increases the complexity of
the planning effort. First, as previously described, tasks must be very well defined
and the role of each individual explicitly set for each task. Second, responsibilities
must be assigned for every task, and it falls on the project leader to monitor task
progress and intervene when necessary. Team members should not have to police
each other. Last, while some tasks can be developed simultaneously, many will
require input from other tasks. Almost any delay may cause other tasks to be put on-
hold, possibly affecting the overall project schedule, and consequently, the predicted
time to market.
Thus, compared to traditional project tasking and scheduling efforts, multidisci-
plinary teams for development of medical devices require additional care both in
initial planning and in workflow monitoring.
4.3
Communication with Actors Outside the Development
Te a m
There are clearly two different levels of communication here. On the one hand, mul-
tiple channels of communication are beneficial for the development process, namely
between researchers and end-users. Examples are frequent meetings between the
