If only I knew what you were going to do: communication and planning in large organizations

In many design companies effective and efficient communication is a big problem. Often the reason for communication problems is not that the designers are unwilling to communicate, but that they don’t know whom they need to communicate with and how they should express themselves so that others can understand. Designers rarely understand fully how their work fits into the wider picture of activities in the company. They don’t know where information comes from and don’t question it or inform their colleagues proactively. People need to understand when information is required and what the costs are of delaying information. If they understood what tasks their colleagues were going to perform, they would know better what they need to communicate. Theoretically it should be possible to learn this from project plans. However companies don’t ordinarily have detailed enough process plans to elicit this information, but use a multitude of overlapping plans with very different units of planning, which are not accessible or comprehensive to the majority of employees. This paper argues that communication within and across organisations can be supported by making comprehensive and universal process plans available to designers. Constructing these plans is a difficult task. We are trying to support design process planning through parameter driven task based models, which show the connectivity between tasks, but also include an element of timing through qualifiers indicating the maturity of the parameter values.