Engineering in Integrated Project Teams

Development teams consisting of user and contractor personnel are becoming recognised as the best way to deliver systems which are focused on the needs of the user. Whilst there are obvious project management and contractual issues, there are also impacts on the engineering process. This paper describes those issues and the lessons learnt from a real project In summary one needs to build on the different skills users and engineers possess, to have a defined engineering process with clearly defined roles, to have a subset of engineering data specially tailored to be understandable to the users and a managed mechanism for assessing and prioritising user comments. These lessons can be applied to a wide range of project types where a mixture of non-engineers and engineers have to work together.