Global Engineering 

In the Global Engineering research project we investigate how Danish and Indian engineers collaborate when engaged in the engineering of factories. When engineering and constructing factories it typically takes about two years and the collaborative effort of 300 engineers from the contract is signed until the factory is erected at the location. In this process there are a large number of shared activities, which are highly interdependent and coupled by nature. These activities need to be coordinated, and in this project we focus in particular on how the collaborative coordination activities between the engineers are handled. In this work, we focus in particular on how the engineers apply a War Room concept into the global collaborative planning activities handling the coordination. War Room as part of coordination effort have been found to support collaboration previously, however nobody have yet investigated how the War Room concept can be used in a none-collocated setting – and we know less about how we can design collaborative technologies for this type of setting.

Research objective and goals
In the Global Engineering project we investigate how collaborative planning activities take place in a global context developing theoretical concept useful for explaining and describing such practices with the aim of designing collaborative technologies supporting such practices. The objectives and goals of the project are 1) a conceptual framework of the how the War Room concept is applied in the global Engineering context focusing on the collaborative planning practices and 2) design concepts for collaborative technologies which can support cross cultural collaboration between the engineers.

Research activities
Our main approach is ethnographic studies of the work practices of the engineers combined with design workshops and prototype development, which we bring back to the empirical partner.

Relation to Global Interaction
The Global Engineering project is global in both objective of study as well as in research project structure. The object of study global engineering is fundamentally a particular type of global interaction. While we have been involved in the ethnographic studies since January 2010, we are currently in the process of involving additional researchers in the project – hopefully expanding the project to have a number of global dispersed researchers.