Understanding engineering email: the development of a taxonomy for identifying and classifying engineering work (original) (raw)
Related papers
Design Science, 2017
Significant challenge exists in the effective monitoring and management of engineering design and development projects. Due to traits such as contextual variation and scale, detailed understanding of engineering projects and activity are difficult to form, with monitoring hence reliant on interpretation of managerial personnel and adherence to defined performance indicators. This paper presents a novel approach to the quantitative monitoring and analysis of engineering activity through computational topic identification and analysis of low-level communication data. Through three metrics of communication activity, this approach enables detailed detection and tracking of activity associated with specific project work areas. By application to 11,832 emails within two industry email corpora, this work identifies four distinct patterns in activity, and derives seven characteristics of communication activity within engineering design and development. Patterns identified are associated with background discussion, focused working, and the appearance of issues, supporting detailed managerial understanding. Characteristics identified relate to through-process norms against which a manager may compare and assess. Such project-specific information extends the ability of managers to understand the activity within their specific project scenario. Through detailed description of activity and its characteristics, in tandem with existing toolsets, a manager may be supported in their interpretation and decision-making processes.
An Exploratory Study into Automated Real-Time Categorisation of Engineering E-Mail
International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC 2013), 2013
For large, spatially and temporally distributed engineering projects, e-mail is a central means for the discussion of engineering work and sharing of digital assets that define the product and its production process. The importance of communication and the value of its content for resolving issues post facto are universally accepted. More recently, the potential value of its content to predict events, issues and states a priori has been explored with some success. However, while in the former context (post facto) trends and patterns can be established through iteration and refinement over time; for prediction, heuristics need to be established in advance and closer to real-time analysis becomes necessary due to the critical and very often short timescales. It is this challenge of making predictions from the content of e-mail that is considered in this paper. In particular, the paper deals with engineering e-mail and the ability to automatically predict its purpose from its content rather than relying solely on the subject line. The work builds upon previous studies by the authors concerning the characterisation of the content of e-mail: what they are about, why they were sent and how the content is expressed. The paper summarises the previous work and looks at the potential of identifying the purpose of e-mail through the use of Naive Bayes and an adapted Latent Semantic Analysis approach. While the techniques have only been applied to an initial exploratory study of 98 e-mails, the results suggest the potential for automated real-time categorisation of engineering e-mails through achieving an accuracy of 66%. Such a capability would both support prioritisation of e-mail for engineers and macro level characterisation of project e-mail dynamics. The latter provides the opportunity for real-time analysis of an engineering projects status and correspondingly, modes of management intervention.
Email as a communication tool in Engineering Design Projects
The effective management of information, design related or otherwise, is critical to the success of a project. A number of communication and information sources are being used in engineering design projects. The use of email as a communication and information sharing medium in large, complex, globally distributed engineering projects is widespread; yet there exists little understanding of the content of the emails exchanged and the implications of this content on the design project, design records and contracts. Email or Electronic mail has grown to become a dominant communication medium for both business and private individuals in recent years. It was noted that information and communication activities vary throughout the course of project and product lifecycles (Eckert, et al., 2005). It was identified that email is one of the few tools to be used throughout this project duration and is expected to be used to support a range of engineering activities.
Issues and challenges for improving email use in engineering design
2008
Good communication within the design process is a key component in an effective design process. As design teams become more distributed, effective communication becomes more difficult. For example, projects may be designed and specified in the UK, developed and produced in India, whilst being managed by a team split between France and the UK. Amongst the many communication mechanisms available to design teams, email has come to predominate, used for both managing the project and assist in developing the design. Despite its importance, little work has been done within engineering to understand email usage or to develop processes/procedures to improve its use. This paper uses a cross-disciplinary literature review to identify challenges and opportunities present in contemporary email software and usage. The issues identified are separated for analysis into categories based on the timescale of their effects: • Collaboration and communication-affecting team working and the discussion and exchange of information and ideas • User-affecting work by individual users • Records-concerning the documentary evidence of a project or activity • Knowledge creation-concerning organisational learning The paper discusses the general themes which have emerged from an assessment of current research. Those challenges and opportunities which are of particular importance in the engineering domain are then identified and further work to address these issues is proposed.
Managing by E-Mail: What E-mail Can Do for Engineering Project Management
IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2000
E-mails are, rightly or wrongly, a staple of the information and communication technology for managing work and collaborative activities. This paper examines the value of the content of e-mail at a project level rather than at the often-studied level of the individual user. The data set consists of emails authored by an engineering team associated with a large, complex, long term, systems integration project, typical of the aerospace, marine and defence sectors. The research applied a qualitative content analysis methodology to classify the content (what the e-mail contains) and purpose (why the e-mail was sent) of the e-mail in the data set. The results of the content analysis were compared and contrasted with secondary evidence from interviews and project documentation to enable a time-phased analysis. The findings show that classifying e-mail content by the categories of management, information and problem-solving transactions revealed signatures that align with project phases and, more importantly, problems encountered. Finally, we found that the purpose of e-mail is not necessarily consistent with the designated job role or responsibility of the sender or recipient. This paper contributes to empirical data on the relation between communication and project performance and the changing nature of e-mail communication throughout the lifecycle of a project. The findings point to a new way to leverage e-mail content to 'manage by e-mail'.
2015
This paper presents a topic-based analysis of email subject line data from a large-scale engineering project and explores its utility for supporting the management of collaborative work. The main contributions of the paper are a novel interpretation of the co-word network analysis method for application within an engineering project management context, and the appraisal of the method for finding patterns within subject line data. Our findings suggest that the approach has the potential to contribute to monitoring work complexity, tracking progress, recognizing synergy and divergence, detecting scope creep, and supporting knowledge capture.
Capturing Design Rationale by Annotating E-mails
Development of a large and complex system, such as satellites, is a knowledge intensive task. Applying knowledge management to such a domain appears to lead to a more efficient development process. However, it has been reported that knowledge management suffers from capture bottleneck, i.e. lack of incentives for members of the community to invest time in sharing their resources, or knowledge. In this paper, we propose an approach to capture design rationale from e-mail communication. We describe the prototype system and analysis of applying the method to an e-mail archive of a satellite development project.
The Evolution of Terminology within a Large Distributed Engineering Project
Communication features in many engineering activities within an engineering project. It is the main form by which information & knowledge is shared, and facilitates the generation of a shared understanding between engineers. While there exists a significant body of literature relating to communication, much of the research has been through qualitative studies using techniques such as surveys, interviews and observation. Given the prevalence of computer-mediated communication and the development of techniques to analyse such datasets, there is now the opportunity to provide quantitative metrics that can characterise communication. Therefore, this paper examines this opportunity through the co-word analysis of the subject line terms of an engineering project e-mail corpus comprising of 10,628 e-mails, featuring 1,045 individuals and spanning over a 4 year period. More specifically, the analysis has focused on the evolution, use/re-use and centrality of terms across the various project stages. The results provide interesting insights in the evolution of engineering terminology, which leads onto a discussion on how these metrics may provide indicators of project 'normality'.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, 2014
This article addresses issues related to problem solving knowledge detection in business emails. The objective is to discover if there are traces of knowledge left in emails and how to detect it. Finding patterns and structure of interest in emails corpora is a difficult task, but it is a necessity for companies in order to keep traces and learn lessons from previous projects. Especially in software development project that can be very costly and time consuming. In this paper, we present a general method for discovering problem solving requests in professional emails using mixed techniques from pragmatics analysis and knowledge engineering. This study takes place in the project memory work aiming at the traceability and structuration of knowledge in daily business environment.
A Social Media Approach to Support Engineering Design Communication
Engineers Talk Be it through conversations, meetings, informal discussion, phone calls or E-Mail, Engineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of knowledge, thoughts and ideas, and therefore, fundamental to Engineering Work. An engineer spends a significant portion of their day communicating as they 'fill in the gaps' left by formal documentation and processes. It is thereby, an inherent source of explicit design rationale that relates to (and very often supplements) Engineering Records and their generation. Engineering Design Communication is not only central for Engineering Work and Records but also offers potential - through aggregation - to reveal underlying features, patterns and signatures that could aid current and future Engineering Project Management. As Engineering Design Communication plays such a pivotal role, it comes as no surprise that there is much extant research. The majority of this is descriptive and has focused on identifying patterns in engineers’ communication behaviour as well as analysing the utility of currently employed communication tools/mediums (such as, E-Mail and meetings). However, little prescriptive research - through either a tool or process - has been undertaken. This may be due to the considerable challenges facing research in this field such as the need to maintain a high-level of Engineering Context, ensure the right engineers are able to participate and associate the communication with its respective Engineering Records. All of which, has to be achieved within an Engineering Context where teams are becoming larger, more mobile, multi-disciplinary & distributed, and often performing variant or incremental design. Although, it is argued that Social Media has the potential to militate these challenges through the use of technologies that provide agile development, support for ubiquitous com- puting and sharing of multimedia. Therefore, this thesis investigates how Social Media can be used to support Engineering Design Communication. This is achieved through the elici- tation and synthesis of the requirements for supporting Engineering Design Communication, and consideration of the e↵ective application of the Social Media. This forms the basis from which a Social Media approach to support Engineering Design Communication is created and then instantiated within a tool called PartBook. PartBook has been developed iteratively and involved an industrial study to evaluate and improve functionality. It has since been used within an eleven week Formula Student project involving thirty- four students from multiple engineering disciplines in a distributed working environment. The analysis of which addresses the validation of the requirements that has led to amendments and generation of new requirements as well as evaluation of the Social Media approach that has led to insights into the potential impact such a tool could bring to Engineering Work, Records and Project Management.