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My work in design management can be summarized in one key finding as follows:

A successful team (organization) is one that freely exchanges knowledge to continuously explore new ideas, but which requires communication and trust.

High performance teams achieve outcomes that exceed the expectations of the project and often demonstrate unique or innovative approaches within a final solution.  These teams challenge conventional expectations by combining individual strengths and knowledge to generate solutions that exceed the capability of an individual team member.  These high performance teams focus on exceeding traditional measures rather than focusing on meeting the benchmark accepted by previous project teams.  This concept of high performance is documented and routinely implemented in diverse industries including healthcare and transportation (Poulton and West 1993).  However, high performance teams and solutions receive less attention in the construction domain.  Rather, the measurement of success within a construction project is often based on meeting historical benchmarks for the classic factors of time, cost, and quality.  As with any longstanding benchmark, the question of whether these classic benchmarks can be increased to a new level should be periodically examined together with the question of how to achieve a new level of performance.  In the context of construction projects, this research effort focuses on the development of a model for achieving high performance results from project teams including enhanced innovation, learning, knowledge exchange, and a notable increase in the classic project benchmarks.

The motivation for this research centers on the extension beyond the traditional construction perspective on project management.  In the traditional perspective, project management focuses extensively on the use of tools to preplan tasks and develop schedules that are as detailed as possible.  The concept behind this perspective is that a majority of issues can be identified and engineered prior to the start of the project.  Additionally, this emphasis is intended to enhance the efficiency of the process by identifying information that is required to be exchanged between participants during project execution.  Research in critical success factors has identified this efficiency of information exchange as a key element in producing projects that achieve benchmarks in time, cost, and quality (Ashley and Jaselskis 1991).

The limitation of this “efficiency” approach is that it produces a reactive project execution model.  In this model, the schedule and its logic emphasize the mechanics of requesting and retrieving information from project participants to achieve individual goals.  The information exchange is guided by the necessity generated by individual tasks within the developed schedule.  This reactive approach is in direct contrast to the methods employed by high performance teams.  In high performance teams, the focus is on the ability of team members to continuously exchange knowledge and insights, in addition to project information, to enhance the collective group output (Katzenbach and Smith 1993).  The success of these teams is not based on an engineered approach to project execution where requesting and retrieving information is the basis for project execution.  Rather, a social network approach to project execution emphasizes the dynamics of interaction and the free flow of knowledge between project participants.  This focus on networks as the basis for high performance is presented as the Social Network Model for Construction.