3/02 mechanical engineering: editorial

editorial

Working Together

By
John G. Falcioni, Editor-in-Chief

In heat No. 1 of the big race, our sporty red race car sped to the finish line—a close third!

Too bad there were only three cars on the track. Nonetheless, my son and I were pleased. After all, last year at the Pinewood Derby race, our car had finished a distant third in the initial heat of the yearly Boy Scout competition. Subsequent heats didn't improve our standing. So the rest of the evening was spent on the sidelines watching faster cars zoom past us. And some of those looked like they were designed by a team of engineers using sophisticated CAD/CAM programs.

"Son, it's not important whether you win or lose," a somewhat sheepish father next to us told his son apologetically. I had just given him a nasty stare as he and his seven-year-old leaped around like a pair of Mexican jumping beans and high-fived each other after their car finished first in the heat.

Certainly, it's always more fun to win. But the best part of the race—or of any endeavor where you can't go it alone—is the experience of collaboration and team building that emerges from working toward a goal with someone else.

The spirit of teamwork couldn't be any more evident than it was at last month's Olympics, where scores of athletes teamed with trainers and coaches to represent their countries in sports ranging from luge to hockey.

Even a team of engineers got into the Olympic act. ASME Fellow Arthur G. Erdman, along with ASME members Will Durfee, Peter McMurry and James Ramsey—all University of Minnesota faculty members—joined others from the university to create the Bobsled Start Simulator, a custom-designed simulation system featuring a high-end treadmill. The U.S. bobsled team used the simulator during training sessions, leading to the final design of the bobsleds that competed in Salt Lake City.

"Collaboration is just a fancy word for working together. Everyone does it all the time in almost everything we do," said Gene Allen, director of collaborative development at MSC.Software in Los Angeles. "Generally, the better you can collaborate, the better you can do your job," he said in the article, "Fast and Virtual," beginning on page 18 of the Mechanical Engineering Design supplement, inside this issue. "No one individual or even a company has all the resources needed to conduct and commercialize R&D. Organizations and people have to work together."

In another article, "Team Decisions," on page 15 of ME Design, ASME Fellow David G. Ullman, president of Robust Decisions Inc. in Corvallis, Ore., says team decision making is often complex and difficult to structure. "It involves solving problems that require the best use of an organization's intellectual assets, which are stored in human minds with each person bringing different expertise, insight, and perspective." Ullman's article highlights issues of consensus building and even displays a "belief map" used to resolve a team's occasional lack of consensus.

Design problems start when teams have a difficult time agreeing until it gets to be late in the development cycle, according to yet another related article, "Seeing Eye to Eye," by Associate Editor Paul Sharke, on page 6 of ME Design. Even at the earliest stages of product development, design and engineering need to join in a chorus with marketing, Sharke says.

Unfortunately, teams with cooperative and even loving partners don't always succeed. A case in point: the "Red Roadster Project," as my son and I called our Pinewood Derby enterprise. A lot of lessons learned come from working together toward a goal. Just the same, had we provided a little more clearance to our wheelbase, who knows what could have happened.