Predictive Simulation as a Decision Support System to Manage A/E/C Global Teamwork

Managing time and human resources efficiently in a project can lead to greater competitive advantage, improved product quality, less waste during the process, and team well-being. It is critical to use a decision support system to manage global teams to enable prediction and identification of potential problems. This paper presents a study how the use of a predictive simulation tool that models organizations, called SimVision, can improve the team process and performance in global project teams by (1) making the workload and backlogs of each team member visible, (2) exploring through what-if scenarios possible interventions to address current team challenges. We simulated in SimVision swift A/E/C project teams in the context of the A/E/C Global Teamwork course offered at Stanford in collaboration with university partners worldwide. We modelled three intervention scenarios to increase: (1) the frequency of the project meetings, (2) centralization of the decision making process, and (3) formalization of the communication among team members. We compared their impact on team performance. The simulations showed that a higher formalization, where ICT can capture the context of the meetings and allow reuse of knowledge, facilitates more effective communication, reduces rework and the risk to increase time to market, improves team well-being and satisfaction. The results of the simulation are validated through comparison with the actual outcome of the project.