Comparing the effectiveness of face to face and computer mediated collaboration

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Abstract

In the construction industry, the need for collaboration between people who are geographically remote is a reoccurring feature. The traditional way of handing this is collocation but this is expensive and disruptive and so increasingly, use has been made of remote collaboration using computational technology over networks. This raises a concern that such a form of working may lose some of the natural richness of human communication which, in turn, will impair the ability of the participants to effectively undertake tasks of a technical nature. To assess whether or not this is so, a carefully controlled set of experiments has been undertaken using twenty pairs of people who are required to work on a partially developed simple design task. The work is undertaken using computer mediated communication supported by a 3D CAD package. As a control, the same pairs have also undertaken a similar design task working face to face. The principal objective is not to simulate a real construction project with all its complexities, but to evaluate collaboration using tasks of a construction design nature. The results show that, for the type of task used (which, by real life construction design standard, are rather simplistic in nature), people collaborating using computer mediated communication, at worst are as effective as people working face to face and are probably actually slightly more effective. This is a surprising result since computer mediated communication lack rich and valuable non-verbal aspects of communication.

Introduction

Some of the most important benefits to the construction industry from the use of the modern technology are the ease with which information can be stored, transmitted and shared. For example, the development of building information modelling (BIM) has facilitated better design collaboration, interoperability, clash detection and planning. The result is a speeding up of the process of construction, an improvement in the quality of schemes and enhanced management processes. Another recent development is the emergence of software tools which can support collaboration and communication by geographically remote participants, allowing for example shared access and collaborative working regardless of time or location. These developments are potentially of great significance to the construction industry with its highly fragmented structure which leads to many separate and geographically remote organisations being involved in each scheme/project.

Communication processes can be defined as the transfer of information from one entity to another. In its most basic form, communication can be divided into two main categories, verbal and non-verbal [1], [2]. Verbal communication involves spoken conversations between people while non-verbal communication uses gestures and body language. The content of verbal communication is largely overt and hence easily comprehended. Non-verbal communication is largely subconscious and less easily understood. Therefore, the participants in face to face (FTF) communication tend not to be consciously aware of the non-verbal messages which are being sent to each other but nevertheless, they respond to these signals which can be very powerful. In FTF conversation, typically about 50% of communication is nonverbal [1].

Communication traditionally occurs between two or more people who are FTF but can also include the exchange of information in other modes, such as diagrams and the exchange of paper based documents. More recently, communication has come to include the process of exporting and importing data in various formats (text, 3D models, tables and ideas) and since the development of high speed network, this has been extended to include VOIP, chat, shared desktop and visual communication via webcams. Network-based communication is grouped together under the collective name computer mediated communication (CMC).

Much research has been undertaken on communication and collaboration systems and more specifically, how to use these systems in the construction industry. The organisation of the construction industry is characterised by its high degree of fragmentation with there being many small companies. Thus, on typical project, many companies have to come together to form an alliance which works together to complete the specified task [3], [4]. This collaboration requires good communication among the construction alliance participants, and it consists of many aspects. First, inter-organisational communication takes place between the representatives from the individual organisations. Secondly, there is intra-company communication. Companies are increasingly international and often within the same company, the workload is shared between people who are geographically remote.

Communication channels are designed for both geographically close contacts and distant connections [5] and effective communication occurs in two ways: formal and informal. Informal communications are important for securing effective personal relationships as well as work related tasks. Formal communication is necessary to agree a decision which may be made by informal means, to record briefly the main causes for the decision, and to communicate the salient information to others who have not been participants in the decision making [6].

The development of modern multi-media technologies, particularly the internet, has had a significant impact on the construction industry, and especially its communication systems. It is hypothesised by Wong [7] that these new forms of communication have resulted in an increase in productivity at each stage of the work. They have also led to a change of the organisational structure of companies from the traditional “functional” to the “matrix form” [8]. Organisational structure for any company is affected by many factors such as organisation size, organisation life cycle, strategy, environment and new technology [9].

Pena-Mora et al. [10] studied collaboration in the construction industry. They found it involves the generation and sharing of information events and actions, and effective communication is necessary to obtain meaningful collaboration. Collaborative working is essential in a highly fragmented and multi-disciplinary industry such as the construction industry, and the development of information technologies and associated communication infrastructures has impacted on the traditional business processes [11].

Collaborative design can be defined as an action of dynamically communicating and working altogether in order to collectively define and consolidate design aims, to search the design space, to discover the challenges and constraints and eventually to find the appropriate solutions [12]. Design collaboration studies have mostly focussed on the initial design phase-generally known as conceptual design. This stage of the process focuses on understanding the client’s requirements and making general rather than detailed specific decisions [13].

Continuous and effective collaboration between project participants is a key factor in resolving conflicts and keeping projects to budget and on time [14]. Another important aspect of working in any industry is that junior members of staff need access to and guidance from those with expertise. CMC can assist with this in cases where the expertise is geographically remote [15]. Moreover, CMC allows people to communicate easily and directly with one another across space and time [16] and it appears to support problem solving by eliciting more purposeful, on-task and purposive communication [17].

The research described in this paper examines the impact on productivity and degree of collaboration that occurs when people who are geographically remote from one another work concurrently on the same project. Two modes of collaboration are studied, FTF and CMC, to implement collaboration between geographically remote participants. The work involves a series of experiments each of which involves two participants undertaking simple design tasks. These were necessarily simple when compared to those in real construction projects, and thus the findings may be not readily applicable or reliably extrapolated, to real problems in the construction industry, but they do form the basis for further work. The experiments have been conducted using participants with a range of experience from complete novices through to experts.

Section snippets

Related work

Many researchers have studied and developed collaboration and communication systems which address various aspects of the project life cycle, because effective collaboration and communication are some of the most important factors for the success of a construction project. Effective coordination and collaboration between different project members is vital for finding solutions to the problems which occur during a project. Developments in computational technology and software have assisted in the

Methodology

The aim of the research described in this paper is to assess the differences that occur between people who undertake engineering tasks FTF and people who do the same tasks when working remotely from one another using a CMC network. The programme of experiments to investigate this has therefore involved teams of two people who are assigned two tasks, one under FTF and the other using CMC, and the order is random to avoid any systematic bias in the results.

In all the tasks, the participants have

Experiment details

As described above, each experiment involves two participants who are required to undertake a series of jobs involving an existing Revit Architecture model of a building, see Fig. 4 for an example. The building design contains some deliberate flaws and inadequacies and the participants are asked to address and improve specific aspects of the building. How and exactly what is to be amended is left open to the participants. Also, the ownership of various sections of the building model is

Degree of collaboration

While the concept of collaboration is well understood, yet many researchers have found the determination of a metric which can be used to assess the degree of collaboration is something which is far more challenging.

Simatupang and Sridharan [56] have developed a collaboration index that computes the collaboration level in supply chain relationship which depends on the three factors of the synchronicity of decision, amount of information sharing, and degree of sharing of operational parameters

Conclusion

In this paper the difference between computer mediated communication (CMC) and face to face communication (FTF) has been discussed thoroughly through analysis of experiments done by participants. Although FTF was originally expected to be the better medium for collaborative design work, generally, the results have proved that the efficacy of CMC is much better than that of FTF, and the following points illustrate these advantages. It should be acknowledged that these experiments were conducted

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