3D Collaboration skills: Design teams are built in different forms according to their needs and limitations. These needs are related to the level of complexity of the project and its magnitude. If your team is designing a briefcase, one engineer and one 3D modeler could be enough. If your team is designing a race car, you will need to create a bigger team with members working on each specific area of the project, such as engine, aerodynamics, breaks, suspension, electronics, and so on. With this in mind, one skill becomes relevant when building your team regardless of its size: communication. The quality of team communication skills inside an engineering team will define the success of any project, and lack of 3D Collaboration skills can lead to the failure of it.
Understanding your role inside the team
For Team Leader (s)
3D Collaboration skills: Understanding the complete picture of your role inside a team is necessary to define the correct mediums of communications you need. When talking about big projects, if you are a leader in one of the main area, you will have to develop tools to easily engage your team with the vision for the design, establish clear goals for your team to follow, set meetings, monitor the advances, and of course the traditional engineering tasks such as effective communication to suppliers.
Understand your team members. Your team is constantly diving inside project details, and it could be easy for them to get lost. Constantly take the time to monitor them, guide them properly. You are the one who has the wider vision in the team, take the time to develop communication channels and train yourself with knowledge and skills to perform it, there are places like Coursera that could help you with this. This is mostly a mandate rather than a suggestion if you want to be successful and build trust inside your team.
For Team Members
3D Collaboration skills: If you are a team member, understand and embrace your responsibilities. First of all, communicate with yourself. Be clear of what your responsibilities are, and establish them clearly on slides, documents or any other tool that you see fit for your own usage. When you dive too deep into the details of a project, is easy to get lost and to forget the purpose of what you’re doing. Don’t forget your goal, and your mental focus will be easier to sustain.
Your duties as a team member are clear and specific and so will be your tasks inside the subject, in contrast to your leader. Every decision made in the project will be based on your work, so transmitting it in the most clear way, will improve the outcome. With this in mind, take the time and effort to elaborate well-done layouts to communicate your findings, sustain your recommendation and cautions. Sometimes decisions are made to save costs and time even against your warnings because your arguments to stop them were weak. A well-thought and communicated warning would have created a broader picture of the consequences of the specific decision
Both Team Leaders and Members.
Meet on a frequent basis. This might sound obvious, but team leaders and supervisors often forget they have a team to lead, and members forgot they have leaders to report to. So everybody works in their own understood direction from the only initial meeting they did, leading to a highly-cost process. Understanding the characteristic frequency of the meeting needed in your project will also be important to measure your progress, by example start on a weekly basis and evaluate the performance, then make changes from there. Small advances and changes in the design can be monitored on the meetings and they can be redirected based on the goals if need it. If team leaders let too much time without meeting, some details will pass undetected creating future problems.
Built a trust-based relationship in a healthy work environment. Each part of the team has a role to play and a responsibility to face. Like in any process, weakness in team members or team leaders might arise. Do not let these things pass by, and build ways to properly handle it, because if one team section fails, the complete project might fail, and nobody wants to feel the time they have invested was a waste.
How can technology be used to improve communication?
It is common that modern team members are distributed all around the globe, and even if they are not that far, business travels might disturb any scheduled meeting. Do not let these things bother in your project. Today, cloud-based technology like Google Drive will help you instantly share your slides and reports to keep yourself updated with the latest advances and leaders’ guidance. Technology also lets teams communicate easily and from everywhere with video calls using software like Zoom.
Cloud-based technology does no stop on docs and call apps, now even 3D modeling tools like Solidface are cloud-based built, allowing every individual of the team to be up to date with the latest design version. While on distance meetings, Solidface’s collaborative tool permits interaction of all team members. This way, you will never skip the meeting details related to your design and 3D modeling parts because of not being “physically there”. Also, you will not have to wait until someone sents you the file by email (And imagine if you are connected in a pc with no 3D modeling software to open the parts they sent you by email). Solidface also includes the ability to access your design everywhere and add visual permissions to suppliers and other related relevant parties on your project.
Conclusion
Modern design teams need to address their communication skills the same as any other technical aspect of the design process. In order to improve communication skills, both team leaders and team members must arm themselves with high capacity technology tools and constantly learn, and improve the techniques they can relate to communications. Solidface is a 3D modeling software designed to fulfill the communication weakness that traditional software has. Solidface is a software designed to improve the communication of your team, increasing the chances of success of your project and Choosing the right tools will lead you to success.
