engine; packaging would check whether the proposed engine could actually fit in the available
space under the hood (see Fig. 1). In the packaging check, particular attention is on such details as minimal distances between components to assure they do not touch even at high speed or on rugged surfaces, resulting in noise and possibly damage of components. Packaging therefore contributes in a major way to a core objective of the organization and its product development activity: to assure a high quality standard for the product. Packaging also qualifies as a core task, its purpose being to eradicate sources of product failure that can generate negative customer reactions of very high impact (such as recall of car models from the market). The budget devoted to packaging makes up 5–10% of the overall budget of the development of a new car model at this engineering centre, making it one of the most costly activities in the development of the car model. Twenty employees are dedicated to the packaging activity on a permanent and full-time basis, constituting a team of an important dimension. Furthermore, packaging is an on-going activity during almost the whole development project, and most importantly, the packaging task is almost the paradigmatic example of a reciprocally interdependent task (our main criterion above). Fig. 1 provides a graphical illustration of the highly reciprocal, technical interdependence: the objective of the packaging task is to optimize the technical performance of the overall system by ensuring that interactions between different combinations of components conform to technical specifications. As explained in more detail below (see Fig. 2), such reciprocal interdependence on the technical level is also reflected on the organizational level: carrying out the full packaging check requires coordinating 26 engineering teams who develop the components and sub-systems in parallel and whose possibilities and constraints in doing so depend on the decisions taken in the other teams. ‘Virtual packaging checks’ (see below) are performed on a bi-weekly basis during the entire life of the development project, from concept development to the industrialization phase. Thus, the packaging activity recurs at least 48 times during a project (and 20 times during our 10
month observation). When our observations started, the project had run for 2 years and had been overseen by the packaging team from the start of the project. Since the people staffed to the team had previous experiences in packaging activities for other projects, their performance is not