ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on product development teams, including the roles of the team members, team structure, leadership and team processes. The most fundamental component of concurrent engineering (CE) is the idea of teams. The chapter discusses industrial teams and how to effectively utilize the organizational concept in the CE process. Industrial teams require the contribution of many individuals to achieve the outcome. Industrial teams are more different in makeup and operation than is commonly understood by the cultural concept of teams. The CE team approach has been very effective in breaking down the wall that existed between design and support groups. With the team concept, the idea is that the support team members should be able to gauge and manage the risk of early release of the design data. In the CE process it is important to assign the full set of core team players at the beginning of the process.
