Design of Design - Chapter 7

The author begins this chapter by asking a question: Why do design teams now telecollaborate? He give several reasons for this: skill specialization, different location preferences, time flexibility, low cost, and politics. For the last one, politics, Brooks explains that large international companies often must split up jobs between companies, so this makes telecollaboration practically essential. Brooks then tells us of when he was designing the IBM system/360. He telecollaborated during this time, and though he said it was a lot of work, the effort was highly successful. Brooks tells us two things that will help make telecollaboration work: meeting face-to-face, and designing clean interfaces for remotely designed components. Finally, the author gives a few different means of telecollaboration: simple documents, telephone, videoconferencing, or a combination of the three.