Engineering project management using the Engineering Cockpit: A collaboration platform for project managers and engineers

Automation Systems Engineering projects typically depend on contributions from several engineering disciplines. While available software tools are strong in supporting each individual engineering discipline, there is very little work on engineering process management and monitoring across multi-discipline engineering projects. In this paper, we present the Engineering Cockpit, a social-network-style collaboration platform for automation system engineering project managers and engineers, which provides a role-specific single entry point for project monitoring, collaboration, and management. We present a prototype implementation of the Engineering Cockpit and discuss its benefits and limitations based on the feedback of our industry partners. Major results are that the Engineering Cockpit increases the team-awareness of engineers and provides project-specific information across engineering discipline boundaries.