New Activities

It has been a quiet year with new members rotating in to the group and others rotating out of the group.

Thanks to Deena for her interest and Vishaka for helping with data entry. These new students are just starting on their research journey. More to come...

coding is still in the process

Over the past quarter, we have collected a large number of interview transcripts. By analyzing those interviews transcripts using a method called coding, we have come up with several great propositions. Although we have collect a lot of data, we did not stop collecting data, because we believe more data can help our proposition become more precisely. Therefore, we are still seeking opportunities to interview others. During this summer, we will  get more interview transcripts back, and we will keep coding those transcripts to come up with more propositions or test what we have already found. In other words, the process of coding is still going on.

summer is a good time for writting

Through our research team's hard work, during this quarter, we have collected enough data for answering our research questions. Therefore, in the summer quarter, we will start to write up our findings. Because I have involved in data collection as well as data analysis, I understand two parts of our research. The first part is methodology. In this part, we will write about how we collect data. Basically, we surveyed and interviewed three different teams from three different companies. In the data analysis process, we coded those cases built by surveys and interviews sentence by sentence. The second part is findings and propositions. After the data analysis, we start to see the fact that similar data tend to have patterns. We believe those patterns are our findings. In order to test those findings, we come up with our propositions. As a result, in summer, I will involve in the writing of methodology, and findings and propositions.

Research Project Update

Diving deeper into research has been a great experience for me. The topics behind team disruptions and lean production have helped me to understand leadership and the inter-workings of companies much better.

Throughout the project I have read up on various articles encompassing the social aspect of team disruptions and have recently made a shift towards the lean production concepts. Both of these have given me so much valuable information that I have been applying to my everyday studies. Such as the continuous innovation that makes 'lean' so useful and efficient in the work place.

As the project progresses we will be conducting more interview as well as exploring further into team disruptions on all levels. This has been such a great opportunity for learning, honing my research skills, and bettering my team work skills.

a brief summary of what I have done and what I am going to do

As our research moves forward, my research team decided to investigate how complexity and team learning contribute to our understanding of disruptions. I am interested in how teams perform when disruptions occur, and the concept of team learning firmly ties to teams' performance. As a result, I picked up the concept of team learning as my focus. One definition of organizational learning come from Dr. Kennedy that is "ongoing process of reflection and action, characterized by asking questions, seeking feedback, experimenting, reflecting on results and discussing errors or unexpected outcomes of actions. "

During the break, I have read several articles about organizational learning from Journal of Operation Management. One of them deeply interests me. It is called "How to learn new tasks: shop floor performance effects of knowledge transfer and performance feedback." In this article, the authors argue that organizational learning involves in knowledge transfer and skills development. In order to achieve the optimal learning outcome, people should learn explicit knowledge (the knowledge that can be expressed by words) by mimicking  the people who have understood the explicit knowledge other than self observation.

Now, I am starting to code the data that my team collected from interviews and surveys for understanding inputs, modification behaviors, performance and disruptions attributes.

Complexity’s pleasures.

Being apart of this research as broadened my horizons. While moving research forward I have learned ideas and disciplines that I would of never ran into during a standard biology major education. One of the more recent things I have been exposed to do to research is ‘System Complexity’.

I’ve read articles and books about System Complexity and found it quite interesting. The concepts lends nicely to the research. In multiple writings the level of complexity a system contains is directly related to the rate of errors or disruptions that happen in the system. As we bring in more data this concept might prove true in services and production companies we are studying.

Another thing I found delightful about System Complexity is that the research surrounding it largely uses organic system to illustrate the concept. This has allowed me to directly use the knowledge I have gain in my biology classes to better this research.  

Studying complexity has been a highlight during this research.

Congratulations

Congratulations Jarvis!  The Associate Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs has announced that one of our undergraduate team researchers, Jarvis Xu, has received the Mary Gates Research Scholarship for Spring and Summer, 2014.