Experience and Knowledge Transfer Through Special Topic Coaching Sessions

Design teams have different problems and needs during their projects. For the teams’ coaches this can amount to a high workload due to acquainting themselves with new topics and preparing different coaching sessions for the teams. On the other hand, former teams might have experienced similar problems, and the experiences and solutions of members from such a team could be valuable to the current teams. In this chapter, we present the concept of special topic coaches that lets former members of design teams provide additional coaching sessions to current teams. This concept allows experienced members of design teams to share their knowledge and experiences with a current team by preparing and running a coaching session. Thus it relieves the dedicated team coaches while providing the team with valuable input and establishing an exchange between different design teams. The teams can discuss their problems with peers and receive additional input on topics important to them when needed. To ensure that our goals are met, we implemented the concept with the help of a coaching seminar parallel to one of our design engineering courses. The seminar was evaluated through observations and questionnaires. We will present the results as well as derived changes to the next iteration of the seminar and our ideas of how to adopt this concept in a company context.