Some projects struggle because the technology is immature, the funding is inadequate or the technical challenge is simply harder than expected.

Others are more difficult to explain.

The people are capable. The science is sound. The engineering expertise exists. The organisation has invested time, money and effort into making the project succeed.

And yet momentum begins to disappear.

Meetings multiply. Requirements shift. Decisions are revisited. Designs move backwards and forwards. Work reaches manufacture or integration before somebody raises a question that suddenly matters. Different teams appear to be working hard towards the same objective, but not always from the same understanding of it.

In multidisciplinary technical work, I think one reason for this is what I describe as translation loss: the gradual weakening or alteration of technical meaning, context and intent as information moves between people, disciplines and stages of delivery.

A project might travel through something like:

RESEARCH → DESIGN → ENGINEERING → MANUFACTURE → INTEGRATION → DELIVERY

At every transition, knowledge has to move with it.

The difficulty is that different disciplines do not necessarily need, notice or communicate the same information. An assumption in one discipline can become an apparent requirement in another. A provisional figure can gradually acquire the authority of a specification. Design rationale can disappear while the geometry survives. A practical constraint that is obvious to the person assembling the system may never have existed in the information available to the person who designed it.

Nothing dramatic has to fail.

The project can simply become progressively harder to deliver.

The problem often lives at the interfaces

Technical capability is necessary. It isn’t sufficient.

Complex research and engineering programmes bring together people who understand different parts of the problem: researchers, scientists, designers, engineers, technicians, manufacturers, suppliers, project managers and decision-makers.

Each brings legitimate expertise, but each also sees the project through a different professional frame.

A researcher may be primarily concerned with whether a particular scientific effect can be produced or measured. Engineering eventually has to translate that into requirements, interfaces, tolerances, materials, services, safety and physical constraints. Neither perspective is wrong, but they are not interchangeable.

The same happens between design and manufacture.

A designer may understand exactly what a component is intended to achieve. The person manufacturing it sees the same geometry through tooling access, workholding, material behaviour, tolerance accumulation, inspection and process capability. A feature that appears straightforward in CAD can carry a completely different implication once somebody has to make it.

Technicians often encounter another version of the same interface. By the time equipment reaches assembly, installation, commissioning or maintenance, questions become very physical. Can it actually be assembled in that sequence? Is there room to reach the fixing? Where do the services enter? What happens when something has to be removed? Has the design assumed access that will no longer exist once surrounding equipment is installed?

Then technical information has to move again when decisions reach project leadership.

Senior decision-makers cannot reasonably absorb every technical detail of a complex programme. Information has to be compressed. But compression is itself a form of translation, and deciding what to remove without removing the meaning is difficult.

A risk can become a status.

An uncertainty can become a date.

A technical trade-off can become a cost.

By the time the information reaches the person making the decision, the detail may be gone while the consequences remain.

This is why I don’t think multidisciplinary engineering problems can always be reduced to “better communication.” Communication is part of it, but the harder question is whether the meaning survived the interface.

Technical knowledge only creates project value if enough of it reaches the person who needs it, at the point when they can still do something with it.

Research ↔ Engineering

Research and engineering are closely related, but they are not trying to answer exactly the same question.

Alignment Is Not Agreement

This distinction matters because good engineering should contain disagreement.

Researchers should challenge assumptions.

Engineers should question requirements.

Manufacturing specialists should challenge features that are unnecessarily difficult to produce.

Technicians should raise problems with assembly, access or maintainability.

Project leaders should question cost, risk and timescale.

A team in which nobody disagrees is not necessarily aligned. It may simply be avoiding difficult conversations.

That creates a very different kind of disagreement.

If everyone understands what the project is trying to achieve and why, different disciplines can challenge the proposed solution from their own perspective without inadvertently changing the underlying problem.

A manufacturing engineer might propose a different feature because the existing design is unnecessarily expensive to produce. A researcher can then explain whether that feature affects the scientific requirement. A technician might identify an installation problem. A designer can reconsider the arrangement while preserving the functional intent.

The disciplines remain different.

That is useful.

The objective is not to eliminate those differences but to give them a sufficiently shared understanding that they can improve the same solution.

Translation loss describes what can happen as knowledge crosses those boundaries. Alignment is one of the conditions that helps resist it.

When Communication Problems Become Engineering Problems

There is good evidence for the broader importance of the human side of project delivery.

Research commissioned by the Association for Project Management examined a range of dynamic conditions associated with project success. Of the conditions studied, interpersonal skills were rated most highly: more than 97% of survey respondents considered them important or very important. Communication, leadership and listening were among the prominent themes.

The UK’s Employer Skills Survey provides a different but complementary picture. In the 2024 survey, team-working skills were lacking in 47% of reported skills gaps, while management and leadership skills were lacking in 49%. Around two-thirds (65%) of employers experiencing skills gaps said those gaps had at least some impact on business performance.

What they do support is the broader point that technical organisations do not succeed through technical competence alone. People also need to communicate, collaborate, interpret information and work effectively across organisational boundaries.

In engineering environments, failures in those processes can eventually become physical.

A component is remade.

A test is repeated.

An interface doesn’t fit.

Equipment arrives before the necessary infrastructure is ready.

A requirement is interpreted differently by two teams.

A decision is revisited because the people affected by it were not part of the earlier conversation.

A problem that could have been resolved during concept development reaches manufacture, installation or commissioning instead.

The communication may be interpersonal.

The consequences are engineering consequences.

And the later a misunderstanding travels through the project, the more expensive it can become to resolve.

This is why practical engineering knowledge matters early. It is also why researchers, engineers, technicians and decision-makers need enough access to one another to test what information actually means before assumptions become hardware, procurement commitments or programme dates.

A Practical Check for Technical Alignment

The response to all of this does not need to be another layer of process.

Sometimes a relatively simple conversation can reveal whether a multidisciplinary team is actually working from the same understanding.

At an appropriate point in a project, ask the people representing the relevant disciplines to answer five questions:

Better innovation needs better interfaces

Technically ambitious organisations need specialists.

Research needs deep scientific expertise. Engineering needs people capable of analysing, designing and integrating complex systems. Manufacturing needs process knowledge. Technical delivery needs people who understand how equipment behaves when it becomes physical. Leadership needs people capable of making decisions across all of those constraints.

The challenge is not to make those disciplines think alike.

It is to prevent the important knowledge held within one discipline from becoming invisible to another.

That requires more than moving information around an organisation. It requires enough shared context to understand what that information means, which assumptions sit behind it and what consequences follow when it changes.

When that happens well, disagreement becomes useful. Problems are challenged while they are still cheap to change. Practical knowledge enters before designs become fixed. Decision-makers receive enough technical context to understand the trade-offs they are being asked to make.

When it does not, highly capable people can spend considerable time solving slightly different versions of the same problem.

Strong technical projects do not require perfect communication.

They do require important technical meaning to survive the journey from idea to delivery.

Sometimes the obstacle to progress isn’t the engineering itself.

It’s the space between the engineers.

Sources

Association for Project Management — Dynamic Conditions for Project Success (2021)

Research examining nine dynamic conditions associated with project success. More than 97% of survey respondents considered interpersonal skills important or very important, making them the highest-rated dynamic condition examined in the study.

Read the APM research

UK Government — Employer Skills Survey 2024: UK Findings

The Employer Skills Survey 2024 provides UK-wide evidence on employers’ skills needs, skills gaps and training. The findings used in this Insight include reported gaps in team-working and management and leadership skills, together with the impact of skills gaps on business performance.

Read the Employer Skills Survey 2024