The study results paint an interesting picture of the state of design teams in North America. In brief, design teams are small, streamlined and often dependent on outsourcing. But there is interesting structure within these well-worn observations that is worth examining.

To begin with, much of the highly integrated design work done today is happening in large organizations. Almost a quarter of the respondents said that their company's annual sales were $5 billion or more. And there are some giants in there: The mean figure is $2.3 billion, suggesting that the $5 billion-plus club has some very large numbers in it. About one-quarter reported sales under $50 million, with the rest spread out in between.

But in this club of giants, small design teams still predominate. Almost a third of respondents worked in teams of five or fewer individuals. Counterbalancing that, about a sixth of respondents reported teams of more than 30.

It was no surprise that bigger design teams happen in richer companies. There was a pretty good correlation between the number of individuals in a team and the annual sales of the organization. There was also a relationship between the size of the design team and the expected shipment volume of the design. The greater the volume, the more likely the design team was to be large. In fact, the median size of the design team nearly doubled when the lowest expected shipping volume was compared with the highest.

Now let's look at the individuals. The respondents represented both management and engineering. Four percent said they were corporate managers, while about one-quarter were some sort of engineering manager or project leader. Seventy percent said they were architects, hardware or software engineers. Over half of all the respondents said they were either hardware engineers or hardware engineering managers. So the sample that is pretty representative of the higher levels of the engineering profession, except for the fact that it's weighted heavily toward hardware.

Job responsibility is another important attribute of working engineers. Interestingly, it is often quite different from the individual's primary job function — how people actually work in a design team may not be closely linked to their titles. And this difference is supported by the data. While 16 percent of respondents said their primary function was system architect, only 8 percent said that what they did was actually mostly architecture. Apparently, about half of the architects on the teams were involved in both architecture and implementation. Not surprisingly, respondents who did only architecture were more common in larger design teams. Somewhat surprisingly though, they were uncommon in the very largest teams, those of over 50 individuals.

In fact, the study showed that a close link exists between the architecture and implementation functions — almost 60 percent of respondents said they were involved in both. Compared with the nearly 30 percent who said they were managers, only half that number said they spent their time actually managing groups of architects or designers. Increasingly, "management" and actually managing people are different things in the industry.

An issue that can't be ignored in looking at the structure of design teams is outsourcing. Over one-third of all respondents said their team did some level of design outsourcing. All kinds of tasks — including, interestingly enough, system-level design — were outsourced. The most common task to ship out was back-end chip design.

Nor does this outsourcing simply mean that a lot of chip design teams use ASIC vendors. In fact, only about one-fifth of respondents said they outsourced tasks to an ASIC vendor. The most common beneficiaries of outsourcing were design consulting companies, with 46 percent of the mentions, and independent consultants, at 41 percent. Apparently a lot of engineers are thriving on independence out there.

All that help is probably necessary. Respondents said they have only about a year to complete the current design — down significantly from the 18 months that has been the informal industry benchmark for a decade. Surprisingly, the one-year figure varied hardly at all with the size of the company, the expected shipping volume or even the method used to implement the design. With so little variance, we may be looking at a number that has been pared down to the point where almost nothing can reduce it further.

So there is a snapshot of the design community as it stands today: mostly small teams, people performing multiple functions, lots of outsourcing and, in effect, no time for weekends. Well, it's a living.

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