SUPPORTING CYCLE MANAGEMENT BY STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE ORGANISATIONAL DOMAIN IN MULTI-PROJECT ENVIRONMENT
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Cantemessa, M.
Author: Elezi, Fatos; Pechuan, Alvaro; Mirson, Alexander; Bidermann, Wiland; Kortler, Sebastian; Lindemann, Udo
Series: ICED
Section: Design Organisation and Management
Page(s): 317-324
Abstract
Today many companies involved in Product Development usually run several development projects at a time. This multi-project environment increases the complexity that the management has to deal with, especially in managing the high amount of iterations (cycles) that are inherent in Product Development projects. In many cases, the management does not have an overview on how and in what amount different departments are being involved in these cycles. This paper introduces a Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM) based methodology for obtaining a snap-shot overview of the level of involvement and interaction between different functional departments. The result of this methodology is an organizational map of development departments (organisational portfolio) that provides information to the management on how particular functional departments are involved in the development processes as well as the level of interaction with other departments and suppliers in the multi-project environment. Based on this information, managers can reach decision on how to improve the information flow between these teams, which supports cycle convergence and consequently reduction of cost and time to market.
Keywords: STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS; PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT; MULTI-PROJECT; MULTI-DOMAIN MATRIX