Hidden Costs of Decomposition: The Need for Fit between Technical and Organizational Architectures

分解的隐性成本：技术和组织架构之间契合的需要

• 批准号: 1563408
• 负责人: Erica Gralla
• 金额: $ 23.92万
• 依托单位: George Washington University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-01 至 2021-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1563408&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Hidden; Costs; Decomposition; Need; Fit

Engineered systems are becoming increasingly complex, and as a result, they are more difficult to design. Effective design requires quickly bringing diverse expertise to bear on each iteration of the design. These two goals -- faster design cycles and better cross-disciplinary integration -- are enabled by model-based concurrent design approaches. These approaches bring multiple experts together into a single room to create a design in a series of short design sessions, and they are widely used in certain fields, such as spacecraft design. These approaches have many proven advantages, but also potentially serious drawbacks due to the level of decomposition they impose on the design problem. For example, many assumptions are made in order to decompose the design tasks into modules for each team member, and these assumptions may not be valid for all design problems. This award supports fundamental research to generate knowledge about how the "fit" between the technical decomposition (the problem being solved) and the organizational decomposition (people and tasks) impacts the quality of the design process. The results will enable design organizations to make better informed choices about how to deploy concurrent design approaches, such as when these tools apply and when they do not, and how to use them well even when the technical and organizational decompositions are slightly mismatched. The resultant gains in design efficiency would have implications for many sectors of the economy that depend on engineering design and innovation. In addition, this research involves several disciplines including aerospace and systems engineering, organization design, and qualitative research methods; this approach will foster multi-disciplinary research and engineering education.The objective of this research is to generate knowledge about how the lack of "fit" between a design organization's imposed decomposition and the problem's natural decomposition affect the speed and characteristics of the design process. The research will focus on understanding the nature of "fit," developing a framework for measuring it, identifying the types of problems that arise in the design process due to this lack of "fit," and explaining the mechanisms by which they arise. Current research in this area is limited by measurement challenges and limited empirical evidence. This research will address these limitations through an empirical study of the concurrent design team at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The research will be conducted through an in-depth observational process study of multiple concurrent design sessions. The design process will be observed, its key characteristics measured, and the technical and organizational decompositions will be recorded, so that the impact of the decompositions' "fit" on the design process characteristics can be evaluated and its drivers explained.

工程系统正变得越来越复杂，因此，它们的设计难度也越来越大。有效的设计需要在设计的每次迭代中快速引入不同的专业知识。这两个目标——更快的设计周期和更好的跨学科集成——可以通过基于模型的并发设计方法实现。这些方法将多名专家聚集在一个房间里，在一系列简短的设计会议中创建一个设计，它们被广泛应用于某些领域，例如航天器设计。这些方法有许多已被证明的优点，但由于它们对设计问题的分解程度，也有潜在的严重缺点。例如，为了将设计任务分解为每个团队成员的模块而做出了许多假设，并且这些假设可能不适用于所有设计问题。该奖项支持基础研究，以产生关于技术分解（正在解决的问题）和组织分解（人员和任务）之间的“契合”如何影响设计过程质量的知识。结果将使设计组织能够做出关于如何部署并发设计方法的更明智的选择，例如何时应用这些工具，何时不应用，以及如何在技术和组织分解略有不匹配的情况下很好地使用它们。设计效率的提高将对依赖工程设计和创新的许多经济部门产生影响。此外，本研究涉及多个学科，包括航空航天与系统工程、组织设计和定性研究方法；这种方法将促进多学科研究和工程教育。本研究的目的是产生关于设计组织的强制分解和问题的自然分解之间缺乏“契合”如何影响设计过程的速度和特征的知识。研究将集中于理解“契合度”的本质，开发一个衡量它的框架，确定由于缺乏“契合度”而在设计过程中出现的问题类型，并解释它们产生的机制。目前在这一领域的研究受到测量挑战和有限的经验证据的限制。本研究将通过对美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室并行设计团队的实证研究来解决这些局限性。本研究将通过多个并行设计会议的深入观察过程研究来进行。将观察设计过程，测量其关键特征，并记录技术和组织分解，以便可以评估分解“适合”对设计过程特征的影响，并解释其驱动因素。

项目成果

Designing Representative Model Worlds to Study Socio-Technical Phenomena: A Case Study of Communication Patterns in Engineering Systems Design

• DOI: 10.1115/1.4048295
• 发表时间: 2020-12
• 期刊: Journal of Mechanical Design
• 影响因子: 3.3
• 作者: Ashish M. Chaudhari;E. Gralla;Z. Szajnfarber;P. Grogan;Jitesh H. Panchal