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

工程系统正变得越来越复杂，因此，它们的设计也变得更加困难。有效的设计需要迅速将不同的专业知识运用到设计的每一次迭代中。这两个目标--更快的设计周期和更好的跨学科集成--由基于模型的并行设计方法实现。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上创建设计，它们在某些领域被广泛使用，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施加的分解程度，也可能存在严重的缺点。例如，为了将设计任务分解为每个团队成员的模块，需要进行许多假设，这些假设可能并不适用于所有设计问题。该奖项支持基础研究，以生成有关技术分解(正在解决的问题)和组织分解(人员和任务)之间的“契合度”如何影响设计过程质量的知识。结果将使设计组织能够就如何部署并行设计方法做出更明智的选择，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。由此带来的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，这项研究涉及航空航天和系统工程、组织设计和定性研究方法等多个学科，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知识，了解设计组织的强制分解和问题的自然分解之间的不匹配如何影响设计过程的速度和特征。研究的重点将是理解“匹配”的性质，开发一个衡量它的框架，确定由于缺乏“匹配”而在设计过程中出现的问题的类型，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。这项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经验研究来解决这些限制。研究将通过对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，以便评估分解对设计过程特征的影响，并解释其驱动因素。

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.