Complexity in Product Development

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Companies are faced with rising product and process complexity when they increase product diversity, introduce new technology, or establish partnerships for development in order to be more competitive. Complexity, if not well managed, is a drag on new product development (NPD) performance and can lead to project failure. Although companies strive to improve productivity, increasing complexity is rarely taken into account in productivity management. Complexity arises from numerous elements and their multitude of relationships, such as between the components of the product being developed, between the activities to develop them, and among the partners and people doing the activities. The research goal is to investigate how product complexity affects new product development. It will consider the interdependence of product elements and NPD process tasks, and it will focus on modelling the explicit exchange of information (knowledge). The research will investigate how product change influences NPD process to better handle increases in complexity as well as new organizational structures that are used to manage the added complexity. It is important to understand the tipping points where an increase in complexity is great enough to cause changes in NPD processes and then organizational structures. Metrics will also be developed to measure complexity in products and processes to get insight into what drives complexity. Computer models and simulations of a typical project work breakdown structure (WBS) used in aerospace development will be created to learn the impact of increasing product complexity on NPD processes and the effects of mitigating coordination mechanisms. These models will show the relationship between product knowledge and its effect on NPD process and organizational structure. Data will be obtained from aerospace companies to build models. Metrics and models will be validated by investigation of NPD processes in the aerospace companies. It is anticipated that there should be an excellent reception to research results, which will mean better design of NPD processes and management of projects with ensuing productivity increases.