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，它们更难设计。有效的设计需要快速地将不同的专业知识应用于设计的每次迭代。这两个目标-更快的设计周期和更好的跨学科集成-是基于模型的并行设计方法。这些方法将多位专家聚集在一个房间里，通过一系列简短的设计会议来创建设计，并且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，但也有潜在的严重缺陷，由于他们对设计问题的分解水平。例如，为了将设计任务分解为每个团队成员的模块，做出了许多假设，并且这些假设可能对所有设计问题都无效。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“适合”如何影响设计过程质量的知识。研究结果将使设计组织能够更好地选择如何部署并行设计方法，例如这些工具何时适用，何时不适用，以及如何使用它们，即使在技术和组织分解略有不匹配的情况下。由此产生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，本研究涉及航空航天与系统工程、组织设计、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。这项研究的目标是产生关于缺乏“适合”设计组织的强制分解和问题的自然分解之间的关系影响设计过程的速度和特性。该研究将侧重于理解“适合”的性质，制定一个框架来衡量它，确定在设计过程中出现的问题，由于这种缺乏“适合”的类型，并解释它们出现的机制。目前在这一领域的研究是有限的测量挑战和有限的经验证据。本研究将通过对美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室的并行设计团队的实证研究来解决这些局限性。该研究将通过对多个并行设计会话进行深入的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，以便可以评估分解对设计过程特征的“适合性”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.