Complexity in Product Development

当公司为了更具竞争力而增加产品多样性、引入新技术或建立发展合作伙伴关系时，它们面临着日益增长的产品和工艺复杂性。如果管理不好，复杂性会拖累新产品开发(NPD)的绩效，并可能导致项目失败。尽管公司努力提高生产率，但生产率管理很少考虑日益增加的复杂性。复杂性源于众多元素及其众多关系，例如正在开发的产品组件之间、开发这些组件的活动之间以及合作伙伴和从事这些活动的人员之间。研究目标是调查产品复杂性如何影响新产品开发。它将考虑产品要素和新产品开发过程任务之间的相互依存关系，并将重点放在对信息(知识)的明确交换进行建模上。这项研究将调查产品变更如何影响新产品开发过程，以更好地处理复杂性的增加以及用于管理增加的复杂性的新组织结构。重要的是要了解引爆点，在那里，复杂性的增加足以导致新产品开发流程的变化，然后是组织结构的变化。还将开发衡量产品和流程复杂性的指标，以深入了解是什么推动了复杂性。将创建用于航空航天开发的典型项目工作分解结构(WBS)的计算机模型和模拟，以了解产品复杂性增加对新产品开发过程的影响以及缓解协调机制的影响。这些模型将显示产品知识与其对新产品开发过程和组织结构的影响之间的关系。数据将从航空航天公司获得，以建立模型。指标和模型将通过对航空航天公司的新产品开发流程的调查来验证。预计研究结果将受到极好的欢迎，这将意味着更好地设计新产品开发过程和管理项目，从而提高生产率。

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.