An integrated methodological framework for project task coordination and team organization in concurrent engineering

Abstract

Complex products or projects with long development times always involve multiple disciplines and a great deal of effort. Especially in concurrent engineering, the design needs to simultaneously consider various downstream activities throughout the entire product life cycle. To accomplish this, tasks in the concurrent engineering environment generally involve multifunctional teams in which team members from different functional departments interact in every phase of development tasks. However, as products become more complex, so do the design process and the project teams. This will inevitably degrade team performance when the team size becomes too large to handle. Moreover, to ensure a successful multifunctional team, it is also important to understand the characteristics of team members that affect team performance. Thus, an efficient multifunctional team can be established with all the right team members being assigned. The objective of this research is to develop an integrated methodological framework for project task coordination and team organization from the concurrent engineering perspective in order to assign the right team members to the right tasks. The framework includes three models: (1) a project task model to understand the complex task structure of the project; (2) a team member model to provide a quantitative representation of three important team member characteristics; and (3) a task-member assignment model to accomplish the research goal - assign the right team members to the right tasks. The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated by an illustrative example. The result shows that the proposed integrated framework is capable of coordinating the project tasks and helpful in organizing project teams. © 2005 Sage Publications.