A project task coordination model for team organization in concurrent engineering

In a concurrent engineering environment, product design needs to simultaneously consider various downstream activities throughout the entire product life cycle, in addition to meeting the functional requirements of the products. To accomplish this, multifunctional design teams are organized with team members from different functional departments interacting in every phase of development tasks. However, without proper task coordination and team organization, communication and cooperation among a large number of dependent or interdependent tasks and team members could seriously delay project completion. This calls for the intention of this research to study the underlying structure of the project tasks. The objectives of this research are: (1) to develop a project task coordination model that identifies the sequence of all project tasks and reveals the underlying structure of the design process; (2) to decompose large interdependent task groups into smaller and manageable task groups by transforming the binary form of task relationships into the quantifiable task coupling strength and (3) to provide a structural foundation for the efficient team organization in concurrent engineering. Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is used to represent relationship among project tasks. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), as a multi-criteria decision analysis, is employed to quantify the binary DSM. The effectiveness of this model is demonstrated by an illustrative example. The result shows that our proposed model is not only capable of coordinating the entire project tasks but also helpful in organizing project teams.