The Misalignment of Product Architecture and Organizational Structure in Complex Product Development

Abstract

Product architecture knowledge is typically embedded in the communication patterns of established development organizations. While this enables the development of products using the existing architecture, it hinders the organization's ability to implement novel architectures, especially for complex products. Structured methods addressing this issue are lacking, as previous research has studied complex product development from two separate perspectives: product architecture and organizational structure. Our research integrates these viewpoints with a structured approach to study how design interfaces in the product architecture map onto communication patterns within the development organization. We investigate how organizational and system boundaries, design interface strength, indirect interactions, and system modularity impact the alignment of design interfaces and team interactions. We hypothesize and test how these factors explain the existence of the following cases: (1) known design interfaces not addressed by team interactions, and (2) observed team interactions not predicted by design interfaces. Our results offer important insights to managers dealing with interdependences across organizational and functional boundaries. In particular, we show how boundary effects moderate the impact of design interface strength and indirect team interactions, and are contingent on system modularity. The research uses data collected from a large commercial aircraft engine development process.product architecture, product development organizations, technical communication, design structure matrix, statistical network analysis

The architecture of transaction networks: a comparative analysis of hierarchy in two sectors

“…In engineering, a square Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is often used to examine the dependencies between design elements or communication linkages between designers (Eppinger et al, 1994;Sosa et al, 2004;MacCormack et al, 2006). Generalizing these procedures, we used a square DSM to examine the pattern of linkages between firms in the two transaction networks.…”

Object Salience in the Division of Labor: Experimental Evidence

“…However, for novel and non-repetitive problems of division of labor, boundedly rational agents may seldom if ever find it ex ante obvious whether the gains from specialization outweigh the gains from customization. Indeed the true extent of decomposability of the underlying task structure or the final product may be unknown (Eppinger 2001;Ethiraj and Levinthal 2004;Sosa, Eppinger and Rowles 2004). Therefore, we argue, basic tendencies in how human minds collectively and individually represent and partition their world may be relevant in understanding how a basis for clustering tasks is arrived at.…”

“…Tests of the mirroring hypothesis have been conducted both in the intra-firm (e.g. Sosa 2004) and inter-firm context.…”

Coordination Implications of Software Coupling in Open Source Projects

“…Sosa et al [4] find a "strong tendency for design interactions and team interactions to be aligned," and show instances of misalignment are more likely to occur across organizational and system boundaries. Sullivan et al [17] use DSMs to formally model (and value) the concept of information hiding, the principle proposed by Parnas to divide designs into modules [1].…”

“…It is therefore essential for an Open Source project Manager to understand the changing coordination requirements in Open Source software in order to ensure successful coordination. While the coordination implication of software coupling has been suggested by various researchers [2][3][4][5], there has been little research done on the effect of the change in coupling on the coordination requirements of developers. Such research is especially important in the Open Source context, where the distributed and generally ad-hoc nature of development makes coordination of the development challenging.…”