The virtual design team

Abstract

payers, many private and public organizations now reengineer their organizations ro improve tiieir products or services and ro reduce time between receipt of a new order and delivery of a requested product or service to a satisfied customer. When managers change existing work processes to reduce schedules dramatically, interdependent activities that were previously performed sequentially must then be performed concurrently. Organization theory predicts that coordination ot concurrent interdependent activities is significantly more difficult and costly than coordination of the same activities performed sequentially. Yet traditional organization theory can predict neither the magnitude nor the specific actors and activities that require incremental coordination, even though coordination load and rework can grow exponentially as there is greater concurrency of complex, interdependent activities performed in parallel.In contrast with today's empirical approach to the Virtual Design Team (VDT) project is that mandeveloping organizations, engineers have long agers should design organizations the same way engidesigned artifacts such as bridges and airplanes using neers design bridges: by building and analyzing computational models. The engineer models a design computational models of planned organizations and in the computer, analyzes it, changes it, and only after the processes that they support. the design is well understood is it finalized and Our approach in the VDT project [6] is to extend released for construction or manufacture. The vision of organization theory so it considers individual organi- 84November 1998/Vol. 41. NQ II COMHUNICATIONS OF T>1E ACM

Defense AR Journal, Volume 15, Number 1, April 2008

“…According to Kunz, Christiansen, Cohen, Jin, and Levitt (1998), Galbraith (1977) asserts that organizations possess limited abilities to process exceptions. Exceptions occur when local knowledge or authority is insufficient to deal with the information processing requirements, and personnel need advice or direction to accomplish their assigned tasks.…”

3DIR: three-dimensional information retrieval from 3D building information modelling environments

“…This approach lies at the intersection of four academic fields: (1) BIM and CAD, (2) information retrieval, (3) information visualisation and (4) human cognition and how particular strengths can be exploited. [16]) and construction (Koo and Fischer [17]) and the organizations (i.e., teams and individuals) that execute those processes (Kunz et al [18]). In addition, building information modelling is not limited to the design and construction phases but can be extended to cover the entire life cycle of constructed facilities, from briefing/programming, through design, to facilities management and even disposal.…”

A generic architecture for redesign of organizations triggered by changing environmental circumstances

“…SimVision (see e.g. [28,29]), also called the Virtual Design Team, is meant to study project organizations and investigate how interdependencies between activities impose requirements on coordination within an organization. It can be used to investigate how the design of an organization and the communication tools change the overall performance, and the coordination capacity of the organization or team.…”

“…SimVision [28,29], OrgAhead [38,39], Blanche [33], and PluralSoar [32]. Such simulations can give an indication what type of organization can be suitable given a certain type of requirement imposed on the organization.…”