Project task coordination and team organization in concurrent engineering

In concurrent engineering, project tasks generally require the establishment of multifunctional teams to simultaneously consider various activities throughout the entire product life cycle. This concurrent strategy increases the complexity of product development and design process and makes teams difficult to organize. Without an effective task coordination and team organization, the lack of communication and cooperation among team members in a large group of tasks could seriously delay the project completion. As the current literature does not offer integrated solutions to overcome these difficulties, this research aims to model both project tasks and team members and to assign the project tasks to the right team members. To accomplish these, we develop an integrated methodological framework that includes three major components: a project task model, a team member model and a task-member assignment model. The project task model identifies the complex task structure of the project with independent, dependent, and interdependent tasks. The team member model provides a quantitative representation scheme for three important team member characteristics, namely functional knowledge, teamwork capability and working relationship. Based on the structure of project tasks and the characteristics of team members, the task-member assignment model accomplishes the ultimate goal of this research—assign the right team members to the right tasks. The effectiveness of the developed methodology is demonstrated by an illustrative example throughout the three models.; This research tackles one important yet largely ignored area in concurrent engineering—project team organization, which is the first step in project management. While tasks and teams are treated separately in existing research, the methodological framework integrates task coordination and team organization in the task-member assignment with a set of quantitative methods for modeling tasks and team members. The developed quantitative measurement of task couplings not only clearly identifies project task structure, but also facilitates the decomposition of large task groups into small and manageable sizes. Further, the ratings of member expertise, teamwork capability and their collegiality help establish a successful multifunctional team. Consequently, concurrent engineering projects can be completed with improved management of valuable technical expertise and human resource.