Identifying Core Teams in Product Development Organizational Networks from the Perspectives of Dependency and Similarity

Abstract

In product development (PD) projects, coordinating the complex patterns of technical dependency among is a fundamental challenge. Many models of product development are concerned with managing the decomposition and integration of teams. However, identifying who lead to wider spreading of influence in organization networks has practical value. In our proposed approach, we build structural models to capture the technical communication dependencies among via the extended multi-domain matrix (EMDM). Then, we select the most influential core teams from modularized organizational network by the modified LeaderRank algorithm. We propose the similarity index as a measure of the local importance of team and comprehensively consider the local importance and global importance of the team in the organizational network. Finally, we link the results to recommendations for the management of complex PD organizational networks.