Virtual Design Team Research Articles

Computational Modeling of Organizations Comes of Age

As they are maturing—i.e., as they are becoming validated, calibrated and refined—computational emulation models of organizations are evolving into: powerful new kinds of organizational design tools for predicting and mitigating organizational riskss and flexible new kinds of organizational theorem-provers for validating extant organization theory and developing new theory. Over the past 50 years, computational modeling and simulation have had enormous impacts on the rate of advancement of knowledge in fields like physics, chemistry and, more recently, biologys and their subsequent application has enabled whole new areas of engineering practice. In the same way, as our young discipline comes of age, computational organizational models are beginning to impact behavioral, organizational and economic science, and management consulting practice. This paper attempts to draw parallels between computational modeling in natural sciences and computational modeling of organizations as a contributor to both social science and management practice. To illustrate the lifecycle of a computational organizational model that is now relatively mature, this paper traces the evolution of the Virtual Design Team (VDT) computational modeling and simulation research project at Stanford University from its origins in 1988 to the present. It lays out the steps in the process of validating VDT as a “computational emulation” model of organizations to the point that VDT began to influence management practice and, subsequently, to advance organizational science. We discuss alternate research trajectories that can be taken by computational and mathematical modelers who prefer the typical natural science validation trajectory—i.e., who attempt to impact organizational science first and, perhaps subsequently, to impact management practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the current state-of-the-art of computational modeling of organizations and some thoughts about where, and how rapidly, the field is headed.

INTEnD: A Dispersed, Virtual Engineering Design Team Approach to Globalize Engineering Education

In 1998 at a meeting in the Netherlands with a group of international engineering educators from TU Delft, University of Utrecht, Eindhoven University and Kaiserslautern University, the INTEnD Program (International Networked Teams for Engineering Design) was created. The INTEnD program links multidisciplinary research groups from participating institutions from around the world for the purpose of studying and practicing how dispersed engineering product design teams can function more effectively. Issues of leadership, power, trust, language, time differences, cultural differences, communication and education differences pose critical barriers to the dispersed teams in addition to the many technical issues that the engineering design process normally poses on a design team.

Collaborative product definition on the Internet: a case study

ProDefine is a synchronised system that has been developed to support early product definition on the Internet. By using the system, a virtual design team can work collaboratively through the web. This paper evaluates the ProDefine system using a meaningful case study. The case study is concerned with the conceptual design of injection moulding machines.

5.4.2 Understanding Enterprise Behaviour: A Feasibility Study

AbstractThis paper describes work conducted as a joint collaboration between the Virtual Design Team (VDT) research group at Stanford University (USA)1, the Systems Engineering Group (SEG) at De Montfort University (UK) and Elipsis Ltd2. We describe a new docking methodology in which we combine the use of two radically different types of organizational simulation tool. The VDT simulation tool operates on a standalone computer, and employs computational agents during simulated execution of a pre‐defined process model (Kunz, 1998). The other software tool, DREAMS3, operates over a standard TCP/IP network, and employs human agents (real people) during a simulated execution of a pre‐defined process model (Clegg, 2000).This docking study was conducted to develop a supporting tool‐set for the concept of Enterprise Systemics, an approach designed to address the increasing commercial volatility of enterprises. It has been funded by the PISCES network project4, which has drawn together a cross‐disciplinary resource for comprehending the dynamics of the extended enterprise.

CAIRO: a concurrent engineering meeting environment for virtual design teams

This paper presents the software architecture for a next generation concurrent engineering environment that helps geographically separated designers and engineers to collaborate effectively. The paper highlights research in computer-supported collaboration work (CSCW) based on various models of group interaction, social communication theory, negotiation theory and distributed artificial intelligence concepts. The paper describes CAIRO (Collaborative Agent Interaction and synchROnization) system, a distributed conferencing architecture for managing designers and engineers in a distributed design meeting. The CAIRO system allows designers and engineers to work together in virtual teams by supporting multi-media interactions over computer networks. CAIRO aids the concurrent engineering effort by relaxing the physical, temporal and organizational constraints experienced in traditional design meeting environments. CAIRO provides both media synchronization, i.e. ensuring that all information exchanged between users is synchronized, and agent synchronization, i.e. ensuring effective structuring and control of a distributed conference. This paper also details the prototype CAIRO system with a detailed example, illustrating its use in concurrent design settings.

Simulating Project Work Processes and Organizations: Toward a Micro-Contingency Theory of Organizational Design

The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith's (1973) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-level information processing, communication, and coordination behavior of participants in a project organization and predicts several measures of participant and project-level performance. VDT-1 (Cohen 1991) and VDT-2 (Christiansen 1993) modeled project organizations containing actors with perfectly congruent goals engaged in complex but routine engineering design work within static organization structures. VDT-3 extends the VDT-2 work process representation to include measures of activity flexibility, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence strength. It explicitly models the effects of goal incongruency between agents on their information processing and communication behavior while executing more flexible tasks. These extensions allow VDT to model more flexible organizations executing less routine work processes. VDT thus bridges rigorously between cognitive and social psychological micro-organization theory and sociological and economic macro-organization theory for project teams. VDT-3 has been used to model and simulate the design of two major subsystems of a complex satellite launch vehicle. This case study provides initial evidence that the micro-contingency theory embodied in VDT-3 can be used to predict organizational breakdowns, and to evaluate alternative organizational changes to mitigate identified risks. VDT thus supports true “organizational engineering” for project teams.

The virtual design team

The long range goal of the Virtual Design Team (VDT) research program is to develop computational tools to analyze decision making and communication behavior and thereby to support true organizational (re)engineering. This article introduces the underlying theory, the implementation of the theory as a computational model, and results from industrial test cases. Organization theory traditionally describes organizations only at an aggregate-level, describing and predicting the behavior of entire organizations in terms of general qualitative predictions. We define and implement a micro theory of the structure and behavior of components of organizations, explicitly representing activities, groups of people called actors, and organizational structure and policies for project teams. A VDT model can be run by a discrete event simulation. Emergent aggregate model output behaviors include the predicted time to complete a project, the total effort to do the project, and a measure of process quality. More detailed model behaviors include the time-varying backlog of individual actors and the exceptions associated with activities. The results are detailed and specific, so they can guide specific managerial interventions in a project team and can support sensitivity studies of the relative impact of different organizational changes. We conclude that such a theory is tractable and predictive for complex but relatively routine, project-oriented design tasks. The application for which VDT offers unique new kinds of insights is where an organization is striving to shrink time to market dramatically for a product that is similar to ones it has previously developed. Reducing time to market dramatically almost always requires that previously sequential activities are executed more concurrently. In this situation, experienced managers can still correctly identify the required activities and estimate their durations and skill requirements; but they almost always underestimate the increased workload arising from exponentially higher coordination needs and the propagation of rework between the now highly concurrent activities. The VDT framework, which explicitly models information dependency and failure propagation between concurrent activities, has proven to be far more accurate, and to incorporate a wider range of parameters, than CPM/PERT process models for these fast-paced development projects.

Representing Medical Protocols for Organizational Simulation: An Information-Processing Approach

Organizational simulations have been used in business, manufacturing, and engineering design tasks to gain insight into organizational process bottlenecks, and to improve the quality and efficiency of processes within these industries. As market pressures demand increased efficiencies within the health care industry, organizational simulation techniques could provide similar insight into the design of better medical care processes, or protocols, in medical organizations. To simulate the process of medical care within a specific organization however, requires models that can represent (1) unpredictable patient responses to care, (2) the flexibility needed to adapt to different patients, and (3) different preferences of health care professionals and the implicit preferences contained within the protocol. Using previous work on simulation in the Virtual Design Team (VDT), and an example protocol drawn from an existing protocol in bone marrow transplantation, we describe extensions to the VDT information-processing representation that will allow us to simulate the performance characteristics of a medical protocol used within a medical organization. Our representational extensions capture the uncertainty of medical care for patients, the activity flexibility within the organization, and the preferences of health care professionals that will make information-processing organizational simulations in the medical domain possible. We believe our representation will provide a robust simulation “tool box” that can be used to investigate the performance of specific medical protocols within different hospital settings, and explore organizational theory within the health care industry.

Modeling and Simulation in Enterprise Integration—A Framework and an Application in the Offshore Oil Industry

This paper presents a framework and methodology that make systematic use of model definition formalization and analysis to en hance enterprise integration in engineering projects Our definition of enterprise models is based on a philosophy for thinking about enterprise in terms of 'an Organization carrying out a set of Processes to create one or more Products which satisfy predefined Objectives " This frame work, which we have denoted the OPPO, illustrates our belief that enterprise models must give a complete and correct description of relevant aspects of reality in order to address their stated purpose Based on the OPPO framework and an information processing view of project enter prise, we formalize our models using a methodology for describing coordination requirements This is based on a set of interaction matrices to develop so called ' houses of complexity, uncertainty and interdependence ' that describe important dependencies between project require ments (objectives), deliverables (products), activities (process) and team members (organization) We use these dependencies as a basis for deriving measures of the coordination which must take place between various project participants during project execution We can then use these coordination requirements as input to analysis, in the Virtual Design Team (VDT) object oriented discrete event simulation environment The simulation results can be used for systematically assessing predicted effects of proposed changes The framework methodology and analysis is illustrated by an example from engineering design of subsea modules for oil and gas production in offshore field development The results from simulation give various performance measures, including critical path duration, work volume (a substitute for cost), and process performance in coordination (error handling and communication attendance)

The virtual design team: A computational model of project organizations

Large scale and multidisciplinary engineering projects (e.g., design of a hospital building) are often complex. They usually involve many interdependent activities and require intensive coordination among actors (i.e., designers) to deal with activity interdependencies. To make such projects more effective and efficient, one needs to understand how coordination requirements are generated and what coordination mechanisms should be applied for given project situations. Our research on the Virtual Design Team (VDT) attempts to develop a computational model of project organizations to analyze how activity interdependencies raise coordination needs and how organization design and communication tools change team coordination capacity and project performance. The VDT model is built based on contingency theory (Galbraith, 1977) and our observations about collaborative and multidisciplinary work in large, complex projects. VDT explicitly models actors, activities, communication tools and organizations. Based on our extended information-processing view of organizations, VDT simulates the actions of, and interactions among actors as processes of attention allocation, capacity allocation, and communication. VDT evaluates organization performance by measuring emergent project duration, direct cost, and coordination quality. The VDT model has been tested internally, and evaluated externally through case-studies. We found three way qualitative consistency among predictions of the simulation model, of organization theory, and of experienced project managers. In this paper, we present the VDT model in detail and discuss some general issues involved in computational organization modeling, including level of abstraction of tasks and actors' reasoning, and model validation.

The Virtual Design Team: Modeling organizational behavior of concurrent design teams

AbstractConcurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and the related processes of manufacturing and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from concept through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements. To achieve successful concurrent-engineering design, one needs an integrated framework, a well-organized design team, and adequate design tools. The research on concurrent engineering to date has focused on developing communication infrastructure, design tools, and product data representations. Little attention has been paid to developing tools to address the organizational issues involved in concurrent engineering. The authors’ research on the Virtual Design Team (VDT) attempts to develop a computerized analysis tool to sup-port the systematic design of organization structures for concurrent engineering projects. VDT is a computer simulation system. It takes descriptions of design tasks, actors (i.e., designers and managers), and organization structure as input, and produces predicted historical records of the actors’ design and coordination behavior, project du-ration, cost, and design process quality as output. VDT has been applied to model more than ten realistic engineering projects, and the results are qualitatively consistent with the predictions from theory and project managers. The VDT framework for modeling concurrent-engineering teams is described, and examples of VDT applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Virtual Design Team approach to modeling the organizational behavior of concurrent design teams.

The Virtual Design Team: A Computer Simulation Framework for Studying Organizational Aspects of Concurrent Design

Successful concurrent design requires a well organized design team. Without analysis tools for organization design, managers must rely on their experience or trial-and-error, rather on systematic generation and evaluation of alternatives, to design their organizations. The goal of the Virtual Design Team (VDT) research project is to develop computerized analysis tools to support the sys tema tic design of organ iza tion structures for complex, project-oriented tasks. The Virtual Design Team is a computational discrete event simulation model that incorporates qualitative reasoning concepts derived from Artificial Intelligence research. VDT explicitly incorporates information processing and communication models from organization theory and allows qualitative predictions of organizational performance. VDT's behavior has been validated extensively for internal consistency. We have also validated that its behavior compares well with theoretical predictions about, and the observed behavior of, real design project teams for petrochemical refinery, offshore oil systems, and power plant construction projects.