Measuring organizational responses to stress: A longitudinal study of product development task networks

This paper uses Network Analysis (NA) to study task interactions in a product development process (PDP). It explores the impact of significant organizational stress on changing information flow patterns in the PDP at a small engineering company. The analysis identifies structured patterns of centralization, role specialization, and formalized control in the PDP. This validates themes from organizational behavior and quality management literature regarding how organizations change in response to stress. These trends are difficult to uncover with Systems Engineering techniques such as the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and N2 method. The results offer several findings. First, reducing variation in task outputs is an understandable approach to controlling a PDP. However, it is important to reduce variation in task inputs as well. Second, tasks, like people, can have varying roles and burdens in terms of how they share information. Companies that want to support multiple concurrent projects must make sure their PDP tasks have an appropriate distribution of labor. Finally, transitivity can identify both valuable and ineffective iteration among groups of tasks. This provides a metric of effective concurrency in a PDP.