Applying the design structure matrix and critical chain methodologies to a technology-development project

Abstract

In today's global economy, enterprises must develop higher-quality products at -an ever-increasing pace to remain competitive. This need drives project managers to seek new ways to organize and manage their development projects. Two means by which the cycle time of projects may be reduced are the Design Structure Matrix and Critical Chain methodologies. The Design Structure Matrix is a representation that makes explicit the dependencies between project tasks and in so doing clarifies how the tasks may be sequenced to avoid unnecessary, time-wasting iterations. The Critical Chain is a project-scheduling and -management methodology that recognizes that each project task is subject to uncertainty and accommodates that uncertainty in a way that protects the completion date of the project and hence minimizes its duration. While application of these techniques individually to product-development . projects has been reported in the literature, there are no reports of their application either together or to technology-development projects. That they have not been applied together is surprising, because the two methods complement each other. That they have not been applied to technology-development projects is surprising, too, because such projects have many similarities to product-development projects, and the same modern needs for cycle-time reduction. Accordingly, this thesis examines the feasibility of the application of the Design Structure Matrix and Critical Chain methodologies together to a technology-development project. The project is a four-month-long subproject of a magnetic-recording technology-development project, involving five people from two different organizations in the same company and an extern.al supplier. The major finding of the thesis work is that it is feasible to apply the two techniques together to a technology-development project-but to do so requires a high level of flexibility on the part of the Project Manager. Additional findings include guidelines for: creating the Design Structure Matrix as a team; choosing team members on the basis of their ability to implement the Critical Chain principles; and dealing with the constant flux in the task list that is inherent in technology development.