Modifying organization design and development process to mitigate project delay in microprocessor product development

Abstract

In today's engineering project management, there is no lack of strategies to plan and assign task items to reduce the overall project timeline. However, as the product gets more complicated and organization gets much larger, the implementation of those strategies becomes the real challenge. Operational issues such as the objectives alignment across teams, transparent and consistent vertical and horizontal communications, and unexpected requirements changes are becoming causative factors for project delay. These issues are seen particularly often in microprocessor product development. Besides its high technology complexity, microprocessor development involves huge uncertainties, frequent changes, closely coupled inter-team efforts, and iterative design processes. The cost of microprocessor project delay is huge, not only because the development process is capital intensive, but also because the demand is technology sensitive-a project delay of several months could keep a product from entering the market and kill the project. As the design process gets more matured in this industry, firms are competing on execution. This thesis argues that a great amount of execution delay comes from organizational barriers, a lack of organizational processes in situations of exception and uncertainty management and the inadequate incentive system that aligns the interests of the project with its team. The author evaluated the effectiveness of the traditional organization structure and other standard structures for this industry, and proposed an innovative hybrid organization structure, a structure that is highly leveraged, robust, scalable and efficient. A thorough comparison of the proposed organization with the traditional ones is conducted with the system tools such as Design Structure Matrix, and System Dynamics models.