THE MEANING AND COHERENCE OF PROCESS, ORGANISATION AND PRODUCT IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

Real design processes show a qualitative discrepancy to planned processes. There is also a large gap between processes and organisation structures. Understanding of product development as a complex social system, with a system theory background, gives insights into this issue. It seems that communic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of integrated design & process science Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 55 - 66
Main Authors Pulm, Udo, Clarkson, John
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 2005
Subjects
complex systems
process and organisation
product development
system theory
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Summary:Real design processes show a qualitative discrepancy to planned processes. There is also a large gap between processes and organisation structures. Understanding of product development as a complex social system, with a system theory background, gives insights into this issue. It seems that communication is more important than a controlled and transparent process. A dynamic organisa-tion with self-organising teams seems to be the more appropriate approach for process management in product development. Communication partly takes place via money. We will discuss why money cannot be used as a measure for process quality yet, but how it could be used. The paper also gives an impression how signposting and design structure matrices (DSMs) can contribute to this approach.
ISSN:1092-0617
1875-8959
DOI:10.3233/JID-2005-9105