Identifying and managing coordination complexity in global product development project

Abstract The complexity of communication and coordination stemming from teams distributed across geographic locations and time zones is a fundamental feature of the global product development (GPD) project. The GPD project is also a complex web of interactions involving many overlapped activities and interdependent components. In order to manage coordination complexity, this paper presents a systematic method for identifying and measuring coordination drivers and coordination barriers in GPD projects. For characterizing coordination drivers, this paper builds quantitative models to measure dependency strengths related to product features and overlapped processes based on Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM) and Design Structure Matrix (DSM). For characterizing coordination barriers, the concepts of daily overlapping working hours ratio and relative spatial distance between GPD teams are presented for modeling dependency strengths related to temporal separation and spatial distance. Further, this paper proposes a new dependency rating scheme of organization DSM to evaluate the integrated coordinative dependency strength (ICDS). A two-stage clustering criteria minimizing the total coordination cost is used to reduce complexity of GPD organization. An industrial example is provided to illustrate the proposed models. Optimization results provide a more integrated managerial insight for evaluating ICDS and reducing total coordination cost.