In‐House Globalization: The Role of Globally Distributed Design and Product Architecture on Product Development Performance

Changes in the global economy and technological advances are stimulating increased geographic distribution of new product design and development efforts. For large organizations that design and develop complex products, this geographic distribution has added a new layer of complexity to product development operations. In this empirical study of a large auto manufacturer, we examine the operational performance implications of splitting the design of vehicle subsystems across multiple geographic locations. Our results indicate that global distribution diminishes the chance of completing tasks on time and degrades subsystem design quality. Finally, by examining the interplay between subsystem centrality and global distribution, we found that higher centrality in the product architecture amplifies the impact of global distribution on subsystem error rates.     

科技类评审中项目选择的两阶段综合集成方法

科技类评审中,如何合理地选择出若干优秀项目加以资助或激励至关重要。本文研究了科技类评审中的项目选择问题,指出在目前通行的两阶段评议法中存在通讯评议阶段的决策信息不能有效传递到会议评议阶段的情况,应采用适当的方法将两个阶段专家给出的评价信息进行综合处理,以得到更为合理的项目评审结果,进而给出了两阶段综合集成的框架与具体方法。算例表明,可以更充分的利用两阶段的专家评价信息,得到满意的选择结果。     

基于企业并购的整合管理研究

本文对企业并购中的整合管理进行了深入的探讨,对整合模式、如何对整合本身进行项目管理、整合内容与整合的方法等问题阐述了作者的观点。     

Managing Outsourced Software Projects: An Analysis of Project Performance and Customer Satisfaction

We examine the drivers of project performance and customer satisfaction in outsourced software projects using a proprietary panel dataset. The data cover 822 customer observations related to 182 unique projects executed by an India‐based software services vendor. Adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, we investigate how project planning, team stability, and communication effectiveness impact project performance and customer satisfaction. We delineate the direct and interactive influences of the antecedent variables. We also examine how these influences are moderated by two important project contexts: (a) the nature of software work (maintenance and development vs. testing projects) and (b) project maturity (new vs. mature projects). Among other results, we demonstrate that, when project planning capabilities are high, the positive impact of team stability and communication effectiveness on project performance is even higher. In addition, our results suggest that the impact of communication on project performance is muted when team stability is high. Finally, we also demonstrate that the impact of the antecedent variables on project performance varies with the nature of software work. Our findings offer specific and actionable insights to managers that can help them manage outsourced projects better, and open up new research perspectives in the context of outsourced project management.     

Managing the Performance Trade‐Offs from Partner Integration: Implications of Contract Choice in R&D Projects

Formal contracts represent an important governance instrument with which firms exercise control of and compensate partners in R&D projects. The specific type of contract used, however, can vary significantly across projects. In some, firms' govern partnering relationships through fixed‐price contracts, whereas in others, firms' use more flexible time and materials or performance‐based contracts. How do these choices affect the costs and benefits that arise from greater levels of partner integration? Furthermore, how are these relationships affected when the choice of contract is misaligned with the scope and objectives of the partnering relationship? Our study addresses these questions using data from 172 R&D projects that involve partners. We find that, (i) greater partner integration is associated with higher project costs for all contract types; (ii) greater partner integration is associated with higher product quality only in projects that adopt more flexible time and materials or performance‐based contracts; and (iii) in projects where the choice of contract is misaligned with the scope and objectives of the partnering relationship, greater partner integration is associated with higher project costs, but not with higher product quality. Our results shed light on the subtle interplay between formal and relational contracting. They have important implications for practice, with respect to designing optimal governance structures in partnered R&D projects.     

我国科技合作项目管理机制的缺陷分析与改进对策

为解决我国科技管理部门对科技合作项目管理流于形式的问题,结合科技计划项目的发展趋势,阐述了完善科技合作项目管理机制的必要性,并通过分析指出现行管理机制中存在法律法规不健全和监控、评估机制不完善的缺陷。最后,从项目管理全过程视角提出了对科技合作项目实施科学管理及提高管理效率的对策。     

Task Design,Team Context,and Psychological Safety: An Empirical Analysis of R&D Projects in High Technology Organizations

High technology organizations need to develop new products or processes that address the dual goals of exploration and exploitation. The competing viewpoints and the asymmetric nature of market returns associated with these goals in R&D projects can heighten stress levels among project team members and reduce their psychological safety. While current research calls for greater focus on task design for improving psychological safety, we know little about how team contextual factors affect this relationship. This study develops and tests a conceptual framework that examines the moderating role of R&D team contextual factors, namely, relative exploration and project‐organization metric alignment on the relationship between a key task design variable, namely, team autonomy, and psychological safety. Relative exploration captures the extent to which exploration goals are emphasized over exploitation goals in an R&D project, while project‐organization metric alignment measures the extent to which project metrics are aligned with broader organizational metrics. Furthermore, we examine the performance consequences of psychological safety in R&D projects. The empirical analysis is conducted using primary data collected from multiple informants across 110 R&D projects in 34 high technology business units. Our results indicate that relative exploration and project‐organization metric alignment have contrasting moderating effects. Furthermore, the effect of psychological safety on project performance is found to be indirect and mediated through team turnover. Implications of the study findings, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

Distributed Development and Product Line Decisions

Distributed product development is becoming increasingly prevalent in a number of industries. We study how the global distribution of product development impacts the profit‐maximizing product line that a firm offers. Specifically, we formulate a model to understand the linkage between cost arbitrage as a driver of distributed development and consequent market implications such as customer perceived quality loss to remotely developed products. Analysis of the model reveals that a firm should expand the product line for a development‐intensive good only at intermediate values of cost advantage and quality loss. We modify the base model to include development capacity constraints as a driver of distributed development and find that the results are robust to this change. Our analysis affirms the need for product managers to incorporate the implications of distributed development in making their product line design decision.     

工程设计企业项目组织结构变革研究

根据工程设计企业的生产经营特点,通过实例分析,说明如何在工程设计企业中建立矩阵式组织结构,并就实施此种组织结构的优缺点进行分析,提出相应的改善措施和相关支撑体系。     

技术整合机制、整合能力和技术合作效果关系研究：以我国某重点汽车零配件公司为例

技术合作是发展中国家企业提升技术能力一个重要途径.而有效的技术合作和技术转移却是一个相当复杂的动态过程.技术接受方所采取的整合机制以及其自身的整合能力是影响技术合作效果的重要因素.本文以我国某重点汽车零配件企业与国外公司之间的技术合作为例,借助LISREL8.7软件进行结构方程建模,研究发现技术接受方组织所采取的整合机制以及整合能力是技术合作效果的重要影响因素.并且发现,整合能力是整合机制与技术合作效果之间的关键中介变量.     

Managing Cost Salience and Procrastination in Projects: Compensation and Team Composition

The rising trend of projects with high‐skilled and autonomous contributors increasingly exposes managers to the risk of idiosyncratic individual behaviors. In this article, we examine the effects of an important behavioral factor, an individual's cost salience. Cost salience leads individuals to perceive the cost of immediate effort to be larger than the cost of future effort. This leads to procrastination in early stages and back‐loaded effort over the course of the project. We model the problem confronting the manager of a project whose quality is adversely impacted by such distortion of individual effort over time. Complementary to prior works focused on the planning and scheduling tasks of project management in the absence of human behavior, we find that managers should reward contributions made in earlier stages of a project. Our analysis also yields interesting insights on the project team performance: teams with diverse levels of cost salience will perform better than homogeneous teams. We also address another important facet of team composition, namely, the choice between stable and fluid teams, and find that the practice of creating fluid teams might have previously unrecognized benefits when behavioral aspects of projects are considered. We conclude with insights and organizational implications for project managers.     

System Dynamics Understanding in Projects: Information Sharing,Psychological Safety,and Performance Effects

Systems thinking has proven useful in project management planning activities and has been suggested as a critical driver of a range of beneficial organizational behaviors. Yet, empirical evidence on the myriad of ways in which systems thinking can impact internal project dynamics and performance remains limited. This study focuses on one aspect of systems thinking in particular: the ability to recognize and understand the dynamics of systems and their features (e.g., feedback and delay). It makes use of a unique, large‐scale interview data set along with objective and structured survey data drawn from multiple sources associated with supply chain system implementation projects. Analysis suggests that an individual's understanding of system dynamics as well as the similarity of such understanding to that typical of their team is, in fact, a strong predictor of both perceptions of psychological safety and information sharing quality in project work. These outcomes appear to mediate the relationship between system dynamics understanding and performance.     

Beyond Make‐Buy: Internalization and Integration of Design and Production

Much recent attention in industrial practice has been centered on the question of which activities a manufacturing firm should complete for itself and for which it should rely on outside suppliers. This issue, generally labeled the “make‐buy” decision, has received substantial theoretical and empirical attention. In this paper, we broaden the scope of the make‐buy decision to include product design decisions, as well as production decisions. First, we examine independently the decisions of whether to internalize design and production, and then we consider how design and production organizational decisions are interdependent. The specific research questions we address are: (1) How can design and production sourcing decisions be described in richer terms than “make” and “buy”? (2) Do existing theories of vertical integration apply to product design activities as well as production decisions? (3) What is the relationship between the organization of design and the organization of production? (4) What organizational forms for design and production are seen in practice? After developing theoretical arguments and a conceptual framework, we explore these ideas empirically through an analysis of design and production sourcing decisions for bicycle frames in the U. S. mountain bicycle industry.     

考虑组织失效与协调的复杂产品研发项目设计变更风险传播模型

基于产品部件间的设计关联和组织产品间的镜像假设,构建一对一依赖的复杂产品研发项目组织-产品相依网络模型。在此基础上,构建考虑组织失效和组织间协调的复杂产品研发项目设计变更风险传播动力学模型,并针对由少数部件发生设计变更风险事件引发的复杂产品研发项目相依网络上的设计变更风险传播进行数值仿真。结果表明：组织失效和组织协调不足均会导致设计变更风险的积累,使得设计变更风险传播经历缓慢传播、失控传播后达到相对稳定状态;组织设计能力充足且组织间协调充分时设计变更风险传播不发生。复杂产品研发项目设计变更风险传播受到部件设计变更风险容量的显著影响,存在设计变更风险传播阈值η*3使得设计变更风险传播不发生;传播阈值η*3与初始变更源规模正相关;研发组织的冗余设计能力存在作用条件,使得传播阈值η*3保持在最低水平。研究成果完善了项目管理中风险动态分析框架,为提高复杂产品研发项目抵御设计变更风险的能力提供建议。     

过程系统管理与技术的综合集成

在激烈的市场竞争中,过程企业不仅要重视技术、更要加强管理,实现全局优化运行。提高过程企业的市场竞争能力必须全面综合集成人、组织、战略管理、经营管理、过程管理及信息自动化技术等因素。本文以石化企业为背景,对过程企业面临的问题及发展趋势进行了分析,并且对过程企业管理模式、过程企业的体系结构以及过程集成与优化技术进行了探讨。     

Value‐Driven Creation of Functionality in Software Projects: Optimal Sequencing and Reuse

We study the problem of optimally sequencing the creation of elements in a software project to optimize a time‐weighted value objective. As elements are created, certain parts of the system (referred to as “groups”) become functional and provide value, even though the entire system has not been completed. The main tradeoff in the sequencing problem arises from elements that belong to multiple groups. On the one hand, creating groups with common elements early in the project reduces the effort required to build later functionality that uses these elements. On the other hand, the early creation of such groups can delay the release of some critical functionality. We formulate the element sequencing problem and propose a heuristic to solve it. This heuristic is compared against a lower bound developed for the problem. Next, we study a more general version of the element sequencing problem in which an element requires some effort to be made reusable. When a reusable element is used in another group, some more effort is needed to specialize the element to work as desired in that group. We study reuse decisions under a weighted completion time objective (i.e., the sum of the completion time of each group weighted by its value is minimized), and show how these decisions differ from those under a traditional makespan objective (i.e., only the final completion time of the project is minimized). A variety of analytical and numerical results are presented. The model is also implemented on data obtained from a real software project. A key finding of this work is that the optimal effort on reuse is never increased (typically lowered) when a weighted completion time objective is used. This finding has implications for managing reuse in projects in which user value influences the order in which functionality is created.     

基于项目管理的国有大型钢铁企业技改项目信息化管理研究与实践

本文通过分析和研究国有大型钢铁企业技术改造项目实施中存在的问题,提出了国有大型钢铁企业技术改造项目实施信息化管理的模式和对策,并建立了国有某大型钢铁企业技术改造项目信息系统的初步框架。     

行为管理制度设计的符号结构图及计算方法——以治理企业污染环境行为的制度设计为例

通过以治理企业污染环境行为的管理制度的实际设计过程为例,提出了专门用于制度设计的符号系统,这个符号系统大大地简化和方便了制度分析与设计过程,使得制度设计更加工程化和技术化,此外,还提出了用于改善制度参数的措施组合优化方法、估计制度有效性的算法、在制度下的被管理者由于非理性而产生的各种行为的概率的计算方法。这些都使行为管理制度的设计技术变得更加实用和可操作,从而为制度研究从定性的理论分析向可操作的技术的发展提供了条件。     

风险环境下企业信息系统项目控制对绩效的影响机制研究:基于项目经理和用户代表的双重视角

虽然当前项目管理水平不断提高,但是企业信息系统项目实施的成功率仍然不容乐观。项目干系人缺乏准确的相互认知和角色定位,以及风险与控制的关系无法有效处理是导致项目绩效偏低的重要原因。为了从不同视角探索风险和控制对企业信息系统项目绩效的共同作用,通过对65位项目经理和63位用户代表所经历的128个项目的调查,利用结构方程模型进行实证分析,并采用层次回归分析技术进行检验。实证结果表明,正式控制和非正式控制对信息系统项目绩效都具有积极的影响,但是项目经理认为正式控制具有更加重要的作用,而用户代表认为非正式控制的作用更为显著。此外,项目经理和用户代表均认为组织风险和技术风险会减弱正式和非正式控制对绩效的有效作用。因此在控制方式的选择和组合上不仅要基于项目自身的特点,而且要基于干系人的角色。同时,信息系统项目绩效并非单纯由成功或失败因素所决定,而是取决于两类因素的均衡程度。研究结论为信息系统项目的风险控制提供了全新的理论依据和决策支持。     

Contractual Integration of Physician and Hospital Services in the U.S.

Using a binary-choice, probabilistic model, this study analyzes data covering the institutional and market characteristics of 759 hospitals in 81 metropolitan statistical are as in the United States to understand why many of them have chosen to contractually integrate with physician and physician group practices. The results support the theory that the contractual integration of physician and hospital services in the U.S. during the 1990s occurred in response to market pressures to circumvent the transaction costs of monitoring physician utilization of hospital resources. They also support the views of Robinson (1997) and Shortell (1997) that the nature of the coordination, the governance structure, and the part to which market mechanisms play are largely determined by the demands for coordination from the market served by the hospital, the capabilities of the hospital to pull physicians into integration arrangements, and the historical context and constraints binding the hospital's decision making. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.