Search

Information of papers to be published in future issues of "IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management" is presented.

The article presents a list of papers that will be published in forthcoming issues of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) transactions in Engineering Management, which includes "Casual Discovery and Inference of Project Disputes," by P. Love, P.Davis, S.O. Cheung and Z. Irani, "The Moderating Role of Organizational Context on the Relationship between Innovation and Firm Performance," by D. De Clercq, N. Thongpapanl, and D. Dimov, and "Assessing Organizational Capabilities: Reviewing and Guiding the Development of Maturity Grids," by A. Majer, J. Moultrie and P. Clarkson.

The design structure matrix (DSM), also called the dependency structure matrix, has become a widely used modeling framework across many areas of research and practice. The DSM brings advantages of simplicity and conciseness in representation, and, supported by appropriate analysis, can also highlight important patterns in system architectures (design structures), such as modules and cycles. A literature review in 2001 cited about 100 DSM papers; there have been over 1000 since. Thus, it is useful to survey the latest DSM extensions and innovations to help consolidate progress and identify promising opportunities for further research. This paper surveys the DSM literature, primarily from archival journals, and organizes the developments pertaining to building, displaying, analyzing, and applying product, process, and organization DSMs. It then addresses DSM applications in other domains, as well as recent developments with domain mapping matrices (DMMs) and multidomain matrices (MDMs). Overall, DSM methods are becoming more mainstream, especially in the areas of engineering design, engineering management, management/organization science, and systems engineering. Despite significant research contributions, however, DSM awareness seems to be spreading more slowly in the realm of project management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of sustainability-based research in Engineering Management, with a specific emphasis on work published in technology and innovation management academic journals. The importance of sustainability is not lost on managers and researchers since this research is necessary for the basic survival of society and man. This paper not only identifies the developments that have occurred in sustainability research, based on the departmental topics of IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, but also potential research streams in the field. We observe that the research in this area has seen its largest growth only in the past few years, but can be traced back for almost 40 years. We also provide an overview of the special issue associated with this review along with an introduction to Sustainability in Engineering Management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The globalization of complex engineering services has resulted in physically dispersed teams that can no longer rely on the traditional and familiar oral transmission of engineering expertise nor can they assume knowledge of their team members’ culture. Yet, such teams need to be able coordinate effectively the dispersed knowledge of team members. We know little about how cultural differences among engineering team members impact the coordination of dispersed knowledge, so called transactive memory systems (TMSs)—or “who knows what” and “who knows who knows what.” In this paper, we present a longitudinal case study of a dispersed, cross-cultural team involving U.S. and Romanian engineers. The cultural differences in values, practices, and institutions had a major impact on TMS indicators of specialization, coordination, and credibility. The paper demonstrates how the cultural differences impeded TMS development. The results provide insight into TMS as an implicit coordination mechanism in a global team. We provide advice in terms of interventions that can promote the development of TMS in a culturally diverse team. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the presence of dependence linkages, changing one element of a product (e.g., functions and components) can trigger changes to other related elements and lead to numerous possible propagation paths (i.e., the “snowball effect”). To address this issue, this paper proposes the matrix-based clustering method. Two matrix models are considered in this research: design structure matrix for the linkages of components and domain mapping matrix for the linkages of functions and parameters. After denoting some product elements as “target” representing the initial changes, the clustering method is used to form and classify the clusters according to the change impacts from target elements. The interfaces between the clusters are also identified to manage the propagation process. The purpose of this method is to provide the cluster and interface information for implementing change requests. In view of the methodical advancement, the clustering method can tailor a clustered matrix for specific change requests and handle two types of matrices. Two examples have been used to demonstrate and support the utility and flexibility of the proposed method to manage matrix-based change propagation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“Multisourcing” has emerged as an important strategy for global information technology (IT) service outsourcing in today's turbulent business environment. The existing literature on IT service provides only limited insights into this phenomenon. However, in the manufacturing domain, a similar concept, supply base management, has been extensively studied. In this paper, we integrate related research in IT service and manufacturing to explore how firms can successfully pursue global multisourcing strategy in IT service. Specifically, we first conceptualize a firm's multisourcing supply base along the dimensions of breadth and depth and theorize about the impact of these two dimensions on outsourcing outcomes. Second, based on this framework, we analyze four configurations of multisourcing supply base. Finally, we conduct case studies of two global financial services firms to illustrate the configurations and identify patterns of evolution of global multisourcing strategy in customized information systems development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite an increase in the offshore outsourcing of information technology (IT) projects, little research has been carried out to identify issues that client managers (CMs) encounter when managing projects with offshore vendors. Also research on how CMs’ responsibilities change to effectively manage offshore outsourcing relationships has received little attention. We conducted a case study of an offshore outsourcing relationship between a U.S. client and its Indian vendors engaged in software-testing projects. In this paper, we identify six project management activities that underwent substantial change. We then describe the coping strategies that CMs employed effectively to deal with changing project management activities. We conclude by discussing the interplay of multiple global boundary variables and its effect on the project management activities. We integrate insights from literature on global distributed teams, organizational communications, and offshore outsourcing to theoretically ground the relationship between the boundary variables and the coping strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In today’s competitive business environment, pharmaceutical companies intensively explore contract R&D opportunities with small biotechnology companies and in-license externally discovered compounds to replenish their product pipelines. In order to maintain and increase external collaboration productivity, pharmaceutical companies must find the most promising outside compounds generated in the research stage as the inputs for later in-house development stages. Thus, the “R”-to-“D” transition is significant in ensuring the scientific quality of in-licensed compounds. In this paper, an optimal adoption strategy is proposed to evaluate the in-licensing opportunities for a pharmaceutical company as it finances several biotech partners who focus on the same therapeutic area. This strategy is fundamentally an outsourcing decision process for the pharmaceutical company, and it is modeled as a Poisson process during which small biotechs submit their outcomes to the pharmaceutical company. We give the formulation for the process, whose simulation results, here, indicate that under the high uncertainty of both time value and market payoff, the pharmaceutical company should make its decision by trading off research time for gradually emerging information on the compound’s quality. Specific characteristics that emerged in this process are discussed. We also carried out interviews with pharmaceutical R&D managers to explore the “practical applicability” of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we review recent developments in the field of outsourcing and offshoring and the implications for engineering management. We examine three aspects involved in outsourcing and offshoring, namely, sourcing models, coordination, and value extracted from outsourcing projects. We conclude that additional research is needed on recent trends in outsourcing and the impact of such change process on the practice of engineering management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Forecasting the diffusion of innovations plays a major role in managing technology development and in engineering management overall. In this paper, we extend the conventional Bass model stochastically by specifying the error process of sales as log-normal and mean-reverting. Our model satisfies the following reasonable properties, which are generally ignored in the existing literature: sales cannot be negative, the error process can have a memory, and sales fluctuate more when they are high and less when they are low. The conventional and widely used model that assumes normally distributed error term does not have these properties. We address how to forecast properly under the log-normal and mean-reverting error process, and show analytically and numerically that in our extended model sales forecasts can substantially alter conventional Bass forecasts. We also analyze the model empirically, showing that our extension can improve the accuracy of future sales forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Few studies of technology alliances have explicitly examined the link between internal research capability and external sources of innovation via interfirm networks. While different partners bring with them different sets of resource opportunities, the networks can serve as "pipes" of information via indirect partners. This research examined whether the level of research capability moderates the performance impact of a firm's network accessibility in terms of the number of technology partners and the firm's centrality in the network. Interviews were also conducted with management executives and engineers to investigate the underlying motives and strategy of technology alliances, While the statistical findings show that increasing research capability enhances the benefits of information access via centrality, our interview data provide support that the role of good engineers as technology gatekeepers is critical to the success of leveraging partners' resources. Building upon the rich qualitative data, we conclude the study with an organizational framework of technology strategy. This paper contributes to engineering management research by linking both strategic and organizational factors of research capability in acquiring external sources of innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As engineering firms, R&D groups, and technical organizations recognize the centrality of their engineers' expertise to their performance, they are widely investing in knowledge management (KM) initiatives. Contemporary KM initiatives increasingly include expertise-sharing networks that Kelp answer questions about who knows what. These systems allow organizations to locate and leverage the specialized engineering and technical expertise that is held in the minds of dispersed individuals. However, stories of such expertise-sharing networks that languish from under-use and abandonment abound and the issue of continuance has received very little attention in prior research. In this paper, we explore this understudied issue We develop a model of expertise-sharing network system continuance through a four-year observational study of 418 users of two such systems and then empirically test it using multiperiod data collected from 122 users of four such systems. The concept of irretrievable investments was used to guide theoretical development in the initial observational phase of the study. The study makes several unique theoretical contributions. First, it develops a model that illustrates' how irretrievable postadoption investments (sunk costs) by individual users of expertise-network systems increase continuance. We empirically show that the model explains approximately half of the total variance in continuance intention. This model advances continuance beyond the traditional expectation-satisfaction model of initial adoption to more advanced postadoption stages of use and theoretically incorporates the network-specificity aspect of postadoption investments in explaining continuance. Specifically, we show that individual users': 1) reputation among peer users of a system increases continuance; 2) system-mediated relationships with other users of the system increase continuance; and 3) Investments in personalization of a system initially diminish continuance. Another notable contribution is the development and validation of several new measures for expertise-sharing network constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how seven process innovations have been shared and adopted (or not adopted) between four factories of a multinational company located in Asia. In contrast to most previous studies in this area, these process innovation diffusions happened in a bottom-up manner in which the decision to share and to adopt is made by the individuals at the sites involved rather than by top management either at a local or corporate level. We observe that the factors enabling or discouraging the adoption of process innovation are highly dynamic. When work priorities shift over time, motivating factors once perceived as primary may become secondary, leading to nonadoption of the innovations. As the engineers face an increasing load of other tasks which also demand time and effort, the decision to adopt the Innovation or not seems to depend more on the effort required to adapt the innovation for local use than other factors. Innovations which are highly embedded in the original settings face slimmer chance of adoption by other sites as they are likely to require more effort in adapting them for local use. In contrast, innovations which are less embedded in original settings are more likely to be adopted due to the low adaptation effort needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimization of warning systems includes the choice of signals to be monitored, the sensitivity of the alert level and the response to these signals. In organizations that design or manage complex, risk-critical systems, the problem is not only the observation of a signal, but also its accurate communication to the appropriate decision maker, and the actions that he or she can take upon receiving the signals given the state of deterioration of the physical system at that time. In this paper, we describe an analytical framework focused on organization performance, based on decision analysis and probability, to design and optimize such a warning system from a management perspective. The probability of failure during the lime it takes to observe a signal, decide of its importance, and communicate a warning, and the time elapsed between the occurrence of an accident initiator and the events that follow, including the action taken in response, are computed in parallel, using a dynamic probabilistic risk analysis, assuming a Markov (or semi-Markov) evolution process when appropriate. The analysis then allows optimization of the choice of signals to be observed, the design of the communication chain, the filtering of the information, and the response at the appropriate management level. The questions are thus: What is the value (in terms of risk reduction) of a warning system of given structure and procedures? And what is its optimal configuration? The optimization model presented here reflects the nature of the engineering system to be monitored, the communication structure within the organization that designs or manages it, errors that can occur in the communication phase, the best action(s) of the decision maker once he or she receives a warning signal, and the expected value of the costs, including those of system failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In concurrent engineering, project tasks generally involve the establishment of multifunctional design teams in order to simultaneously consider various activities throughout the entire product life cycle. Team members from different functional departments of the company interact in every phase of development tasks to design the products and processes concurrently. lb ensure a successful multifunctional team, it is important to understand the characteristics of team members. Three fundamental descriptors of team members are developed in this research. The first is to represent the multifunctional knowledge of team members due to the need of concurrent engineering. Second, to build a successful project team, teamwork capability of team members is needed by taking their experience, communication skills, and flexibility in job assignment into account. Multifunctional knowledge and teamwork capability ratings are captured from each member using analytic hierarchy process. Third, since the team members work closely, their collegiality directly affects team performance, regardless of their knowledge. Thus, the working relationship model is developed to provide such a metric. Personality profiling using Myers-Briggs type indicator serves as the basis of assessing each team member's abilities to work with others. Finally, we complete this paper by providing a step-by-step procedure with an example for selecting the best multifunctional team using the three ratings. This research helps establish an efficient multifunctional team because every team member will be capable of communicating to each other within the team due to their multifunctional knowledge, teamwork skills, as well as an established good working relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issue of the journal "IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management." The journal includes nine research articles, one technical management note, one comment on the technical management note, one comment on the technical management note and one focus on practice paper. The papers published in the journal claim that concurrent engineering project management and team organization represent an important area of management research that has drawn a great deal of attention from academia and industry alike.