PREDICTING TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS

This work explores prediction of technical communication patterns with in product development organizations. Our methodology involves first p redicting the patterns of communication and then measuring the actual communications to see if the anticipated linkages are realized, We app lied this methodology to a commercial product development project in t he electronics industry. In this case study we found that: 1) 81% of a ll coordination type communication linkages were predicted in advance; 2) occurrences of frequent communications were more accurately predic ted than infrequent communications; and 3) two-way communication excha nge was most often observed, even where one-way information transfer w as predicted, For the management of product development projects, thes e results imply that certain aspects of organizational design can be p lanned by anticipating the technical communication linkages required f or project execution, Finally, a critical analysis of our methodology suggests improvements for future work.