COORDINATION AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF THE PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS

This paper addresses the following question: how does the coordination challenge faced by managers change over the life of time bound projec ts such as product design, We use coordination structure, an approach to modeling organizational situations that highlights concurrent respo nsibility interdependencies rather than the more traditional task inte rdependencies, We explain coordination structure and use it to capture the responsibility interdependencies in a sample of complex system de sign projects drawn from two different organizations, We use this data : to illustrate the differences possible in the responsibility interde pendencies that can exist within design projects from different organi zations and at different project key points; to identify a set of four basic modules, or groupings, of responsibility interdependencies usef ul for modeling design organizations; and to generate a set of testabl e hypotheses on how the coordination challenge faced by project manage rs can vary between organizations and over project key points.