A Framework for Measuring the “Fit” Between Product and Organizational Architectures

Abstract

This paper develops a framework for measuring the “fit” between product and organizational architectures. The ability to measure “fit” in an objective and systematic way is a necessary precursor to understanding the nature of the hidden costs associated with design support tools that are becoming commonplace enablers of complex system design. Specifically, these tools are enabled by significant upfront decomposition – the problem is a priori broken up into a set of loosely coupled tasks that can be worked in parallel, with interactions across tasks routinized and often encoded in computational tools. When this imposed structure fits the problem well, it can drastically speed up design cycles and enable intraorganizational collaboration, by hiding extraneous information and freeing up experts’ time to focus on the hardest parts. However, even minor mismatches between the organizational decomposition (people and tasks) and product decomposition (the problem being solved) can cause designers to miss important trades and make poor choices. The proposed measurement framework builds on existing measures from the organizational design literature and systems engineering literature. Our contribution lies in unifying the level of analysis of the two disciplines and developing a novel strategy for tracking the interaction among the product and organizational system. The utility of this approach for observing influences in real systems is demonstrated with a “toy” case study example based on space system development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Zoe Szajnfarber and Erica Gralla contributed equally to this work.