DSM/DMM-based Methodology for Handling Changes in Product Development Project

Abstract

With the growing complexity of the business context, companies are confronting more challenging Product Development (PD) projects because of the potential risks externally brought by the partners’ participation and internally accumulated through the activities’ execution. In this paper, we formulate and decompose a PD project in a hierarchical way, and the obtained end elements perceived as objects are built into a number of Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) and Domain Mapping Matrices (DMMs). We also propose a conceptual model of change occurring and change propagation, base on which the potential change propagating channels are discovered through observing and tracking change occurring and change propagation in DSMs and DMMs. Associated with the depth-first and breath-first search methods executed in matrices the critical objects during change propagation are discovered and the implicit change propagating channels cross multiple fields are identified. As the exploratory results, the critical objects taking account of change propagation are highlighted as the contribution to change management in PD project