Performance of coupled product development activities with a deadline

Title from cover. "May 31, 2000."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 24-26).Nitindra R. Joglekar ... [et al.

Performance of Coupled Product Development Activities with a Deadline

This paper explores the performance of coupled development tasks subject to a deadline constraint by proposing a performance generation model (PGM). The goal of the PGM is to develop insights about optimal strategies (i.e. sequential, concurrent, or overlapped) to manage coupled design tasks that share fixed amount of engineering resources subject to performance and deadline constraints. Model analysis characterizes the solution space for the coupled development problem. The solution space is used to explore the generation of product performance and the associated dynamic forces affecting concurrent development practices. We use these forces to explain conditions under which concurrency is a desirable strategy

Detecting Coordination Problems in Collaborative Software Development Environments

Software development is rarely an individual effort and generally involves teams of developers collaborating to generate good reliable code. Among the software code there exist technical dependencies that arise from software components using services from other components. The different ways of assigning the design, development, and testing of these software modules to people can cause various coordination problems among them. We claim\ud that the collaboration of the developers, designers and testers must be related to and governed by the technical task structure. These collaboration practices are handled in what we call Socio-Technical Patterns.\ud The TESNA project (Technical Social Network Analysis) we report on in this paper addresses this issue. We propose a method and a tool that a project manager can use in order to detect the socio-technical coordination problems. We test the method and tool in a case study of a small and innovative software product company

Schedules, Calendars and Agendas

Time management instruments such as schedules, calendars and agendas are obvious tools to organise individual and collective action. Besides being of great practical significance in the western world and beyond, these tools are remarkable in that they are rarely questioned by those who are governed by them. Yet, they are tools and as such they can be used by management in organisations. This paper will explore: -why these time instruments are much legs visible than the task itself, -to what extent they are knowingly used by management, and -if their effectiveness is somehow limited to certain activities. It is argued that the unobtrusiveness oftime instruments is related to the natural distinction between content and context. Tasks, intellectual or practical, lead the actors to focus on content. Time management instruments appear to belong to context instead. Hence, they are normally taken for granted, framing the problem.Time; management

Achieving World Trade Organization Compliance for Export Processing Zones While Maintaining Economic Competitiveness for Developing Countries

Export processing zones (EPZs) are statutorily created investment parks that developing countries establish to attract foreign investment in exchange for government-granted fiscal incentives. At their core, EPZs are a quid pro quo between host governments and investor companies: in exchange for the promise of job creation, technological transfer, economic development, and compliance with export performance requirements, investor companies receive substantial fiscal incentives, such as tax and tariff exemptions. Most EPZ statutes are inconsistent with Article 3.1(a) of the World Trade Organization\u27s Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM Agreement) because EPZ incentives qualify as prohibited export subsidies. Fortunately, many developing countries have received exemptions from this prohibition to maintain their EPZ systems. The exemptions, however, are set to permanently expire for many countries on December 31, 2015, spurring the need for EPZ reform. This Note proposes a framework for achieving WTO-compliance for EPZ statutes by conditioning EPZ incentives on an investor company\u27s implementation of standards of corporate social responsibility. This proposal will permit developing countries to maintain fiscal incentives—thus helping preserve their economic competitiveness as attractive destinations for foreign investment—while also offsetting potential harm that the mandatory elimination of EPZ export requirements may cause to developing-country industries

Analyzing Multiple Product Development Projects Based On Information and Resource Constraints

Product development (PD) and engineering design processes are often characterized by the information flowing among activities. In PD, this flow forms a complex activity weba process that can be viewed as a complex system. Most literature on the subject of information flow in PD focuses on a single project, where precedence information constraints (based solely on necessary information and possible assumptions) determine the execution sequence for the activities and the resultant project lead-time. In this paper, we consider multiple PD projects that share a common set of design resources. Especially in this setting, precedence information availability is insufficient to assure that activities will execute on time. We extend the information flow modeling literature by including resource availability. We model several PD projects as a portfolio, where activity execution is based on both information and resource availability. We demonstrate the effects of accounting for resource constraints on both individual projects and portfolio lead-time distributions

Identifying and evaluating parallel design activities using the design structure matrix

This paper describes an approach based upon the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) for identifying, evaluating and optimising one aspect of CE: activity parallelism. Concurrent Engineering (CE) has placed emphasis on the management of the product development process and one of its major benefits is the reduction in lead-time and product cost [1]. One approach that CE promotes for the reduction of lead-time is the simultaneous enactment of activities otherwise known as Simultaneous Engineering. Whilst activity parallelism may contribute to the reduction in lead-time and product cost, the effect of iteration is also recognised as a contributing factor on lead-time, and hence was also combined within the investigation. The paper describes how parallel activities may be identified within the DSM, before detailing how a process may be evaluated with respect to parallelism and iteration using the DSM. An optimisation algorithm is then utilised to establish a near-optimal sequence for the activities with respect to parallelism and iteration. DSM-based processes from previously published research are used to describe the development of the approach

The European Carbon Market in Action: Lessons from the First Trading Period Interim Report

Abstract and PDF report are also available on the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://globalchange.mit.edu/).The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is the largest greenhouse gas market ever established. The European Union is leading the world's first effort to mobilize market forces to tackle climate change. A precise analysis of the EU ETS's performance is essential to its success, as well as to that of future trading programs. The research program "The European Carbon Market in Action: Lessons from the First Trading Period," aims to provide such an analysis. It was launched at the end of 2006 by an international team led by Frank Convery, Christian De Perthuis and Denny Ellerman. This interim report presents the researchers' findings to date. It was prepared after the research program's second workshop, held in Washington DC in January 2008. The first workshop was held in Paris in April 2007. Two additional workshops will be held in Prague in June 2008 and in Paris in September 2008. The researchers' complete analysis will be published at the beginning of 2009.The research program “The European Carbon Market in Action: Lessons from the First Trading Period” has been made possible thanks to the support of: Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, BlueNext, EDF, Euronext, Orbeo, Suez, Total, Veolia