Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 1999. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83). / The management of large-scale system development has become increasingly difficult as the complexity of the systems has increased over time. The structure of the project team has become more complex as well with the increasing reliance on joint program structures. The helicopter industry provides two excellent examples that can be studied to understand the impact of complex program structures on project management. The RAH-66 Comanche is a new armed reconnaissance helicopter being developed jointly by Sikorsky Aircraft and Boeing Helicopter for the U.S. Anny. The S-92 Helibus is a new medium civil transport helicopter being developed by Sikorsky Aircraft and five international partners. These two programs provide the frame of reference needed to study various methods of project management in a joint development program structure. A comparison of Department of Defense versus commercial joint programs identifies the challenges that are presented to an organization confronted with supporting both types of project structure. Particular emphasis is placed on global commercial projects, as industry trends indicate that this type of development will become increasingly prevalent in the future. A system dynamics model is used to introduce the concept that project management activities can be cost effective if they improve initial quality and reduce rework discovery time. The project manager requires sophisticated methods to profitably develop new products to meet the requirements of a discerning customer. A functional decomposition is used to determine the requirements of project management. The functional decomposition identifies the highly coupled nature of the project management requirements. Current and proposed new methods are identified and compared with the functional requirements identified in the decomposition. An evaluation of the methods m performed to determine their suitability for meeting the identified project management requirements. The methods identified fail to address the coupled nature of the project management functional requirements. A dynamic business plan is proposed as the required project management method. The lack of project management method and skill development within the organization is identified as an inhibitor of the successful implementation of project management methods. A functional resource for project management is proposed as a means to overcome this limitation. / by Thomas J. Toner. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-78). / This thesis outlines a structured framework for complex system design and management. There have been and continue to be many efforts focused on defining the elusive generic System Engineering Process. I suggest one reason why industry, government, and academic efforts have had limited success in defining a generalized process applicable to many contexts, is that the time and logical domains have not been explicitly identified and characterized in distinction. When the logical view is combined with the chronological view, the resulting process becomes application specific. When these are characterized in distinction, the overall framework is preserved. This thesis develops a generalized process that maintains this distinction and is thus applicable to many contexts. The design and management of complex systems involves the execution of technical activities together with managerial activities. Because of the organic connection between these two sets of activities, they must be integrated in order to maximize the potential for success. This integration requires a clear definition of what the system development process is in terms of the technical activities and how they logically interact. The" control logic" thus provided is then used to develop the logical connection between the managerial and technical activities. / by Paul B. Adamsen, Jr. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-64). / by Steven Davi9d Weiner. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / The service concepts found in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) have been used in software design for many years, with ever-improving tools and a growing understanding of where and how SOA should be applied. Applications built utilizing SOA concepts promote principles such as modularity, distribution, encapsulation and clear interfaces, all core concepts of object-oriented and component-based software development. Despite the clear design advantages of the service concept, most SOA implementations have failed to address many of the issues facing corporations today, including the need for corporate agility, the gap between IT and business, IT project failures and shortcomings in the measurement of business performance.This paper explores the complementary nature of SOA and the core principles of business process management. When combined, these methodologies can help an organization shift to thinking about business processes, map processes to business goals and expose processes as services within the SOA framework. This strategy, when coupled with the abstraction of business flows and rules away from individual applications and infrastructure, has the capability to make the organization more agile, closely aligns IT and the business and enables business performance to be measured and improved. The potential externalization of these business processes can help the organization focus on the needs of customers and partners and promotes the benefits of a virtual organization. / by Paul R. Gomez. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-154). / This study investigates the cause of the nearly twenty-five year decline in the percentage of U.S. born undergraduates earning degrees in engineering. This dramatic decline has occurred despite incredibly high pay and low unemployment among individuals holding engineering degrees. On the surface, this situation appears to be violating the basic laws of labor-market supply and demand. A system dynamics model was created to represent the institutional forces and feedback loops present in the real-world system. This model internally represents the economic forces governing the choice to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, distinguishing features of highly quantitative knowledge that constrain its transmission, and factors determining the overall quality of STEM education in our schools. This work presents a theory that high industry pay for STEM workers and low pay for STEM K-12 teachers directly cause long-term labor shortages that are self perpetuating. A scarcity of STEM workers will cause wages to rise as employers bid up the price of those skills in the short-term. Schools are left with fewer qualified and lower quality teachers. This makes labor shortages worse ten to twenty years down the road. The fact that mathematics knowledge is highly sequential with strong dependencies on past-performance exacerbates the situation. Students who fall behind in mathematics find it nearly impossible to catch up. / (cont.) This work explores many societal shifts that occurred in the 1950's through 1980's that could have resulted in the perplexing behavior seen from 1985 until the present day. Finally, policy proposals to correct the situation are simulated in the model to test their ability to move the system in a more positive direction. The system is found to exhibit "tipping point" behavior. Small reforms will have negligible impact while larger reforms have the potential to make the system move into a fundamentally better pattern of behavior, but only after considerable delays. In addition, this work presents a speculative hypothesis for the cause of Kondratieff economic long-waves briefly in an appendix based on unanticipated behaviors present in portions of the model. / by Daniel Joseph Sturtevant. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-83). / This thesis explores the role of industrial design in the formulation of technology strategy for certain firms that compete in markets of high-tech consumer products. The initial intuition is that the role of industrial design becomes more important at mature stages of the product evolution cycle. Industrial design makes products more user-friendly and attractive, which are highly valued by later stage, mainstream users. Successes of such firms are largely dependent on user's experiences of the firms' products. A utility-based concept model is created to formalize four components that are responsible for user's experience: functional performance (how well it does its job), capability (what jobs can the product do), usability (how easy to use the product to do its Cajnobd), aestetics (how externally beautiful is the product). The concept model is then converted into a testable framework for analyzing existing high-tech consumer product trends. A case study on the mobile phone industry is conducted to test the concept model and to understand the role of industrial design in various mobile phone evolution cycle scenarios. 36 phones are evaluated in detail and a survey is constructed to measure "prettiness" of the products. The final result confirms the initial intuition: soft factors of industrial design become more important in determining product success at later stages of the product evolution cycle. / (cont.) There are also strong supporting evidence to show the series of product evolution cycles that can occur for a given high-tech consumer product, when there is a dramatic shift in the importance of industrial design. The recommendation for firms of high-tech consumer products is to (i) understand the stage of product evolution cycle, (ii) understand the appropriate level of functional performance, capability, usability, and aesthetics in comparison to competitor's products, and (iii) make industrial design to be the core component of technology strategy for the firm's products. / by Arthur T. Mak. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-102). / Teams are rapidly becoming the primary work unit across business and industry. Much has been written about the advantages of teams in problem solving, decision-making, quality improvement and performing complex tasks. Likewise, the body of knowledge surrounding team development, teamwork and team dynamics has grown rapidly over the last 15 to 20 years. Many theories of team performance have been developed. However, few unified approaches to measuring team performance have been proposed. Team performance measurement (TPM) is important for several reasons: 1) team measures have a motivating and focusing influence on team processes; 2) measurement provides necessary feedback for decision-making, problem diagnosis and intervention; and 3) measurement is fundamental to team learning and continuous improvement. The premise of this thesis is that the design and deployment of effective team performance measurement strategies can best be accomplished through a systems approach. A systems approach to TPM considers the following: I) The object of the measurement, the team is a system. 2) Team performance measurement strategies must consider the elements of the system (members, sub-teams, tasks, processes and interfaces) in addition to system outputs. 3) The team operates within an organizational super-system, which imposes contextual and environmental influences on team performance. 4) Team performance measurement is itself a system, with an associated function, interrelated elements, interfaces, influences and context. This thesis suggests an architectural framework for analyzing the critical factors influencing team performance and a holistic TPM framework for developing and deploying a balanced set of team measures. / by Daryl R. Hunt. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-98). / Background: Project and program budget estimation and execution within the estimated budget are critical functions in any organization, in particular those dealing with fixed cost contracts. During planning, the functional organization estimates the baseline cost and schedule by considering the project as a number of interacting tasks and rolling up resource estimates for completing these tasks and the senior management allocate contingency or management reserve to account for project risks. During execution, project organization measures the project performance against the baseline cost and schedule to prevent cost overruns. One of the methods for monitoring project performance is the Earned Value Management (EVM) methodology which uses conceptually simple parameters like Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI) to monitor and articulate project performance and to compute estimated cost at completion (EAC). Motivation: The budgeting approach as outlined above does not explicitly account for emerging project uncertainties and as a result contingency allocated by the organization at the planning stage may not be sufficient, as the allocation is based on prior experience and does not take the impact of the emerging risk on the project into account. During planning differences in perceptions of risks with regards to requirements, work scope, maturity of technology, engineering effort and organizational capacity introduce uncertainties. / (cont.) During execution, uncertainties emanate from emerging risks, utilization of past performance to predict EAC and assignment of "earned value" to partially completed tasks. Accounting for these uncertainties could result in a wide range of valid EAC values each associated with a unique likelihood (probability or confidence level). From a project risk management perspective, establishing and constantly monitoring this 'likelihood' value will help organizations to accurately measure performance and proactively implement risk mitigation strategies to keep the project in check and to clearly articulate project performance status across the organization. Approach: This thesis extends EVM for incorporating uncertainties and establishing parameters for articulating project performance in a systematic manner. During project planning "Risk Elicited Earned Value Management Procedure" systematically captures embedded costing assumptions and quantifies the impact of task level uncertainties to determine the likelihood of a project meeting the baseline cost using Monte Carlo methodology; such risk quantification will help organizations in contingency allocation for addressing known risks and unknown risks. In this thesis, total contingency amount will be split into two parts - hard and soft values. The hard management reserve (HMR) allocated by the senior management is primarily for addressing known risks and soft management reserve (SMR) is primarily for addressing any unknown risks that typically emerges during the course of project execution. / (cont.) The senior management would also like to challenge the organization to improve its performance by not completely funding the project but would like to know its impact on the likelihood so as to prevent unduly burdening the organization. During execution, the same risk elicitation procedure can be used to estimate the likelihood that a project meets the EAC calculated by EVM and in addition, establish what it would take to meet the challenge imposed by the management. Additional emerging risks and refinement in risk mitigation strategies can be incorporated to improve the confidence level on the estimated likelihood. In essence, the new procedure provides a systematic framework for deliberations between functional and project organizations in developing a robust risk management strategy and the likelihood can be used to articulate project status to senior management. Results: The case studies indicated that the risk elicited approach yields additional parameters that would allow the organization to evaluate the impact of the underlying risk profile and project performance on cost and schedule and help establish confidence levels on the estimated cost and schedule. The approach also helps benchmark organizational performance against management expectations. Conclusions: The systematic risk elicitation approach outlined in this thesis improves the process of project cost estimation and project execution by making the process more transparent and instilling accountability across the organization. / (cont.) This transparency ensures that the entire organization - functional, project and senior management have the same understanding about costing methodology. The process establishes confidence levels on the estimated cost and schedule at completion which were not available to the organization previously. This additional information will help the organization with prioritizing risks, securing allocation of adequate funding and contingency amounts and assuring the senior management that the organization is not unduly challenged minimizing employee frustration and burn-out. The framework provides a quantitative means to compare the effect of emerging risks and mitigation plans on project performance. The case studies also demonstrated that the approach has the ability to indicate problems even at the project planning stage by establishing confidence levels that can be used to evaluate robustness of project costing and articulate status of the project during its execution in an objective manner. / by Parthasarathy Seshadri. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 140-144). / Why do certain types of companies, goods, services survive and others do not. Why does one set continuously reinvent themselves and others wither away and die? Why does Cisco continue to provide exciting and innovative networking products, while companies like Cabletron die? Several academics believe that a dominant factor is that winners are able to create robust and effective product platforms. These platforms are able to cater to changing customer needs. On the winning side, the platform leader is effectively able to manage the various conflicts that are present in the platform ecosystem. On the loosing team, often there is no platform leader!I believe that effective platform leadership, platform architecture play a key role in product success.In this thesis, I plan to compare two large platforms. These are the IPTV platform and the conventional cable based TV platform. Both are competing with each other to provide similar services to the same customer set. I have coined the term 'Mega Platform" to describe such large platforms. . As part of this comparison I will develop a set of metrics or comparison points which will help compare the two competing platforms. Please note that the purpose of this thesis is not to prove that there is a strong correlation between platform success and market success. / by Shantnu Sharma. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-96). / The satellite is a highly complex system due to the tight physical constraints, high reliability requirements, and the scale of the product. Except for some commercial missions, most of the satellites are designed from concept to optimally achieve their missions. Historically, the multidisciplinary team spent several months or even a year to finish the concept design. As the information technology revolution occurred in 1990's, Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) was invented to reduce cycle time and reduce resources but with higher quality. It is a new method of real-time team collaboration based on the quantitative computer-based calculations. It was introduced with significant success by JPL/NASA and The Aerospace Corporation. Some organizations followed in using ICE and also confirmed that the design period was reduced from months to weeks. Despite the remarkable successes of the ICE application in the United States and Europe, it is neither used nor well known in other parts of the world. The Japanese organizations, for instance, provide complex products and show their presence world wide, but there is no report of an organization utilizing the ICE approach. They applied the concurrent engineering in manufacturing long ago. It is unclear what brought this situation. The ICE approach has been well examined from the systems engineering perspective but not from the cultural aspect. This thesis analyzes the ICE approach to identify the key factors for successful implementation and operation from both systems engineering and cultural perspectives through the case studies of a implementation failure in a Japanese organization and some successes in Euro-American organizations. Then, the author proposes several ways for successful implementation in the Japanese organization and proposes how the ICE should be approached and be utilized to leverage the design capability of the organization. / by Akira Ogawa. / S.M.