WP073: Design Your Project Organization as Engineers Design Bridges
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
AEC owners and contractors constantly strive to increase performance of new facilities and simultaneously reduce design-development time and cost. Yet, many companies have found that the savings in time that they actually achieve are far less than they expected, and that facilities developed in this way frequently both fail to meet performance objectives and have serious quality flaws.
Why the problem? People work as hard as they can. But, by overlapping highly interdependent tasks, projects generate huge and largely unanticipated volumes of coordination and rework overhead that overwhelm even the most dedicated product development organizations. This coordination and rework is hidden effort: it is not planned, tracked, managed or even acknowledged except by the overworked staff. Organization models represent the design and construction process of a facility development project, the human groups and individuals involved in the project, and their respective attributes and relationships. An organization model graphically shows and links the plan with the organization chart. The analyses graphically show the predicted schedule, breakdown of total effort into direct work and hidden effort, i.e., coordination, rework and waiting; schedule risks, and the demand and backlog of groups and individuals. We discuss the use of organization models both for project design and week-to-week management and objective tracking.
Description
Type of resource | text |
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Date created | July 2002 |
Creators/Contributors
Author | Levitt, Raymond E. | |
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Author | Kunz, John |
Subjects
Subject | CIFE |
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Subject | Center for Integrated Facility Engineering |
Subject | Stanford University |
Subject | Coordination |
Subject | Hidden Effort |
Subject | Organization Models |
Subject | Simulation |
Subject | Total Effort |
Subject | VDT |
Subject | Virtual Design Team |
Genre | Technical report |
Bibliographic information
Access conditions
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Levitt, Raymond E. and Kunz, John. (2002). WP073: Design Your Project Organization as Engineers Design Bridges. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/bs801ts5508
Collection
CIFE Publications
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