Chapter 16: Toward a Systematic Repository of Knowledge about Managing Collaborative Design Conflicts - Organizing Business Knowledge The Mit Process Handbook [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 16: Toward a Systematic Repository of Knowledge about Managing Collaborative Design Conflicts

Mark Klein

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as M. Klein (2000), Towards a systematic repository of knowledge about managing collaborative design conflicts, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Design, Worcester, MA, June 26-29, 2000. 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

16.1 The Challenge

Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. Conflict (i.e., incompatibilities between design decisions and/or goals) is common in such highly interdependent activities. In one study, for example, half of all interactions between collaborating architectural designers were found to involve detecting and resolving conflicts (Klein and Lu 1991).

Better conflict management practices are needed. Current, mainly manual practices are being overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of modern design artifacts. Consider the Boeing 767-F design project. This project involved the integrated contributions of hundreds of individuals in tens of disciplines and hundreds of teams spread over several continents and a span of years. The design includes millions of components and underwent thousands of changes. Design conflicts were often not detected until long (days to months) after they had occurred, resulting in wasted design time, design rework, and even scrapped tools and parts. Design rework rates of 25 to 30 percent were typical. Since maintaining scheduled commitments was a priority, design rework often had to be done on a short flow-time basis that typically cost much more (estimates ranged as high as 50 times more) and could reduce product quality. Conflict cascades that required as many as 15 iterations to finally produce a consistent design were not uncommon. To give another example, roughly half of the labor budget for the Boeing 777 program (which is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars) was estimated to be due to changes, errors, and rework, often due to design conflicts. All of this occurred in the context of Boeing's industry-leading adoption of concurrent engineering practices such as multidisciplinary design teams (Klein 1994).

A key barrier to the development and utilization of improved design conflict management practices has been the lack of dissemination of this knowledge in a systematized form. Conflict management is fundamentally a multidisciplinary topic, and information in this area is scattered as a result across multiple disparate communities including computer science, industrial engineering, and management science, to mention just a few. Previous efforts to develop taxonomies of conflict knowledge (Matta 1996; Castelfranchi 1996; Ramesh and Sengupta 1994; Feldman 1985) have been small in scope and have left out important classes of information, particularly meta-process information, which will be described below. The result is that good ideas developed within one discipline, or even within one industry, do not readily propagate to researchers and practitioners in other settings, and opportunities are lost to carry on a more systematic and cumulative exploration of the range of potentially useful conflict management techniques.

The work described in this chapter addresses these challenges directly by developing a semiformal Web-accessible repository of multidisciplinary collaborative design conflict management expertise organized so as to facilitate key uses:

Pedagogy. Helping students, researchers and practitioners learn about the state of the art in design conflict management

Business process redesign. Helping practitioners finding alternative ways of designing their collaborative design processes

Research. Helping researchers identify gaps in conflict management technology, identify common abstractions, facilitate discussion, and foster development of new ideas

The remainder of this chapter will describe the key ideas and tools making up the conflict repository, evaluate its effcacy with respect to the goals listed above, and describe potential directions for future work.