Organization method for complex cooperative design projects

Research for reduced lead time and cost in product design becomes crucial in new work organizations. Today, the design projects involve more and more activities and work groups which must be efficiently coordinated. In this paper, we propose a method for structuring cooperative design activities in order to improve lead time and workload. Classical methods for project management decompose a project into several work groups which are then scheduled. However, these methods do not allow to control the size of the obtained work groups. We propose to supplement this first decomposition level with a more detailed structuring level. In the proposed method, each initial work subgroup can be executed in parallel or sequentially. The objective is to determine the more efficient organization between a total sequential and a total parallel decomposition. For this we propose a frame for defining a multicriteria organization. According to the most relevant criteria, we propose a model to structure the work organization.