The meaning and coherence of process, organisation and product in engineering design

Abstract

Real design processes show a qualitative discrepancy to planned processes. There is also a large gap between processes and organisation structures. Understanding of product development as a complex social system, with a system theory background, gives insights into this issue. It seems that communication is more important than a controlled and transparent process. A dynamic organisa-tion with self-organising teams seems to be the more appropriate approach for process management in product development. Communication partly takes place via money. We will discuss why money cannot be used as a measure for process quality yet, but how it could be used. The paper also gives an impression how signposting and design structure matrices (DSMs) can contribute to this approach.