Projects With Sequential Iteration: Models and Complexity

Many new product development (NPD) projects are inherently complex, making effective management of the tasks, resources, and teams necessary to bring new products to market problematic. Frequently, managers of such NPD projects are overwhelmed by complicating factors such as stochastic task times, ill-defined specifications, complex interrelationships between tasks, and information dependencies. Recently, several researchers have developed an alternative project management tool called the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) that explicitly takes into account the iterative nature of new product development projects. In this paper, we analyze the numerical DSM and establish the complexity of this class of problems. Next, we introduce a mixed integer linear programming formulation of the DSM. Finally, numerical analysis of the DSM problem and heuristic approaches shows that relatively good solutions can be easily obtained, thereby offering managers efficient alternative solution approach to the original DSM problem.