Department of Industrial Design National Cheng Kung University No.1, Ta-Hsueh Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan
Department of Spatial Design Kun Shan University
Department of Industrial Design National Cheng Kung University
Today, R&D projects within enterprises are always executed by a multidisciplinary team. Its members are normally composed of designers, engineers and market researchers. In general, the responsibilities each discipline has to take are not clearly specified. Thus typical problems of unexpected mistakes and time wasting in executing the works are raised because of the uncontrollable conflicts and miscommunication within a team. Importantly enough, re-allocation of the works and efficient inter-communication mechanism among teammates become the key issue of this research. The authors have tried to bring about a newly developed model to solve the problems mentioned above. To start, the model of Responsibility Division is created through the process of a user survey that is filled out by the team members. These results are collected to form a responsibility division diagram that shows what the leadership tasks are. A Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) diagram is subsequently introduced that shows the allocation of workforce and executing time.A case study has been introduced in this research. It has demonstrated that a project has been finished in 116 days by the application of the responsibility division model, compared to 141 days in original work flow without using it. Workforce and Schedule management technique developed by the model is an explicit contribution in this research. It is no doubt responsibility division model has served as an efficient tool that breaks the cross-disciplinary barriers in teammate’s communications and furthermore improves the project management.
Keywords: multi-disciplinary project management, responsibility division, workforce division, schedule division
(*Contact: E-mail yong@cc.kyu.edu.tw )
Cite this article as: Chia-Hsiang Ma, Alfred Chen and Cheng-Yong Huang, "Responsibility Division Model for Multidisciplinary Project Management – A Case Study of An OEM Company," Journal of the Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers, 23, 501-518 (2006).