The Virtual Design Team

The long range goal of the “Virtual Design Team” (VDT) research program is to develop computational tools to analyze decision making and communication behavior and thereby to support true organizational (re)engineering. This article introduces the underlying theory, the implementation of the theory as a computational model, and results from industrial test cases. Organization theory traditionally describes organizations only at an aggregate-level, describing and predicting the behavior of entire organizations in terms of general qualitative predictions. We define and implement a “micro” theory of the structure and behavior of components of organizations, explicitly representing activities, groups of people called “actors,” and organizational structure and policies for project teams. A VDT model can be “run” by a discrete event simulation. Emergent aggregate model output behaviors include the predicted time to complete a project, the total effort to do the project, and ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: CACM
• Authors: John C. Kunz, Tore R. Christiansen, Geoff P. Cohen, Yan Jin, Raymond E. Levitt
• Keywords: Behaviors, CACM 1998, Organization, Theory