PhD Defence Jan Lenssen | When Fragmentation Impedes Decisions - Supporting knowledge sharing for decision-making in large scale complex system design

When Fragmentation Impedes Decisions - Supporting knowledge sharing for decision-making in large scale complex system design

Jan Lenssen is a PhD student in the Department of Design, Production and Management. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr.ir. G.M. Bonnema and dr.ir. K. Nizamis from the Faculty of Engineering Technology.

Systems Engineering plays an important role in managing the complexity and uncertainty that come with developing state of the art high-tech systems. As technological progress is rapidly advancing, systems are expected to increase in scale and complexity, and the organisations designing these systems must work hard to keep up with these developments. Finding solutions that balance a variety of different aspects becomes harder as organizations grow as well, while simultaneously trying to keep performance high and time-to-market short. The growing size and complexity of development organizations lead to bigger distances between ever larger development teams and therefore a fragmentation of knowledge. In this dissertation we address these challenges of balancing the system design as challenges in systems engineering decision-making.

To understand the needs of systems engineers for developing a support, we first explored the prerequisites for decision quality through a triangulation study at a high-tech partner company from the semiconductor industry. From this we concluded that the main aspects pertaining to decision quality are a focus on the preparation of the decision, gathering the right knowledge and information, and prioritizing (pre-decision) stakeholder alignment. Based on this knowledge and an effort to create a shared understanding with the partner company, we developed the DISPA support: Decision Information Sharing for Pre-decision Alignment. Evaluation in the high-tech context showed that DISPA is able to increase decision quality by providing structure, locating stakeholders for alignment, and improving completeness. However, the increased effort for preparation makes that the support's usefulness is currently more limited outside the most complex and large scale decisions. Nevertheless, our research in this dissertation shows that we can improve decision-making in high-tech system design by streamlining pre-decision stakeholder alignment, creating awareness for the explicit search for knowledge and information, providing guidance for articulating the decision problem and proposals, and providing tools and methods for gathering and using the required knowledge and information.