Seminars

Managing Complex Product Design Projects

Offered by:    Professor Steven Eppinger, MIT Sloan School of Management

Website:    MIT Sloan School of Management, Executive Education 

Through lectures, exercises, interactive discussions, and teamwork, participants in the program learn how to use DSM to map complex design procedures into simple arrays. Most important, they learn how to solve four key problems that confound complex product development project management: iteration, overlapping tasks, architecture, decomposition and integration.

In Managing Complex Product Development Projects, participants learn to:

  • better document existing procedures 

  • reduce complexity 

  • share data with confidence 

  • facilitate project flow 

  • expose constraints and conflicts 

  • design iteration strategically

VDI Seminar „Komplexitätsmanagement“ (available only in German)

Offered by:    Professor Lindemann, Technische Universität München

Website:    VDI Wissensforum 

The seminar takes place twice annually, offering an insight into how structural complexity in product development can be managed. It is tailored towards project managers, development engineers, process planners, and other personnel faced with the challenges of complexity. The seminar introduces all participants into the details of Design Structure Matrices, Domain Mapping Matrices, and Multiple Domain Matrices.

The following topics are addressed:

  • Complexity in product design

  • strategies, models, methods, and tools of complexity management

  • variant management, change management, risk

  • decomposition, abstraction, modularization, interfaces, scenarios, dependency models

  • interacting with complex structures and deducing guidelines for improvement

  • complexity in the enterprise: integration of systems, alignment of the architectures of products, processes, and organization

Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications Tutorials and Workshops

Offered by:    Professor Tyson Browing, Texas Christian University

Website:    Tyson Browning

Tyson Browning offers several courses, both as executive education and tutorials that can be run at individual companies. The courses are mostly based on the DSM methodology and represent the different facets of its application. All courses can also be tailored to the needs of the participants. Basically, the following courses are available:

Tutorials/Workshops:

  • Introduction to the Design Structure Matrix:  Applications to Systems Architecting, Organization Design, Process Analysis, and Project Management 

  • Information-Driven Project Management:  Why Schedule Tasks When You Should Schedule Results?    

  • Using the Risk Value Method to Forecast and Track Progress and Added Value in Projects and Programs    

 
Executive Education Courses:

  • Process Improvement:  Lean, Six Sigma, and Toyota Production System 

  • Introduction to Project and Program Management 

  • Project Risk Management 

  • Project Scheduling 

  • Developing Operational Excellence

Managing Complex Product Design Projects

Offered by:    Dr.-Ing. Maik Maurer, TESEON GmbH 

Website:    www.teseon.com

Regular seminars provide the basics for the successful management of complexity. The target audience consists of product designers and managers as well as methods specialists and workshop moderators. Theory and practice are introduced in clearly organized units and cover the handling of product, process, and organizational complexity. Industrial use cases demonstrate the practical application and facilitate participants the transfer to their own application scenarios.

Participants learn to:

  • Describe and define a complex system

  • Acquire information about system elements and dependencies 

  • Analyze structures and identify important system constellations

  • Improve the system management and design