The Impact of misalignment of organization structure and product architecture on quality in complex product development

A well-planned and well-executed new product development (NPD) process, which produces a stream of timely and high quality products, can provide significant competitive advantage to a company. Focusing on product quality as a key measure of NPD performance, we examine the impact of technical and organizational factors on a vehicle development process. Our results indicate that centrality in a product architecture network is related to quality according to an inverted-U relationship, which suggests that vehicle subsystems of intermediate complexity exhibit abnormally high levels of quality problems. To identify specific subsystems in danger of excessive quality problems, we characterize mismatches between product architecture and organization structure by defining a new metric, called coordination deficit, and show that it is positively associated with quality problems. These results deepen our understanding of the impact of organiza-tional structure and product architecture on the NPD process and provide tools with which managers can diagnose and improve their NPD systems. Key words: new product development; product architecture; organization structure; complex network