The project management tool for integrating knowledge context and multidisciplinary responsibility

New product development projects are often collectively executed by multidisciplinary members, and inherently the issue of cross-discipline management will arise. With investigations into the information related to knowledge creation, unified modeling language (UML) and Integrated New Product Development (iNPD), this study proposes the project management tool for integrating knowledge context and multidisciplinary responsibility, using an LCD TV multidisciplinary Research and Development (R&D) project as an example to explain the visual presentation of the said tool in different quadrants. This tool may authentically record the knowledge context and re-arrange the project flow to reduce the execution duration, while offering a visualized knowledge context chart of the responsibility domain as reference for the project team to adapt promptly upon changes of external data.


INTRODUCTION
New product R&D project teams in modern corporations usually consist of multidisciplinary members from the marketing department, engineering department and design department.The new product R&D process requires the three departments to work together to determine the promising direction of the product before they may create the product that matches the client's expectations and the user's requirements.
In a multidisciplinary new product R&D project, all of the professional members have their respective viewpoints concerning the new product.The marketing department focuses on product concepts based on marketing standards, such as focus group, selling price, retailing and cost.The design department focuses on the product concepts based on visual appearance or human *Corresponding author.E-mail: yong@mail.ndhu.edu.twTel: +886-933-771-825.Fax: +886-3-863-5120.factors, such as operability.The engineering department focuses on the product concepts based on technical innovations, such as performance, technique and production.Traditionally, in a multidisciplinary new product R&D development project, it is the marketing department that defines the new product; however, the engineering and design departments may redefine it from their perspectives.
Therefore, the tasks of a multidisciplinary new product R&D development project team are not specific in many cases.The team members may fear dealing with the conflicts between the creativity and the system within a project.Such conflicts involve data collection, information processing and knowledge creation across the professions; as a result, many members do not know how to collect reliable data to produce the desired results (Cagan and Vogel, 2002), or determine the responsibilities among the members (Bradfield and Gao, 2007), thereby causing the failure of the R&D project.
In the process of a new product R&D, planning and execution by a sound multidisciplinary project team are believed to constitute the best way to increase the possibility of success for a new product (Ayag, 2005), by breaking through the barriers within the multidisciplinary project team and verifying the responsibilities of each discipline, such as whether a task is to be performed by a single discipline or jointly by two or more disciplines, as well as data collection, information processing and knowledge creation among different disciplines (Chen, 2010).The planning and execution of a project requires coordination among all of the disciplines to increase execution efficiency and save time in executing the project, which also signify the core values of this study.
The execution of a multidisciplinary new product R&D project comprises a series of processes, each of which includes a set of goals that the multidisciplinary team members have to painstakingly achieve.However, performing the tasks by the team members to achieve a goal also requires a series of processes.Therefore, the recording of the knowledge context achieved by the project may allow more efficient knowledge storage and retrieval, knowledge sharing and knowledge synthesis (Bradfield and Gao, 2007).There are numerous project management software available on the market; they often include the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), and a database to record the task performance, such as schedule, labor and resources (Shtub, 1995), but such a database does not have the function of recording the knowledge context, which is the track record of decision-making in project management that comes from the induction or deduction of external data by the team members (Chen, 2010).
The primary purpose of this study is to create a tool that may integrate knowledge context as well as verify the responsibility of a multidisciplinary team and project flow management to allow the corporate executives and project managers to understand the knowledge context, responsibility and execution flow of a multiple-team project.Such a tool is based on PERT and increases the dimensions of responsibility and knowledge context of a multidisciplinary team to achieve the purpose of the study.This tool, therefore, in addition to allowing the project manager to plan for the project, also allows the project members to record the results of their performance and compile the data, information and knowledge of the project in the database.There are three issues that this study must handle: (1) Determining how to record the project flow as it goes on since the performance of a project involves different disciplines; (2) Determining how to record the context and results of the knowledge created by the multidisciplinary team involving data collection, information summary and knowledge creation; (3) Determining how to record the responsible domain of a task, the decisions and reviews during the process of a new product development, which are the responsibility of one or more disciplines.This project management tool for integrating knowledge context and multidisciplinary responsibility that provides the corporate executives and project managers with a visualized, easy to control tool and comprehensive understanding for the management of a multidisciplinary project team.

RELATED ELEMENTS
For a new product R&D project to break the barriers among different disciplines and increase project efficiency, a standard method that applies to all disciplines must be defined to record and plan the project flow; knowledge creation flow is the answer (Fong, 2003).Knowledge creation involves data collection, information processing and knowledge creation; it is the process of the making of many decisions during a project, and covers all of the relevant disciplines.The issue to be considered next is recording the process of the knowledge created by different disciplines in the project management tool.The software engineering project management tool offers some of the answers (Gelbard et al., 2002), and UML offers a more stringent organization structure (Nieto et al., 2011).The last issue is clarifying the responsibilities among different disciplines; iNPD may help with defining the responsibilities for different disciplines (Ma et al., 2006).The relationship between the investigation on the related tasks and the issue to be solved by this study is shown in Figure 1.

Knowledge creation
The knowledge management for an R&D project is the same as that for a corporation; it is a process to create values from the intangible asset of the members (Morey et al., 2000).Simply put, knowledge management concerns information processing to obtain useful information, and the key elements in the decision-making process include: data, information, knowledge, and the process derived from individuals and organizations (Liebowitz, 2001).Data is an unprocessed object; it needs a transformation to produce information.Information requires a cerain rule or inspiration to produce knowledge, or to create useful information with added value.Knowelge is a capability to apply information, and the creation of knwoledge has its particular context (Liebowitz and Megbolugbe, 2003).
Knowledge creation involves the inference process through either induction or deduction.Nelson calls induction the backward reasoning that categorizes or defines the result with the rules relating to the issue to achieve the goal, as shown in Figure 2. Deduction is called forward reasoning; it obtains more or new knowledge through a certain rule or a creative status until a certain result serves the goal, as shown in Figure 3.  Usually the process of knowledge creation includes the mixed use of both methods.The black circles in Figures 2 and 3 represent external data or information.The answers, represented by the white circles, are produced through knowledge induction or reduction until the final goal is achieved (Matto, 1991).
Knowledge creation theory reveals that data input turns into information through the reasoning rules of the human brain, and turns it into useful knowledge through induction and deduction, to achieve the goal of the task.However, the knowledge creation process will include the mixed use of induction and reduction.Therefore, to achieve the goal of recording knowledge context within PERT, the process of knowledge creation must be recorded as well.This creates a new issue at the same time.In the knowledge creation process, the data, information and knowledge will be used repeatedly in different stages of a project to achieve different goals, and this involves the input and output of parameters   between different nodes.How can they be recorded?More details are provided in the next section UML.

Unified modeling language (UML)
UML, is a visualized diagram used to support the analysis, design and application of the information system life cycle, and is a tool like computer-aided software engineering (Gelbard et al., 2002).UML is a notation that comprises diagrams and diagram elements to describe the design of a software system.UNL 2.0 has 13 diagrams comprising behavior diagrams, interaction diagrams and structure diagrams.The investigation of this study on the related tasks in this part adopts the concepts and guidelines of the UML activity diagram as the reference for developing the project management tool.The activity diagram is a be-havior diagram and is usually used in the process modeling of a project process using one case or scenario of use, and focusing on the detail logic of the project rules.The activity diagram may provide graphic guidance for the complex operation model.It is equivalent to object-oriented flow charts and data flow diagrams in the structure development of software engineering (Ambler, 2004).Its horizontal part is the project process, or the original PERT.To record the knowledge context for different nodes, the vertical part has added input and output to allow comprehensive recording of data input, information output and input and knowledge output directions within a node of project task.

Integrated new product development (iNPD)
iNPD, proposed by Cagan and Vogel(2002), defines the conceptual overlapping part of the concerned disciplines, as shown in Figure 4.The overlapping part of design and marketing defines the product expectations, such as: brand, life-style, ease of use, aesthetics, and cost.The overlapping part of marketing and engineering defines the product practicality, such as: function, platform, safety, stability, and production cost.The overlapping part of design and engineering defines the product fit, such as: ergonomics, product interface, feature difference, materials, and cost integration.The key point is that the interaction directly originates from the practicality, fit and expectations among the disciplines, and therefore it is the overlapping of disciplines that defines the product value for the consumers.Such a value may help the product to achieve success in the market and revenue for the company.
While the necessity of discipline integration is obvious, in practice it is difficult primarily because of the different ways of thinking among different disciplines, which may lead to conflict among the disciplines.Not all of the parts of a complicated product can be designed by the team members, and a new category system is required to assist the team and manager to determine which components must adopt integrated design and which parts may be commissioned to a single discipline; therefore this study has developed a model that may specifically define the responsibilities, help the team to understand the differences in the project, and consolidate the consensus among the team members.

Mapping tool
The project execution consists of a series of nodes.Only when the project team members have completed a node will they move onto the next node.Each node involves data collection, information compiling and knowledge creation, and serves as the base for the execution of the next node.If the project execution involves personnel from different disciplines, the executor often has his/her own subjective determination based on the accumulated professional knowledge and experience, and re-interprets the results from the previous node to which he/she must refer, resulting in deviation for the project execution.Therefore, stringent recording of the contextual relationship during the knowledge creation process is critical to the project execution process; it completes the decision relations among different nodes.The first issue that we must deal with in the mapping tool is the recording of   data, information and knowledge context within the project management tool.This study adopts PERT as the primary tool for project process recording.The vertical part has added the parameter input and output to record the knowledge context among different nodes.We use the process flow and knowledge context flow of two nodes as the example, as shown in Figure 5. Node 1 has 6 data input (D11 to D16), and 2 knowledge output (K11 and K12).I12 is the parameter input required by Node 2, and Node 1 is marked in particular, using a dotted line to represent the knowledge context flow: Node 3, with inputs of I12 and I 11, produces K21.This vertical recording of knowledge context and horizontal recording of project process may solve the direction problems at the different nodes in the knowledge creation context flow.
Next, this study maps the multidiscipline domain as the third dimension.Currently the multidiscipline project management pays more attention to the complicated relationships among different disciplines (Dayan and Benedetto, 2010); it involves the issues of assigned responsibility and execution efficiency.That means the project execution must take the multidiscipline factors into consideration.A regular new product development project involves three multidiscipline domains: marketing, engineering and design; it considers only placing the nodes individually since the execution discipline seems insufficient to define the assigned responsibility for the respective discipline.Therefore, the discipline responsibility allocation diagram becomes very important.If it can clearly denote the importance of the discipline among the nodes, the responsibilities of the tasks can be understood easily.From the aspects of design and engineering, as shown in Figure 6, when a task is in a domain over-lapping two disciplines, cooperation is required to achieve the goal.Therefore, one discipline in charge of the progress of a task must also satisfy as much as possible the expectation of another discipline; the two disciplines must reach a consensus before they can move onto the next task.A similar defining method may be applied to the overlapping among marketing and engineering and the overlapping among marketing and design.The part where the three disciplines overlap can be regarded as the core of the new product development.The three disciplines must share a consensus and their respective expectations must be satisfied, as shown in Figure 7.
The project management tool to be mapped in the end is shown in Figure 8.The two quadrants of multidiscipline and project flow focus on the understanding of the PERT nodes among all disciplines; therefore, the nodes are presented on a time sequence on the Z-axis that falls on the respective discipline.The two quadrants of multidiscipline and knowledge context focus on the understanding of the knowledge context at the nodes among the respective disciplines; therefore, the multidiscipline responsibility relationship diagram consisting of three circles is adopted to define the coordinates of Y-axis of nodes and the Z-axis, followed by linking automatically with the contextual relationship line.

MAPPING CASE
This study uses an LCD TV multidiscipline R&D project team in Taiwan as the example to explain the integration of knowledge context, multidiscipline respon-sibility and project management tool.An LCD TV R&D project has 32 nodes and 195 working days.However, after the end of the marketing efforts, the project will be left to the design and engineering.Therefore, the total duration of the project is 141 days.Table 1 shows the node number, node name, days, discipline of execution, and the responsible discipline.Due to space limitation, the data collection, information compiling and knowledge creation are not shown.Some of the knowledge context relationship will be shown in the Figure 11.

Project process and execution of multidisciplinary quadrant
The quadrant of project process and discipline of execution is presented in a way similar to the PERT flow chart, but the difference is in the y-axis of the flow chart: the nodes are located on their respective discipline of   9 shows the 33 nodes in Table 1 and their respective disciplines of execution.The arrangement of the process of the 33 nodes is related to the knowledge context flow.The red line represents the critical path, or the path with the longest accumulated execution duration: 127 days.

Project process and knowledge context quadrant
The quadrant of project process and knowledge context is presented in Figure 10.Use Nodes 1, 3 and 6 as examples: Data input D11 to information processing IP11 at Node 1 are compiled into information output (I11, I12, I13 and I14).Input I11 and I12 feed knowledge processing KP11 to produce knowledge K11 and K12, and I14 feeds information processing IP32 at Node 3. The knowledge creation context among the similar nodes is thoroughly recorded.The little round dots represent the shortcuts of input to other nodes.

Multidisciplinary and knowledge context quadrant
The coordinates of x-axis and y-axis of the nodes in the quadrant of responsible domain and knowledge context are located according to their respective discipline.Due to the sheer number of nodes and the complexity of the knowledge context relationship, the full spectrum is not presented here.In Figure 11, using data input D31 at Node 3 as an example, when the environment data of D31 changes, N06 of marketing, N23 to N25 of marketing

DISCUSSION
This study uses an LCD TV multidiscipline R&D project as an example to explain the presentation method of the management tool proposed herein.The quadrant of project process and the discipline of execution in Figure 9 suggest that the time schedule plan, based on a knowledge context relationship, may be reduced from 141 to 127 days.That is a 14-day saving.The quadrant of project process and knowledge context in Figure 10 reveals that the multidiscipline project has a very complicated execution context.The information output of a previous node feeds the information processing of the next node, while the knowledge output of a previous node also feeds the information processing of the following node.This suggests that the process of knowledge creation, or induction and reduction, is constantly operating during the project execution.The quadrant of responsible discipline and knowledge context reveals that the knowledge context relationship in the execution of a new product development project moves around among different domains of the respective responsible disciplines.Therefore, every stage of project execution must achieve the pre-defined expectations of all disciplines before the project may move onto the next stage; any The visualized presentation of the example in the previous chapter explains that the project management tool developed by his study solves the following problems: (1) They place the nodes on the discipline of execution in the project process and the discipline of execution, and thereby solve the issue that the traditional PERT chart cannot present the respective discipline; (2) They reveal the process of data input, data compiling and knowledge creation of the nodes in the quadrant of project process and knowledge context; all cubes of data, information, and knowledge comprise one file folder that holds all of the files.Though not mentioned previously, it can be a viable solution to record the process of knowledge context using PERT nodes; and (3) A project is not necessarily carried out by a same unit throughout its life cycle, and the quadrant of responsible discipline and knowledge context may solve the resulted problem by visualizing the individual and joint responsible disciplines.In addition, the knowledge context of a node may also help the project team members to rapidly respond to the changes of external data.Furthermore, it allows one discipline to realize whether its responsible tasks have met the expectations of other disciplines or shares the

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Related tasks and the issues to be solved.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Illustration of knowledge creation by induction.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Illustration of knowledge creation by deduction.

Figure
Figure 2: Illustration of knowledge creation by induction

Figure 4 .
Figure 4. Integrated new product development.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Knowledge context flow and project process flow.

Figure 8 .
Figure 8. Integration of knowledge context, multidiscipline responsibility and project management tool.

Figure 9 .
Figure 9. Project process and execution of multidisciplinary quadrant.

Figure 10 .
Figure 10.Project process and knowledge context quadrant.

Table 1 .
Nodes of a multidiscipline project team.