In global product development projects, coordinating complex technical communication among teams across time zones in the overlapping process is a fundamental challenge. To optimize a global product development organization to reduce the negative impact of time separation on coordination, this article presents an innovative approach to solve two key problems: how to quantify the coordination among distributed teams and how to identify efficient global product development organization. We build structural models to capture the coordination dependency strength among global product development teams from the time separation and overlapping process perspectives, employing the design structure matrix method. Then, we analyze the factors that influence synchronous and asynchronous communication due to time separation. We also apply the random walk method to identify a team similarity matrix, taking into account the direct and indirect dependency relationships among teams associated with their performed activities. Finally, we use the team similarity matrix as an input to a spectral clustering algorithm to identify the clustering strategy for the global product development organizational architecture, yielding and reinforcing several managerial insights, including how to analyze the coordination among global product development teams as well as how the offshoring costs impact the clustered organization.

中文翻译：

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在全球产品开发项目中衡量和优化组织架构的结构化方法

在全球产品开发项目中，在重叠过程中协调跨时区团队之间复杂的技术沟通是一项基本挑战。为了优化全球产品开发组织以减少时间分离对协调的负面影响，本文提出了一种创新方法来解决两个关键问题：如何量化分布式团队之间的协调以及如何识别有效的全球产品开发组织。我们建立结构模型，从时间分离和重叠过程的角度捕捉全球产品开发团队之间的协调依赖强度，采用设计结构矩阵方法。然后，我们分析了由于时间分离而影响同步和异步通信的因素。我们还应用随机游走方法来识别团队相似性矩阵，同时考虑到与其执行活动相关的团队之间的直接和间接依赖关系。最后，我们使用团队相似度矩阵作为谱聚类算法的输入来确定全球产品开发组织架构的聚类策略，产生和加强一些管理见解，包括如何分析全球产品开发团队之间的协调以及离岸成本如何影响集群组织。