Study On Hierarchical Organization In Major Projects Based On NK Model

Major engineering projects relate to the national economy, great science&technology competition and national defense construction, and are generally conductedby the national ministries and commissions, research institutes, universities andenterprises. Due to the complex relationship among participating units, it is difficult toachieve the coordination management and the proper arrangement of engineering tasks.The organizational structure of engineering projects, as the core architecture of thewhole engineering management, plays an important role in improving the constructionefficiency and quality of the engineering. However, the major engineering projects thathave been built or are under construction in China have a hierarchical structure withunique roles.Major engineering projects can be seen as a complex system. In this paper, the majorengineering projects are analyzed with CAS (Complex Adaptive System) theory, theoverall organizational performance break down level by level with a mathematicalmodel, and the model of hierarchical structure is established with a simulation method.Setting different parameters can change the organizational structure of the engineeringprojects and the complex relationship inside and outside the departments. In this paper,the features of hierarchical organizational structure in major engineering projects arestudied from the following three aspects.In the first place, the core of hierarchical organizational structure is the powerdistribution. Hierarchical system has a long history in China, and has resulted in twocommon modes of power distribution, i.e. centralized model and decentralized mode.While, the absolute centralization and the absolute decentralization seldom exist in thepractical engineering project management, and the combination of these two modes isfrequently used, which is better than the function of a single mode in most cases.More over, all major engineering projects include many sub-projects, some of whichmay be conducted in parallel and others may be conducted in series. Around the rules toconduct sub-projects, a general conclusion is reached through the comparison oforganizational performance in parallel and in series under different environment andorganizational structures to guide the management of engineering projects.Lastly, major engineering projects involve many sectors influencing each other. Thiscomplex relationship will have an impact on the overall organizational performance ofengineering projects. By changing the complexity with simulation models, we can findthat the organizational performance is reduced with the increase of the complexrelationship inside and outside the departments.