Ray Levitt, Ph.D., Founder and Director
VITE works with its clients to identify potential organizationa1 limits and
bottlenecks of alternative product, process and organization configurations.
VITE helps its clients assess the effectiveness of potential reorganizations or
enabling information technologies. In short, VITE's clients can truly
"(re)engineer" their enterprises for fast, high quality product development
projects.
The VITE computational enterprise model links the organization chart and the
process plan of a product development project.
Organization charts cannot represent the task being performed, and critical
path method (CPM) activity diagrams do not represent the structure or policies
of the organization that perfiorms them. The VITE project model represents both
the organization and the activities needed to complete a given task. The VITE
software can then analyze the enterprise design, i.e., it can simulate the
organization executing the product development project, to predict product
development time...
Team participants or actors," (yellow ovals) and supervisory relationships (red
lines) define the organization of the team. Like a Critical Path Method (CPM)
activity network, VITE's model represents planned project activities (green
boxes) and their sequences (blue lines). However, the VITE model also
represents information flow (green line) and change propagation (brown line)
between parallel activities. The enterprise model links each activity in the
process plan to a responsible actor (gray lines). Dialog boxes enable users to
define and modifv attributes of the team. its actors and activities.
The primary objective of business process reengineering is often to reduce
"time to market" i.e., the time between receipt of a new order and delivery of
a requested product or service to a satisfied customer-while simultaneously
improving the company's products or services. To improve coordination among
developers and also accelerate project completion, activities that were
previously performed sequentially are often scheduledto be performed
concurrently. Executing interdependent activities concurrently leads to a
dramatic and non-1inear increase in required coordination effort, so that even
the most experienced project managers frequently underestimatethe magnitude of
the extra resources required to accelerate a process. Moreover, even when
managers recognize the need for extra coordination resources, neither
organization theory nor existing process modeling tools help them to identify
which activities or organizational units the manager should augment to support
the required additional coordination.
The VITE organization simulation allows managers to describe the information
requirements of activities. The model also describes the skills and capacities
of organizational units to process and communicate the required information.
The VITE simulation highlights the specific activities that will run longer
than planned because of incremental coordination and rework. Also, VITE
predicts the degree to which specific team members will become backlogged when
their coordination load, together with their direct work load, exceeds their
capacity to process and communicate information. It supports modification of
models to test the impact on time, cost and quality performance measures of,
e.g., adding personnel to specific sub-teams, or replacing existing team
members with others who have higher skills.
VITE vs. CPM PREDICTIONS: The VITE Gantt chart shows both the oSnistic Critical
Path Method (CPM) schedule (thin colored bars) and the more realistic VITE
prediction (thicker gray bars). Current, CPM-based project management software
typically only models direct woric. In contrast, VITE models the planned direct
work for each activity, and simulates the additional unplanned work arising
from required coordination and rework. The VITE model can thus predict which
organizational entities will become backlogged with coordination and rework
tasks, delaying not only their activities, but also those of other team members
who dePend on them for informaffon and/or suPervision
VITE sells software products and services to clients who have high value,
complex projects that they want to manage better. The software product is a set
of computational tools to help VITE and its clients analyze the predicted
behavior of their organizations. The service is consulting to identify
organizational objectives and capabilities, create a computational model of the
client's work process and organization, and analyze the model's results.
UTE consultants interview client representatives about a product development
project and the associated organization. This typically takes about 10 hours of
contact time with the client's personnel and about 10 days of VITE consultant
effort. The interview process itself provides value to clients in creating a
"shared mental model" of project activities and interdependencies.
The bundled product package delivered by VITE to its clients includes:
VITE's fee for the interviewing,analysis and reporting on a consulting project
of this type will typically be in the range of $25,000 to $35,000, depending on
the size and complexity of the project and on the amount and accuracy of
available documentation.
Follow-on training and consulting will be billed at $1,500 per day for senior
VITE consultants.
The company founders are principals in the research project at Stanford
University that developed prototype versions of VITE's organizational analysis
tool. The founders have extensive prior experience with IT and management
consulting, and with start-up companies.
Raymond E. Levitt, VITE's Chairman, is Professor of Civil Engineering and
Associate Director of the Center for Integrated Facility Engineering atStanford
University. Since 1990 he has led the development of the Virtual Design Team
project at Stanford, developing the methods and software used byVlTE. Dr.
Levitt was Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at MIT until 1980. He
received a BSCE in Civil Engineering from the University of Witwatersrand in
South Africa, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Civil Engineering (Construction
Engineering and Management) from Stanford University. His research and teaching
focus on applications of computer modeling to engineering and management of
complex projects. Dr. Levitt has extensive management consulting experience
with engineering projects and companies. He co-founded, and serves on the board
of, Design Power, Inc., an engineering automation software and consulting Firm.
Yan Jin is a VITE Vice President and a Senior Research Engineer in the
Department of Civil Engineering, Stanford University. He has been a principal
developer of the Virtual Design Team, developing the methods and software used
by VITE. He earned the Ph.D. degree in Naval and Information Engineering from
the University of Tokyo. Since then Dr. Jin has done research on
knowledge-based planning systems; distributed problem solving and multiagent
systems; organization modeling; and their application to marine traffic
control, computer integrated manufacturing, co11aborative design, and project
management and control. Dr. Jin is a member of AAAI and INFORMS. He consults to
manufacturing firms globally on product modeling and engineering automation.
John C. Kunz is a VITE Vice President and is a Senior Research Engineer at the
Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) at Stanford University. As
Chief Knowledge Systems Engineer at IntelliCorp from 1984-1990, Dr. Kunz
directed IntelliCorp's "knowledge engineers" engaged in developing a variety of
engineering and manufacturing applications. Since 1990 he has been a principal
in the Virtual Design Team project at Stanford, developing the methods and
software used by VITE. He has degrees from Dartmouth College, Thayer School of
Engineering, UCLA and Stanford University. Dr. Kunz is a member of AAAI and
AAAS. His interests include the theory and practice of symbolic modeling and
its applications in a broad range of engineering domains.
Mission
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