Summary |
This book presents the collection of papers on Research and Development Management Systems problems delivered at a conference at Case Institute of Technology. The general objective of these papers is to present applications of the methodology of operations research to the solution of some research and development management problems. A few papers dealing with both methodology and problems of a pioneering nature are presented in this book.
For our purpose a research and development management system is a behavioral system, consisting of men and facilities, with multiple and sometimes conflicting goals and objectives. The system operations consist of the performance of research and decision acts, where the responsibility for decision making is usually shared among groups having specified areas of responsibility, annual budgets, and completion schedules. Communications exist among groups whose essential outputs are ideas or developments, usually to serve another department within the organization. Each decision maker has a number of alternate courses of action (e.g. new project initiation, project termination, project delay or speed-up) and a number of desired outcomes (e.g. project implementation, project payoff, research group growth). The outputs of such systems are often probabilistic, involving difficult and important problems of measurement and evaluation of output efficiency. In this brief description of a research and development management system there may be noted many of the elements that are used by operations researchers in the description of classical management systems.
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