A communication-based management model for project´s capability

In various product developments, group work is commonplace. Members gather into "project" groups for purpose of making products. The members have various levels of task maturity; experts and novices. The project capability is established through a complex mixing of individual members\´ abilities. The simple sum total of the members\´ abilities as individuals is not necessarily equal to the whole project capability. It is difficult to for managers predict the project capability. A new management model is therefore proposed. The model is based on communication among members. A basic idea of the model is that good communication results in high quality products. In the model, communication logs are analyzed by vector space models for calculating similarity between communication logs, and clustering algorithm for classifying the communication logs into every same topic. The size of clusters which are generated by the model indicates project capability. After the management model has been evaluated by small-scale experiments, the model has been adapted to large-scale projects. As a result, the large-scale projects\´ features have been clarified using the analysis results of the model.