Networks in Organizational Risk Management

We propose to develop a formal modeling software tool, Networks in Organizational Risk Management (NORM), that allows mission planners and organizational designers to create and experiment with organizational structures that minimize risk throughout the lifecycle of a system. The core of our approach is a computational organizational model of the network of interrelationships among people, knowledge, tasks, technology, organizational goals, system failures, and the surrounding environment. In Phase I we defined a simulation and optimization model of organizational safety and illustrated the use of NORM as applied to Team X, a concurrent engineering design team specializing in unmanned space missions. In Phase II we will develop the NORM modeling software, develop a customized Team X application, and perform a comparative analysis of Team X using NORM and several additional computational modeling tools.