Characterizing and measuring activity dependence in engineering projects

In an increasingly complex business environment program managers have to take dependencies within the product domain, process domain and organization into account. While activity dependence is still predominantly perceived as only an input-output relationship, a more detailed understanding of activity dependence is expected to improve program and project performance. This paper contributes to the understanding by presenting eight characteristics of activity dependence and 21 respective measures, all derived from literature and expert discussions. We further present an attempt to validate the characteristics and measures by means of a survey with 139 responses. While we could not prove the proposed characteristics wrong or right, we learned about the understanding of activity dependence and show future paths for further research in the paper. The possibility to significantly characterize activity dependence should support program and project managers with the identification of unknown but important dependencies and facilitate to select appropriate means for coordination.