Designing in young organisations: engineering change propagation in a university design project

Engineering change (EC) is an important phenomenon in the design of products and systems, accounting for nearly one-third of the work effort; however, the literature has been focused on mature firms, and few studies have documented the impact of EC beyond them. Hence, we use a case study approach to study EC and its propagation in the context of a university design project as an example of young organisations, and compare it with the existing work done on mature firms. It was found that 33% of the changes that occurred in the case study were planned, and change propagation accounted for 20% of all changes. The propagation of changes was usually one step (67%), and it was concentrated in one independent network (54%). The results were subsequently compared with EC studies done in mature firms, being revealed that EC behaves differently in the context of a university design project; hence, existing change management tools developed to suit mature firms may not be directly suitable for supporting university design projects. The findings from this work can be used as a platform to better understand how EC propagates when designing in young organisations and shape the development of appropriate change management tools.