| Over the past twenty years the international character of the (Space-) Astronomy discipline has been enhanced considerably. Also its focus has shifted. Initially, international collaborations in astronomy meant utilisation by foreigners of advanced national facilities. With the founding of institutions like the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the European Space Agency (ESA) international collaborations have extended towards developing and manufacturing scientific instrumentation for the Organisation/Agency facilities. For ESA s scientific satellites, the usual agreement is that instrumentation comes in general, fully funded, from the participating countries. Till the mid-eighties, one or two institutes from one or two countries built instrumentation. With ESA s Horizon 2000 programme, starting in the mid eighties and comprising also very large facilities, the size of the instrument programmes increased considerably as did the technical complexity. In order to be able to afford the instruments with state-of-the-art performance, large consortia of institutes were (are) formed. But also a wider variety of technical expertise needed for the instrumentation required a larger number of participating institutes in a consortium. Presently the largest instrument consortium comprises 25 institutes and 11 countries (HIFI). But in an average project the amount of involved nationalities is not much less than 6. The stepping up in size was strongly facilitated by the increasing capabilities of internet and by the associated hardware and software. The Management and Organization science discipline however remained based on techniques developed in the sixties and seventies. The approach to cope with the larger sizes is basically done by a direct extrapolation from management of smaller projects. Internet techniques were applied with old communication concepts in mind and there was little reflection on the interplay between classical communication methods versus internet communication and how to optimise. Second, little attention is given in new insights about how to design and construct projects of a larger scale by using modern concepts from management and engineering. So far little has been done to an evaluation of the conduct of past projects and to lessons-learned. Return and transfer of experience, which is amply available, is executed on an individual basis and usually very limited by time/availability constraints. To create successful international instrument consortia is a challenge itself. These projects are created, in which the contributions of dispersed units, each with a differentiated mission, are interlinked and integrated with each other. The roles of the dispersed units are defined according to the plans, product structure, and demanded links between them. Much of the knowledge on these large, complex projects is grounded in research related to innovation, and, more particularly, new product development. There are two central and interrelated streams of research, the management of communication within large projects and the organizational design of this kind of projects. The current study, therefore, aims to address both aspects and their interrelation in the area of large international instrument consortia. First, the structure of communication as embedded in the organizational structure is investigated: (1) within-unit structures; and (2) across-unit structures, in particular attention is paid on virtual communication and the interplay between classical communication methods versus internet communication. Second, the question is addressed on how to design and construct large instrument consortia resulting in an efficient and effective organizational structure and what are the required characteristics for system-level coordination. |
