When Project Information Flow Becomes Turbulent: Toward an Organizational Reynolds Number

When managers try to develop complex products with many interdependent subsystems quickly, the high information processing load this creates can cause organizational failure. There is currently no way for managers to tell when the demands placed upon a project team are great enough that the risk of organizational failure has reached unacceptable levels. Engineers use the Reynolds number in fluid mechanics as a metric that predicts whether the flow of a fluid will be smooth and stable versus turbulent and chaotic. This paper describes an initial attempt to define a similar metric for project information flow, an "organizational Reynolds number" that uses various organization and work process parameters to predict whether a project team is approaching the turbulent information flow regime and is thus at risk of organizational failure.