Dr. Tyson R. Browning

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Operations Management
Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University

Biography

Professor Tyson Browning is an internationally recognized researcher, educator, and consultant. He is a full Professor of Operations Management in the Neeley School of Business where he conducts research on managing complex projects (integrating managerial and engineering perspectives) and teaches courses on project management, operations management, risk management, and process improvement in TCU's highly rated MBA program (e.g., The Economist, Princeton Review).

Tyson has trained and advised several organizations, often in industries such as aerospace concerned with developing complex systems using complex organizations and processes. He earned a B.S. in Engineering Physics from Abilene Christian University before two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tyson's research results have been published in journals such as IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information Systems Research, Journal of Operations Management, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, MIT Sloan Management Review, Production & Operations Management, Project Management Journal, and Systems Engineering, among others. He is the co-author of the book Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Operations Management from 2018-2023.

Keynote Address - Abstract
"Designing Products for Adaptability"

Developing products that are more easily adaptable to future requirements can increase their overall value. Product adaptability is largely determined by choices about product architecture, especially modularity. Because it is possible to be too modular and/or inappropriately modular, deciding how and where to be modular in a cost-effective way is an important managerial decision. I will present a model that accounts for trade-offs between components’ option values and inter-module interface costs, thereby supporting product architecture decisions at the component level. I will show an example of optimizing a measure of architecture adaptability value (AAV) at one of four firms that re-architected an existing product to increase its profitability. The evidence suggests that firms can benefit from designing products for adaptability, but that how they do so matters. I will share several key insights pertaining to modularity and adaptability that emerged from this research.