For many product development companies a multi-project situation is reality driven by competitive environment: offering customers a variety of new, more complex, high performing yet flexible products at a shortest possible time and lowest cost. Customers’ product complexity is however not an equivalent of the product development complexity and, while striving to deliver highly sophisticated products, development companies use various complexity management techniques in order to control and minimize it internally. High level of modularization, well-defined interfaces between the modules and components commonality & standardization are some factors contributing to complexity reduction. The benefits (according to Anderson, 1997) would be a capability to rapidly introduce incremental product improvements which can be called "new" products — that are really planned "variations on a theme," based on common parts and modular product architecture. Independent design of system components allows for clear definition of project boundaries and scopes within a project development portfolio, minimization of uncertainty and results in reduction of development cycle and ultra-fast time-to- market. However, according to Kentaro & Cusumano (1993) “…focusing on design modification is not advantageous strategy either in terms of the new product introduction rate or average platform design age”. 

According to Whitney, some products, like high power mechanical ones, as opposed to low power signal processor type products, would benefit from more integral design if technical performance is a priority. Technical constraints, such as light weighting, low power consumption etc. drive designers towards more integral architectures (adopted from Hölttä-Otto, 2005). Integral architecture is characterized by multiple dependencies between system entities (where entities could be functions, physical or non-physical elements), when interfaces are difficult to define clearly.  Kentaro & Cusumano (1993) demonstrated that system-level co-ordination is required between different projects when composing and optimizing a project portfolio for complex products with integrated architecture. A practice of early enforcement of restrictions upon the project scope /requirements in order to avoid potential system-level dependency conflicts with other projects makes further development process less flexible and responsive to changing business requirements such as costs, product flexibility etc. Resolving system-based interdependency-related issue has traditionally been seen as system architect’s task: ”...architects’ greatest concerns and leverage are still, …with the systems’ connections and interfaces because (1) they distinguish a system from its components; (2) their addition produce unique system-level functions, a primary interest of the systems architect; (3) subsystem specialists are likely to concentrate most on the core and lest on the periphery of their subsystems (Maeir & Rechtin, 2002). Other players like development project group members and management in general have often limited access to dependency-based system views and use intuitive approach when dealing with dependencies., hence a transfer of knowledge is essential to be able to support flexibility in system-level project co-ordination.