In our real-world experience of this sort, we found a productive means of capturing knowledge via Plexus, a commercial off the shelf tool that affords collaborative construction of boxes-and-arrows diagrams, that can then be visualizes as DSMs, and then subjected to several types of analysis, including cycle identification, partitioning, tearing, automatic optimized scheduling, critical path, and stochastic analysis. Plexus was found to be a versatile tool and powerful methodology with outstanding ability to elicit and represent complex networks of activities and dependencies with alternative or cyclic logic. PLEXUS supports activity grouping in multiple hierarchies and significantly facilitates sequencing, scheduling and other trade-off analysis for multiple objectives