Engineering design involves the specification of many variables that define a product, how it is made, and how it behaves. Before some variables can be determined, other variables must first be known or assumed. This fact implies a precedence order of the variables, and of the tasks of determining these variable consequently. Moreover, design of complex systems may involve a large number of design activities. In this paper, the activity-activity incidence matrix is considered as a representation of design activity analysis which mainly focuses on the precedence constraint. In order to analyze the activity-activity incidence matrix, a heuristic algorithm is proposed, which transforms an activity-activity, parameter-formula, and parameter-parameter incidence matrix into a lower triangular form. The analysis of the structured matrices can not only significantly reduce the overall project complexity by reorganizing few critical tasks in practice, but also aims at obtaining shorter times considering the solution structure by exploring concurrency.