The difficulties in design collaboration stem from the managerial complexity in terms of the interactions and interdependencies among the respective development activities. This paper introduces a simple structural partitioning algorithm of design structure matrix, basing on dependency relationships among tasks via tracing the input tasks chain. The algorithm is composed of four modules, which are used to organise and transform design tasks into input model, cycle model, group model and execution ordering model correspondingly. Cycle matrix is created to partition the task set into individual groups that are with different interdependency levels. Coupled and unordered individual task set could be converted into uncoupled, ordered task clusters. The illustrative case studies on automotive industry has verified the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, which could partition the development processes into different execution clusters to improve the concurrence and collaboration of product development tasks. Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.