Steering development projects

Not only developers are working for car manufacturers: also marketing, quality management, controlling, legal and sales department play important roles during product evolution. Often times those business departments are based on different continents. Increasing time, financial and quality pressure forces OEMs into industry-wide co-operations. “Those companies but also the departments of the same business are often poles apart”, says P3 consultant Alexander Badini, “they speak different languages in functional and cultural respects and they often have different goals.” Yet they have to talk to each other – especially during the development of a new product. And therefore a good translator is needed.

P3’s project management takes all parties involved to the round table. Be it during the development of a new light duty truck platform for Fuso, Freightliner and Daimler or during the integration of alternative drives into vehicles of Mercedes Benz: For Alexander Badini the primary factor for success is “the efficient co-operation between value-added stages and cross-section functions. The first task is: Creation of transparency in the customer supplier relations of the project. The second task is: Identification of risks e.g. in production costs or variant numbers and initiation of optimization processes.” Since such development tasks are not only technologically but also organizationally complex.

The P3-method initiates projects by individual measures. “Customers want us to bring the development project home, with their culture and employees, not any ready-made concept”, relates Badini from experience. Buzzword management is out of place. You also expect a translator to have more than a few standard phrases in his vocabulary.