Autor: Jan Strickmann

Development projects are prone to continuous changes, whether because of additional insights or changes of requirmenents. To execute changes in a controlled and traceable manner, standardized methods and processes are used in product development, often as part of configuration management. The IT-support of configuration management with defined workflows and release mechanisms is provided by product data management systems (PDM). However, these often fail to acknowledge organizational and financial effects of a change on project management. To remedy this deficit, the article proposes an integrated project/macro-product model implemented by a semantic web and an ontology. This integrated model can be used to run metrics to analyse technical and commercial effects of a change thus improving the change management process as a whole.

The development of new complex products is increasingly conducted cooperatively in distributed, heterogeneous organisations in a dynamic environment. To successfully accomplish a project, the coordination of project controlling is of vital importance. Each participant of the development network has individual controlling systems, which cover his information and management needs. For cross-project controlling however, the creation of interoperability between distributed systems is a precondition for the coordination of processes. The article describes a cross-project controlling approach, which fosters integration by semantic modelling.