process support

The software embedded in technical products has increasingly become the driving force of product innovations. Software has rapidly acquired relevance and complexity, particularly in the areas of industrial and automotive engineering. The development of the software, however, is faced with the often difficult task of integrating the systems into complex technological environments such as cars or production lines which rigid requirements concerning safety and reliability. To cope with these challenges a close collaboration between the developers of various areas of expertise such as mechanical, electrical, and software engineering is indispensable. Particularly the involvement of the software development is a common weak point in many companies. With the Quality Gate Plan this article presents an approach to the project management for the development of software-intensive sys-tems.

Knowledge transfer is critical for the success of R&D projects in terms of supply, usage and multiplication of knowledge within and between projects. However, possibilities to opti-mise knowledge transfer do hardly exist since the application of structured methods appears to be hard to realise because of criteria specific for R&D projects like creativity, incertitude and little structuring. In the following, a concept is introduced that establishes transparency according to knowledge transfer in R&D projects and creates a basis to use potentials for optimising knowledge transfer by specific application of knowledge management methods.