project management

In development projects, a delay in connection with budget overruns is often the consequence of unrealistic scheduling. A simulation based approach for modeling development projects has been developed to support the project planner and will be presented in this paper. This novel approach allows the modeling and simulation of the project-specific structural organization and the process organization as well as the typical non-deterministic project behavior. Therefore, a realistic scheduling and resource allocation of complex development projects can be achieved. The application of the approach in projects of our industrial partners in the chemical industry has shown the suitability of the developed tools.

Unlike common opinion the efficiency of product development projects can be increased by the application of workflow-management-systems. The basis for this provides a reference model for workflow-supported product development which classifies the required workflow types and software tools for the different tasks in the project. For the frequent case of a change management process it will be shown how different variants of this process can be configured through workflow modules and which interdependencies between workflow and project management system occur.

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.

Within the scope of a research project together with the companies Alcatel SEL, Conti Temic, Knorr-Bremse, Rohde & Schwarz and Webasto, a methodical approach has shown that many development projects have significant deviation from the planned process. This leads to negative effects on each success parameter of the development task, especially on time schedule and profitability. The objective of an optimized project management is to detect weak signals when differing the scheduled path. This information will be transferred immediately to project management. A concept was elaborated and effec-tiveness was proven in case studies.