Situation
A renowned German medium-sized company that specializes in individual / special production would like to establish itself as a system supplier. The new electronic system (LED lamp with hardware and special power supply unit for finishing processes) is presented at the trade fair, but months later it is still not ready for series production. I am hired as overall project manager and am to take over the development management on an interim basis in order to implement this project in a timely and targeted manner.
Challenge/scheduling
The team of highly specialized experts is demoralized and demotivated. The actual task was to develop this system to the end. One difficulty was that it was a global product for the EU, America and Asia, and global certification with EMC approval still had to be completed. Due to the new delay in implementation, the account managers were extremely tense and did not feel their interests were properly represented.
As the project manager with overall responsibility, my task was to quickly gain an overview of the current situation. I have therefore taken on the project-related management of production, sales, service and purchasing in order to ensure rapid implementation.
Sustainable result
By clearly allocating tasks, clear task packages were agreed with all departments and specific deadlines were set. As the central contact person – SPOC (Single Point of Contact), I received ALL open questions and complaints, analyzed them and handed them over to the team in work packages. The necessary changes have been discussed and prioritized with the help of a new global change management system in order to coordinate and implement the necessary changes. Suggestions for improvements that would have led to major changes in the current project were integrated into the specifications for the next generation.
An inventory of stocks has been set up in order to rework devices/units or to determine the market for which they can be sold according to their development and certification status. I presented a weekly status report to the management steering committee.
Conclusion
After three months, the certification was completed and the development team was able to finalize the last changes. The centralization of requests and the change management system brought calm to the organization, and after six months, development was completed and series production could begin.
In the months that followed, I gradually handed over responsibility for the individual specialist departments again and enabled the employees to manage projects of this kind independently in future. In addition, the foundation was laid for the development of the next generation in accordance with the product development process (PDP).
