The parallel development of hardware and software is a real situation encountered by many hardware manufacturers and automotive enterprises in project management. Complex project management scenarios and r&d processes put forward higher requirements for enterprise project management ability. How to achieve efficient software and hardware r&d project management to ensure product delivery efficiency and product quality? Today, WE share with you the research and development project management practices of well-known automotive customers, hoping to inspire teams with similar project management needs.
I. Customer background
In order to quickly occupy the new energy vehicle market, a well-known domestic automobile company (vehicle oEMS) needs to develop multiple new energy models in parallel within a given time to achieve mass production and launch.
Vehicle research and development is related to the design, development, testing, and repeated tuning of thousands of parts, as well as the research and development of on-board software system. There is a tight correlation between each research and development task and the established sequence, so the team needs to invest a lot of manpower to control the project schedule and risk. The parallel research and development of multiple new models has further increased the pressure of project management: schedule control pressure, cross-project personnel management pressure, risk control pressure, PMO team is facing great challenges.
In order to solve the above problems and carry out project management more efficiently, the auto company team abandoned the traditional management and control mode of offline daily meeting supervision and report, and adopted online, digital and automatic management. After extensive research and trials of project management tools, the PMO team found ONES to address the various needs and pain points of project management.
Ii. Customer project requirements
Vehicle research and development need to mobilize all the resources, involves the collaboration between the different levels and roles in team, from the team managers/PMO to project manager, to the actual execution, how to realize the effective management of managers top-down and bottom-up process feedback, improve the transparency of the project, is to ensure the safety of vehicle r&d project efficient implementation of the important factors. After full communication with the customer, ONES sorted out their specific needs as follows:
1. Management /PMO requirements
A. Project set management: All projects can be comprehensively displayed on the same page to quickly understand the development progress of each model.
B. Custom report: visually present commonly used project reports and risk items to facilitate quick decision-making and timely response to risks.
2. Project manager needs
A. Project template: A project leader usually manages several projects at the same time. Due to the established process of vehicle development (valve process), project template can help the project manager to quickly reuse the process to different projects, saving configuration time and improving management efficiency.
B. Schedule management: plan and schedule the project as a whole and assign tasks. In order to control the development process in an orderly manner, the project manager also needs to set up important nodes for the project to achieve valve management (i.e., milestone management), when the target output is submitted and approved before moving on to the next phase. In addition, change management of the project plan needs to be implemented.
C. Resource management: It can estimate the working hours in the project planning stage, register the working hours in the project execution process, and manage the working hours of each member, so as to allocate resources reasonably.
3. Executive personnel requirements
Team cooperation: record the work results and problems found, upload relevant videos or drawings, share project information among members, and efficiently complete task cooperation.
According to the needs of the enterprise, ONES provides a complete R & D management program, realizing the implementation of the whole process management of software and hardware r & D. Let’s take a look at how the requirements for each class of roles are ultimately implemented within the ONES system:
1. Management /PMO: Manage project progress from a global perspective
Project set management of ONES Plan, which collects multiple projects in one place and provides managers with a global perspective to control the progress of multiple projects. Managers can also focus on a vehicle development project and learn the details of sub-projects under the project, such as viewing the project cycle, task leader, number of tasks and the progress of each task.
In the ONES dashboard and Overview, managers can also set up custom multi-dimensional cards and reports to focus on the core data of the project and control the progress of the project at any time, improving the team’s risk response ability.
2. Project manager: planned projects quickly and allocated resources efficiently
ONES supports flexible project configuration to meet the team’s personalized project management needs. The team has formed a mature project management process. After configuring a project, the project manager can copy the project quickly by “copying the existing project”, and reuse the process into the R&D management of multiple models.
In order to ensure the quality of vehicle research and development, vehicle enterprises are extremely strict in the control of research and development process, following the waterfall management mode. ONES provides a perfect schedule management solution. The Project leader can set up a “Project plan” in ONES Project, set milestones and deliverables at key nodes through WBS dismantling tasks, and set up a sequential relationship for different tasks to achieve robust process management. During project execution, the project leader can also check the progress of r&d, milestones and deliverables through the Gantt chart at any time.
When the project changes, baseline comparisons can help the team understand deviations from actual execution and project plan, identify schedule risks early, and adjust schedule gaps.
Efficient allocation of resources is also the key demand point of the vehicle enterprise. ONES supports “time estimation” and “time registration”. When a task involves multiple members, the sum of estimated hours of all members reflects the overall estimated hours of the task, helping the team scientifically measure the workload of the project. In addition, the project manager can use the “Team Resource Report” to view the resource utilization and saturation of the project and the team and allocate the team resources appropriately.
3. Executive: timely feedback progress, enhance team collaboration
During the execution of specific tasks, team members should record project information and feedback project progress in time as required. The ONES Project supports customized attribute field configuration. The Project manager can set task detail fields for executives to fill in according to the company’s management standards to form standardized management.
Important documents from the project can be deposited in the ONES Wiki repository and shared with relevant team members to increase project transparency. At the same time, team members can discuss and communicate in the comments section of the document to improve collaboration efficiency.
By combing the complex hardware and software r&d scenarios and requirements of the car company, ONES helped the team successfully achieve digital R&D management, and continued to provide consulting services in practice, share industry best practices, and help enterprises improve the efficiency of R&D management.