Collaborative and cross-company project management within the automotive industry using the Balanced Scorecard
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2009
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Cross-company product development projects are often managed without clearly
defined project goals and without an alignment of these goals to an organisations
strategy and objectives. With a shift towards more decentralised and distributed
development teams, and an increasing level of collaboration, project transparency is
reduced and status measurement more difficult due to a lack of transparency. To
overcome these difficulties, the quality of collaboration in the automotive manufacturing
industry needs to be improved. The understanding of unifying goals and of the mutual
purpose to produce new products is essential for efficient and effective collaboration.
A methodological study in the automotive industry as part of this research lead to the
conclusion that a strategic scorecard method based on the Balanced Scorecard
concept by Kaplan and Norton is capable to improve cross-company project
management and reduce existing difficulties in typical product development
collaboration, such as communication or collaborative risk management. A common
definition of project goals, leading and lagging indicators to measure the status, and
defining corrective action are core elements of the Collaborative Project Scorecard
concept.
This thesis identifies the current problems and difficulties in automotive project
management and explores solutions to improve its efficiency and effectiveness based
on the Collaborative Project Scorecard. It is shown how the concept is derived from
business strategies for an improved alignment of project goals with business
objectives. A project impact analysis facilitates the development of project strategy
maps to increase transparency of goal impact interdependencies. Furthermore, based
on the results of workshops, surveys, and interviews the Collaborative Project
Scorecard concept is applied to typical automotive product development projects and
the identified advantages and limitations are evaluated by an application to a crosscompany
project of an automotive supplier and a manufacturer. The development of
the Collaborative Project Scorecard is followed by a software implementation of the
results. The integration of a collaborative project management model that has a focus
on time, task and communication management enables the project manager to create
operational indicators that can be controlled on a strategic level by the Collaborative
Project Scorecard. Additionally, it is shown how risk management and performance
assessment are supported by the concept. Advantages, benefits, and limitations of the
methodology are identified and further application scenarios suggested.
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