Problem Identification
The core of success in the automotive business is innovation and new technological changes introduced each year. Before a car is manufactured, it is designed and tested. The main problem faced by the automotive business today is the lack of coordination and cooperation between departments and functions dealing with concept cars. “The most important part of this department is the creative ideas that come out of it, and allowing all the employees to collaborate, across continents sometimes, is hugely important” (Understanding Correct Roles and Responsibilities 2008). These processes demand constant change.
Automakers are impressed by the volume of change in the workplace in recent years and regularly conduct an informal surveys. If they reflect the experiences of typical project workers, they indicate that projects are being carried out in an environment of astounding turmoil. Such turmoil leads to fluctuating priorities, blurred visions of goals, and “rubber baselines.” Ultimately, it contributes to schedule slippages, cost overruns, poorly specified requirements, and reduced customer satisfaction. Clearly, an important management challenge for project managers is the management of change. In a stable world, change management is a nonissue: automakers carefully develop a plan and then stick to it. But in a chaotic world, they must come to grips with the inevitability of change. The idea of developing a plan and sticking to it is absurd in a wildly fluctuating world. The change will happen. The big question is, are the companies prepared to deal with it?
Concept car technology is changing at an ever-faster pace. Such change has dramatic implications for conducting project work. In an era when the life expectancy of new technology is extremely short, any project that has a time horizon greater than six months must grapple with changing technology. Common questions that project staff face includes these: Is a particular solution that we recommend going to be relevant next year in view of changes in technology? How does technological change affect the way we conduct our operations internally? A ubiquitous source of change on projects is key people changing their minds (Berkun, 2005).
As concept cars’ projects evolve, the automakers can count on customers, managers, and technical staff to alter their views of what they need and want. This is a natural occurrence referred to as the learning effect. At the earliest stages of a project, people’s vision of the deliverable is vague, and requirements are largely abstractions. As the deliverable becomes more tangible and people see what they will actually get, they ask for change. If they like what they see, they often ask for enhancements even before the deliverable is complete. If they don’t like what they see, they request changes to make the deliverable more reflective of their needs and wants. Clearly, for organizations to survive and thrive in these turbulent times, they must develop a pro-change mindset. They must alter their cultures so that change is seen as something desirable, filled with opportunity. Given people’s natural resistance to change, the development of a pro-change mindset is not easily achieved. Some steps organizations can take to create it include the following (Berkun, 2005).
Possible Solutions
An End-to-End Automotive CRM
One of the most effective solutions to these problems is an End-to-End Automotive CRM. “While most Automotive CRM solutions won’t get specifically into the testing of concepts and designs from a functional standpoint, they will help this department with a number of automated features” (Understanding Correct Roles and Responsibilities 2008). For these departments, Automotive CRM becomes one of the most important business strategies (Greenberg, 2004). The goal of this strategy is to examine and analyze customers’ needs and wants in order to meet their requirements and expectations. “Payroll software would also be necessary to look at for this department as part of a larger solution, however, integrating payroll software is not very necessary and existing legacy systems will probably be sufficient for most small business needs” (Understanding Correct Roles and Responsibilities 2008). The main advantages of this approach are that it allows companies to monitor activities and tests projects, take into account previous sales results and “keep an accurate reflection on where vehicles are, and automatically update inventory levels within the factory/warehousing facility itself, giving full corporate insight into various distribution” (Understanding Correct Roles and Responsibilities 2008).
Design Change as Part of Project Life Cycle
Another possible solution is to treat change as part of the project life cycle. The traditional project management, practiced by automakers, has been that the project life cycle ends once the deliverable has been handed over to the customer. What happens to the deliverable after it has been delivered to the customer should be of great concern to the project team. If the deliverable is not used, is underused, or is used inappropriately, then some measure of project failure has occurred. In the final analysis, project success and failure are determined by customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is in turn often determined in the post-project operations and maintenance phase, at which time customers actually use what the project team has produced (Greenberg, 2004).
Focus of Customers
In order to respond to the constant change in design and technology, the new focus on customers is reflected in the discussions and pronouncements of project staff and management, who openly define their key objective as “satisfying the customer.” The problem is that the customer is fiction. The phrase implies the existence of a monolithic customer perspective. There is no monolithic customer perspective because all projects have multiple customers. When project staff begins to identify a single individual or group of individuals as the customer, they are inviting trouble. To see this, consider the case of typical defense procurement. The implications for project managers of the crisis-filled work environment are clear: it is acceptable today to use crises to direct the attention of project workers and upper management to key issues (Berkun, 2005).
After a progress review of a new control system being developed by an automotive firm, its customers are so stimulated by what they have seen that they ask the firm to add some new features to it even before the design is complete. Owing to the incompatibility of word processing software in the purchasing department of a government agency, the agency IT standards-setting manager requires that everyone use a single standard word processing system. This means that the majority of employees must be retrained to use the new software. There is nothing extraordinary about these solutions (Berkun, 2005). They reflect the typical fare encountered by typical project workers in typical organizations today. The common theme of each story is, of course, change. In today’s chaotic world, change is the one thing people can count on, leading us to quip that the only constant changes.
Bibliography
Greenberg, P. 2004. CRM at the Speed of light, 3e. McGraw-Hill.
Berkun, S. 2005, The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly)). O’Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition.
Understanding Correct Roles and Responsibilities. 2008. Web.