Increase of development success through an automated measurement and visualization of project progress

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Rainer Stark
• Subject Area: Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 329507397

Manufacturing companies are facing the challenge of not achieving their technical and economic goals in product development projects. Decreasing competitiveness due to regress payments and image losses are the consequences. To achieve the defined development goals concerning quality, costs and time despite the increasing complexity, an effective and efficient project management is of utmost important. Beside project initiation, definition, planning and execution, project controlling is a critical success factor. If the project manager would know the exact progress of the project at any time in the project he could readjust before quality issues or delays would occur. Existing methods and tools for monitoring and visualizing the project progress generate the needed information over manual requests from the project employees. This causes high administrative efforts and long intervals between the reports. To increase the success of product development projects and thus the competitiveness of manufacturing companies, it is essential to create new approaches for monitoring and visualizing the project progress. These new approaches need to generate the project progress automatically. One opportunity for this is provided by the data within the IT-Systems of the product development (e. g. CAD and process models). This data contains information of the project progress, which could be used for automatically project progress monitoring and visualization. The main objective of the research project is to increase the success of product development projects by creating new assessment and control mechanisms through automated project progress monitoring and visualization of the development activities. This innovative approach differentiates from existing approaches by automated gathering of the needed information from the data within the IT-Systems used in product development projects. Thus a more often and more detailed progress monitoring is possible, which leads to an increase of the project success and thus to a competitive advantage.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants