۱- Introduction

۲- Research Environment considerations

۳- Analysis of Multi Company Models

۴- Conclusion

References

Abstract

In general, Risk-Assessments or discussions about sustainable development of a product have mostly a pure technical focus, in order to secure the factors of time, cost, quality, functionality and market acceptance. This paper will review the significance that at the start of the project life cycle, it is of vital importance to also consider the maintainability or evolution of the initial product-mission in order to secure the success of the product. Planned evolution and maintenance of a product is not restricted to prepare the product to carry potential new functions without being completely hardware- or software-architecture redesigned. Considering the automotive market cost pressure of products, it is usually not possible to allow hardware to be ready for more than the predefined set of functions. This research will consider product architectures and also focus on the review of (multi) company team structures, company capabilities (i.e. skills) and company resources (i.e. infrastructure), which need to be considered and development to be able to react to the new market opportunities.

Introduction

Automotive companies or researchers review project management organizational structures, such as requirement management processes [1-7], the V-model [8] or agile methodologies [8], from the start of a project until product launch to the market. The focuses of most papers are how to handle the “Requirements becoming increasingly unstable to achieve shorter lead times and faster reaction to changing markets” [۹, p.125] is not sufficient. IT companies consider two major product life cycles: the Development-Phase and the Maintenance-Phase [10]. Some of the software maintenance problem factors proposed by Jie-Cherng Chen, Sun-Jen Huang [10] are “Previous studies have shown that one of the causes of software maintenance problems is that software maintainability is not often a major consideration during software design and implementation”. From personal experience this observation is also centered on the fact that a project budget allocations do not take into account the maintenance phase. The disregarded consideration of maintenance has the problem that possible reductions of maintenance costs are not part of the product feasibility and is difficult to estimate or forecast. Maintenance consists of SW/HW Bug-Fixing and product improvements driven by the constantly changing demands of the market. Requirement management mechanism of change request or bugs is discussed in several papers [1-7], but to forecast new product features depends on the markets, competitor survey an, history data and “Estimations are based on individual judgement and as such highly subjective” [۹, p.125]. The project risk rises after the development phase with respect to the team capacity and capability far beyond the considered final phase, the maintenance or evolution phase of market introduction. In addition, commonly neglected is the consideration of far more complex project organizations, which are nowadays rapidly growing and established by fact that todays “Organizations can rent what they were earlier forced to make or own. Generic concepts like rent translate into collaborative relationships with service providers who provide access to capabilities and resources otherwise not available to the organization”.