Experiences in Agile R&D Project Management for New Product Design and Development in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

In the past 20 years technology has advanced at incredible speed. Product life cycle has decreased tremendously. Innovation in product and process has become essential for companies’ survival. Products are not longer simple, they integrate different and new technologies and therefore manufacturing process is evolving towards intelligent, virtual, sustainable and high performance factories. In spite of all these changes in manufacturing, R&D project management has not evolved at the same pace. The authors have approached a new way of conducting R&D projects that can integrate IT Agile Project Management and Innovation Management best practices. As a result the present paperformulates a methodology for agile new product and process development that can match the actual product cycle development requirements, shortening project life cycles but keeping space for innovation and creativity. The methodology has been applied in R&D projects for the automotive industry to develop new automated manufacturing cells for production lines. The experience allowed to identify the key processes with more risk during the project execution and helped us to gather information to keep improving the methodology.