With the shift from mechanical value delivery to mechatronic value delivery, development environments are becoming more complex. Intuitive decision-making in development management is becoming increasingly challenging. Meanwhile, the use project management software is spreading, bringing about a new level of project data for development projects, holding to potential to enhance human decision making. To this end, the paper presents an extension to factor analysis of mixed data, which can facilitate usage of exploratory data analysis to improve decision-making in development project planning.

Abstract product development models, such as the Integrated Product Engineering Model (iPeM), are insightful yet complex, hindering practical application. The paper introduces a prototypical tool designed to simplify the application of iPeM. A case study at CERN showcases the tool's capability in utilizing the iPeM to streamline the tailoring of standards into methodologies for research environments. The tool's impact is evaluated through interviews at CERN. The findings suggest the tool's benefits, especially for individuals without formal project management backgrounds.

The Arctic region is commonly seen as a territory of international dialogue and cooperation. This perception is largely due to the science diplomacy efforts that are largely being contributed by universities, scientific centres, research teams and individual scholars. This paper discusses the Arctic science diplomacy initiatives proposed by Russia’s northernmost federal university. Of particular interest is the case of establishing in the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation of national biological monitoring network – the initiative supported by the government-funded mega-grant programme. Our analysis suggests that two pillars of science diplomacy – “science for diplomacy” and “diplomacy for science” – can be successfully combined within the framework of one project. Evidence is provided of the pursuit of national interests being not a limiting factor but rather a driver in the process of promoting diplomatic collaborations in science, serving as a third science diplomacy pillar. Significant progress towards ensuring peace and harmony in the Arctic and sustaining international dialogue on science-based responses to global challenges has been achieved through science diplomacy initiatives proposed by Northern (Arctic) Federal University (NArFU). The authors confirm that most effective tools for establishing good neighbourly relations in the Arctic and promoting international cooperation are offered by scientific discussion.

This paper aims to identify the reasons for neglecting and the motivations for using management tools among three groups of students participating in a project that was carried out and followed over a period of one semester. For this purpose, a survey in the form of questionnaires and interviews was created. Particular emphasis was placed on the use of project management methods, tools and techniques and respondents were asked to rate the effectiveness of their usage. Additionally, the participants were asked to report limitations or distractions they had encountered. The results revealed five aspects that mainly influenced the students’ motivation in using management tools: the team atmosphere, determining responsibilities, performance transparency, expectations by the supervisors, feedback and performance evaluation. On that basis conclusions were drawn on what actions can be taken to motivate future students and designers.

Among the topics of psychological ownership (PO) within current literature, a significant gap exists in understanding PO within a prescriptive lens. This study will examine how instigating the PO mapping method will help us understand how the PO mapping method can support an ownership journey. In addition, we want to see how we can create a prescriptive ownership structure that one follows rather than using the tool as a descriptive method. To do this we will follow a Research Through Design methodology and test the PO mapping method in an organisational case study. We believe that the PO mapping method can help frame and guide organisational project handovers. We want to examine the factors that influence the parties (project teams) emergence and relinquishment of ownership, and how that affects the feeling of ownership of a project over time. Based on this understanding we will derive prescriptive phases to integrate into our PO mapping method. Thus this study demonstrates how the PO mapping method can be used in different contexts to support and provide prescriptive guidance for ownership journeys.

Sharing information between stakeholders is a critical success factor for ecodesign projects. This sharing is based on indicators that can be interrelated, i.e., impacting each other.

This article focuses on the perception of environmental performance indicators’ relationships during the design phase of projects. It uses a DEMATEL approach combined with a graph-database visualization linking environmental performance indicators. While the DEMATEL approach highlights the critical environmental indicators, the graph-based visualization maps the primary interrelations of these factors and defines the best scale to manage them. The novelty here lies in the complementary use of these two methods to facilitate environmental project monitoring.

This research is applied to rail infrastructure projects. The main results insist on land optimization, landscape insertion, carbon footprint, economic benefits, and biodiversity measures as critical factors when designing these projects. The graph-based visualization maps the main oriented links between indicators, allowing managers to identify the gaps between the perceived knowledge and the ground truth, facilitating their project monitoring.

As the demands for new complex products/services increase, leading to strict constraints on budget and time-to-market, it is hard to learn from experience and improve practice. Improvement can be exercised in all aspects contributing to project management: the skill set of project personnel, the project structure, and the development process. People are the key asset of the project. Identifying the key participants in a project whose role is influential is important for improving the project's success. These people can receive support, remove their burdens, make sure their communication channels work well, etc. This paper offers a multilayer network-based method to examine an actor's influence in a project while combining two additional organizational key aspects: products and processes. Considering these three aspects together allows for a more informed evaluation of the actors' influence on the project. Using the insight from graph theory, we gain indicators related to each network actor. The influence of the actors in a multidimensional network makes it possible to present a clearer picture to decision-makers in the organization to make better decisions related to increasing the effectiveness of the development project.

Product development is facing new challenges due to increasingly complex and individualized products in small batch sizes and short time to markets at high quality standards. Integrated product data management along with systematic requirements engineering and early stakeholder involvement are known to be key enablers for the success of future product development. In software development, established platforms such as GitHub exist, which have been shown to improve stakeholder communication, requirements elicitation, and software design decisions. In product development, similar platforms exist with impressive functionality, but which have some drawbacks such as closed source licenses, vendor-specific data formats, and expert-level user interfaces. To overcome the current situation, we study how the ideas of GitHub can be translated to an open source solution for product development and which concepts can be reused or must be changed. Core deliverables of our work are (1) an integrated data model of requirements (or design tasks), project schedules, and revisions of computer-aided design (CAD) models as well as (2) an interface model.

The number of publications on methods in product development is increasing constantly. In addition to scientific models, method guidelines exist in practice to support the selection of suitable methods. When looking more closely, it is noticeable that new methods are not new developments of methodical principles, but rather adaptations and summaries of known methods to specific application areas.Although approaches to standardize methods exist, they are usually formulated too abstractly to be useful to project managers as a support for method decision making.In our contribution, we analyse common methods of technical product development regarding similarities in content and time. In doing so, we were able to derive a method DNA on the basis of which all methods can be described and, above all, distinguished in a verifiable manner. In addition to essential activity blocks, the DNA also includes the description of temporal sequences, which in particular enables a differentiation between agile and classic methods. Ultimately, the method DNA not only offers the chance to make methodical work comprehensible, but also the possibility to select methods specifically for upcoming development steps arises through the classification option.

Complex research problems are increasingly addressed by interdisciplinary, collaborate research projects generating large amounts of heterogeneous amounts of data. The overarching processing, analysis and availability of data are critical success factors for these research efforts. Data repositories enable long term availability of such data for the scientific community. The findability and therefore reusability strongly builds on comprehensive annotations of datasets stored in repositories. Often generic metadata schema are used to annotate data. In this publication we describe the implementation of discipline specific metadata into a data repository to provide more contextual information about data. To avoid extra workload for researchers to provide such metadata a workflow with standardised data templates for automated metadata extraction during the ingest process has been developed. The enriched metadata are in the following used in the development of two repository plugins for data comparison and data visualisation. The added values of discipline-specific annotations and derived search features to support matching and reusable data is then demonstrated by use cases of two Collaborative Research Centres (CRC 1368 and CRC 1153).

Revolutionary changes of a VUCA-world are effecting more and more industries. Focusing the automotive industry, this is caused by several new trends in technology or market. This situation is requiring high flexibility and is questioning for sustainability as well as resilience in system development projects. This publication represents results out of a survey, part of a wider research. The objective is the development of a process orientated method for risk and technical change management. The survey is conducted by participants of transdisciplinary system development in automotive industry. Topics questioned are VUCA, complexity, (re-)action, quality and module interfaces of Generic Systems Engineering. The results demonstrate the participants’ experience and demands for sustainable and resilient system development projects. In conclusion, this report provides information on the considering elements to develop a process orientated method for risk and technical change management in automotive industry.

Scaled agile development of large systems has primarily followed the approach used in traditional systems engineering – system decomposition and static teams assigned to subsystems. However, this arrangement may result in an inefficient allocation of resources and uneven progress. This paper presents an alternative approach in which problem-based decomposition replaces system-architecture-based decomposition, and resources are flexibly allocated to problems for each sprint using ad hoc teams. Using a field study approach, we examine a mechatronic system development project utilizing these agile adjustments and discuss situations in which these methods may be successfully utilized in other projects and organizations.

Research is increasingly conducted through multi-institutional consortia, and best practices for establishing multi-site research collaborations must be employed to ensure efficient, effective, and productive translational research teams. In this manuscript, we describe how the Population-based Research to Optimize the Screening Process Lung Research Center (PROSPR-Lung) utilized evidence-based Science of Team Science (SciTS) best practices to establish the consortium’s infrastructure and processes to promote translational research in lung cancer screening. We provide specific, actionable examples of how we: (1) developed and reinforced a shared mission, vision, and goals; (2) maintained a transparent and representative leadership structure; (3) employed strong research support systems; (4) provided efficient and effective data management; (5) promoted interdisciplinary conversations; and (6) built a culture of trust. We offer guidance for managing a multi-site research center and data repository that may be applied to a variety of settings. Finally, we detail specific project management tools and processes used to drive collaboration, efficiency, and scientific productivity.

In this article Rachael Wild discusses the transformational difference librarians and information professionals can make by contributing to community causes in the workplace, using her own experience leading Fieldfisher's Sustainability Programme to show how they can become effective project leaders.

In business processes, gaining customer satisfaction is vital for online retailing. In this way, it is necessary to identify the important factors for attracting and retaining customers in online retailing. Many factors are involved in efficient customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Their efficient implementation needs a deep focus on key customers, proper organization, knowledge management, technology, market, sales, ordering, support, and many other factors. Therefore, this paper examines the effective factors (including innovation management, market knowledge, competitive intelligence, entrepreneurship management, stakeholder management, project management, and business project management) on the efficiency of the CRM systems for online retailing. The data were collected from Digikala employees in Iran. Based on Morgan's table (Table A2 (Appendix)), 248 samples were randomly selected, and questionnaires were sent to employees, where 234 were fully answered. Research data and assumptions were evaluated using SPSS and PLS software. Research findings showed that innovation management (ß = .390, t = 6.426, p < .001), market knowledge (ß = .296, t = 4.864, p < .001), and competitive intelligence (ß = .115, t = 2.190, p < .005) directly impact the efficient CRM systems for online retailing. Stakeholder management (ß = .283, t = 9.713, p < .001), project management (ß = .229, t = 5.458, p < .001), and business project management (ß = .544, t = 11.351, p < .001) are also effective through the mediator variable of entrepreneurial management (ß = .143, t = 2.314, p < .005) on the efficient CRM systems for online retailing.

Successful research and development requires interdisciplinary collaboration, often across organisational boundaries and for extended timeframes, such as in innovation networks or ecosystems. Open Organisation (OO) research can support collaboration and knowledge exchange in such situations. It builds on established concepts of Open Innovation through enhancing the exchange of knowledge by the exchange of humans. This paper contributes to OO research by presenting an OO lifecycle framework, which analyses evolving organisational and collaboration characteristics and resulting management needs.