Traditional automotive companies are increasingly object to unfamiliar competition from tech companies. The concomitant speed in new product development and the induced changes in technology overstrain their established product development systems. Alternative, more flexible and customer-oriented design approaches such as agile product development are necessary instead. Agility reflects the continual readiness to create, embrace, react to and learn from change to improve customer value. While agile product development has become a standard in software development its transferability to mechatronic product development in general and cars in specific is yet to be proven. The aim of this research is to explore agility in automotive product development. It is divided into three research objectives. First, to systematize agile product development in respect to design context characteristics based on coordination theory. Second, to evaluate agile methods in the automotive domain and categorize agile constraints. Third, to generate domain specific agile coordination strategies to avoid the experienced constraints. To accomplish this research aim an Action Research methodology was employed. During a four-year research project agile methods and practices were introduced to a spectrum of automotive development requirements in eleven pilot projects. Change in the form of adjusted agile practices was actively and repeatedly introduced to observe its impact on development dynamics. The methodology allows to iteratively design and evaluate context-specific agile practices in collaboration with affected product designers within their application contexts. The researcher was an active part of the development projects and able to directly collect qualitative data sets. To ensure research rigor participation across projects was varied, data sets were analysed according to a standardized process, and findings were cross-referenced with supplementary qualitative and quantitative data sets from outside the pilot projects. A coordination reference model is established to provide a comprehensive understanding of agile product development in relation to context characteristics. The findings show that agile methods rely on emergent, self-adjusting coordination strategies based on mutual adjustment coordination modes. The lightweight composition of interlinked coordination mechanisms autonomously adjusts to changing project dynamics. But in the automotive domain agile product development is limited by constraints of scale and physicality. Both cause multiteam development systems and translate into coordination determinants that overstrain original agile coordination strategies. Their lack of inter team coordination mechanisms outbalances the self-adjustability of the coordination system. Three scenarios are presented to avoid this imbalance. Scenario one introduces domain-suitable inter team coordination mechanisms which match automotive coordination determinants. Scenario two applies digital development technologies which enable to develop hardware like software products. Scenario three changes the product structure to realize coordination determinants that suit original agile coordination strategies. The research improves the applicability of agile product development in the automotive domain. It provides a straightforward tool to adjust agile methods to project specific requirements. Additionally, it allows to estimate realistic benefits of agile product development based on project characteristics. The theoretical contribution of the research includes a model-based understanding of agile system behaviour in different application contexts. This proceed is not limited to automotive development and hence opens opportunities to research agile product development in further domains. Moreover, the comparison of constraints of scale and physicality in the automotive development shows how opposing characteristics of domains cause similar limitations to agility and hence allows to connect both research streams.    «

Traditional automotive companies are increasingly object to unfamiliar competition from tech companies. The concomitant speed in new product development and the induced changes in technology overstrain their established product development systems. Alternative, more flexible and customer-oriented design approaches such as agile product development are necessary instead. Agility reflects the continual readiness to create, embrace, react to and learn from change to improve customer value. While ag...    »