During my career I manage a large number of projects, but one of the most challenging ones was the development and launch of a Telematic Control Unit for an important car maker in Japan. The project is important to me due to technical challenges we faced, the skills I applied and the impact on the company.
As Program manager my role was to lead a cross-functional team including Design Engineers, SW Engineers, Operations teams, Material procurement teams, quality and logistics, among others to successfully launch the product to mass production.
First, I kicked-off the project. For that, I shared with the team the project scope, the goals to achieve, I shared the project plan with key milestones and defined the roles and responsibilities for the different team members.
During execution, to maintain a clear communication, I set up design review sessions with the entire engineering organization to ensure everyone was aligned and fixing potential issues in advance. Besides, I led a weekly core-team meeting where we assigned tasks to team members, and setting clear deadlines for each task. To make these tasks easier to manage, I made sure tasks were broken down into manageable sizes with clear descriptions and acceptance criteria. This helped the team to stay focus on their deliveries and maintain speed.
Another important part was to manages Risks. I worked with the team to identify and classify possible risk that might impact to the project deliverables. We defined a Risk matrix to monitor during the development process, and also a project board with the main KPIs to achieve during each stage of the project.
To ensure quality, we defined different testing processes focused on the design, and the process. We installed specific quality check for the documents and devices delivered for each of the milestones of the PDP, as well as a clear quality control in mass production.
Finally, for transparency, I reported on monthly basis to our company leaders and customer about the project status, focusing on Timing, cost, quality and scope.
By employing these strategies, we successfully launched our module on time matching with all the requirements defined by our customer. This was a great example of teamworking, and taught me the importance of breaking down large projects into smaller and easy to manage pieces. Transparent and clear communication was also a great lesson learned. This approach helped me to improve in leading teams through complex problems.
