One point that may help in other's considerations of what recipe might work to formulate
a better way to execute car projects is to repeat a pretty good summary of application for the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) that I once heard.
If you think of the PMBOK as the Bible and a particular project as a different religion you apply the 'Bible' to. For the most part, the essential pieces remain the same but you pick and pull what will work best from the PMBOK for that project. A different project may require a different 'religion'.
Once I realized that it's more of a dance than a science it made it easy to say were not using X for this project because it doesn't work. Lets try something else out of there.
I think back to managing large IT projects and how the different groups called for different approaches (although the MOU, SLA, Burn-down charts and Sprint backlogs still had to be worked every week) to get everything done.
Infrastructure and platform-as-a-service teams worked best when we applied a large amount of project management. An easy parallel would be your large car maker's assembly line processes. Cookie cutter and lots of checks and balances involved. I think this side of the industry is where we mostly get frustrated with pushed deadlines because hanging new fenders and doing a respray should be pretty straight forward for a professional. I ***think*** this may be the side of things where we could best focus on some good best practices for our industry. They are there but not enough of the smaller shops observe them.
The Web development guys who did front end graphics... oh no, no, no... those are your artists and they'd subconsciously push back on regulation of time and deliveries to the point of being in serious risk of their jobs with as much methodology as applied to the other groups. They were artists so creativity had to flow in a less regulated way some times. This is where maybe most custom car guys are (half of me SO identifies with this group). Creativity is not inspired by a work breakdown chart and a Monday morning due date. Other methods much apply to these types of crafts which makes it very difficult to manage as a project. I think this side of the industry is where we mostly understand and don't get frustrated with pushed deadlines.
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Originally Posted by ironworks
Agreed.
Plus in the custom car world your trying to give each car a different personal feel for the owner. In auto repair, you just fix it properly and send it down the road. There is no personalization or emotion in the process. It's either fixed and working or its not.
The simpler and less custom you make each build the more you can scale that business model. The is no way to scale the high end side of the custom car world. The bigger the scale the less options. Until pretty soon your considering a Shelby Mustang custom.
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Your point is very valid and brings up a good consideration to applying the execution of car projects (or any parallel trade) which is technical break\fix vs. Customization.
From what I've read so far, we mostly all agree that simple things like paint repairs, engine swaps, Audio installs and interior projects with little customization are more predictable and therefore could lend to be managed using more project management methodologies.
Managing full custom builds that are WAY off the beaten path becomes much more challenging to do and nail the landing on completion dates because we're talking about artists, inspiration, exploration of 4 things that don't work to discover the one that does, etc. Not to say that a good system in place cant help but would create a pretty big paper trail in change orders and resetting commitment on completion dates.
I also want to be the fist to call myself out to say that this is much like discussing diet and exercise: I have some experience in doing it good and also in doing it bad and I fight that challenge every day along with everyone else to get better. I want to run an amazing operation but know that it only comes by going to path of good > great > excellent > amazing.