• Anomaly management
• Automotive
• Product development
• Project management
• Vehicle problems

This thesis is rooted in the curricular internship, an extraordinary opportunity of personal growing combined with the application of problem-solving skills at Lamborghini. Working with the project management team provided a comprehensive overview on an entire automotive project development, with direct hands-on experience.
In this paper, the reader will find a real example of how an automotive project is managed: from scheduling project milestone, co-working on impacting decision-making, tracking project KPIs and continuously adapting to unexpected conditions every day. An overview on how the project team interacts with different company functions is provided, establishing functional relationships typical of a matrix organization structure. A focus on relationships between costs, timing and quality is deeply investigated to guarantee the project profitability. This analysis is supported by some examples of running change modifications and their impacts, evaluated accordingly to the magnitude of changes required, relating it to the correspondent “jump” on the V-model, a well-known scheme widely used in automotive product development.
In the final chapter, specific focus is placed on the new process developed within the company during the internship period, which occurred on the second half of the project life cycle. Therefore, particular attention is given to the validation and testing phase of pre-series vehicles. Some improvements were identified in the management of detected issues. This topic became quickly of major interest for the company, who decided to spend more resources on tracking and reporting KPM tickets (the company tool used to report vehicle defects). The new procedure here proposed includes management leadership on KPM tracking, generation of weekly reports to give an overview of status to the project team, with particular focus on KPM forecast closure curve. Different improvements are shown to reduce this curve to zero-opened issues in time for SOP MS, thanks to a new developed escalation process for unsolved solutions. An example of issue detected and managed with the established procedure is provided.

This thesis is rooted in the curricular internship, an extraordinary opportunity of personal growing combined with the application of problem-solving skills at Lamborghini. Working with the project management team provided a comprehensive overview on an entire automotive project development, with direct hands-on experience. In this paper, the reader will find a real example of how an automotive project is managed: from scheduling project milestone, co-working on impacting decision-making, tracking project KPIs and continuously adapting to unexpected conditions every day. An overview on how the project team interacts with different company functions is provided, establishing functional relationships typical of a matrix organization structure. A focus on relationships between costs, timing and quality is deeply investigated to guarantee the project profitability. This analysis is supported by some examples of running change modifications and their impacts, evaluated accordingly to the magnitude of changes required, relating it to the correspondent “jump” on the V-model, a well-known scheme widely used in automotive product development. In the final chapter, specific focus is placed on the new process developed within the company during the internship period, which occurred on the second half of the project life cycle. Therefore, particular attention is given to the validation and testing phase of pre-series vehicles. Some improvements were identified in the management of detected issues. This topic became quickly of major interest for the company, who decided to spend more resources on tracking and reporting KPM tickets (the company tool used to report vehicle defects). The new procedure here proposed includes management leadership on KPM tracking, generation of weekly reports to give an overview of status to the project team, with particular focus on KPM forecast closure curve. Different improvements are shown to reduce this curve to zero-opened issues in time for SOP MS, thanks to a new developed escalation process for unsolved solutions. An example of issue detected and managed with the established procedure is provided.