Improving Global System Development and Collaboration across Functions: Experiences from Industry

In large and complex organizations efficient collaboration across different locations (e.g. global system development) and different functions within the product lifecycle (e.g. sales, development, production) are key success factors in system and software engineering. As a global expert department for process consulting within the Siemens AG, we developed approaches to analyze and improve collaboration in these two scenarios and have successfully applied them in different Siemens business units. From our experiences, both approaches have similarities and often the challenges faced in industry when implementing global development are a combination of both: collaboration across locations and across functions. This presentation describes our approaches for analyzing and improving organizations with respect to these two scenarios. We emphasize their similarities and differences and show our experiences with them. The individual steps and methods (toolbox) within the workflow are explained using practical examples from Siemens organizations. In addition, challenges and questions we encountered are discussed.