174 Hahn, Schmiedinger, and Stephan
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Participants are all heads of units and selected employees (if possible opinion
leaders) of participating departments. The participants document their commitment by
signing the protocol of the workshop.
As another result of this workshop, technical topic groups (see section on applied
knowledge management methods) are defined to build project support structures and
activities. Special technical topic groups could be electronics, mechanics, and so forth,
which handle a smaller field in the development process.
Target definition workshop:- Participants: leaders of participating departments and (if possible) opinion leaders
- Responsibility: project manager (for preparation and execution of workshop)
- Preparation: meeting schedule, invitations, preparation of agenda, preparation of
short presentation about critical elements of the new machine. Critical means
elements with “high effort for TAT,” “completely new for TAT,” or “success factor
for TAT” - Content: discussion of critical elements and the ongoing information and experi-
ence exchange in the development process across department borders. Definition
of technical topic groups and their leaders/participants - Goal: definition of cooperation in development process across departments. No
technological goals for machine (which are already stored in the concept)
Possible goals out of such a workshop are as follows:- Goal 1: securing feedback from all TAT departments
- Goal 2: monthly exchange of project status, experiences, and problems between
development and construction staff - Goal 3: quarterly information of all departments about project status and experi-
ences
All defined goals are tracked with adequate measures in the development phase (see
following section).
Development Phase (II)
The development phase is of great importance for the successful implementation
of the procedure model, because in this phase the interaction of all participating
departments occurs. Substantial for this phase is the definition of knowledge and
communication goals in the target definition workshop.
The three subphases (1-3) execute and track the defined and committed goals out
of the target definition workshop. This fosters efficient cooperation, successive con-
struction of know-how in all departments, following the development department, usage
of know-how of the following departments, and last but not least, securing the ongoing
information about the project realization of all TAT employees.
Subphase II.1 – Preparation
As preparation work is already done before the target definition workshop, there
is an overlapping part with subphase 2 of the initialization phase. A suggestion for the
workshop is to take an external moderator for efficiency and meeting targets. During this