PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

Summary From the postwar period until the present time, the development of project managementhas radically changed structures and processes within car manufacturing companies. But onthe reverse, we can say that project management had been changed by its implementationwithin the automotive context: from technique and tool orientation to more strategic andorganizational approaches, from highly precise contractualized relation patterns to proce-dural open learning ‘‘meta-rules.’’ The auto industry was a latecomer to project manage-ment, compared to military equipment or construction business. But these sectors are nowtrying to transform there project management tradition and adopt the project managementpractices that were developed in the late 1980s and 1990s in the auto sector. We can seevarious reasons behind such a dragging effect: the economic importance and symbolic no-toriety of the auto sector, of course, but also the importance of researches in managementscience and economics in the field, that happened to evaluate the performances of variousproject patters and to trace the transformations round the world.This process is not yet complete, since performance limits are constantly increasing.