Virtual Team Research In Automotive Electronics Multinational R&D Project Management

The good performance of the domestic auto market attract more and moremultinational automotive electronics parts corporations to setup product research anddevelopment (R&D) and technical support centers in the country. By forming adistributed multi-national virtual R&D team, the company can develop products morequickly and suitable for Chinese market with the internal resources and technology.This new form of organization not only brings many benefits to the company, but alsobrings more challenges and difficulties to the project management.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the outstanding problems of multinationalR&D in automotive electronics industry, and to propose the key factors affectingeffectiveness of global virtual R&D team, and then to improve the management of theglobal virtual R&D team by combining the actual project experience.The following paragraph introduces the motivation of multinational automotiveelectronic parts company establishing R&D center and technical center in China, andanalyzes the strengths and weaknesses of global virtual R&D team. Then verify BUIC’s strategy to improve effectiveness of global virtual team in the real project.Provide suggestion to people who will join virtual team or team leader and projectmanager who will manage the virtual team, or the company who will adopt globalvirtual R&D team, through the experience on how to improve and solve the problems,such as communication, trust and leader, in project management of global virtualteams in Continental Automotive.The research results includes the following three items：1.) Improve the model of Dynamic Lifecycle Virtual Team Critical Success Factor2.) Improve the objectivity of the study by consulting overseas project managers and project leaders, who have a lot of global virtual team managementexperience. Re-design the critical success factor in each period of DynamicLifecycle Virtual Team Critical Success Factor improved model3.) Propose solution and recommendation in Business Unit IC of ContinentalAutomotive, and verify the research result in the real project.