Assessment of the project teams’ communication skills in the automotive industry

The implementation of a new product in serial production is a very important element in the company’s functioning. Manufacturers of cars and complex subassemblies have been working for years according to the established standards of designing and implementing new products for serial production. A great emphasis is placed here on the formal side. In addition, the supplier must prove that has sufficient resources to achieve these objectives. And this is what customers verify during system, product, process and potential audits. However, despite formal approval of parts from the supplier, as well as confirmation of design and production capabilities, defective parts or components are sometimes assembled in cars and distributed to the market. Why does this happen? The answer can often be found not in the forms, manuals or procedures, but in the way the project teams communicate and cooperate with each other and with other organizations. This is confirmed by the research results presented in this paper, which show that one of the key issues requiring improvement during production implementations is not the knowledge of specialists, problems with the machine park or plant equipment, but increasing the ability of specialists and managers to effectively communicate and cooperate. It shows how important is the problem of risk assessment related to the project team for the project within the quality planning. According to the authors, the new model of project plan should be enriched with the risk assessment related to communication in the project team, as a part of the feasibility assessment of the whole project.