Cases

Examples of how we have helped our customers to product development success. How can we help you?

Overlapping teal and blue triangles with a dark background

Audi

Driving Success Through Transparency and Effective Governance Processes

Challenges

Project reporting and governance across the VW Group brands were not aligned towards fast delivery of new, intelligent vehicles
Suppliers of software components were not managed effectively
Ways of working and governance was not aligned across vehicle launch

Approach and Solutions

We established a governance structure across the E3 TaskForce to ensure successful integration as the first step and lead this with the leaders across the VW Group brands.

This paved the way for aligning on tool chains and data structure that ensured we could build consistent data that ensured transparency of integration status, functional safety status, and issues. This was done through SAP data extraction and PowerBI analytics that resulted in simple automated and always updated PowerPoint presentations.

Lastly we helped manage the delivery of components by performing daily project management with hundreds of project and test managers across brands and suppliers.

Results

Governance and project reporting was aligned with a focus on quality assurance and vehicle launch
Processes for managing software componen suppliers were harmonized and optimized for rapid delivery
Successful delivery

Conclusion

Aspire Innovation’s contributions have had a lasting impact on driving projects forward with strategic foresight and practical solutions. His leadership principles and experience have set a benchmark for efficiency and effectiveness in the organization

Daikin Applied

Ensuring delivery of 21 Product Updates Ahead of Deadline

Challenges

Industry regulations required updating nearly all products with a hard deadline
Required updating more products in one year than had been released in the previous five

Approach and Solutions

We began with a quick, but comprehensive assessment of the current state of product development and the desired future state
Identified major challenges with cross-functional communication and need to adjust scope if necessary to meet the deadline for the most important parts of the product lines.
Deployed an Agile for hardware system to address both issues

Results

Cross-functional communication improved and process bottlenecks identified earlier
All 21 projects released to market ahead of the regulatory deadline
Agile approach ensured that the most critical updates were available early enough to allow shipment of the new technologies to customers on January 1.

Conclusion

Partnering approach allowed Daikin to implement the most critical changes in their process while under tremendous pressure to execute ahead of the regulatory deadline.
Collaborative approach enabled the start of a continuous improvement mindset leading to 6 broad initiatives to further improve the development process not that the regulatory deadline has passed helping them drive substantial future growth.

Graco

Transforming Product Development with Customer-Centric Approach, Driving Successful Product Launch

Challenges

Product development was an engineering function and products were not ready to make and ready to sell at “launch”.
New product ideas were engineering driven without feedback from market on whether they solved customer needs

Approach and Solutions

We conducted a comprehensive assessment of the product development system to identify key opportunities for improvement.

Two key initiatives were undertaken for rapid improvement:

Framework for market launch developed including enhanced voice of customer research, development of opportunity landscapes, and cross-functional market launch planning workshops
Recommendation to shift project leadership from a lead engineer to a cross-functional project manager.

Results

Successful voice of customer interviews conducted that validated value of engineering concept and provided feedback for minor changes to enhance value
Market Launch Planning workshop held for alignment on go to market strategy
Successful launch of GCI injector product line

Conclusion

Aspire Innovation’s listen first approach helped the organization make lasting change and release a market changing product line.

Vestas

Enabling successful portfolio management across all divisions by establishing a cross-functional and cross-divisional governance team & processes

Offshore wind turbine on the ocean with cloudy sky

Challenges

Vestas’ portfolio management was challenged by a lack of collaboration between its divisions and a clear gap existed between the technical teams and the business side, preventing effective decision-making and alignment on priorities.

Approach and Solutions

To bridge this gap, we established a dedicated product team focused on portfolio management, ensuring representation from both the business and technical sides across all divisions.

Key steps included:

Setting up an effective governance structure to support collaboration and decision-making.
Facilitating the creation of portfolio management processes to ensure transparency and efficiency.
Organizing and coaching the product team, product owner, and Scrum Master to foster agility and cross-functional collaboration.
Leading the team for two years, driving continuous improvement and alignment across divisions.

Results

The team successfully aligned business and technical perspectives, enabling Vestas to manage its portfolio holistically for the first time.
Portfolio management was executed effectively across all divisions, improving prioritization and resource allocation.
The structured governance and continuous improvement approach led to sustainable collaboration and efficiency gains.

Conclusion

Aspire Innovation’s leadership and strategic approach enabled Vestas to overcome long-standing silos and create a highly effective, cross-functional portfolio management practice. Their work has had a lasting impact, setting a new standard for collaboration between business and technology at Vestas.

We have also helped these other great companies

Porsche AG

Mark Madsen demonstrated exceptional leadership and strategic problem-solving skills in various cross-functional vehicle projects. His expertise in software development and supplier management significantly enhanced our operational efficiency and effectiveness. We highly value his contributions
Danfoss

Olaf Kolthoff: Mark has been the head of the Hydrostatics PMO for three years. Under his leadership we have built up a global project management office, with team members around the world, that successfully executes our projects. [...] I have learned a lot of about agile project management from him and appreciated the opportunity to work with him.
Grundfos

Allan Erlandsen: Aspire Innovation significantly helped us understand the needs of the organization and brought invaluable lessons learned on our path ahead.
Together we built a revised strategy for the Global PMO & Excellence's transformation and defined a set of key actions to implement in the first months to ensure success for our customers.
Andel Energi

Mark is very professional, takes full ownership and drives his projects without any slips - and at the same time manages his project owners and other stakeholders in a fantastic way. This means that within a month he was already "an insider" and has been a "go to" for the organisation all along.
Abena

Simone N. Pedersen: We very much liked Aspire Innovation's workshop approach to quickly and easily bring our leadership team to alignment on the goal and both short and long term and the steps to get there.
I am happy to recommend Aspire Innovation to help assess and improve project management. We would use them again.