CORE SPICE

Move Fast. Build Right.

CORE SPICE is a lean, coaching-based framework for running safety-critical automotive projects—the made-to-order programs where scope, budget, and the start-of-production date are fixed before the team writes a line of code.

I have spent decades inside development programs, almost always the ones already in trouble. The same pattern keeps showing up. The schedule is slipping, the defect counts are moving in the wrong direction, and somewhere along the line, the senior engineers have quietly stopped believing the program can still be saved. By the time someone like me is called in, the problem is rarely only technical. The team has lost the plot, and no document brings it back.

CORE SPICE is the framework I use to turn that around.

The idea behind CORE SPICE

Safety-critical programs do not fail for lack of documentation. They fail when ownership goes fuzzy, when urgency leaks away over the months, when the people closest to the work stop believing it will come together. Those are the things CORE SPICE is built to hold in place.

It is a coaching framework. At its center is a role dedicated to one thing: the team’s capability to deliver—ownership, motivation, urgency, and the speed of intervention when something slips. Around that role sit twelve principles that put safety, responsibility, and merit first, fourteen short approach documents that the team writes and owns, and automation that takes repetitive work off engineers’ desks. It is as agile as the program needs and no more.

What I am coaching toward is a team that can carry the program on its own, and still wants to.

How CORE SPICE works

Twelve principles

CORE SPICE rests on twelve principles. They are short on purpose:

  • Safety first
  • Integrity and ethics before profit
  • Quality culture instead of formal control
  • Approaches instead of process chains
  • Project over matrix
  • Cooperation instead of confrontation
  • Risk minimization instead of risk management
  • Ability to deliver instead of the final delivery
  • Engineering skills before consensus
  • Responsibility instead of control
  • Merit instead of bureaucracy
  • Automated traceability

Five accelerators

Principles set the direction. These five coaching measures are what move a project:

  • No task left behind. Whoever spots a critical risk—a missing requirement, a design flaw—owns that task until it is closed or formally handed over. No throwing the problem over the fence.
  • Maintain the sense of urgency. The whole program runs as a single continuous task force, from kickoff to the start of production. Buffers do not get spent early on optimism.
  • End-to-end responsibility. A Feature Owner carries one customer function across every discipline, from requirement through verification. Silos and duplicate tickets disappear with them.
  • Constantly assess the team. People who are not contributing get moved. Morale is a resource, and you protect it. This is politically hard, and it matters more than almost anything else on the list.
  • Automate everything. A Project Tool Engineer takes peer reviews, traceability reporting, regression testing, and compliance documentation off the engineers’ desks from the first week.

The Team Capability Coach

The most distinctive role in CORE SPICE is the Team Capability Coach. The Project Lead owns scope, budget, and risk. The Coach owns the team’s capability to deliver—ownership, motivation, urgency, and the speed of intervention when something slips. The two work side by side. On a distressed program, the Coach is usually the difference between a recovery that holds and one that slides back.

Fourteen short approach documents

CORE SPICE replaces thick process documentation with fourteen approach documents—issue management, configuration management, verification and validation, quality assurance, and the rest. Each one defines outcomes, responsibilities, and ways of working in a few pages. The core team writes them early together and keeps them alive as the project progresses. They are short enough that people actually read them, and are owned by the people who use them.

The thinking underlying all of this is Effective Critical Systems Thinking—Russell Ackoff’s observation that a system’s performance comes from how its parts interact, not from optimizing each part in isolation. You cannot assemble the best components from different cars and get a working car. Projects fail the same way.

Built for made-to-order work—and for turnarounds

CORE SPICE is designed for made-to-order automotive projects, where the contract fixes quality, scope, and timing, and none of them flex. It is also built for the programs that are already late. The turnaround sequence is deliberate: assess in the first weeks, realign stakeholders, re-examine scope, reorganize the team, hold the safety line, then steer toward the start of production over the following months. Stabilize first, then rebuild the team’s capability to carry the program the rest of the way.

Start here

The framework is worked out in detail across these articles:

The Recovery Dashboard — how to see a project’s real state.

China Speed — matching fast competitors without owning every supplier.

Teams and purpose — why distressed programs break.

The templates are free

The fourteen approach templates, plus a full demo project, are open-source under a Creative Commons license at github.com/CORE-SPICE. Take them, adapt them, and use them in your own program. Drafting an approach with an LLM and then properly reviewing it cuts the work by 70 to 80%—a fourteen-page issue management approach, with diagrams included, in a day instead of weeks.

The book

CORE SPICE is fully documented in Chapter 6 of Car IT Reloaded: Disruption in the Car Industry (Springer Vieweg, 2025), now available in both German and English.

A dedicated CORE SPICE book is on the way and will be published by Springer. “Ping” me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/romanmildner), I’ll let you know when the book has been released.

Find out where your program stands

If the pattern at the top of this page sounded familiar, start with the CORE SPICE Pain Check. In a few minutes, it tells you which symptoms your program is showing.

If you already know your program is in trouble, book a diagnostic call. That is the work I do—I come in when the project is hard, and I leave when your team no longer needs me.