Defining the scope, estimates, resources and schedule, and monitoring progress against them — the management spine that the engineering processes run inside.
ASPICE MAN.3 Project Management identifies, establishes and controls the activities and resources needed for the project to produce a product in line with its requirements and constraints: defining scope, life cycle, feasibility, estimates, resources, interfaces/commitments and schedule, then monitoring progress and taking corrective action on deviations.
MAN.3 is the management process the whole V runs inside. It's assessed on whether the plan exists, is realistic, is followed, and is corrected when reality diverges — not on how pretty the Gantt chart is.
Purpose (per the ASPICE PAM): identify, establish and control the activities and resources necessary for a project to produce a product in the context of the project's requirements and constraints.
The process is achieved when these outcomes hold:
Establish what the project will deliver.
Life cycle appropriate to scope/constraints.
Feasibility against resources/constraints.
Activities and their dependencies.
Effort, cost, resources.
Staff the project appropriately.
Internal/external interfaces.
Schedule with milestones.
Estimates, resources, schedule consistent.
Monitor and report against the plan.
The output work products MAN.3 asks for (named per the standard):
This is where the standard meets reality. Each work product and outcome has a concrete home — an issue type, work-item type, or model element — in the tools you already run. Types are configurable, so treat this as the typical ASPICE setup:
| Work product / outcome | Jira | Polarion | Codebeamer | DOORS Next | Enterprise Architect | Confluence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WP: project plan | project + plan document link | Project Plan LiveDoc | plan item / document | — | — | project plan page |
| WP: schedule / milestones | Advanced Roadmaps / Epics + Sprints + Versions | Plan + Work Items with due dates | Gantt / planning | — | — | roadmap / milestone page |
| WP: estimates / resources | story points / time estimates + capacity | estimate fields + resource plan | estimate fields | — | — | estimate table |
| WP: progress / status report | burndown / velocity / dashboard | LiveReport / dashboard | report / dashboard | — | — | status-report page |
| WP: corrective action | action issue + due date | action work item | action item | — | — | actions log |
The trap isn't the tools — it's that the links between them are maintained by hand and decay the moment a requirement changes. (See best ASPICE tools.)
Here is the part almost everyone misses. MAN.3 can never reach a mature capability level (CL2+) on its own — it can only be as mature as the configuration-management data model underneath it. SUP.8 Configuration Management is the secret enabling layer: the shared data model of items, versions, baselines and links that is the basis on which every other process group becomes provable. Scatter that data model across a Jira project, a Polarion space, a DOORS module, an EA model and a Confluence tree, and the model is fragmented by construction — the traceability that MAN.3 depends on decays the moment anything changes, and no amount of process ceremony fixes it.
What actually unlocks maturity is a headless ALM — an API-first, tool-agnostic configuration-management data model that is the single source of truth for every work product and every link, readable and writable by both humans and agents — plus an agent/human workflow definition, coordination and traceability platform on top of it, so every change is planned, assigned (to a human or an agent), executed and traced against that one model. That is the layer that lets MAN.3 be mature instead of theatrical.
ASPICE deliberately gives you no blueprint. So we wrote one. This MAN.3 guide is part of The Blueprint — our free, open template QMS for ASPICE: every VDA-scope process area, its outcomes and work products, mapped to concrete artifacts in your tools and grounded in one configuration-management data model. Take it, use it, no cost.
Agents keep the plan honest — reconciling actual progress in the tracker against the schedule and estimates, flagging deviations and their impact on the milestones early, so corrective action is timely instead of retrospective. And we offer to implement The Blueprint for you: our agentic solutions (Vera generates MAN.3's work products and traceability as a byproduct of the build, each with a confidence score and audit trail) running on a partner headless ALM — the API-first configuration-management data model that makes the whole thing provable.
MAN.3 Project Management identifies, establishes and controls the activities and resources needed to deliver the product — scope, feasibility, estimates, resources, interfaces, schedule — and monitors progress, taking corrective action on deviations.
A project plan, a schedule with milestones, estimates/resource plan, progress/status reports, and corrective-action records.
Scope and schedule as Advanced Roadmaps/Epics/Sprints/Versions, estimates as story points or time with capacity, progress via burndown/velocity dashboards, and corrective actions as tracked issues — the plan document itself in Confluence or a Polarion LiveDoc.
No. MAN.3 is agnostic to agile or plan-driven delivery — it asks that the project is planned, estimated, scheduled, monitored and corrected, which agile teams satisfy with roadmaps, sprints and burndown just as well.
Grounded in the standard, honest about the theater: All VDA-scope process areas · SUP.1 Quality Assurance · SUP.10 Change Requests · SYS.1 Elicitation