Two years ago, the new CEO of the Project Management Institute (PMI), Sunil Prashara, qualified the world as “being projectified” and coined the Project Economy. The large change initiatives in organizations are managed with projects. IBM’s Cindy W. Anderson added in her article Welcome to the Project Economy (2019): “The projects in these organizations, and others, are being led by people with a variety of titles, solving a variety of problems in industries big and small, and across all regions around the globe. The Project Economy has room for all of them.”

Are these the project management trends?

In early February 2021, NK Shrivastava and Phillip George conducted a PMI webinar Looking Forward to Project Management in 2021 after a Turbulent 2020. The undoubtedly well-intentioned key trends, I believe, underestimate the real needs in the project economy.

1. Project delivery will continue to be impacted by COVID-19
2. Cybersecurity projects will be as important as ever
3. Demand for project managers will increase
4. PMOs need to innovate to stay relevant
5. Design Thinking approaches will be integrated by project managers
6. The use of Kanban will increase on projects
7. Agile and DevOps approaches need to integrate further
8. Quality engineering will take precedence over quality assurance
9. Agile teams will be more distributed than ever
10. Agile coaching and transformation services will rise

One project has come to a standstill due to the pandemic, while other projects have just started to solve emerging problems. How literal and wry is one person’s death, the other his bread. Think of the projects at pharmaceutical companies to bring a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 on the market within a year, the projects to develop a Corona notification app, organize source and contact research, set up test and vaccination lines, or to organize corona proof in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

In projects such as the Dutch Corona notification app and the serious data breach in the application that the public health services use to register source and contact research, the importance of information security became painfully clear. The importance of cybersecurity may well have increased.

I recognize the increased demand for project management competencies, but do not see PMOs as independent entities that remain relevant through innovation. Apart from a PMO in 2017, I can easily do without it for two decades. Design Thinking is one described, simple technique to facilitate the divergence and convergence of ideas. The suggestion that project managers are going to integrate this technique (s) requires explanation and context. A key trend is an exaggeration in this.

Using Kanban and projects in one sentence makes you rethink your field of expertise. Kanban originated as a signaling technique in assembly line work in production companies. Bottlenecks, such as a machine that has come to a standstill or stalled, must be resolved as quickly as possible to resume the flow of continuous production. As a contrast to repetitive activities in the Operations of an organization, we realize in projects the new products, services, or processes that will change that. Not as assembly line work in accordance with a configuration script, but a risky temporary company that wants to get from A to B based on good or even emerging approaches and deliver the required results.

The call to integrate Agile and DevOps suffers from the same problem. Agile is an umbrella concept of frameworks, techniques, behaviors, and principles to make people, teams, and organizations agile in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous outside world. A multidisciplinary team develops something. This can be done in many ways, for example with an agile framework such as Scrum. By subsequently asking the team to also take care of the management and maintenance of the delivered items, Dev(elopment) and Op(eration)s are brought under one organizational roof. If you have delivered a good product, you don’t have to worry about it much afterward. As the parties involved, you know the most about the product, so it is logical that you can and can also provide a next version, an improvement, or change. If you have delivered rubbish, you can also clean it up yourself. This can be about software, but also about renewing and managing a section of motorway.

Building in quality instead of testing is commendable. With more and more working from home worldwide during the pandemic, the claim that Agile teams (meaning: development or DevOps teams in organizations) are spread over the workplaces of all individuals involved is an open door. This does not go without a struggle, it makes a considerable appeal to the people who have to provide coordination, leadership, and integration and shows daily how much you miss non-verbal cues in communication and collective learning becomes a source of headache.

And yes, with all those organizations on the move to implement and improve agile ways to work (together), there is a temporary or permanent need for coaching and change management. I do not see the direct link with project management key trends.

Megatrends for project managers looking beyond the obvious

If you really want to contribute to a better, more beautiful, cleaner world, check whether your project actually means something for themes such as:

• COVID-19
• Climate crisis
• Civil, civic, and equality movements
• Shifting globalization dynamics
• Mainstream Artificial Intelligence

These five megatrends described by Cindee Miller et al on PMI’s Voices of Project Management on February 11, 2021, may take place outside of your bubble. At major Dutch banks and top 3 insurance companies, we think that everything revolves around software, everyone works agile and project managers are passé. The fact that I provide monthly project management training on PRINCE2 via the Capgemini Academy raises questions. Is PRINCE2 still in use? So yes. Otherwise, organizations would have no need to let their people do this training (s) and pursue certification.

Admit it, on your resume it is more interesting to be able to report that you have made a significant contribution to one of the above-mentioned megatrends than just another back-office migration, implementation of pieces of legislation, or the revision of an online dialogue for the application of an insurance product or a loan?

What skills are needed now and in the future?

The British project manager, author, and speaker Peter Taylor distinguishes three types of project managers (I also wrote about it in 2019 and the words are in full force in 2021):

• accidental project managers (through harm and disgrace, rolled into the emerging field more or less by accident. Peter Taylor is an example of this);
• educated project managers (project management as an element in the curriculum, a career move, colleagues with the necessary training and practical experience. I am an example of this myself);
• intentional project managers (students who already choose to become a project manager, immediately do major project management and are able to lead projects from their entry into the labor market. As a people manager and trainer I regularly come into contact with such ‘energetic folks’).

The September 2019 New Statesman published an article Investing in 21st-century skills. This taps into the intentional project managers and points out how to prepare young people for the project economy by engaging in technical and social skills, daytime practice at work, as well as in volunteering, and other out-of-hours projects.

I think it is cool to work with young people in their twenties who have already led projects with PRINCE2 in their training, have a master’s in Innovation management, or have already learned to deal with conflicts, lead teams, or presenting convincingly. I prefer to put them on the track to lead projects instead of wasting time on typical young professional roles at an IT consultancy company as a tester, junior business analyst, or project assistant.

Regardless of the type of project manager you count yourself on, it is important to remain relevant. In the promotional video of the project economy, the change “From frameworks to whatever works” comes over. For me, it typifies the transition of project management. Do not dig (too) long in the past if you are looking for the future of project management (such as John Verstrepen, Roelof van der Weg, and Ben van de Laar in The project manager in translation: looking for the future of project management, 2017). On the shelf with the professional literature, new books such as Psychological Project Management 2nd edition or Citizen Development: The Handbook for Creators and Change Makers would rather belong than the upcoming seventh edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide).

Introduction

The ability to quickly identify emerging defects in powerline insulators is one of the key challenges of the power transmission industry. Conventional methods of powerline insulator inspection are costly, time-consuming, resource-intensive, and even risky. The transmission utilities must therefore replace outdated methods with faster, automated, more accurate, and safer modern methods of insulator inspection.

Breakdowns need to be reduced to a minimum as they severely impact revenue and customer experience

Transmission line inspections are carried out as part of both breakdown and preventive maintenance, to localize and assess fault severity . Traditional methods generally comprise visual walk-through or drive-by inspection using hand-held instruments. This process is generally time-consuming, leading to slower resolution of faults and defects. It results not only in lost revenue for utilities companies, but also adversely impacts customer experience. Also, line inspections are necessary before re-energization, for the safety of life and transmission assets in the aftermath of natural calamities, such as cyclones or storms, or during transmission system breakdown. Modern inspection methods are increasingly deploying drones or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), which use high-resolution cameras to capture visual and thermal images.

Capgemini offers a robust solution for powerline inspection, leveraging drones, image analytics and seamless integration with SAP, SCADA, OMS & GIS

Capgemini’s E&U Industry hub has developed a unique solution for real-time monitoring, visualization, and analysis of powerline insulators. The solution uses high-end images of powerline insulators captured by drones and combines intelligent data capturing, cloud computing, deep learning and smart video analytics to detect insulator faults, such as developing cracks or structural deformities. It leverages 5G communication technology for real-time video streaming and image transfer, which accelerates defect processing and decision making.

The image analytics help O&M field crews develop maintenance strategies and use aerial data insights to proactively manage faults, thereby avoiding costly breakdowns, service breaches, and reputational damage to the utilities company. The analytics also helps quickly attend to defects and restore the system.

The key differentiator of the Capgemini solution is its seamless integration with transmission utilities applications such SAP, SCADA, OMS, and GIS. The solution has the potential to considerably improve the reliability of the transmission system through proactive fault management, which has a direct impact on the utilities’ revenue and maintenance efficiency, as well as regulatory and service commitments.

This solution can be extended to monitor other transmission line assets as well

The solution is scalable and can be extended to monitor not just powerline insulators, but also other transmission line assets, such as tower structure, conductors, joints, spacers, vibration dampers, and features including transmission line sags (ground clearance) and vegetation undergrowth. The solution provides transmissions utilities the following tangible and intangible benefits :

1. Better situational awareness of powerline insulators and other network assets
2. Enhanced personal and asset safety during transmission line inspections
3. Condition-based predictive maintenance and faster defect restoration
4. Optimizing maintenance strategy, resources, and operational expenditure
5. Improved reliability and availability of transmission lines
6. Compliance with health, safety, and regulatory performance standards
7. Contribution to sustainability due to reduced breakdowns and losses.

Our drone-based analytics solution can also be effectively deployed for the inspection and defect identification of the water and gas utilities infrastructures.

To learn more about this solution or see it live in action, contact :

Bragadesh Damodaran, Director – Energy & Utility IndustryHub

Jayant Sinha, SME Energy & Utility IndustryHub

Amit Gupta, GIS Lead, Energy & Utility IndustryHub

Aniket Mahato, GTM Lead, Energy & Utility IndustryHub

In this short series of articles, we’ve been looking at the supply chain challenges organizations typically face, and the extent to which they have been complicated by current pressures. We’ve also outlined the characteristics and benefits of the autonomous supply chain.

In this, the third and final article, we’re going to assess the current climate for the adoption of this approach, at critical success factors, and at the support an external services provider can give.

Key focus areas

In previous articles in this series, we’ve already seen indications of a business appetite for the end-to-end visibility that the autonomous supply chain can provide. Indeed, in a recent report conducted for Capgemini by NelsonHall, we learn that roughly a third of enterprises (34%) plan to undertake significant autonomous supply chain initiatives over the next two years. These initiatives can be broadly grouped into three areas: planning and forecasting, supply chain optimization, and supply chain execution.

Within these three areas, the functions on which survey respondents were most focused included:

• Supply forecasting (40% of respondents) – obtaining more data from key suppliers to enable longer range planning
• Demand forecasting (32%) – using wider sources of information such as social media, and increasing campaign integration with major retailers
• Warehouse optimization (22%) – fully automating orders, right through to depot picking and dispatching. Also, moving raw inventory on plant pull signals with no manual interventions
• Consignment tracking (52%) – implementing real-time tracking on more raw inventory for greater overall improvement of the supply chain. Also, simultaneously improving customer satisfaction and reducing inbound service inquiries, by using machine learning techniques to track data supporting logistics movements, and then proactively providing that information to customers.

Partnership criteria

The supply chains of major enterprises are so large and complex, and their role is so crucial, that it’s no surprise to find that, according to the survey in the NelsonHall report, 84% of organizations will involve vendors when implementing autonomous supply chain initiatives. So – what should you look for in their potential partners?

Perhaps, needless to say, it’s important to work with service providers with both the consulting and operational supply chain expertise to reimagine and deliver supply chain transformation projects – and who are also able to address your organization’s own global scale of operations.

Less obvious, maybe, is that this process knowledge needs to be matched with substantial experience of automation and analytics. For example, machine learning and deep learning technologies are rapidly becoming essential in the supply chain’s ability to become touchless and autonomous. To demonstrate relevant experience in these areas, potential partners should be able to show they have developed best-in-class solutions based on integrated combinations of process models, industry platforms, and automation technologies.

Critical success factors

There have always been significant and complex demands made of enterprise-level supply chains, and the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the pressure for them to deliver – both figuratively and literally.

There are several key elements for success:

• A staged approach – it’s a good idea for the overall strategy to involve a series of linked short-term projects, each delivering demonstrable returns on investment (ROI) in the near term
• A pilot program – each of these stages should be piloted, so as to provide a working prototype that addresses all the issues that have arisen along the way
• Leadership buy-in – continuing to demonstrate ROI will maintain senior support for the transformation, and this, in turn, will help to keep things moving through to completion
• External buy-in – trading partners need to be on board, too
• A good team – the people implementing the program are likely to be a mix of internal personnel and those from vendors and service providers. They need to have relevant complementary skills and experience, and they also need to work together well, and towards shared goals
• Good data – legacy systems and manual processes present problems. The prospect of tackling them is daunting, but the main lifting and shifting will with luck be a one-time fix, and the results will be worth it
• Continuous improvement – addressing the major legacy and manual issues may largely be a one-off, but transformation as a whole certainly isn’t. An autonomous supply chain, and the Frictionless Enterprise of which it is part, have versatility and flexibility in their DNA.

Experienced service providers will of course be part of the good team on this list, and they will be able to help ensure you address all these factors efficiently and effectively.

To learn more about the autonomous supply chain and its role within the Frictionless Enterprise, read NelsonHall’s full report “Moving to an Autonomous Supply Chain: An Essential Guide for Manufacturing & CPG Firms.”

Read the “Fast Forward: Rethinking supply chain resilience for a post-COVID-19 world” report by the Capgemini Research Institute (CRI) to understand how you can future-proof your supply chain for a post-COVID world.

Finally, to learn about how Capgemini’s Digital Supply Chain practice  can help your organization build a resilient, agile, and frictionless supply chain, contact: dharmendra.patwardhan@capgemini.com

Read other blogs in this series:

• The autonomous supply chain – long-term challenges and current pressures
• The autonomous supply chain – characteristics and benefits

Dharmendra Patwardhan is responsible for developing offers and capabilities for transforming supply chain operations that drive tangible business outcomes for Capgemini’s clients.

For many companies striving to be agile, redefining authority and responsibility is a difficult topic that comes with many cons and pros. In this article, I will focus at redefining decision-making authority and responsibility.

Re-evaluate authority

Re-evaluating responsibility is a difficult topic. It is not without reason that sharing responsibility scores high on both key success factor and challenge of agile transformations (Capgemini Consulting, 2017, Agile Organizations). Within a business context, I think of authority as “a group of people with official responsibility for a particular area of activity” (Cambridge Dictionary). So, these often concern line-management officials who are responsible for a particular area of the business, department or service.

I notice that people drop terms related trust very fast when they are re-thinking authority. Line managers are scared of losing control and communication, afraid that everything will fall to pieces. But it comes as no surprise that in order to apply a customer-centered end-to-end process at team level, team members cannot check every detail with someone who is higher up in the hierarchy. For example, asking for approval via email or a especially designed request system just makes it longer to reach a decision and respond. If a request comes in on Monday, for example, you are lucky if you get an answer by Friday. In the meantime, the customer isn’t being helped and is just waiting in the dark.

Decision-making teams

Re-evaluating team authority and responsibility means giving teams the authority to make relevant decisions that affect the implementation of their day-to-day activities. In other words, treat grown-ups like grown-ups. Give team members the power to decide without having to ask someone higher up for permission. In practice, this means that the teams have the authority to prioritize feature changes in products. Alternatively, the developers talk directly with architects and product owners to understand the customer’s needs.

Giving team members authority also fosters freedom and autonomy – and this is one factor that, according to Pink (2009: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us), motivates people. Pink argues that people are intrinsically motivated by three factors: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The first factor, autonomy, refers to the ability to direct your own life and work. You can control what you do and how you do it. Traditional ideas of control, such as regular work hours and dress codes, can be retaught, improving staff autonomy (Pink, 2009).

Focus on signature customer moments

Re-thinking responsibility involves moving away from traditional top-down authority patterns and putting the authority at the place closest to the customer in the value chain. Move away from traditional top-down hierarchy. Set teamwork up in non-traditional ways in which fast reaction times and feedback loops are priorities that enhance the customer experience (Capgemini Consulting, 2017, Agile Organizations).

To elevate the customer experience, it is also necessary to distinguish your organization from others during signature moments. Capgemini Consulting (2020, One Happy Customer) discusses these signature moments. H&M Kik chatbot, which presents users with different outfit photos to help styling, is one example. The signature moments are different than “regular” processes in online retail, such as online checkout. As a result, these moments make or break interactions with customers. They have the power to build deeper and longer relationships between people and the business. Especially during the signature moments, should the customer experience a speedy and flexible process. Most importantly, this requires teams that are able to make fast decisions and are not stuck on long decision-making paths.

New communication and responsibility for agile teams

Just like all other things in life, rethinking authorization has two sides. By distributing authority to teams, you give them the power to make relevant decisions. However, this also means that you give them new communication lines and responsibilities to align with the agile organization. These are responsibilities they probably did not have to think about before. Guide teams towards becoming responsible for sharing knowledge, rethinking ways of working, and making information accessible for others. Before, the line-manager took care of this. Now teams themselves need to break silos and start thinking as a holistically. However, learning to take care of new responsibilities is unlikely to happen overnight. Teams will reflect and improve this process along the way. Give teams time to learn and adapt to the agile organization.

Author

Nick van Zuijlen

Senior Consultant Transformation

Capgemini

The prolonged COVID-19 context has created a new normal to which both our clients and their customers need to adapt. New behaviors, needs, and expectations have arisen. For B2B as well as for B2B2C, our clients must accelerate remote selling and reinvent their interactions with customers, offering the right phygital mix. It’s more important than ever to truly understand end customers and better anticipate their needs using AI and data. At the same time, new sales approaches continue to emerge due to competition and budgetary issues, such as ROI-based selling, new solution-based business models, (servitization such as subscription models) and a new channel strategy with the development of direct to consumer (D2C).

B2B Sales x marketing : Illuminate the dark funnel

Why?

With social distancing, trade show cancellations, and overall client adaptation to the COVID situation, sales reps need to reinvent their tactics to understand and address existing and new customers.

Meanwhile, influenced by B2C’s behaviors, B2B buyers want greater anonymity, are marketing-resistant after years of email harassment, and use more digital channels in their purchasing journeys.

That’s why it’s so important to align B2B buyer journeys with those of B2Cs by increasing the number of touchpoints in the early stages of the B2B buyer journeys and collecting more data to identify, preempt, and seize business opportunities and adopt the sales strategy accordingly with new products/services and business models.

How?

Now more than ever, demand comes from the prospect. Therefore, marketers and B2B sellers need to work together to uncover or even generate this demand and turn it into opportunities, engaging prospects and customers in a linear journey. For this, B2B companies have to illuminate the “dark funnel,” which covers the initial stages of the B2B customer journey, from problem identification to solution exploration and requirement building. The challenge is to identify and qualify the journey while introducing sales at the right time to engage with prospects and increase lead generation and wins.

Intelligent market monitoring solutions can increase acquisition potential by capturing business opportunities and getting ready-to-use leads thanks to social listening, lead generation tools, and enhanced account management. Companies such as Schneider, General Electric, and BNPP are already well engaged in this approach.

Sales efficiency

Why?

COVID-19 had a huge impact on the traditional sales journey. First of all, sales reps needed to reinvent their way of working to engage remotely with clients and prospects. Besides, it has become more difficult for them to reach their quantitative objectives due to markets uncertainties and new level of competitiveness unleashed by the pandemic. As a result, budgets for both buyers and sellers have had to be readjusted and lowered. Therefore, B2B companies need to readjust their sales performance models and focus on measuring and optimizing sales efficiency.

How?

Successful B2B companies have reinvented their sales journeys by focusing on efficiency in this new normal. In this respect, we are seeing a new sales approach develop around ROI-based or Business-case selling which consists in envisioning the impacts of sales for your customers and committing to them.

Besides, B2B companies have started implementing AI-based solutions in order to enhance the productivity of sales reps using solutions such as NBA and intelligent-guided selling based on contextual best practices, reducing time spent per customer while offering their customers relevant solutions and improving hit ratio. Data and AI solutions can also help to better target and predict customer demand, optimizing effort spent on customers. Moreover, B2B companies have revised their compensation models by adding qualitative objectives such as digital prospection, social network activity, or customer satisfaction measuring its related ROI impact.

Voice of Customer

Why ?

• Now more than ever, it has become critical to qualify and quantify customer sentiment and perceptions in order to proactively understand and adapt to their needs.
• Thanks to Voice of Customer and associated customer feedback management solutions, companies can bet on higher customer satisfaction (up to +25 pts in the Net Promoter Score), a +20% increase in additional spending per customer and accelerated growth.
• VoC is now emerging in B2B industries. Although VoC is nothing new in B2C, there are more expectations in terms of customer/consumer understanding and getting valuable insights from direct and indirect channels such as social networks.

How ?

For optimal use of Voice of Customer, companies need to:

• Listen carefully to customer feedback at each touchpoint of the customer journey.
• Analyze and understand the data to turn it into valuable insights for future projects.
• Revamp their continuous improvement processes to integrate and act on insights collected through concrete action plans across the organization.
• Engage with the customer in continuous dialog and ensure that their voice is at the center of the organization.

In this way, companies are able to identify concrete actions to correct an issue in the customer experience together with their clients.

Sales team transformations to support new business models

Why?

• Emergence of new technologies and high connectivity
• COVID-19, lockdown, social distancing impact distribution models and customers behavior
• Higher competitive tensions on the markets.

How?

For the above-mentioned reasons, we are seeing the emergence of new business models, including:

• Servitization – shifting to pay-per-use and pay-per-output, in which customers do not pay for the actual product but for the benefits that the product brings.
• Direct-to-customer – when a company decides to create a direct distribution channel for one or many products from their portfolio in order to directly reach the consumer with no intermediary (wholesalers and retailers).

Companies need to adapt and transform their customer service solutions to provide best-in-class customer experience, ensuring that the new business model promise is honored and meets high customer expectations.

For instance, sales reps will use social media more intensively to promote their products and attract new prospects and will directly engage their customers on chat.

Similarly, they will have to adapt their speech and behavior with clients. For instance,  for outcome-based services, sales reps will have to switch from a “product-seller” position to outcomes advocate to support their customers and help improve the product to best meet customers’ needs and expectations.

Author

Julien Leblois

Customer Experience, Europe SBU.