PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

  First was the Covid, then the war and the political crisis between USA and China have contributed heavily to highlighting the weak strategy in supply chain management for the majority of the companies worldwide. Usually, we hope the "quality is inbuilt" into the product we buy, but this is not. Quality also means meeting the expectation of the customers in terms of lead time and "serviceability" of the product: being out of stock with spare parts or not being able to deliver because of the "global" situation should not be an option. If we look at the root causes, some of them are in the engineering and designing of the product. Companies do not consider double sourcing for several reasons:  Poor risk management R&D budget Shortened design cycle  Sometimes lack knowledge and experience in the new generation of engineers.  I remember that 20 years ago, the double "choices" at the components level also for semiconductors were just part of our ...

  Recently the CHF has become stronger than EUR which can cause a big headache to Swiss companies that produce in Switzerland and export to Europe. Having visited a few of them, we can certainly see that we have room for improvement and urge a change of pass in investments to improve their automation. In fact, the only strategy to maintain competitiveness and production in Switzerland is through massive investment in technologies for industry 4.0 to enable improvement in productivity and therefore squeeze the costs. Some technology enablers are machine vision, robotics, cloud, connected edge computing and sensors. Switzerland has a big advantage to have reliable telecommunication infrastructure and some of the big technology players operating in the country, hence it should not be difficult to start the journey of change and keep the competitiveness of the company by avoiding the outsourcing of processes.     

  Source pixabay Many business companies have a new schizophrenic (i.e., disorganized thinking) behavior by hiring and firing in sequence. Short story long, it is about missing analysis that leads to missing planning, even for financing, and therefore missing resource planning and overall miss risk management. We can see the consequences in the medium to large companies, where they need to achieve short-term results (e.g., shareholders are not happy if they do not get dividends). CEOs appoint well-known consulting companies to "justify their choices". They develop a "restructuring plan" in year x and a "growth plan" in year x+1 or x+2, afterword the cycle starts again. They do not plan long term, anticipating and managing the economic cycles. Many basic disciplines in project management can support and sustain the business management at a corporate level. Hence, looking at issues like market, regulation, finance, resources, competencies, and supply chain, ...

You are asking yourself why after spending so much energy pushing the market, your revenue does not fly. Most probably you belong to the old school. You still use classical channels by making lots of cold phone calls and several visits to customers that are not interested, at least not now, in your products and services. Hence,  you have a group of sales managers that look for personal contact with the customer and are very frustrated to get so little from their effort. Therefore, the revenue does not increase as expected each time you add a workforce. The reason is that today customers take their first information from the internet, and most of the time, their effort goes behind by comparing offers and looking for references before taking action to contact the supplier. In this new environment where the "digital word" play a key role, businesses need to organize themselves to understand the new rules and the associated technologies and then take advantage of them to generate...

  by pixabay Learning project management and getting involved in PMI activities has been an experience that helped me a lot to understand how to deal with my daily job. Whatever function and role I have taken in my career, I have carried my duty according to these best practices. In fact, while projecting development activities is obvious, others like purchasing or selling are also projects and need a good plan and excellent execution. You can manage a portfolio of such projects, hence leading purchasing or selling accounts, and you can also lead programs to set up a new supply chain or develop a new market.  

from pexels Some time ago, I was talking with the CEO of a company about his IT infrastructure on-premises and the cost to maintain it. He told me: "if you have a better idea that can allow me to save money, you are welcome". With my consultant, the company moved to a hybrid cloud architecture, and after a positive experience, they further moved business processes to third-party platforms and enjoyed the benefits.  When someone asks me how to modernize their IT landscape, I always start from the as-is assessment. Furthermore, I suggest considering IT as part of their business strategy. In addition, I recommend thinking about what level of collaboration they need because you can find many applications based on web technologies. For instance, we can look at Office365 or Google Workspace. Hence, starting with the needs for services: Communication Storage Access control and user device management Security including disaster recovery measures, firewall, antivirus Hosting including...

Graphcore  produces and sells HW dedicated to AI computing, while TSMC is a leading Fab for semiconductors and leader of  edge technolog ies for their packaging . Those technologies are explained very well in this video. WoW is a new way to make the CPU more efficient and with a higher rate of interconnections between computational units and memories.

  Many companies have "managers" thinking solutions to improve their "silo" or push new fancy technology. Most of the time, the customers do not benefit from that Inside-out approach.  A company live thanks to its customers and, they have to be at the centre of the company strategy. Hence, all solutions have to drive better customer experiences. That is thinking Outside-in. 

Managing IT and devices in today's environment: remote workers, large portfolio of end devices (e.g., laptop, desktop, tablet, phones). Security is another aspect: encrypting disks, lock/disable USB ports, using VPN, and so on. Microsoft 365 can solve these problems, providing a cost-effective solution for enterprises. Besides, it makes life for IT managers easier.     

  Software development for applications where security plays a central role is a challenging activity. Let's take the example of applications such as automotive, railway, medical devices. In these cases, the coding activity represents only a minimum part of the aim of the project. The documentation, testing and validation part can also take up to 85% of the activities involved in the development. In particular, the "product" resulting from the development could be subject to certification for its "general availability" to the market. There are regulations and norms (i.e., IEC 62304) that dictate the requirements to follow in such cases.  While this exercise can look complex, the famous V-Model can help the organization in managing it. There, an organization can easily map the necessary process steps and documentation needed to control the development and realization of the product. An Agile based organization can adopt this model for example by assuring that the...