PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

  Source: "artificially made by AI language model created by Microsoft": Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most exciting and influential fields of technology today. It can potentially transform many aspects of our lives, from health care and education to entertainment and business. However, AI is not a magic bullet that can solve all our problems and challenges. In fact, AI has its own limitations and risks that need to be carefully considered and addressed. One of the limitations of AI is that it is often dependent on data. Data is the fuel that powers AI systems, enabling them to learn from patterns and make predictions. However, data can also be biased, incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated, which can affect the performance and reliability of AI systems. For example, if an AI system is trained on data that reflects historical or social biases, such as racism or sexism, it may end up reproducing or amplifying those biases in its decisions or recommendations. Similarl...

Often we come across products that are difficult to use, which provide many features, more than what we need, but are still complicated to use. This situation mostly happens when engineers drive strategy in the company rather than people from marketing and sales. The last ones know the market and what makes value for the customers. We can take the example of the endless discussion between Android and iOS. The first one leaves the user with the choice to "twist" the system, sometimes changing settings which are hard to understand, while iOS focus on easy and ready use and does not leave too much freedom. That means it makes life easy for the one who wants a mobile phone that works without too much thinking. The question is how to setup the processes and the responsibilities to maximize the profit for technology "driven" companies. A simple answer would sound like this: R&D is responsible for driving innovation into the products under the "business cases...

Today's businesses and people have a very high interest in A.I. and how is progressing research in this field. A big noise is made by OpenAI and one of its applications chatGPT, but what about others. Hence, I wanted to test it and ask this question, here is the answer.  

By using natural language in the caption, OPEN AI engine can create images and paintings. It is a fun example of using technology to be creative. However, Open AI provides the API for "programmers" to convert natural language into source code, therefore, instead of using a keyboard and "programming", OPEN AI Codex, for example, let the programmers focus on "what" the SW shall do.

  source pixaby A common scenario for a company is a startup phase, ramp up and then a maturity phase when its products and or services are well recognized. Unfortunately, here the initial innovation is over, and the mindset of "we have always done like this, we do not need to change" is established. This mindset is the most dangerous, and it is when many companies and individuals stop learning and exploring. Soon they become obsolete. Hence, change and improvement are opportunities to stay competitive, and off-course they require effort and hard work. In some companies, this means removing roadblocks and hiring new blood that can bring new ideas. Looking at best practices from top market leaders, or going for solutions that change the game, should help the process.

  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.