Joining forces

How are project teams working more collaboratively to achieve results? A roundtable hosted by Project explored this issue in depth.

Earlier this year, Project hosted a roundtable to debate the issue of collaboration and control within project teams, focusing particularly on the important role of technology. Deloitte kindly hosted the event at its London offices and project experts from a range of industries joined us to share their views during a lively discussion.

The roundtable was held in association with online collaboration software provider Projectplace.

How do you collaborate within your organisations at present?

Richard Gladman: At Deloitte, we do a lot of collaboration. The ideal thing for us is to have a single team, seamless between our clients and ourselves. Half of my team are from the US at the moment so that creates a few collaboration challenges to do with time differences and where you place material.

Ashish Jain: I work for Doosan Babcock, which builds thermal as well as nuclear power stations. Typically we operate across many time zones. We use a lot of cutting-edge technology for collaboration, but the challenge is to enhance the usage of the available tools. We operate with a lot of proprietary technology that needs to be protected.

Simon Addyman: At TfL, we have a lot of focus on internal collaboration with the supply chain. And then we tunnel under, and interface with, about 80 buildings in the City.

Paul Loucas: BGL Group operates predominantly in the business-to-business sector, providing car insurance for companies. We have a lot of interactions with a nity partners or business partners that we white-label for.

Chris Beach: My role in collaboration is to help to bring all parts of EC Harris together to share knowledge. We have some good internal tools for collaboration and knowledge sharing. But one of the challenges is, how do we take that into the supply chain? Project last held a roundtable to discuss collaboration three years ago.

How do you think collaboration has moved on during that time?

Chris Beach: I’ve seen more investment in the behavioural aspect of collaboration - trying to bed in a culture of collaboration in a business. It’s about trying to drive down costs by doing things right fi rst time.

Paul Loucas: I concur. We are mainly technology-driven and the big change for us has been moving away from the traditional approach to project management, the waterfall approach, towards the agile world of project management – or ‘chaos’ as you might call it. Because agile conducts a project so differently, it lends itself to collaboration.

Richard Gladman: The intensity of projects gets greater every year. A few years ago you’d have team get-togethers to work out if you’re on track on a pretty frequent basis, but we’re now driving that twice a day. So the timescales are being compressed. I think that agile has made quite a big di erence, particularly in the public sector, with big IT programmes.

Tobias Andersson: People have different definitions as to what agile is. But the mega-trend that we see across the board in various countries and industries is a more common approach to ‘lean’. Organisations want to work smarter, cut out waste and not spend time on things that don’t add value for the organisation or the clients.

How has technology enabled us to progress?

Alex Bolton: The technology that enables us to collaborate better has moved on in the past three years. Three years ago, we weren’t talking about cloud solutions for collaboration on iPads, iPhones and BlackBerry Messenger in everyday life.

Tobias Andersson: We did a recent study where we interviewed over 1,200 project managers across six countries in Europe, including the UK, and we called it The Chaos Theory. In the research, one third of the project managers clearly state that they still don’t communicate well within their project team even though they could have technology to support them in doing that. They also say that sometimes the IT department blocks them from pursuing modern solutions.

Meredith Boden: It’s important to focus on collaboration between people, both within organisations and between consultants and organisations. That means forcing people to work together more e ciently and effectively. It means getting rid of emails, not turning your computer on and getting the human aspect back.

Richard Gladman: One of the arts of being a good project manager is working out when you need to get people together face-to-face to solve a problem collectively, when can you do it by phone conference and when can you use software and data-sharing as a way of being efficient. It’s about getting the balance right. You can’t be faceto- face all the time so you’ve got to have a smart way of dealing with that. You’ve got to invest in keeping collaboration tools fresh.

Simon Addyman: Most of our collaboration is by virtue of the fact that we speak to each other. I sit next to our supply chains project director. Very rarely do we use IT to communicate in terms of the way we should collaborate together.

Dawn Hart: It is all about getting people in the room together so they can have the full conversation rather than snippets – we proactively try and encourage the teams to do that.

Alex Bolton: But where you’ve got to deliver complex projects across geographies, it’s not always possible to collaborate in person. Getting everyone in a room face-to-face even at the project kick off – which we know would be absolutely ideal – is not always possible, so you’ve got to be able to simulate that. I’ve heard a few comments calling email into question, but I think it’s a crucial tool for e ective collaboration.

Does collaborative technology exist to support the right human behaviours rather than to replace human behaviour?

John Pelton: That’s my perspective.

Chris Gage: If things go badly as a project progresses, it obviously a ects behaviours. As soon as projects start under-spending or getting delayed, you end up with a lack of collaboration.

Dawn Hart: As part of our procurement activity for any major projects, we interview the managing directors from the companies to say: “What are you doing to make sure your sta members are capable of delivering exactly what you’re saying that you can commit to?”

Meredith Boden: We are seeing more of that as a theme in the bids that we work on.

Paul Loucas: If you go back a few years, it was more around ‘command and control’, which was very di erent from how you see control now. The whole industry is moving more towards that. We still have control but it’s about collaborative control.

Richard Gladman: Typically, the mix of the teams we support our clients with on big programmes is changing. Five to 10 years ago, it was more about putting in prudent leadership specialists and prudent managers. Now the teams are more complemented with people from a business change background. We put in people who can facilitate change and get people working together as well as people who are great at planning and delivering.

How do you collaborate efficiently with your clients when there is information you don’t want to share?

John Pelton: There’s actually remarkably little that cannot be shared in an open and honest way with clients. The problem is the perception that you need to keep back a lot more. It can become a poisonous perception and I’m of the view that the more you can encourage people to open up, the better.

Simon Addyman: When we did the procurement for upgrading Bank Underground Station, we used a novel approach that we called ‘innovative contractor engagement’ and we shared every single piece of project information with the full bidders before we even sent out the tender documents.

Chris Gage: There’s a trend for open-book contracts, particularly with Crossrail, Network Rail and London Underground. Dawn Hart: We go a step further. The project team (us and our supply chain) develops the overall project target cost. By having this, we’re all working in the same direction.

Paul Loucas: If you’re not collaborative, if you’re not disclosing as much as you can disclose, you just lose the trust element. Then you don’t work as a partnership and it turns into ‘command and control’. You need to be open, honest and straight with each other. That trust really frees people up.

Are security risks affecting what you do and, if so, how do you manage them?

Tobias Andersson: You can have super-secure systems but if they are not user-friendly, your users will fi nd other ways to communicate and share documents, which will not always be the most secure ones. You should make sure that you have a trusted and proven solution.

Alex Bolton: I don’t think project managers are primarily concerned about security; I think chief information officers are primarily concerned about security. Project managers who are dealing with highly sensitive projects in their daily work have to be conscious of it. But the human factor comes into play.

Simon Addyman: As project managers, we only use the products that the CIO has already signed o . We don’t go out and buy bespoke IT solutions.

Richard Gladman: It’s not just about the technology, it’s also about educating our client that under no circumstances can data of a certain nature come in our direction. Part of that goes back to collaboration, and being quite clear about the protocols you’re going to adopt, and making sure all data is secure.

Paul Loucas: We take data security seriously because we’re dealing with so many brand partners. If something goes wrong with brand reputation, it could be disastrous for us – we could lose contracts. The Financial Conduct Authority guides the way we handle data. We have to do penetration tests to make sure people can’t breach our systems.

Meredith Boden: We do courses on security every year, particularly about being careful with our laptops. You don’t want to have a conversation with a partner or client about the fact that you’ve lost your laptop…

John Pelton: Complacency because of familiarity is a risk that can breach almost all systems if we’re not careful.

Alex Bolton: But this is where collaboration can help in terms of security. If there’s nothing on that laptop that gets stolen, where’s the risk? Everything is secured, sitting in the cloud.

Chris Gage: We still need sufficient infrastructure. I’m always in places where there’s no 3G or 4G.

Paul Loucas: There are lots of collaborative tools that we never use because we don’t feel secure, especially when they feed data up to the cloud. There’s nothing to demonstrate that they are as secure as they need to be.

Ashish Jain: Our system access rights are defi ned by roles and responsibilities. Everybody cannot access everything. We have audits to make sure we stick to our own information security policy. We have a clean-desk policy so sensitive estimates are not left on tables.

What impact do Facebook and social media have on security?

Paul Loucas: For me, Facebook isn’t a business tool.

John Pelton: I thought like you and then I had a ‘road to Damascus’ moment when I went to the Transport Systems Catapult in Milton Keynes. They had a screen on the wall showing Facebook and Twitter activity – essentially it was an emotion chart showing the responses of travellers in the UK. They were beginning to start to do things at a big-data level with sign-in information in terms of response times and prioritisation of activity.

Paul Loucas: We use Facebook and Twitter to promote our business. We encourage sta to use it for socialising. But we’d never put out sensitive information on it because it’s just not the right thing.

Meredith Boden: But the younger generation are using it more and more. When we’re interviewing people for our graduate programme, they will have gone onto Twitter and Facebook and other forums to look at other people’s experiences of the Deloitte interview process.

Do you worry that someone might issue a tweet that would have your PR team cringing?

Ashish Jain: Anything we want to say on social media needs to be as per our social media policy.

John Pelton: It comes down to values. We have not yet had a problem. Our staff and contractors are pretty proud of Crossrail. There’s a mantra across the whole company – if you don’t want to see it on the front page of the Daily Mail tomorrow, don’t put it in a tweet.

Chris Beach: We’ve rolled out social media training, which mitigates some of the risk.

Tobias Andersson: In our collaboration project software, we have a ‘like’ button. The more likes they get, the more they’ll do it in the future. It fosters positive behaviour in the team.