On the first day, keynote speaker Nathalie Drouin discussed the current research that is helping organisations create a portrait of their project management implementation and enabling them to reflect on current position, consider alternative positions and plan improvements. Lapo Mola, another keynote speaker and professor at SKEMA's Digitalisation Academy, highlighted the ongoing research at SKEMA in datification. She showed how organisations could make a meaningful transition to modernise their capability to capture and use data for enhanced decision-making. Jan van de Poll, founder of Transparency Lab, illustrated the use of a proprietary software that utilises AI to accelerate decision-making and project scorecard reporting in large projects with minimum human intervention.
On the second day, the participants learnt how the UK government is using data to measure and control performance on a wide spectrum of public sector projects of different sizes and duration, challenging traditional perceptions of performance. They also saw how, in the future, we would require fewer project workers but more experts in project management, challenging the usual pillars of project management practice such as the "need" to control what people do. By automating more of the work, less control is needed. Since experts know what they are doing, there is no need of control in the traditional project management sense.
On the last day, Jonas Søderlund, professor in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at BI Norwegian Business School, explained how to get different knowledge bases to play together in the search for new project management theory drawing from the 4 Ps - Project, Problem, Perspective and Process. The participants also got to know about micro and macro challenges of using big data in the construction industry from Karim Rebeiz, dean of the School of Business at Phoenicia University. In the afternoon, Nabila Boukef, associate professor at SKEMA, explained how social network analysis can be used to analyse team dynamics as a basis for better communication and performance. The session where a team from Manchester University applied data transformation concepts to complex multi-project environments proved to be quite enlightening for the participants.
For more information, contact Hélène Borelle.