Project management, essential for the success of your industrial 4.0 projects!

Any project involving the implementation of IT solutions for industry, whatever its size and ambitions, requires strong business expertise, flexibility and controlled management of its progress.

An IT project for industry is not conducted in the same way as any other project. The context, the stakes and the constraints are not the same! The challenges of this type of project lie mainly in the fact that the deployment of any new solution and the resulting change management must always be implemented while limiting the impact on production as much as possible. Production cannot be penalized or stopped by the deployment of a new solution. The implementation phases cannot constrain production. On the contrary, they must adapt to it by matching the downtime and availability of equipment and field resources. Production also evolves daily, with its hazards and changes.

It is often underestimated, even neglected, and yet project management is essential to the success of industrial projects.

An industrial project is prepared, organized and planned with all the stakeholders. Its progress is managed daily with proactivity, agility and rigor.

– Visibility must be given through natural and proactive communication. Sharing platforms, e-mail and telephone are all tools that can facilitate communication, but face-to-face meetings on site remain essential. In these times of health restrictions, videoconferencing still helps to maintain a form of proximity with stakeholders. Critical information can be transmitted and important decisions made through daily communication. It is therefore important to formalize these exchanges.

– Standup meetings must be held regularly. They allow the whole team to be informed of the evolution of the project context and to guide the stakeholders in their daily work.

– Intermediate deliveries and sprint reviews make it possible to adapt the pace of deployment to that of production and to guarantee flexibility in the result.

– The status, organization and planning of the project are monitored during the monthly steering committees. The most critical decisions are also taken during these meetings. A formal report must be drawn up systematically at the end of such meetings.

– Change management is facilitated by continuous training, coaching and follow-up in the field.

Probably due to ideology, project management methods, which shine on paper with their convincing principles, are unfortunately sometimes applied in an overly academic way, imposing the project context to adapt to comply with them and finally annihilating all the flexibility that they advocate.
The reality of the field requires adaptability, pragmatism and responsiveness. Even if it can be guaranteed by different certifications, the project management skill alone is not enough. Business expertise, field approach and human contact are essential. And it is ultimately the combination of all these skills that will make the difference in practice. Through years of experience, Synthetis has understood this. That is why our employees are above all experts in their field, close to their customers and passionate about the industry and the field. This is part of the DNA of Synthetis.

At Synthetis, we prefer to talk about project management rather than project management. Because it is on the basis of our proximity to the field, our ability to understand our clients’ business and to identify the challenges and constraints of production that we guide the deployment of your projects in a pragmatic and adapted way. This is how we design and deploy innovative solutions for industry optimization.