HomeOffice/Remote Management - Reco&Experiences

In my collection of "Quick tips", during this crisis situation, I offer you my experience and recommendations to be successful even if your team has to work remotely in home office.

What type of projects I have successfully done remotely in the past 2 years?

• Market survey & Business case: for a US company (Bitzer group) and a Hondurean company (INMSA group) I have done 100% of the project remotely delivering a detailed market survey + customers mapping + qualified leads generation + meetings with potential customers + proposals. I used for that internet research + teamwork.com to structure the tasks/milestones/documents/timetracking/risk management/reports + rocketreach.co to find customers information and details + zoom.us to communicate with the customers

• Build 2 automotive plants in Mexico and Nicaragua: for 2 french-us-japonese companies (Streit group and Delfingen group), I have delivered 2 plants including: land prospection + design + tenders' management (30 suppliers) + construction supervision & control. 90% of the job was remotely done and 10% with local resources. I used teamwork.com + zoom.us + Autodesk + .xls

• Strategic plan + reorganization plan: for a central american company I have driven a 1 year program, updating a 5-years business plan and a reorganization plan to implement the strategy. 80% was done remotely and 20% with presential meetings. I used teamwork.com + zoom.us + googlesheets + powerpoint

• BIM Strategy + data base setup: for a US manufacturing company, I have set a BIM Strategy (Building Information Modeling) to prepare their company to deliver 3D models to their customers building a strategic 3D data basis. I used for that teamwork.com + zoom.us + Autodesk Revit (3D design/engineering software). I worked 100% remotely

• BIM Modeling: with a local team in central america, I have produced in the past months more than 400,000sqm of 3D BIM models for customers in Chile, USA and Belgium. 100% remotely done with teamwork.com + zoom.us + AutodeskRevit (BIM=Building Information Modeling)

• Corporate fund raising: for a french company setting up a greenfield project in Africa, we raised 2MEuros equity. I worked 100% remotely using Trello.com + Zoom.us + intralinks.com + rocketreach.co but also I committed 2 consultants in Belgium and France to have some meetings in Paris and Brussels. (10% of the workload of the project

What are main benefits of my customers?

• My customers saved a lot of TRH costs (travel/restaurant/hotel) but also infrastructure hidden costs (office space..)

• They spend almost 50% less than a local consultant usual fee,

• A ready to play person and team with experience into strategic project management with proven templates & backbones

• a committed person conscious that I had to be successful, no other option.

What are my recommendations?

• create and maintain trust + transparency with your customer and the whole project team. I achieved that basically with the project methodology, tools and corporate reporting + commitment + availability thanks to teamwork.com showing all my tasks/milestones/documents/reports/timetracking in almost real time asking my customer just to connect the platform and review the general dashboard (5minutes/day). Of course my experience was key also.

• be open to feed back and ask regularly your team (or customer) to give you some, including basic perceptions

• use short reports focused on actions and achievements, reminding frequently the goals of your project avoiding loose the track of your project and let the customer loose himself into to many details which are not relevant.

• Investigate the IT and management culture (DNA) of your customer. You can use all the technologies and processes of the best-in-class companies, but if your customer is not ready to work on the same way, just use them for your personal productivity and share with your customer the information on a way that I can analyse it. If your mission is a change program, of course it is not the same deal

• Invite the middle & bottom management into your conferences and remote process, most of them do appreciate because they save time and feel as important person. It is a big leverage to get the project leaders on board and convince the Company's board of directors to work this way.

A bit of history and explainations

I started with remote services in 2008 just after the financial crisis. At that time, I consider that less of 20% of my job was done remotely because people were not ready technical wise and cultural wise (even in the US), today I deliver almost 90% of my services remotely for many reasons:

• people are digitalized in their private life and they do implement this culture in their business life and accept the challenge

• most of the middle managers and some top managers have around 35/40 years old and are born with a smartphone ;-)

• globalization is a fact and even if traveling is cheaper today, still the customers try to improve productivity thanks to technology, also because each manager is a PNL manager looking for savings (some of them have incentive plans too)

(Picture: 1 visit with my customer Delfinger to visit other plants withint the country, before starting the construction process, then they came just for the delivery of the plant 9 months later)