SEF 2023

I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate at Swiss Economic Forum during two days, on June 8-9 this year.

SEF is the most important annual conference for Swiss executives and this year it was even more prestigious as the 25th anniversary edition. The talks were in areas of the financial system, sustainability, geopolitics, innovation and of course digital technologies.

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Blockchain for Trade Finance

I was invited recently to take part in Blockchain Finance conference in Singapore as a panelist in a panel discussion about the use of blockchain for trade finance applications. I find this subject very interesting for many reasons that I will try to elaborate in this post. First I will just explain the main purpose and challenges of trade finance, and then what the benefit of blockchain in this particular field can be.

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Digital Lean

The Future of Project Management in the Digital Age

I am tempted to conclude that project management is on the decline. There is saturation in the number of project managers, in the activities called projects, in the number of projects managed by professional project managers, and many other metrics used to measure the effectiveness of project management discipline. It seems that this practice , as designed and used more than 15 years ago needs to redefine itself to be able to produce strategic advantage in the era of digital transformation.

If it is so, what other methods and concepts should business companies use to execute the work in an efficient manner? And also, what should the project managers do?

To answer these questions, we need first to remember how project management achieved such a high visibility and popularity in the last 15 years. Recall that this was the time of big investments in IT infrastructure and in-house developped IT applications. These investments required very strict scope management, time scheduling, resource deployment and cost management skills to make sure the company resources are used wisely.

But nowadays, the data is moving onto the cloud platform, and business value is created by using readily available APIs from an external ecosystem to make our business and application experiments. And it seems we don’t need project managers for that.

Let me then outline some advice on how to navigate through this new digital world without traditional project management.
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ChinaIT Series – Market and Opportunity Analyses

I’m discovering a real gem – Chinese IT market with a lot of busines potential, for collaboration, partnership, outsoucing, export and import, and business development.

Chinesse IT market is currently 2nd largest in the world, and is growing fast. In the contry there are 2 million registered web sites, 5 millions IT professionals. Yearly IT spending is $200B and is growing $30B per year. What is also important, China is moving the ship towards higher value adding activities and innovation, so I believe there is quite a lot to learn from this new IT power.

Maybe selling their products in the West currently looks overwhelming and risky for these businesses, but I believe it’s just the matter of time when we’ll have them more present in Europe and Switzerland, as it is already the case with Japanese corporations like Fujitsu, Hitachi and NTT.

I’m opening a new series of blog posts that I will call ChinaIT, and in which I will do deeper business analysis of some big established players, but also small innovative startups from different technology domains.

Sasha Lazarevic, 2014

The Challenge of Change Management

Another book that completely changed my view on project management:

In Leading Change and the second volume – The Heart of Change, John P. Kotter speaks about the management of change on a business and organizational level, but also practically demontrates that every project, whether small or super-sized is a transformation of an existing system and has to be considered from that perspective.

Kotter makes the case that business companies can’t survive if they don’t continuously change and adapt to the external environment (this is something we already know), but also cannot survive if these changes do not alter profoundly the behaviour of people who work in these organizations. And to change the behaviour of people, a change agent must win first and primarily their hearts. Kotter here suggests eight-steps process through which one should first explain why change, develop a sense of urgency, create a guiding coallition, jointly develop the vision and the mission, provide short-term wins, and communicate, communicate, communicate.

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