Five Years Later
Global remote working is not the same as working from home on Fridays or for a few weeks during a pandemic. After five years of operating a virtual specialist business we have learnt a few lessons. Within TAM all of our specialists have over 20 years honing and broadening their skills, generalists don’t survive in our environment. We work remotely across continents for a broad range of clients with a broad range of issues.
Specialists
Most of all, global remote working for clients requires a great degree of discipline and genuinely specialist skills, generalised experience won’t cut it. We have become very selective about who joins the network.
We require people to write a methodology that demonstrates first principles understanding of the subject matter and demonstrates a philosophy of excellence in that domain. If the methodology only describes a technique and not the application of fundamentals it demonstrates to us that the individual is only repeating experience, they haven't analysed and learnt from that experience.
As we solve problems for clients we find the single biggest problem is people who have repeated their experience rather than properly understanding the situation at hand. We believe the biggest recruitment mistake is hiring on the basis of experience alone and not testing the technical understanding of the recruit.
The main global remote working benefit to the client is access to specialist teams. Specialists identify what is required, quickly and efficiently. Hence, we must ensure people are genuinely specialists.
Digital
It is digital technology that makes the business model possible. A high level of digital literacy is required, not just to function this way, but because we best assist the client by being able to automate our knowledge such that there is no ongoing dependency on our services.
We don't want to repeat the same work again and again. We are not handle turners who charge by the hour to regurgitate, and even simply reformat the same deliverables. The nature of the people that meet our specialist criteria is that they want to be on the next challenge.
Thus, many in our network are producing digital technology that we organise into an overall virtualisation solution for clients. Addressing not just the issue at hand but building a digital platform for the client's future.
Developing technologies instead of providing services means an increasing proportion of our network is made up of specialist companies rather than individuals, as a collection of specialisations are needed to bring a digital product to market. It amuses us to see the paradox here, but we believe that will also mature with time.
Risk Awareness
Global remote working may be perceived as incorporating some risk. The most significant aspect of remote specialist services is communication and providing access to the data/information. Today’s technology has matured to the point where access is no longer a concern, but this way of working is heavily dependent on the quality and accuracy of the data.
The remote specialists should take a lead with the client in establishing the communication chain and making it clear what information is required and where it might come from. This could be plant operation, design data, maintenance records and even anecdotal observations. Being able to talk and communicate directly to front line staff often saves time and effort and reduces confusion.
Having a clear and early understanding of what information is required and prioritising it is a skill in itself. Identifying which information requires verification and clarification also requires specialist knowledge; significant inconsistencies must be identified and dealt with in a timely manner.
Access to data/information on any brown field study or project is seldom perfect even when working in house. In some cases, delayed or even missing information can be derived by analysis to allow the investigation to proceed.
The time difference between the client and remote specialist is often perceived as a potential issue. Our work to date has shown that this is not an issue even with a 12 hour time difference. Indeed, it is more often an advantage when the remote specialist works through the clients night and vice versa. Working with a team of specialists in different time zones often shortens the delivery time.
Hence, the emphasis has to be on delivery and not oversight. This is not difficult because professionalism and specialisation tend to go hand in hand. The required discipline is the same for both aspects. This level of trust is what many clients find hard at first, but becomes no issue after the quality and the speed of the first deliverable.
Marketing
Perversely, most of our business has originated from personal contacts.
The business model challenges the convention of engineering contracting and the race to the bottom of commodotised engineering. Make no mistake, this model needs to be challenged, but there is a lot of vested interest in the conventional business model, and even in the commodotisation of engineering that allows people to repeat the same experience instead of continued professional development.
Hence, the biggest downside of the business model is in reality a downside of the conservatism in the marketplace. Networking both on and offline becomes endless. We have to develop a relationship to the point where we become the trusted advisor and our business model is accepted as the means of accessing our specialist skills.
Thankfully, we have just established our first client that was attracted by the business model, and was doubly impressed by the quality of the specialist knowledge, rather than already knowing and respecting a member of the network. Hopefully, this will be an upside to the current issues that are accelerating the adoption of remote working.
Thus, this adventure gets ever richer with developments in global communications and technologies. The most interesting aspect of the adventure is which clients will join us next?
A significant barrier to conducting our role as specialists is the client desire to bring us in to their way of working/thinking without realising the potential that may exist. In particular clients often provide a detailed scope of work, that has involved considerable time and effort to produced. It will typically contain a description of the issue and detail how the we should investigate the issue and what we should develop as the solution. I can recall many occasions when an outline of the issue was all that was required. The structured means of investigation, whilst showing the level of the clients commitment, they have not always been technically appropriate or possible. The defined solutions, have often been found to been unnecessary, in the short, medium and/or long term. In some cases, they would have been ineffective or made the issue worse. In many cases, simple controller tunings and/or control modifications, changes to operating procedures and less intrusive/expensive modifications would suffice. A staged approach to long term solutions have also been provided, deferring CAPEX and plant shutdown requirements. There have also been many occasions where a detailed SoW has covered many aspects of the investigation, whilst missing out on some key points. Often the client will say what they want. However, this may not be reasonably practical, economical or possible. We shouldn't need to be told how to do what is required, we only need the information. We can build the picture in stages and discuss what is necessary, to provide what is required to deliver what is reasonable. That extra few percent of capacity could be an order of magnitude more expensive. As specialists we also understand money, cash flow, NPV, payback, risk etc. This is part of engineering.
Thank you to John Krska for originating and co-authoring this post
Thank you for sharing Howard. At BPT we adopted your way of working also some 5 years ago. You mention data quality and accuracy. We would also like to add consistency :-) Like TAM we capitalize on our detailed domain knowledge as a service company, creating quality assured sensor data by combining use of a first principle thermodynamic tool and a reconciliation solver. The results provide both consistent and high accuracy data as well as full access to augmented data. All ingredients needed to replace repeatable work in a data driven operationional environment.
I have been working remotely working with operations in the field and it looks like we have developed a novel approach to implementing change. Very exciting.