Adam Skinner on how Valcon is using technology to transform project delivery
Valcon is a a European consulting, technology and data company based in the Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Sweden, Germany and Croatia. As the firm looks to grow to meet rising demand from clients to get the most from new innovations, Valcon UK’s Head of Consulting, Adam Skinner, explains what the future holds for the consultancy, and the broader industry.
How did you get into consulting?
It wasn’t the obvious career choice after my psychology degree. When I got into consulting, project management was much more of an engineering discipline – it was about ensuring all the components came together to build the right architecture. But in the last ten years there has been a radical shift – these days the people element of project management is much more recognised – it’s about building the right teams to deliver the change that people want. When I started out in consulting, I didn’t think my degree was relevant – but it’s proved to be really useful.
My first job post uni was in the civil service at the Inland Revenue, on its fast-track graduate scheme. I spent four years as a policy adviser and private secretary to the Right Honourable Dawn Primarolo, who was Paymaster General. It was a great grounding for a consultancy career, as it was all about stakeholder engagement and managing expectations and prepared me well for the organisational challenge of running big, complex PMOs.
I got a bit disillusioned with the pace of civil service life and wanted a taste of the corporate world, so went to work for PA Consulting’s government practice. From there I moved to Atkins, a big design engineering firm with a consulting arm and it was there I got the bug for building capabilities and practices for other firms. I then did a masters in major programme management at Oxford, focusing on building big programme organisations. This brought my knowledge of organisational psychology to the fore and got me really interested in how organisations are developed.
I then moved to P2 in 2015 as I wanted to get involved with a consultancy that was scaling quickly. Now we’re part of Valcon, it’s been a fascinating journey – we’re part of an organisation with a much broader offering and the focus on data, technology and transformation gives us a fantastic proposition.
What does Valcon do?
Valcon is a really interesting organisation. We’re pan European, 2000 people and we have data, technology and consulting practices, as well as a near shore and development arm in Croatia. With that combination, we can handle pretty much any difficult organisational transformation.
P2 Consulting joined the Valcon group in 2021. At the time, P2 was a 250-strong transformation consultancy providing design, delivery and control support to organisations and large-scale transformation. Joining Valcon was massive for P2 because it gave us access to data and tech capability and gave us a genuine reach into Europe and the opportunity to operate at a scale we didn’t have before.
The integration has been smooth – we’re culturally very well aligned - and it’s been interesting to discover the synergies across the capabilities and the innovative offerings within our business. Predictive analytics is a good example. Our PPM capability can now branch out and support big data and technology implementations across Europe.
How do you approach innovation in consulting?
Creating a forum where people can float and try out ideas is key. Giving people the autonomy to try out new things and see what works and what doesn’t is key.
PDAAS (programme delivery as a service) is a great example of the innovation and autonomy we try and engender. Interestingly, this isn’t new for us – we have been doing transformation and change for 20 years – what is new is how we have packaged this capability in one service whilst pulling in the cutting edge of analytics and automation capability- it’s proving to be a genuine game changer.
So what is PDAAS?
PDAAS is hopefully doing for PPM delivery, what SAAS is doing for software provision. In a nutshell, it provides a single way of commissioning the design delivery and control of your mission critical projects and programmes without the hassle of building your own delivery engine and ways of working.
It basically can radically overhaul how your organisation does projects and PMO, without having to build your own structure. We provide you with all that, the programme structure, the programme control, the digital PMO that controls delivery and we supply award winning, pre formed delivery teams. Another bonus is that we leave you with all improved ways of working and controls to radically overhaul how your organisation does PMO going forward. It provides the blueprint.
What do you think is next in the world of consulting? What are the big trends coming down the track?
There are two exciting areas for transformation management. Technology and psychology.
In terms of technology, it has to be developments around AI. In terms of project management, we are seeing a lot of interesting tools to help better decisions and make better predictions of how projects will pan out. It will also take the grunt work out of delivering complex transformation. Examples of great AI tools include PMO-bot, Milestone Prediction Analytics, Automated Resource Profiling.
And the other development I think will be the increasing use of psychology in project management, exploring the links between psychology, people and the science of PM. More and more we are realising that change happens to people and not to technology so a better understanding of how to build programme organisations, engage end customers and prepare people for change is becoming a priority. It has become a real game changer.
Adam Skinner is head of consulting at Valcon UK. He is also part of the Association of Project Management (APM) portfolio management special interest group and is co-author of the APM’s ‘Pragmatic Guide to Portfolio Management.’