Schlagwort-Archive: Roles

What constitutes a platform

New business models become reality, due to the saturation of the economy with computers and networks. Uber, AirBnB, Alibaba, Youtube and many more have created platforms, where service providers can meet and agree with interested people. These services poach, up to now, in the traditional business fields of taxi companies, hotels, department stores and media corporations. Typically, these platforms do not feel in competition with traditional providers. No drivers are hired, no hotels are operated, no goods are moved and no content is generated. In fact, they are not subject of existing regulations, which, for example, taxi drivers have to meet: a clearance certificate free of traffic offenses and other criminal acts, a medical certificate, the technical standards of the vehicles, the provisions of the passenger transportation law. In this sense, today’s platform providers are not commercial service providers in the above sense, but they are simply offering a place, where the providers and users can get together. What constitutes such a platform?

In the first step, we look at various building blocks, which form together the platform.

  • Protagonists (roles)
    A platform connects three groups of people. 1) The producers, who offer certain products respectively services. 2) Consumers, who are looking for these products and services. 3) The brokers, who connect producers and consumers and operate for this purpose a platform.
  • Added value for the protagonists
    The unique selling proposition of a platform, the USP, is the added value that the providers and buyers of the services as well as the intermediaries draw from the platform. A common interest may be the business sector (e.g. passenger transportation, accommodation, consulting and coaching services for companies). The producers have direct access to individual consumers. They find similar services bundled under one umbrella. The mediators benefit from the network that evolves over time.
  • Marketplace (Point of Sales)
    Services become visible, comparable and accessible on one platform. For this purpose stands are built, just as in a marketplace, in which the providers present their deliverables. The platform operators have the task to prepare the marketplace in such a way that allows the providers to present themselves in an easy way and that provides the buyers at one place the desired deliverables. This includes measures that ensure the reliability of the providers, make the offers comparable, enable the exchange of information and even ensure trustworthy payment transactions.
  • Information hub
    A platform lives on the available content. These are e-books, brochures, white papers that are ultimately provided by all protagonists. In addition, information brokers can place here payable content. The appeal of the platform increases eventually through appropriate interaction functions: forums, surveys and the like.

Bottom line: The platform is the basis for many new business models and at the same time the hub for a wide variety of business areas. Producers, consumers and brokers exchange their contributions under one umbrella. Like traditional market places, every participant can meet its needs here: offering and buying services and exchanging information. The variety of possible uses and the satisfaction of the interests of all protagonists constitute the platform.

Theoretical feasible is not enough

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More and more tasks are realized in cross-functional projects. The most important differences to tasks that are accomplished in line responsibility are

  • changing subjects,
  • heterogeneous composition of teams,
  • different time-frames, and
  • above all temporally limited assignments to a project.

Work packages become more compact and the necessary work time shorter with agile approaches. Eventually, project managers and employees have to work and control many tasks within more or less the same time. However theoretical feasible is not enough, in order to get to a realistic utilization rate.

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In the old days, when things were produced in a way that you could take, weigh and measure them, the effects and the necessities were closely linked with one another. Activities in the project that produce and process information cannot be measured in the same way. As a consequence more and more different tasks are assigned to the same person. What is the basis to better assign the tasks?

  • Role
    The required role is described by the tasks, authority and the responsibility. Projects manager have the task to lead an initiative, need for this purpose sufficient authority to decide and are responsible for a successful conclusion. Team members receive tasks according to their abilities to create something with the appropriate authorization and the responsibility that goes beyond the correct delivery of results. Neither the individual roles are clarified, nor are the employees characterized sufficiently. This can quickly lead to an overload of the team.
  • Expertise
    The most probable is that the expertise will be considered. To what extent the project manager should have technical knowledge apart from its control of project management, can be decided in the respective assignment. If the PM-knowledge is not well developed, the project can fail because of the lack of goals, plans or bad control, but not so much due to missing specialized know-how. On contrary, not existing expertise of the employees has considerable effects. Bad PM-knowledge is then replaceable by the good guidance of the project manager.
  • Availability
    Often it is sufficient to be simply available at a certain time, at a certain place. Unfortunately these are seldom the really required know-how carriers, but new or less competent employees. Since the start and the end can only be synchronized with difficulties across project borders, there will be idle running times or overload of the teams, while a project does not find an end the new project generates too fast, too much effort.

Surprisingly, the extent of utilization of the individual employee is not enough considered or not regarded at all. In the absence of resource planning across project borders the actual, temporal load does not become visible. At the same time only a few people know the number of doable, parallel activities. How many projects can be put responsibly in one hand? How many tasks can be realized at the same time? The theoretically feasible number has to be regarded in individual cases. But in principle the timeframe and the setup time times set natural limits that are not related to the capability of the employee.

  • Time-frames
    The time-frames of the individual project plans and the necessary expenditures are usually not even considered in the Multi PM cross-functionally. If an employee needs five working days per project for his tasks, he/she cannot take part to more than four projects in a month.
  • Setup times
    The setup times between the different projects burden the existing time budget additionally. The related files have to be searched, the current conditions checked and the next steps have to be planned. The more often you jump from one project to another, the less time is available for the actual work.
    Let’s assume that the projects mentioned above (four projects with in each case 5 working days) are switched only once from one day to the other, the respective setup time is hidden in the 5 active days.
    But if we change half daily with a setup time of half an hour, then the change burdens the work with already five hours.
    If we have to leave one project to enter the next one (5 minutes for storing the results and 10 minutes for renewed set-up) the load increases to ten hours.
    If than there is an additional relocation (to another plant or another building), the change can easily cost an hour or more. It results in two hours per day, i.e. forty hours per month. This represents nearly five person days that are missing for the real work.

Bottom line: Estimations become practically feasible, if you select the calculation basis realistically. Without the proper preparation of a project, a reliable planning is only possible with difficulties. For this purpose, besides the actual planning, the role descriptions, the required expertise and the availability of the respective employees as well as their current utilization must be determined. If you ignore the timeframe and the setup times, this will inevitably lead to overload and probably to project failure.