How Bouygues manages an Empire-Sized Footprint

Bouygues is into telecoms / media, and building and road construction. It also knows it has to watch its energy footprint closely. Owning 47% of energy giant Alstom keeps it constantly in the media spotlight. Shall we find out more about its facility management policies?

The journal Premises and Facilities Management interviewed MD Martin Bouygues on his personal opinions concerning managing energy consumption in facilities. He began by commenting that this was hardly a subject for the C-Suite in years gone by. Low-level clerks simply paid the bills following which the actual amounts were lost in the general expenses account. That of course has changed.

Early pressure came from soaring energy bills, which were pursued by a whole host of electricity-saving gadgets. However, it was only after the carbon crisis caught business by surprise that the link was forged to aerial pollution, and the social responsibilities of big business to help with the solution. The duty to have an energy strategy became an obligation eagerly policed by organisations such as Greenpeace.

Unsurprisingly, Martin Bouygues? advice begins with keeping energy consumption and its carbon footprint as high up on the agenda as health and safety. ?It needs bravery and a lot of hard work to get it there,? he says, ?so perseverance is the key?. 

The company has developed proprietary software that enables it to pull data from remote sensors in more than 80 countries every fifteen minutes. A single large building can contribute 50 million data items annually making data big business in the system. Every building has an allocated energy performance contract against which results are reported monthly, as a basis for reviewing progress.

The system is intelligent and able to incorporate low-occupancy periods such as weekends and public holidays. What is measured gets managed. We all know that, but how many of us apply the principle to our energy bills. With assistance from ecoVaro, the possible becomes real.

We offer a similar service to the Bouygues model with one notable exception. You don’t buy the software and you only pay when you use it. Our systems are simply designed for busy financial managers.

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Project Management

In a cutthroat market, where the competition is constantly on the attack to break into your market share, implementing a project-based system can give your organisation the necessary tools to be more efficient and agile.

However, rapidly changing consumer demands, technologies and other factors make it ever more difficult to generate a strategic advantage from projects, let alone develop one. Also since a large organisation can easily end up having to manage multiple projects at the same time, the new management paradigm can appear too complex.

What your company really needs is the expertise that can guide you starting from conception and planning, down through procurement and execution in order to maximise whatever resources you have. Each move must be well thought out so that there are clear goals and objectives as well as methods to achieve them.

Programme Management

Are you running multiple projects pointing to an overall strategic direction? Then you’ll need more than just a “scaled-up” version of project management to make sure every component’s work effort is well coordinated to achieve your enterprise’s desired outcomes.

Through our expertise in programme management, we’ll work with your stakeholders, executives and clients to achieve the following:

  • Design a well-articulated management structure and clearly define decision-making roles & responsibilities – This will ensure decisions are made rapidly with zero to minimal overlapping issues and to promote a unified, well-synchronised advance towards the common objective.
  • Set objectives then make sure they are met by guiding your key personnel in coordinating activities across projects.
  • Design or utilise existing financial models such that they adhere to your enterprise’s financial policies.
  • Develop procedures for reporting expenditures specific to the programme.
  • Establish the programme infrastructure, including
    • The appropriate technical environment and tools (e.g. hardware, software, communication, and other IT-related items)
    • IT staff and administrators
  • Evaluate your enterprise’s current IT architecture to determine whether it will suffice to achieve your objectives. If it doesn’t, propose options you can take to meet what is required.
  • Plan out activities that should take place in different levels in the organisation.
  • Implement a periodic review of the programme progress as well as of interim results to ensure everything is aligned with the strategic outcome.

Programme and Project Reviews

Whether we’ve helped you set up your programme or you did it on your own, time will come when you’ll need to know whether everything is going as planned. If it appears like the entire programme is going smoothly, chances are, something’s going awfully wrong somewhere. Remember, even the most well-planned projects and programmes are still under the mercy of unforeseen variables.

We’ve got highly specialised reviews for either projects or an entire programme. We’ll be able to provide you answers to questions like:

  • Are all projects aligned with the programme’s intended direction?
  • Are the people working on your projects as focused with the business rationale as they have been with meeting deadlines and utilising resources?
  • Where are your risks and exposures? How can they be remedied?
  • Is the project viable at all?

We understand how your staff would want to function normally as quickly as possible. Rest assured, our programme and project reviews are conducted swiftly and efficiently so that both interruptions and oversights are brought to a minimum.

After we’re done, you can expect a detailed quantitative assessment of your programme and/or projects’ status.

Basically, we’re not here to find mistakes; we’re here to help you find ways to correct them. If a project rescue is required, we’ll be the first to lend a hand.

Project Rescue

Believe it or not, many of our clients approached us not before or during their project’s planning stages. But rather, after having gone through sloppy execution, when they end up losing control. In other words, we’re usually at the receiving end of the distress signal, after they’ve punched the panic button.

While obviously this isn’t the ideal time to seek the aid of any expert because it means you’ve incurred unnecessary losses already, all is not yet lost. If the appropriate remedial actions are taken in a timely manner, you can still achieve highly acceptable end results.

In fact, in most of our experiences with project rescue operations, we’ve been able to put projects back on track – just the way the planners wanted them to be. We’ll also help you devise airtight strategies to prevent your project from going astray again.

At the end of our project rescue,

  • You’ll regain complete control
  • Milestones will be reached as planned
  • Requirements will be accomplished, and
  • The project will be realigned with ideal business directions

Project Governance Processes

Constructing a firm underlying structure is essential in any organisation. So before we’ll institute project management, we’ll do the following first.

  • Set up a PMO or Project Management Office to ensure, among others, that
    • Utilisation of facilities, budgets, technical support and other resources will be well coordinated
    • Work products can be tracked and reviewed
    • Issues regarding methodology and processes will be given appropriate attention
    • Training can be organised
    • Project management discipline be instilled in the IT department
  • Establish a steering committee to oversee the implementation of IT and business strategies
  • Fill up slots for a project manager, IT executive and a business sponsor and define the roles of each
  • Infuse project management practices to all affected units of the enterprise

Establishing PMOs, steering committees and other management structures is the easy part. Many organisations spend so much in order to create the structures related to project management, only to find out later that the effort has been all for naught. That’s why we won’t end there. Our objectives will therefore include the following:

  • To plant and cultivate an environment appreciative of project governance i.e. one that does not project it as just a bunch of bureaucratic processes and protocols.
  • To establish an organisational culture that starts at the top.
  • To make everyone involved understand that the power of project governance still lies in the hands of those who will ultimately implement it.

A project-driven enterprise is never propelled by a single project. Since multiple projects require a more complex governing structure, you’ll need to understand the intricacies of programme management.

How Accenture Keeps Rolling Out Sustainability

Multinational management-consulting and technology-services company Accenture has a good eye for sniffing out new business, with 305,000 employees advancing its interests in more than 200 cities in 56 countries evidence. Last year, it netted US$30 billion profit that is a tidy sum of money in anybody?s books.

Accenture also practices what it preaches. This is maximum business efficiency within moral standards. It tracks its carbon emissions from its offices around the world. Being a technology services company it is unsurprising that it automated the process. Being management consultants it can drill down to finest detail in its search for continuous improvement.

As a forward-thinking company Accenture is committed to transplanting its business skills into other organizations, in order to drive higher performance and sustain greater profits in the long term. It works with clients across borders and industries to integrate sustainability into their business models, and find effective ways to lighten carbon footprints.

The City of Seattle in Washington is a case in point. Following a proud history of nature and energy conservation, it engaged Accenture in 2013 to help it reduce downtown power consumption by 25%. Other project members were Microsoft supplying software, the local power utility for technical advice, and a non-profit to set up a smart building program. The initiative uses cloud services to process the big data generated by a host of building management services, plus a multitude of sensors, controls and meters.

The project is vital for the City. It wants to continue expanding but needs to avoid another power plant polluting its skyline. At the time of writing, the pilot sites had proved successful and the program was rolling out. Seattle?s next challenge is to acquire 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The smart building solutions Seattle trialled in five downtown buildings, had a further welcome spinoff; by reducing operating times, facility managers can look forward to extended equipment life and fewer maintenance downtimes. The green building philosophy is alive and well in the City of Seattle, driven both by necessity and vision.

It is a no longer as question of if – but when – other urban communities follow suit. EcoVaro believes it is time long due for individual companies to start enjoying lower energy costs plus the prospect of profitably trading carbon credits. The process begins with measuring what you have and identifying cost-effective savings.

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Operational Efficiency Initiatives

When was the last time you checked your technology spending against your IT infrastructure’s contribution to the bottom line?

Chances are, what’s happening underneath all those automated processes, expensive hardware, and fancy graphical user interfaces is not doing your bottom line any good.

If you don’t keep a watchful eye, your IT operations can easily nurture a lot of wastage and unnecessary costs. Underutilised servers, duplicate processes, poorly managed bandwidths, and too much complexity are among the common culprits.

For minor problems, we can eliminate wastage by setting up some technology enhancements, instilling best practices, and performing a few tweaks. However, if you’re not adequately trained on how to go about with it, your band-aid solutions can add more complexity to the mix.

Of course, there will always come a time when you will have to spend on new technologies to maintain the overall efficiency of your IT infrastructure. Whether you intend to purchase new hardware or software applications or build an entirely new infrastructure, the sheer cost of such undertakings warrants seeking expert advice.

Failure to do so can result in fragmented resources lacking in cohesiveness, which don’t contribute to efficiency at all.

Our solutions for improving operational efficiencies cover the entire spectrum: from planning what to buy, optimising what you’ve already bought, to making your team comfortable with them all. Please find time to view our solutions below and uncover ways to drive those profits up even as you work within your budget.

 

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