Vineyard Management Consulting GmbH
Vineyard Management Consulting GmbH is an experienced
Management Consulting company with focus on:
We have constantly enhanced our expertise and competence in numerous global projects in the sectors banking, insurances, telecommunications, automotive, and information technology.
Our Management Consultants have a project and professional career experience of more than 10 years leveraged by continuous investments in their personal development. During the successful delivery of our customer projects we emphasize on social aspects and intercultural specifics as well as on positive and target oriented communication.
Our core competencies are
| Transition Management comprises the strategy definition and the implementation planning to viably establish the change in the company context. | People Management is often an implicitly required aspect in our projects, i.e. the steering and personal development of project members/staff and groups in terms of a value oriented coaching. |
| Complexity Management means the capability for our Management Consultants to analyze, assess, and change complex structures, processes and IT systems. Vendor- and SW solution selections and management of RFI, RFP and RFQ processes. | Project Management is in our view a core competence to ensure the sustainable implementation of largescale projects. The key elements for a successful delivery are long-term experience as interim, project and program manager, classic project management instruments according to e.g. PMI, Prince2, Six Sigma or CMMI and the ability to connect sector specific knowledge, people and deliverables. |
Preface & Acknowledgements
The challenges of our customers are more and more diverse. A couple of strong trends like digitalization and cyber security issues are facing the daily life of all of us – this is true for our business and private life. That “People make a difference” is a strong Vineyard belief. Therefore, in this book the Vineyard consultants are interviewed in order to present their individual consulting experiences.
As a starting point the current customer challenges and consulting trends are summarized. A contribution towards the GDPR deadline and approaches how to deal with these changes is following. The next article is suggesting how to handle the need in the pharmaceutical industry to communicate with business partners beyond the firewall. Based on Vineyard’s long experience in the IT Cyber Security world the following article is emphasizing why security is priority zero and how IT Security standards and frameworks can be used in a beneficial and lean way.
The following two articles have a strong technical focus. While the first one is introducing the new technology “Summarizer” which is capable to compress existing files from a content perspective the following is about what an agile methodology can deliver in the field IT Service Management.
The benefits of a focused eDiscovery approach for litigation processes are discussed in another contribution. How transitional changes for companies as a result of Brexit for example can be managed is following. Risk management in the cyber field for the banking industry and leading in projects are two interviews that reflect typical customer challenges. How to set-up an electronic archive as part of a digitalization initiative is outlined in an expert interview for the insurance industry. The benefits of a focused eDiscovery approach for litigation processes are discussed in another impulse. An interview about knowledge management is closing this book. As a key component for the customer in a knowledge society it is discussed how this can be approached for a consultancy.
If you focus your deep dives you can also see the
little things in a broader context.
We wish our readers inspiring insights and new impulses to find the individual balance between the right deep dives and the ability for the helicopter view. Many thanks again to all Vineyard colleagues contributing to this new Vineyard book.
Hofheim am Taunus, November 2017
Carsten Fabig Alexander Haasper
Managing Director and Management Consultants of Vineyard Management Consulting GmbH
Alexander Haasper
Consulting Trends
The European consulting market is a growing business as the last 5 years are showing an increase of more than 5 percent per year. The 2016 turnover increase of 7,9% in Germany is an outstanding segment with a total market size of 9,3 billion (Mrd.) EUR. The stable economic environment and the digitalization across all industries are the main market drivers. In particular, the market as well as strategy consulting is also growing continuously. This is still a huge heterogeneous segment where the customer is supported by consultancies in various roles to drive the implementation of their strategic programs. The IT outsourcing business is of course growing as a result of cloud technology.
Looking from a customer perspective there are some major trends that are important to characterize the current customer situation. This should also inform consulting companies as to how they should enhance and sharpen their portfolio.
Digitalization means business model transformation
Digitalization has become a game changer. New competitors have already entered markets that have been stable for decades. Of course, the most prominent example is Google, an internet age company that has entered the automotive sector with their mobility services and autonomous driving competence. However, the majority of the companies have only just started to restructure as a result of digitalization. Across all areas of digitalization change management and business model transformation are required as this has a huge impact customer interaction and service delivery management from an organizational point of view.
The true potential for digitalization does not lie in one singe business line as today the majority of the organisations are in a near optimum state regarding the specific business line processes. The potential is in the orchestration and automation across business lines. Therefore, digitalization requires organisational transformation. The promises of artificial intelligence (AI) are high. But the implementation of this technology will take much longer as many of the protagonists are currently forecasting. The main reason are the risks related to applications of AI. As a consequence, all decisions supported by AI require a clear organizational setup and rules how to deal with risks and critical situations when the human staff needs to stepin for AI.
Data protection requires to manage the business records
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Community requires companies to manage their records and enable deletion of individual data, based on pre-defined retention periods and, in certain circumstances, at customer request. The challenge is that the majority of the IT systems has never been designed to fulfil deletion requirements. Also for unstructured data e.g. on Microsoft SharePoint sites and file share systems the amount of data is a big and growing issue that companies need to get under control. The requirement to manage business records is not new one as a lot of regulated industries need to be compliant with law and regulation demanding minimum retention periods, some requirements of which date as far back as the 50s. The big challenge today is replication and copying of data to other contexts which has increased the amount of data tremendously. Besides the sheer volume of data there is also an issue with old or historic systems. There is often a lack of available know-how with these systems.
IT security needs to defend the company against cyber security threads
IT security is getting rising up the CEO’s and CISO’s agenda in the majority of companies, even those that are not heavily regulated. Security awareness has increased over the last couple of years due to the potential impact of malware like WannaCry or the risks related to direct hacker attacks. The main challenges for the customers are to deal with the different business stakeholders and regulatory bodies regarding cyber risks as well as manage a variety of relevant technologies and their operations effectively around the weakest links in the chain. The big challenge still facing the CISOs of the Mittelstand (Small and Medium sized Enterprises – SMEs) and the traditional industrial companies is that IT, and in particular IT Security, often does not have the appropriate importance in the organisation compared to Sales, Sourcing and Production.
Project management at high maturity level is a must-have transformation skill
In the majority of the companies the maturity of project management has increased significantly in the last decade. Even in industries where project managers have been hired from the external market there is a trend to staff projects more and more from the internal market. However, when it comes to strategic projects it is still a struggle to find the right people. The agile project hype is still relevant, however the companies are currently learning in which areas the agile approach is feasible and where it has to be combined with more traditional methods.
Although discussed for more than a decade, complexity management is a consulting topic the majority of the companies still do not want to buy or integrate in their day-to-day project management business. However, any organization has to deal with increasing complexity in a world becoming more and more digital and meshed.
Summary and Recommendations
Overall, the need for strong, solution orientated, including reliant, project delivery for consultants and companies is greater than it has ever been before. All strategic projects and disciplines require very skilled and experienced staff that harder and harder to find. On the one hand, more and more standard IT solutions help to not reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, the more complex topics require end-to-end and cross-organizational solutions which involves managing a variety of stakeholders and the interdependent aspects of strategic projects.
The majority of well established companies have not yet changed the organizational structures and daily work culture significantly: Agile approaches are mostly project or program specific, IT oriented projects are more open minded for the working environment for young talented software engineers, but often have missed to adjust the next management level, customer business attitude and parameters for a successful working relationship with these new IT teams.
The lack of skilled resources as a result of the high demands of the trends above is both an opportunity and a risk. As it is unlikely to find a perfect team from a subject matter skill perspective, the opportunity is to develop the relevant skills on the job and drive team and organizational development through long term partnerships and cooperation with consultancies that support new successful ways of working.