4.3 Corona trends
In the end of 2019, several cases of suspicious pneumonia appeared on seafood market of Wuhan, China, which was later discovered to be a well-known Coronavirus (COVID-19).
Coronavirus has made some serious changes to our everyday life, without even saying how it has influenced economic situation of world-leading countries. Many countries have decided to close their borders, people were forced to stay at their homes on quarantine in order to avoid continued spread of the disease, world stock market collapsed, oil price significantly dropped, logistics froze, people started losing their jobs and the whole world has faced the economic crisis.
Starting from today, we can only make assumptions of how the future after the leaving of Coronavirus will look like and who will suffer or benefit from it the most. In this chapter of our thesis work we will try to analyze what is the role of project management in the current pandemic state, how it can help and what are possible outcomes of this collapse.
On the example of Italy, we would like to show how project management is dealing with the one of the worst, by the number of infected/dead people(on 29th of April it is 204 043/27682), COVID-19 experiences in Europe. The level of health service in Italy is reasonably high, Healthcare Access and Quality Index was rated 95/100 in 2018. Although, we have made sure that it did not help to avoid suffering from a huge number of deaths and enormous pressure on healthcare system. It is clear that the most serious cases had to be stored in intensive care departments, providing special treatment and equipment, however even if there is everything needed in hospital departments, it takes about few weeks to get a person completely cured.
Thus it has become a real challenge for Italian project managers to supply hospitals with enough amount of needed equipment in minimum allowed time. Another difficulty was that all countries need this necessary equipment at the same time, while it may be not enough for others. That was a perfect timing for big Italian industrial companies such as Ferrari, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Armani, Fendi, Gucci, Prada, Valentino and non-Italian Moët Hennessy – Lois Vuitton (LVMH), Roche, Ford, Dyson and others to stretch out a helping hand. [Priozzi, 2020] For instance, Ferrari and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles started production of breathing apparatus, others started production of personal protection equipment, LVMH started to produce hydroalcoholic gels.(https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/big-business-joining-fight-against-coronavirus/)
Another project that project managers had to accomplish was providing enough places in hospitals for each and every infected person, that is why completely new dedicated infrastructures have been built and existing ones have been improved. “.. A total of 5300 places in intensive care department and of 6.625 places in pneumology and infectious disease departments were available (source: Domenico Arcuri, commissary for the enhancement of hospital structures); these capacities, in few weeks, almost doubled and quintuplicated..”.
Finally, the major project had to be done the first time among European countries in order to stop COVID-19 spread, which was lockdown of the whole country, that means everybody was not allowed to leave their homes without a strong reason. Beginning on 9th of March national lockdown was implemented in Italy.
We can summarize that project management is a good help at operational phases and previous planning phases, especially nowadays, when facing emergency situation such as Coronavirus. [Priozzi, 2020]
Another important aspect that is a big problem now is inability to work remotely. After numerous lockdowns all around the world, people started to realize that for most of them it has become impossible to work from home, especially for those from industries including Airlines, Automobile, Banking, Computer Hardware, Construction Tools, Education, Electronics, Food, Indoor Decoration, Machinery, Manufacturing. Instead industries like E-Commerce, Internet, and Software Development were more flexible and efficient. [Choudhury, Koo, Li, 2020]
[Choudhury, Koo, and Li, “Working (From Home) During a Crisis: Online Social Contributions by Workers During the Coronavirus Shock.”]
A survey found that about 80% of 139 early-stage investors are interested in investing in industries thriving during coronavirus pandemic. 47% of them to healthcare, 42% to remote work ideas, 32% to logistics. They think that crisis is not the only time for material loss and damages, but also an opportunity for adoption and creativity that could turn into a top business model. The time of web conferencing software has come. It is a fact that now it is barely possible to communicate in real life, as a result, there is a rapid increase in usage of web software that allows to keep work up. [Shen, Lucinda, 2020]
[Investors are pivoting to coronavirus-boosted industries like healthcare and remote work. By: Shen, Lucinda, Fortune.com, 4/10/2020]
A great example of a drastic growth would be Zoom or Microsoft Teams software. Zoom’s daily active user count is up 378% and monthly active user count is up 186% from last year, by estimations of Apptopia. While Microsoft has witnessed a 775% rocket growth in use among monthly users of Microsoft Teams in Italy and 44 million daily active users as of March 19 overall. [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/zoom-microsoft-cloud-usage-are-rocketing-during-coronavirus-pandemic-new-data-show-2020-03-30].
The impact this disaster will have on the modern world is still blurred. Nevertheless, we can hear from a large amount of scientists, economist and businesses that the world will become considerably different. Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, believes that “..the coronavirus will create a world that is less open, less prosperous, and less free”. “Companies will now rethink and shrink the multistep, multicountry supply chains that dominate production today…More companies will demand to know more about where their supplies come from and will trade off efficiency for redundancy…Profitability will fall, but stability should rise” states Shannon K. O’Neil, the vice president, deputy director of studies, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Laurie Garret, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, sees a new stage in global capitalism coming “The result could be a dramatic new stage in global capitalism, in which supply chains are brought closer to home and filled with redundancies to protect against future disruption”. [Walt, Niblett, and Mahbubani, 2020]
[Walt, Niblett, and Mahbubani, “A World Less Open, Prosperous, and Free.”]
4.4 Future Project Management
It is rather difficult to predict what will happen after COVID-19 comes to the end, moreover it is not much easier to guess what will the world experience in the next few weeks. However we may also assume how project management will change and what will the takeaways from this crisis be.
In this chapter of our thesis, we are going to discuss future scenarios of implementing artificial intelligence(AI) and blockchain technologies in project management to evolve and will see how those technologies are supporting a combat against Coronavirus.
4.4.1 Artificial Intelligence
As far as we know, humans are incapable of always making ideal decisions due to cognitive biases and gaps in rationality that lead to imperfect solutions. AI could be a great help with that problem, because AI is a creature of computer science “that studies how machines can be made to act intelligently”.
Main functions of AI:
• Learning – deriving patterns learning methods from acquired data to apply again in the future;
• Understanding – field-specific tasks require certain methods for knowledge representation;
• Reasoning – can be deductive, inductive, temporal, probabilistic and quantitative;
• Interacting – in order to complete tasks or communicate with the environment, interacting with people/machines takes place.
AI has shown great progress in recent years. It has come a long way, started from the very beginning with question answering chatbots, later we have witnessed appearance of self-driving cars on the world automobile market to todays AI-generated music, artworks and game development. But what are possible applications in project management field?
Artificial intelligence can be used in order to provide more individual interactions to customers and prospects. This includes improved quality of matching content to target audience and better customer communication using chatbots. It does ease work for companies when they understand what are their potential customers and how desired product or project solution looks like.
Another way for AI to be used is creation and training of models from unstructured data to achieve more accurate predictions, make better decisions and, as a result, improve business processes. It is going to be a great chance for organizations to use these AI models in order to improve operational efficiency, increase speed to create new products and services. Without exaggeration, AI can save a lot of time, which is priceless today.
“AI offers great promise in helping organizations with critical business operation tasks such as strategy planning, product design, marketing, and customer support. As business leaders aim to develop and deploy more AI within their organizations, a critical first step in this process is to determine the plan for the specific use of AI to meet their business objectives and the development of a comprehensive AI strategy.”
[Gil et al., “AI for Management.”]
4.4.2 Blockchain
Blockchain is relatively young technology that is used for a transparent procedure in the transaction process of goods, information and money. It provides anonymous payments