Project Management

Talent retention and the rise of environmental, social and governance top issues for project management profession.

Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM), identifies the pressure points among the profession, launching the 2022 ‘The State of Project Management in Australia’ report. With over 73% of respondents claiming projects experienced staff shortages, 52% reporting delays due to sourcing key skills and 62% expecting ESG requirements to influence their projects and programs in the future, AIPM representatives are calling for greater investment in attracting new talent, fostering career development and upskilling from leaders in the profession to improve business outcomes and stay relevant within today's market.

AIPM’s newly released annual report, based on a survey of the profession conducted with KPMG Australia, on the ‘State of Project Management in Australia’ aims to help identify and elevate the key issues within the project management workforce. The fifth instalment of the report brings to light the increasing pressure facing project management professionals including an ageing workforce, supply chain issues, digital transformation projects and the emerging influence of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG).

“The broad effect of skills shortages and supply chain disruptions places immense pressure on the project management profession. These report findings raise the need for innovative and inclusive ways to bring more people into the profession and to retain and upskill the existing talent.”

“The C-suite critical leaders and decision-makers should consider attracting emerging talent, and mentoring and professional development are key focuses for their organisations. With 65% of respondents directly working on high-value projects in the past 12 months, it is crucial for the shortages not to hamper project success.”

The survey of project management professionals highlights trends and factors around the quality of project delivery. Topic areas also include:

Ageing workforce

Experienced project managers are approaching retirement with over 40% of respondents having 20+ years of experience. Organisations must focus on attracting and developing emerging talent to prepare for the looming skills exodus. Yet, 42% of respondents said their organisation wasn’t doing anything (or they didn’t know what they were doing) to attract and encourage emerging project professionals.

Project delivery performance

On-time project delivery has slipped in the past two years (32% compared to 42% in 2020), likely due to de-prioritisation, rise of complex projects, skills shortages, supply chain disruptions and other economic constraints. Delivery of most projects in line with business goals is steady (50% compared to 51% in 2020), demonstrating resilience and perseverance in challenging times. Concerningly, 48% of respondents claimed stakeholder satisfaction and only 36% of projects were delivered on-budget most of the time.

Labour shortage

The report clearly calls for Australian organisations to deploy innovative and inclusive ways to attract people into the profession and to retain the experienced and qualified professionals already in place. 39% of respondents said team stress and burnout were increasing with a further 28% saying their own stress and burnout were increasing.

Several factors pointed to the under-valuing of project management as a profession. These factors included weakness in recruiting and appointing suitably skilled project managers and a need for greater investment in continuing professional development. Many respondents indicated that their organisations did not offer a professional development path and career opportunities and almost 30% indicated that their organisation committed none or less than one day of professional development per year.

Esg

Australian organisations have accepted the need for action on ESG issues, driving an increase in transformation projects. Organisations must recognise the need to put Project Management Offices at the helm to get the best ESG outcomes. Similarly, project professionals must upskill to lead these projects to success.

The report respondents clearly already understand the need for upskilling as organisations continue to incorporate ESG matters into business operations and strategy. The profession is already seeing the impact: ESG specific roles are already growing in demand, with hundreds of open positions in Australia alone.

Supply chain disruption

Supply chain constraints, resource scarcity and rising costs are some of the biggest disruptors facing the project profession. 44% of respondents had projects affected by supply chain disruption and 51% faced rising costs of materials and/or staff.

The report calls for supply chains to be reimagined to help organisations build resilience and avoid material shortages and spiralling costs to better navigate future volatility. Cultivating resilience through technology investment and strategic partnerships will help organisations better anticipate and respond to the unexpected.

Complex projects and digital transformation

Highlighting the need for evolution of project methods to keep pace with the complexity and agility of modern workplaces and projects, 57% of respondents believe that project complexity has increased with the use of artificial intelligence software increasing from 10% to 29% this year.

Artificial intelligence will help to absorb more transactional project tasks, addressing and improving support for project professionals and executives. 74% of organisations said its digital transformation projects are business-driven to improve customer experience, cost reduction and maintain competitive action.

AIPM is committed to continue to monitor new ways of working for impacts on its certifications, members and the profession as a whole. Its certifications are always aligned with best practices and ensure individuals can demonstrate their capabilities to drive project management excellence so they can meet strategic objectives for businesses in a dynamic environment.

aipm.com.au

Switzerland: Graphene on platinum surfaces defies Coulomb’s Law

Researchers from Basel and Tel Aviv discovered that friction varies with speed in specific graphene structures on platinum surfaces, defying Coulomb’s law which states that friction is speedindependent in the macro world.

Materials made of single atomic layers are highly valued for their lowfriction qualities, useful in reducing friction in hard disks or moving parts of satellites or space telescopes. Graphene, consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like a honeycomb, is a prime example and is under examination for its potential as a lubricating layer. Earlier studies showed that a graphene ribbon can glide almost friction-free across a gold surface.

If graphene is applied to a platinum surface, it has a significant impact on the measurable friction forces. Now, physicists from the University of Basel and Tel Aviv University have reported in the journal Nano Letters that, in this instance, the friction depends on the speed at which the tip of an atomic force microscope is moved across the surface. This finding is surprising because friction does not depend on speed according to Coulomb’s law, which applies in the macro world.

Swiss Nanoscience Institute, University of Basel

Australia: Researchers have successfully split seawater without pre-treatment to produce green hydrogen.

The international team was led by the University of Adelaide’s Professor Shizhang Qiao and Associate Professor Yao Zheng from the School of Chemical Engineering.

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100% efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” said Professor Qiao.

A typical non-precious catalyst is cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface.

“We used seawater as a feedstock without the need for any pretreatment processes like reverse osmosis desolation, purification, or alkalisation,” said Associate Professor Zheng. The team published their research in the journal Nature Energy. “The performance of a commercial electrolyser with our catalysts running in seawater is close to the performance of platinum/iridium catalysts running in a feedstock of highly purified deionised water.

“Current electrolysers are operated with highly purified water electrolyte. Increased demand for hydrogen to partially or totally replace energy generated by fossil fuels will significantly increase scarcity of increasingly limited freshwater resources,” said Associate Professor Zheng.

Seawater is an almost infinite resource and is considered a natural feedstock electrolyte. This is more practical for regions with long coastlines and abundant sunlight. However, it isn’t practical for regions where seawater is scarce.

UniSA

Japan: New process technologies have been developed for the manufacturing of Micro LED displays.

The size of a Micro LED chip is not visible to the naked eye, with the length of one side being less than 50 μm (micrometers). For example, in order to manufacture one 4K display that has four times the resolution of a conventional high-definition screen, it is necessary to precisely array about 24.9 million chips. In order to improve the complexity and yield ratio of Micro LED chip manufacturing and the transfer process of each chip, Shin-Etsu Chemical has been working to take advantage of the latest materials technologies. They have lately solved the key manufacturing challenges of Micro LED display manufacturing.

The new process technologies introduce innovative technology that will transfer singulated anisotropic conductive film (ACF) of Φ80μm or less onto the targeted location by laser equipment. Employing this technology, it has become possible to transfer the singulated ACF only to the designated plate and mount the Micro LED chip. This makes the repair process in Micro LED display manufacturing easy to carry out, a matter which had been a large issue up until now.

Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd

USA: A new superalloy shows the way forward for electricity generation.

As the world looks for ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have shown that a new 3D-printed superalloy could help power plants generate more electricity while producing less carbon.

Sandia scientists, collaborating with researchers at Ames National Laboratory, Iowa State University and Bruker Corp., have used a 3D printer to create a high-performance metal alloy, (superalloy), with an unusual composition that makes it stronger and lighter than state-of-the-art materials currently used in gas turbine machinery. The findings could have broad impacts across the energy sector as well as the aerospace and automotive industries, and hint at a new class of similar alloys waiting to be discovered.

“We're showing that this material can access previously unobtainable combinations of high strength, low weight and hightemperature resiliency,” Sandia scientist Andrew Kustas said. “We think part of the reason we achieved this is because of the additive manufacturing approach.”

Sandia National University

Australia: Swinburne University of Technology researcher discovers the seemingly impossible.

Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, the Swinburne University researcher, alongside an international team of scientists, has reportedly observed massive candidate galaxies at the beginning of time, up to 100 billion times the mass of the Sun. If confirmed, would contain more mass than was thought to exist in the whole Universe at that time. The research, published in Nature magazine, could upend our model of the Universe and force a drastic rethink of how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang.

“We’ve never observed galaxies of this colossal size, this early on after the Big Bang,” says lead researcher Associate Professor Ivo Labbé from Swinburne University of Technology.

“The six galaxies we found are more than 12 billion years old, only 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, reaching sizes up to 100 billion times the mass of our sun. This is too big to even exist within current models,” adds Prof Labbé. Follow up measurements are being carried out to confirm the galaxies and rule out alternative explanations. “One alternative, equally fascinating, is that some of the objects belong to a new class of emerging supermassive black holes, never seen before,” Associate Professor Labbé says.

Swinburne University of Technology

Australia: CSIRO to boost SpaceX projects.

Australia’s national science agency has signed a five-year agreement with US-based company SpaceX to support their future space missions. CSIRO’s iconic Murriyang telescope situated out in Parkes NSW, and other telescopes owned by the agency, will provide ground station downlink services to select SpaceX missions.

The Parkes telescope has a long history providing spacecraft tracking services for NASA and other international space agencies.

CSIRO also manages the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex for NASA, and the New Norcia ground station for the European Space Agency.

Dr Douglas Bock, CSIRO’s Director of Space and Astronomy, said the agreement with SpaceX recognises CSIRO’s experience operating large, complex spacecraft tracking and radio astronomy infrastructure.

“Our Parkes radio telescope began supporting NASA space missions in 1962, when it tracked the first interplanetary space mission, Mariner 2, as it flew by the planet Venus,” Dr Bock said. The telescope, along with NASA’s Honeysuckle Creek tracking station, famously received the television signals from the Apollo 11 Moon landing watched by more than 600 million people around the world. Most recently, the telescope received data from Voyager 2 as it entered interstellar space in conjunction with the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex.

“Providing ground station services for space missions complements the astronomy research conducted with our telescopes and helps to maintain their capabilities as world-class research instruments,” he said. While the telescope recently celebrated its 60th anniversary, its technical systems have been upgraded many times keeping it at the cutting edge of research into understanding our Universe.

CSIRO

Australia: Destroying the supercondiuctivity in a kagome metal

A new RMIT-led international collaboration published in February has uncovered a distinct disorder-driven bosonic superconductorinsulator transition.

The discovery outlines a global picture of the giant anomalous Hall effect and reveals its correlation with the unconventional charge density wave in the kagome metal family, with potential applications in future ultra-low energy electronics. Superconductors, which can transmit electricity without energy dissipation, hold great promise for the development of future lowenergy electronics technologies, and are already applied in diverse fields such as hover trains and high-strength magnets (such as medical MRIs).

However, precisely how the superconductivity forms and works in many materials remains an unsolved issue and limits its applications. Recently, a new kagome superconductor family has attracted intensive interest for their novel properties. ‘Kagome’ materials feature an unusual lattice named for a Japanese basket-weave pattern with corner-sharing triangles.

The FLEET-led collaboration of researchers at RMIT University (Australia) and partner organisation the High Magnetic Field Laboratory (China) confirm for the first time the electric control of superconductivity and AHE in a van der Waals kagome metal CsV3Sb5. The team chose to test this theory on CsV3Sb5 which potentially has the largest spare atom space for proton intercalation. The devices were easily designed and fabricated based on the team’s rich experience in this field.

Further experimental and theoretical investigations indicate that this dramatic modulation of giant AHE originates from the Fermi level shift in the reconstructed band structures.

Nature Communications