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In this article, Davide Gronchi highlights the importance of mindset in business.

In my past 10 years spent optimizing the design of industrial investments, I have come across a broad variety of situations with many differences and few commonalities.

From 20 to 20,000 mio USD in value, from tiny vaccines molecules to 800t mining excavators, from “one large investment every 10 years” to teams with heavy 1000-pages Capex manuals, from small start-up to super structured and complex hundred-years-old multinationals have asked me to assess their highly strategic Capex projects to look for residual value.

All of them with few commonalities: missing the owner’s mindset in the project team, whose focus was mostly centered in the technical complexity of a physical assets.

If the same people were building their new home, they would certainly focus on maximizing perceived value. Why in their professional role are they neglecting this target?

Some not exhaustive answers are listed here

People don’t want to fail. Redundancies and backup systems help provide a more robust technical solution. But how much redundancy is necessary? And additional technical systems aren’t adding complexity to be managed and understood?

Maximizing value can be a never-ending exercise. Project teams can easily track project’s KPIs with a defined target and work to achieve it, but find it difficult to work toward an asymptote not knowing “when is it enough”. Shouldn’t be the company leaders to define the process to continuously improve and decide “when is it enough”?

Industrial investments are complex multidisciplinary projects that are often processed in sequential steps at any detail level simultaneously. A strong performing owner’s team would strive for the systematic involvement of all stakeholders in all phases: from scoping and conceptual design down to procurement and installation.

There is a huge opportunity in all our business and in the society in making industrial projects better. Not only companies can improve EBIT by 1-3 percentage points, but earth’s resources can be saved if new factories require less space, energy, water and materials.

Key points include:

• Redundancies and backup systems

• Maximizing value as a never-ending exercise

• Complex multidisciplinary projects

Read the full article, The right attitude when leading industrial investment projects, on LinkedIn.