Choose … Wisely

How to avoid a digital twin “project of doom”

The 1989 movie?Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?is centered on a quest for the Holy Grail. According to myth, the Grail has incredible powers, including the ability to heal grievous wounds and convey immortality upon anyone who drinks from it. Unfortunately for seekers of the Grail, it hid in plain sight among dozens of other chalices which shone with the luster of gold and the brilliance of encrusted gems. Anyone drinking from a false Grail suffered a horrible fate, which raised the stakes considerably for those seeking the True Grail.

Thankfully, the risks associated with a digital twin project are lower than for Grail seekers (as are the rewards –?I haven’t seen anyone linking digital twins with immortality). Still, it’s important for many reasons to select digital twin projects carefully, especially for a company early in its effort to realize their promise. After all, no one wants to hear one of their company leaders utter some version of, “He chose … poorly.” How then, can you choose a project that will yield benefits from your investment in a digital twin? What trail should you follow on this quest?

Know What You Seek

The first step is to ask the right question. As dazzling as technology can be, starting with technology and then looking for applications will lead to the ruin of a project. Instead, start with?your business?and think about the opportunities, risks and problems which are most salient to the health and sustainability of that business, or at least a large enough component of the business to matter. Your top priorities might include reducing the cost of field rework, improving worker safety, skills training for new hires, improving your eCommerce customer experience, or other business challenges. Eliminate priorities which are obviously unrelated to digital twins (just the obvious ones though,?you might be surprised). Congratulations –?you’ve just avoided the?Ivory Tower. This pitfall has entrapped countless people so entranced with a technology that they start looking at the problem from the inside out. Once a project becomes disconnected from business needs, it’s almost impossible to follow the guideposts that lead to success.

Next, establish a short list of potential projects that seem like good candidates for a digital twin solution. As part of this, you’ll need to do plenty of research into digital twin platforms and their applications. Essentially, you’re pattern matching to look for a fit. Using the short list, identify the underlying issues for each business opportunity or risk. Why does an opportunity exist, and what is keeping the company from leveraging it? What are the main factors contributing to problems and risks? This step will require digging –?the information you need likely resides across multiple teams within your organization as well as your vendors and customers. The reward is more than worth the effort however, since you’ve now avoided the trap of?Irrelevance. By this point, you know what the opportunity or risk is, and you understand what opportunities for improvement are possible. Your business justification is half done.

From your short list, you now need to select one or two projects to evaluate for viability. Assessing viability requires more than just determining if something is technically feasible. You need to validate whether a technical solution is likely to lead to the hoped-for business benefits,?and?you need to understand what is required to support that solution at scale, even if you are starting with a smaller proof of concept. What capabilities will the solution provide? Who will use the solution and how? What integrations are needed? What tasks will be removed and what will be added –?and can these tasks be automated? What skill sets are needed to implement and maintain a technical solution and what are the implications to hiring and training?

In this phase, you will likely need to bring in others with specific domain expertise. Vendors can be helpful but may be unwilling to invest significant pre-sales resources in what is effectively a scoping exercise. No matter what, this phase involves uncertainty. You will end up with a range of possible answers which can be translated into a range of possible costs for investment and operating cost changes. You can’t know exactly at this stage what impact each topic will have on project economics or risk, but it’s possible to estimate ranges and sort into high / medium / low impact categories. Not only are these estimates crucial to assessing business case viability, but they also provide you with key development objectives and project metrics that can be evaluated from initial development through post-implementation. You’ve provided yourself with a map through the?Fog of War.

Break Trail

Having a plan is useless if you don’t put it into action by committing resources. How you structure resource commitment is as important as the viability study. The process to establish project viability will help identify and scope risks and open questions. High-risk projects can be compelling if the rewards are high enough, but with high risk it’s often best to start with smaller-scale projects to address risks before committing more resources. Breaking the project up in this way keeps teams focused on critical deliverables, within the scope of a larger and longer-term plan. Of course, even the best-planned project can run into difficulty for many reasons, including unexpected technical challenges, resource availability or organizational changes. You will need to make decisions –?and having clear objectives and metrics at hand is critical to making high-quality decisions.?

You should also expect some notable successes during the project. Take time to celebrate and communicate them –?teams and individuals want to see progress toward a goal and for their hard work to be recognized. While you’re at it, celebrate and communicate lessons learned the hard way. Lessons learned from conquering challenges are often those that drive the greatest progress for organizations and the people within teams.

Consider a Guide

Whenever you break new ground, it’s important to seek advice from people who have knowledge you need. The answer may be as simple as working with a mentor in your own organization or may involve seeking outside help. The most crucial phase of any project is its initial conception, as that establishes everything that follows. Having a trusted partner to help establish that direction can be invaluable. When choosing a trusted partner, ensure that they have experience with relevant applications. The field of digital twins is diverse, and includes domains as diverse as XR-based training, IIoT integration, marketing configurators, human-machine interfaces and more. A guide can help you make sense of this diversity and select the right technologies and vendors to reduce the risk of implementation problems while keeping project costs under control and establishing a platform for future expansion.

After I published this article, Winfried Schwan reached out to me with another great example referencing Indiana Jones and digital twins! Last year, Winfried published a project report from the work he did at Salzburg University to create a real-time digital twin of the Portland, Oregon TriMet public transportation system. This is a very cool example of a digital twin integrated with GIS and real-time data feeds, and Winfried also created this graphic from page 15 of the report:

Ed Martin is the founder of Twinsight Consulting LLC. Learn more at https://twinsightconsulting.com.