Smart Cities: Choosing the right partner for emerging technologies

The smart cities or the next generation cities are built by cross discipline teams as compared to the existing model. I have experienced working with a very talented team of civil engineers, software engineers, electrical, data scientists, network infra engineer, designers and so on. Each of them look at the problem and solution with their own vantage point according to their expertise. Choosing the right partner to achieve the project goal is vital especially when each of the partner is delivering a major piece of the commitment. The situation gets more complicated when delivering emerging and unproven technolgies to those customers and partners who are use to stable enterprise applications and services with different expectations and assumptions.

 I have learnt a hard lesson while building the smart cities about choosing the partner companies in order to achieve the committed goals with the customers. Partners could commit for certain activities and goals in the agreement, planning and design phase. But sometimes the priorities of a partner changes during the execution. Moreover, the partner wasn't able to open in order to provide the required access for project development. Although the partner did give assurance of delivering the commitments but with the passage of time actions shows otherwise.

This results in high risk of delivery on time and within budget. As changing the partner during the execution phase is very challenging hence there should be certain strategies which must be formulated. In my case as a project manager, I reduced the scope of committed scope from the partner and held them accountable for their claimed specialty. Then as a solution architect, I worked on creating a small team which can help build those use-cases that are also important from data driven operational excellence as well as monetization. But primarily, these use-cases can be built without affecting the execution of partner committed deliverables. I did take calculated risk for building a product which can provide a good solution according to the requirements of the city council rather than adopt and modify it by most of the companies. The key advantage is the flexibility of adding R&D modules as well as scalability options. 

By the end of the project, we were able to deliver the committed use-cases and also able to provide additional use cases. The partner did able to deploy the use-case but with partially working solution but primarily we were able to cover them with another use case solutions meanwhile demonstrating several analytics features which was icing on top of the desert.