P2: L., more F not really PM
One thing we haven’t really touched on yet is the time we spend aligning national policy with the region. With something like defense, everyone is suddenly shouting about it nationally, but translating that into something concrete for regional SMEs is incredibly hard. Try getting someone at the Ministry of Defense to actually meet with an small company. So we spend a lot of time helping companies understand what new regulations or priorities actually mean for them in practice — and pushing ministries to not just launch challenges, but also ensure development funding and actual procurement follow.Bridging that national-regional gap takes a lot of capacity, and if we’re too deep in execution projects, we can’t free that up. So it really is one leg in the policy meeting cycle and one leg with the companies, trying to build that bridge — ideally through a concrete project or program.
P3: L., not really PM
keeping municipal civil servants informed and the network up to date— and that times seven municipalities, each with their own layers of management. I don’t have the illusion that you can keep your entire network continuously well informed, because it’s simply too much. We use a newsletter, LinkedIn, Instagram, personal contacts, the local newspaper — but you’re always operating multi-channel and you can’t reach everyone all the time. What takes disproportionate time is grant administration — tracking hours, co-financing forms, Chamber of Commerce numbers on everything.
P5: S., PM RWS
In terms of finding the right partners for new innovations, that’s more the role of our knowledge field trackers and the people responsible for specific innovation portfolios — like someone who manages the bridges portfolio. They look at what’s already out there. We also have a department for international contacts and a department for knowledge relationships with account managers at TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, Wageningen, TNO, Deltares and others — we ask them what’s already known in a given area. It’s always a bit of a search process, and I’m not sure it’s always done equally well. That’s also where the innovation portfolio is really useful — you can search on a keyword and immediately see everything we’re working on internally. In a large organisation of 10,000 people, you simply don’t know what’s all going on otherwise.
P6: M., PM Novum
The PM spends a considerable amount of time assessing and qualifying incoming projects — his first question is always whether the right people, conditions, and priority are in place. A notable time drain is retrieving knowledge from previous projects: without a proper knowledge database, he has to search through files and conversations to find out what has been done before. Finally, he spends time on reports for management and the strategic innovation manager, for which he has to bring together information from multiple sources.