Newsletters
Can Any One Manage a Programme?
Shared Leadership creates a mindset of collective responsibility, spontaneous collaboration, intuitive working relations and "institutionalised" good practices from individuals' complementary experiences.
Working Together: How Information Management and Business can create strategic advantage
Information is one of business’s greatest assets. Integration
of information systems increasingly offers opportunity for more
innovative services for customers. Systems that search, pull and
match data from many sources can reduce transaction costs and
present rich information and services in a way that customers
can understand and use more easily, ensuring they return to
you rather than a competitor.
Sustaining 'sustainability'
‘Sustainability’ is the Zeitgeist. Our leaders are extolling the need for ever-greener credentials. But is this sustainable? And is going green the same as embracing ‘sustainability’? Will sustainability prove to be the latest fad, or is it here to stay? This edition of (e)xtra explores where sustainability has come from, where it is moving to and how organisations can stay ahead of the curve to their financial advantage – the key to making sustainability sustainable across the economic cycle.
Christmas 2007
Five years ago we brought you the story of how Father Christmas handed over the reindeer to Santa Claus Jr, who re-engineered the North Pole operation, using state-of-the-art information and communications technology. But things move on…
Shared Services via Business Change
People, process, technology: all elements of successful change. Technology is often blamed for failure to deliver transformational change, but recent research into the reasons suggests a different story...
The Holy Grail of Competitive Advantage
In the search for the Holy Grail of competitive advantage, too often, technology ends up dictating how we work. The servant becomes the master and investment is wasted making technology do what we really need. Give a technophile a hammer, and every problem becomes a nail: business users rightly treat them with suspicion. So what’s the Da Vinci Code that will unlock ROI in IT?
Dealing in Uncertainty and Risk
Given the number of high-profile projects which complete late and cost more than expected you might conclude that investment in new facilities, business change and IT is a game of chance. Indeed, the reality is that probabilities figure large in any challenging project and the secret of being a winner rather than a loser hinges on understanding and managing the risks. But what can we learn from Monte Carlo about where to place our project bets?
Broadband... the next utility?
Both the number of people and the number of businesses with broadband have passed the halfway point. Is a broadband service now as essential as our electricity supply?
The wait is over...
Queuing for visas is becoming a thing of the past. Atkins has been working with UKvisas, an agency which issues visas to foreign nationals entering the UK from 163 offices worldwide.
Christmas Special: Advent Calendar
For 2006 our Christmas newsletter took the form on a traditional Advent Calendar. It had the typical 24 little windows to open. Each window opened on to an image depicting an Atkins project, with a brief description on the back of the perforated window.
Images ranged from trains to planes, school to shops, tanks to trade centres, and even windmills!
Unfortunately, owing to the nature of this newsletter, it is not available for download. Please contact us if you would like to be posted a back-copy.
A day in the life of...a relocation project manager
As I get off the tube at Canary Wharf and plod slowly up the escalators (well, it is a Friday), I’m not sure whether to look forward to logging on or not. I’ve just got time before the daily progress meeting at 8.15 to see if the guys in the US managed to get anywhere with the LAN problem we fl agged up a couple of days ago. Be great news if they had, but not so sure what to do if they haven’t. Escalate or wait?
Risk and Reward in the workplace
It is well documented that if you adopt leading edge technology, customise it to meet complex business requirements with ‘five nines’ (99.999%) reliability and demand rapid delivery you are almost bound to run into trouble and pay dearly for it.
However, for 20 years, Atkins has been specifying, procuring and managing delivery of such projects with a 100% success rate. Why would anyone repeatedly undertake such challenges? And how do you make it work?
