For many service-based consultancies, it can be challenging to showcase technical expertise because our clients own the technology solutions we develop. Due to contractual restrictions, consultancies are often limited in what they can demonstrate to potential new clients.

As a result, investment in internal initiatives that allow consultancies to build collateral to demonstrate our capability is essential. They offer the added benefit of providing practical learning and development opportunities for our teams.

At BJSS, we always seek to identify internal initiatives to help our people grow. However, it is just as important to our teams that those initiatives offer wider benefits. Our people want those initiatives to give back, engage with their local communities, and provide practical benefits.

Whether you are a consultancy or another type of organisation, the appetite to make a difference in others’ lives seems to be a more central ethos for our teams than ever before. So, how do organisations put community benefits at the core of such initiatives?

A valuable project

There are a few things to consider when identifying a suitable initiative. It must achieve the benefits sought; the solution you develop must be of added value to your business. It must give you a reason to invest time in developing it and have a clear vision for the community benefit you are trying to achieve.

We had an innovative idea that involved building a Digital Twin of our new purpose-built Glasgow Office to help us understand how effectively we’re using the hybrid space and how it performs against our sustainability goals.

From a business perspective, the initiative met all the required criteria. It would provide BJSS with data to improve existing offices and feed directly into the designs of any new workspaces.

It would allow us to showcase our expertise in service design, IoT, cloud, software engineering, data engineering and data science and would enable us to demonstrate strong software engineering controls and automation through continuous integration and deployment pipelines.

In today’s market, corporate social responsibility increasingly features in the tender process to win new work, which the initiative would support. Lastly, it would be a fantastic celebration of our new Glasgow office.

Involving the Community

With the digital landscape becoming increasingly integral to daily life, BJSS is keen to ensure it plays a pivotal role in developing the next generation of IT talent. It also wants to create a more diverse and thriving technology sector.

These aims are especially important in Scotland, where there is still a significant digital skills gap. Involving local schools, universities and tech groups in a community project is hugely powerful as it provides students with practical hands-on experience working with experts in the field. A well-curated community project should be fun, inspirational, and challenging and offer real hands-on solution development opportunities.

To kick off the Glasgow Office’s Digital Twin, BJSS Scotland agreed to sponsor the Engineering Visions Summer School. This is the first year Engineering Visions has been hosted in the UK by Glasgow Caledonian University.

It has been running for several years and sees teams of four to six students brainstorm ideas about how to create a more innovative world using the power of engineering. The two-week projects are based on real-world problems provided by local companies.

The scope of the BJSS Engineering Visions project was to capture a broad set of ideas on what we could achieve with a Digital Twin and develop a few of the best ideas further with visualisations and technology suggestions.

Effective Project Support

As with any project, it’s hugely important to provide the necessary support to the project team so they can deliver a successful outcome. This support is even more essential with community projects where those involved often lack company context, knowledge and language that are taken for granted.

The Engineering Visions Summer School is very well organised and provides several learning and development opportunities and team-building sessions. Academic mentors also offer project support.

To complement the academic support framework provided by the summer school, we wanted our student team to be located in our office to understand how we work, why collaboration and design thinking are essential, and how our office space needs to support that.

We also wanted our staff to have a say in the project. This engagement between internal BJSS staff and the community is critical as we, the company (BJSS), are looking to carry forward any outputs and, therefore, must share a stake in its evolution.

With this in mind, we included the student team as part of our wider BJSS for two weeks. We shared our expertise in design thinking (led by BJSS’ Design arm known as Sparck).

We showed them how to run lean coffee sessions so that they could effectively run ideation meetings with our people. We also provided free technical consultancy, coaching them as a team to help them navigate the project to a successful outcome.

Digital Twin of BJSS’ Glasgow Office

The students further developed three of the ideas captured with visualisations and technology suggestions.

One looks at how we can better connect people in the office – knowing when your squad or capability leads are in or whether there are people with specific skills and experience nearby that can help you with a problem.

Another idea looked at heat mapping the space to better understand where the popular areas are and at what times of the day. It aimed to answer questions such as; are people using the furniture in the office? Could we move it to a more popular space? How can we make some areas more popular?

The final idea focuses on how we nurture the office space – the use of plants in different areas, the effect on usage, and how we can use data to ensure the plants thrive. There were also some innovative thoughts around visualisations and the possible use of virtual or augmented reality to bring the Digital Twin to life.

Celebrating Success

Our team of international students, with representatives from the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden, grasped the Digital Twin concept with great enthusiasm. They facilitated ideation sessions in small groups, where they drew out over 100 ideas from our BJSS attendees.

They presented their research findings and developed ideas to BJSS Scotland in our main collaborative office space, affectionately dubbed “The Bleachers”. Back at the University, they wrote an in-depth technical report and presented the project to a panel of international academics. And they did all this in a second language.

As well as acknowledging the team’s achievements along the way, we had a final celebration and farewell. The students also shared a video showing their great experiences over the two weeks.

Celebrating success is sometimes forgotten, but it is an essential part of life. It makes all the hard effort worthwhile and makes you keen to attack the next challenge with as much or even more commitment.

Conclusion

For any organisation, community projects like the BJSS Glasgow office Digital Twin offer excellent opportunities to build exciting technology that can provide real value to your business and benefit the wider community.

Identifying a good valuable project is not easy, but it is vital. It needs to deliver value to the organisation, exploit the company’s expertise and services, and demonstrate the processes and methods employed to achieve success.

Organised and supported community engagement can deliver elements of a larger internal project and benefit both the organisation and the community. The more you invest in support, guidance and expertise, the more you gain.

These community engagements help to ensure that we are adequately developing the next generation of IT talent with the skills they need to succeed. And crucially, they are helping to create a more diverse and thriving technology sector.

BJSS – is a  leading technology and engineering consultancy for business.

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