Meet Skypuzzler’s Delivery Manager, Jacob Løfdahl
Jacob Løfdahl is Skypuzzler’s Delivery Manager. He is in charge of ensuring that Skypuzzler meets all the expected deliverables for customers, funding projects, and applications. With a master’s degree in information technology, Jacob applies his strong academic skills in his everyday tasks, which are heavily loaded with research, project management, ISO implementation, and customer collaboration.
In this Meet the Team series, Jacob is the first person to take us along on his everyday work at Skypuzzler.
How has your educational background and past experience directly influenced your approach to project delivery and your tasks at Skypuzzler in general?
My educational background was fairly project-oriented, and even though I was not super structured when planning or keeping a schedule during my own studies, that time served as one of the first real project-oriented experiences. This helped me gain the necessary skills to dive into and understand complex subjects. I’d like to add that obtaining a certification in PRINCE2 Foundation and Practitioner certainly didn’t hurt (that much). Apart from my educational background, I gained extensive project management experience as a graduate knowledge management engineer at the European Space Agency and as a knowledge management project manager at Siemens Gamesa. These previous roles taught me a lot about the mechanisms of corporate setups, system design, and organisational development.
I have worked a lot with the concept of learning organisations and how knowledge and information are structured and organised to make it accessible to the right people at the right time. I have tried to bring these learnings with me into Skypuzzler, especially regarding the implementation and operation of our various ISO-certified management systems. While not being an expert in knowledge management (yet), I can confidently say that knowing where to find knowledge and information relevant to our daily doings is vital. It enables us, for instance, to write better project proposals and create stronger process and project documentation. Having pre-existing knowledge available to you is just a naturally strong precondition for starting off any work activities on the right foot. In my opinion, effective knowledge management precedes the successful project and the value-creating customer collaboration.
Given your experience with ISO certification, how do you ensure that quality management and risk mitigation are seamlessly integrated into Skypuzzler’s project delivery lifecycle?
Short answer: with a lot of difficulty. Long answer: lots and lots of research on how other organisations, big and small, have set up their management systems—basically learning from their experiences. It was a very daunting task, as I had never worked with ISO implementations before. For that reason, I initially started doing deep research about the subject before even thinking about drafting up a system. Knowing the ropes of ISO was the first thing to get sorted. Second, was getting to know all the processes we work with in the company. As you might imagine, without any of these being codified anywhere, there is a lot of tacit knowledge and information that needs to be uncovered and structured into a coherent “ecosystem”. Given that Skypuzzler was a fairly small company when all the ISO work started, it was a huge help. I had a lot of visibility and access to everyone at a moment’s notice. These preconditions helped me to define and design a system that would fit into our work approach rather than the other way around.
The support from the Top Management was great and necessary, as they understood and accepted the need for structure and documentation. Factors such as product quality, environmental sustainability, information security and a risk-based mentality were crucial to ensure, as well as guaranteeing that Skypuzzler would consistently provide our customers with high-quality products that are environmentally sustainable, and safe and secure.
What aspect of your role as a Delivery Manager do you find most rewarding?
Being a naturally curious person, as some of my colleagues will attest, I really enjoy the initiation phase of a project or customer collaboration. It is where ideation flourishes and runs free, and all the interesting questions are asked and hopefully answered. Working on developing new technology concepts that have the potential to strengthen our core offering is super motivating because it makes you feel like you’re at the forefront of technology research (well, at least in the drone industry).
Working with customers is a bit different, as it is much more complex. A lot of active listening and deduction are required, as well as some strategic flair and empathy, to discern exactly what our customers need and how we can meet those needs. You should also be able to convey our company’s vision, mission, and values efficiently, which can be a bit tricky when there are different understandings of complex concepts.
Describe a typical day working for Skypuzzler
Coffee. A good, typical day at Skypuzzler always starts with coffee – and a little bit of catch-up with colleagues to ease into the day. Workwise, a typical day for me is focused on a variety of things depending on what’s most pressing. Usually, I’m in no short supply of things to do. I do a fair bit of project reporting, deliverable planning and reporting, project proposals and applications. Most importantly, and likely less interestingly, I define and implement organisational processes, lots and lots of processes (courtesy of ISO). Ever since I started working at Skypuzzler, I have been heavily involved in the definition, development and implementation of all things ISO-process related. This means that I spend a lot of time asking many questions about how product realisation happens (while slightly reducing the quality of life of the colleagues I play “Answer My 20 Questions” with). It is basically a full audit of the entire company, with the purpose of mapping out every nook and cranny with regard to the organisational context we operate in. This is pretty great, as I get to have a unique, holistic view of the entire company’s internal workings and external factors we influence and are affected by.
After a day at the office, I like (to):
Go to the gym
Spending time at the gym is always a good way to switch off and practice a bit of mindfulness.
Reading
I like to read, especially sci-fi novels, but also research articles and books that can help me improve my professional profile. Only issue is that I collect articles faster than I can read them, so my pile of shame (i.e., unread articles) is substantial.
Gaming
I find gaming to be a good way to connect and have fun with friends and work as a team around a common goal (When playing cooperatively)
