Communications is pivotal in daily interactions as it allows individuals to relay messages and to coordinate with another person. This applies also in mega projects where stakeholders need to communicate among each other to attain mutual understanding. Project Management Office (PMO) plays a vital role to ensure that there are seamless communications between various stakeholders as communication breakdown between stakeholders promotes losses in terms of time and cost in a project. The aim of this chapter is to examine the main failures in managing communications between stakeholders in the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) deployment project in Malaysia and discusses the potential communication management alternatives to address the communication breakdowns between the stakeholders. This chapter was developed using secondary data and information obtained from extensive reviews of relevant literature pertaining to communication breakdowns that are related to the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) deployment project in Malaysia.
TopIntroduction
Adaptation of next generation technology has many challenges, especially when introducing it to a whole nation. Megaprojects are defined as complex ventures that distinctively take years to deploy, possesses multiple stakeholders, impacts many individuals, cost a huge amount of money and is the most optimum delivery model to be adapted to deliver goods and services across multiple range of business and sectors which includes information technology (Flyvbjerg, 2014). This became inevitable in early 2016 when Malaysia decided to adopt one of the most recent, rapidly deployed technological breakthroughs in the power utility industry globally which is the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) technology (Ministry of Energy, 2017). This mega project is governed by the Energy Commission of Malaysia and managed by the main power utility service provider in Malaysia, TNX (Suruhanjaya Tenaga, 2019).
AMI technology is a pivotal piece in the Smart Grid initiative where it creates economic improvements in the electric power distribution grid. Among the benefits of Smart Grids is that it can reduce blackouts, improve environmental conditions by only producing electricity based on demands of the consumer and allowing consumers to save electricity bills (Faheem et al., 2018; Karimulla et al., 2019). AMI basically prepares the way for the enablement of smart grids and involves smart meters, which is the last mile device in the electric power distribution grid that communicates the electrical energy usage of the consumers. Smart meters essentially are able to perform basic metering functions on top of being able to perform other functions such as collect necessary consumption data, connect or disconnect electricity supply to the consumers, report faults or events such as tempering and also communicate all these to the central servers (Umang et al., 2015).
There are various stakeholders in this project which includes the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources Malaysia, various parties within TNX, AMI technology provider, various smart meter manufacturers, installation contractors and the end users whose premises will be equipped with smart meters. Managing the expectations of the stakeholders are important as they are vital to the project’s success. Communication is the most important tool which can be used to properly manage stakeholders in various stages of a project (Assudani et al., 2010). A proper communication management can build positive productivity in a job environment on top of relaying a message correctly to another party (Genç, 2017).
In the AMI deployment project in Malaysia, EXY was hired by TNX to function as a Project Management Office (PMO) and is responsible to assist TNX in managing all stakeholders in this mega project besides planning and managing the deployment of AMI in Malaysia (Rao, Chang and Bennett, 2020). Communications between stakeholders are fundamental for success as it increases productivity besides enabling various stakeholders to transfer message and provide mutual understanding between peers to benefit the project (Genç, 2017). The aim of this paper is to examine the key communication breakdown in the AMI Deployment in Malaysia by discussing the main failures in managing communications between stakeholders.