VEFF Magazine 1 2021

VEFF//21 VEFF – THE DNV GL EMPLOYEE ASSOCIATION VEFF MAGAZINE 2021

Freedom and flexibility = high efficiency

Meet the

Meet the

Updates

GROUP CEO – REMI ERIKSEN

CFO – KJETIL EBBESBERG MONSSEN

DS – MEET OUR NEW PRODUCT LINE DIRECTORS

I EDITORIAL I

Greetings, we hope you are doing good In this magazine, a dedicated team of highly talented colleagues will give us an insight in their specific business objectives and how to draw up tailor-made solutions to customers in their markets.

CHAIR OF VEFF, NINA IVARSEN

The VEFF magazine is produced by employees in DNV and sponsored

by VEFF union, which is a union for DNV employees.

© VEFF 06-2021 Editor: Nina Ivarsen Front cover photo: ©iStock Back cover photo: ©DNV Design and print: Bodoni, 128400

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I CONTENTS I

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With distributed expertise and continuous support, we all become a part of our growth in the new strategy period. Our global network of expert colleagues provides in this magazine real-time input from the field, giving your insight to industry changes as– and when they happen. In each article they break down and analyze the market by segments, understand the prevailing dynamics and study the business area operating in these spaces. We think that by sharing experiences in a personal manner, we will all get inspired, and this can help us have the competitive advantage we need for the future.

Our intention with the VEFF Magazine has been to highlight content and ideas that are focused around building a stronger and more connected future, even during the challenges around us. I look forward to the day when we can unite and connect as human beings beyond our frustrations of the pandemic, and I celebrate the moments where we do just that. Even so, I continue to be saddened by the recent development in many countries. In Norway, as we start to return to workplaces, schools, live events, and public gatherings — I believe we need to address caution and have respect for regulations long into the future.

Consider Remote Work After the chaos of 2020, we are constantly looking for ways to find business opportunities and win contracts. With the pandemic still going on, more and more businesses are starting to find ways to generate income while staying at home or with limited contact with other people. We in DNV are doing the same, and in the second part of the editorial we have done a study that reflects on the challenges and opportunities of working remotely from home.

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CEO Remi Eriksen

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CFO Kjetil M. Ebbesberg

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Lucy Craig

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Kristoffer Engström

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Code of Conduct

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Aimilia Evdaimon

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Frank Børre Pedersen

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New strategy

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Matthias Wehnert

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Cecilie Gudesen Torp

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Kenneth Vareide

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Tony Alfano

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Koheila Molazemi

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Christian Wood

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Ron Howard

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Deborah Wood

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Circular Economy

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Mystery Coffee

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Jon Grimes

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© iStock

One of the best ways to continue making money in the pandemic is to work remotely. Working remotely allows you to generate income from your primary job without risking possible infection from your colleagues. You can still perform your work at the comfort of your home. However, working at home can make you feel lethargic at times because of the temptation to sit around unproductive or lay in bed, so make sure that you have a designated workspace for you to remain productive and focused. Working remotely, can be considered as flex jobs, working from home, working nomads, jobspresso and fiverrs.

Location independent work is a popular trend, not just among employees, but also for many companies. This is because it does not only create greater freedom for individuals, but also offers entirely new recruiting possibilities for companies.

EDITORIAL

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I EDITORIAL I

“What we believe is that great things happen when we meet in person. We also believe in giving our employees more flexibility, CEO Remi Eriksen”.

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I EDITORIAL I

Freedom and flexibility For some employees, the freedom and flexibility of remote work have created problems since becoming part of the daily agenda – admittedly always at a certain price, because: where there is no obligation to be present, there is often also no protection.

There are unpaid acquisition phases between projects and there is rarely a guarantee of subsequent work in future. The remote work model now promises those same freedoms for permanent employees, who also benefit from all the advantages of a work contract at the same time. This is primarily made possible by rapid technological development: broadband connections and powerful laptops, tablets and smartphones are a matter of course nowadays, as are special software for Web conferences and secure data transfer.

recognizing the advantages of having remote workers – and these benefits are certainly noticeable. Of course: for many businesspeople, a key question is whether the development brings a financial pay-off. The answer is a definitive yes. Just imagine if half of your employees no longer needed a space at the office.

You would make direct savings on all the costs for your office infrastructure. But for many companies, a completely different factor is decisive: their location disadvantage up to now. Small and medium-sized office located outside of major urban conurbations increasingly complain about a lack of skilled staff and decreasing numbers of applicants. Remote work virtually functions as a recruitment miracle in such cases: if a change in job is possible without changing location from Høvik to Trondheim, jobs will also become more attractive to skilled staff.

Earning a pay rise while travelling the world

Weaknesses of the model

The reasons to expand the use of location-independent work are therefore clear. However, doing away with traditional office life is not only associated with positive consequences, as removing a fixed workspace also means getting rid of an established office neighbor or a lunch partner. Moreover, not everyone sees themselves as an extrovert globetrotter who can make new “Moreover, not everyone sees themselves as an friends anywhere in the world extrovert globetrotter who can make new friends within minutes. On the conanywhere in the world within minutes. On the trary: many people appreciate their place of work as a familiar, contrary: many people appreciate their place of work secure environment where they as a familiar, secure environment where they meet meet people they know well. people they know well”.

This shows that this working model is not perfectly suited to every employee. And employers are also confronted by some via Skype. On the other hand, there can be far more practical problems by the transition. For managers, it becomes more diffireasons that lead to individual colleagues working remotely – for cult to observe and ultimately evaluate their employees. On the example relatives who require care, or partners who live abroad. other side, there is also a question of how much of a connection So, there are many different motivations behind remote work. employee can form with their company if they only know their One thing is clear: employees expect certain benefits from the colleagues from group chats and have only seen the headquarincreased flexibility and freedom. Scientific studies are not yet ters in photos. available, but surveys show that the advantages do arise: for example, a survey of 1,400 users of the ‘Flexjobs.com’ portal Making workspaces more flexible brings many advantages – on revealed that making working life more flexible had led to increboth sides. Companies based in less attractive locations can ased personal satisfaction and even improved perceived health profit from this. At the same time, the social factor should not in the majority of cases. be ignored. Employees still need to be involved in and connected to the company, otherwise the employer will soon become Høvik or Trondheim, location disadvantage benefits an easily exchangeable element and high staff turnover will be For a long time, the public debate around making working unavoidable. life more flexible has been focused on this aspect: the benefits for employees. However, more and more companies are also © iStock

The advantages for employees are clear. Why take a holiday to finally make that trip to Asia? If the hotel has a stable Internet connection, the database can be updated just as easily by the pool. Customer emails can be answered on the beach and coordination with colleagues can be arranged without difficulty

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I EDITORIAL I

WORKING FROM HOME – THE NEW STANDARD? One of the new projects VEFF is running is a study that is meant as a supplementary study to the project GSS/EC is doing in DNV. We would like to look at the subject from a human perspective and include some international studies and references.

We would also like to find out if COVID 19 have changed our work habits.

CHAIR OF VEFF, NINA IVARSEN

Remote work has become our new norm and has proven to be more efficient than expected With rapid changes in our society and with the demand of integration of new technology, we also see a change in our physical environment and the way we communicate. The way we receive and share information are now much more efficient, but it also has challenges such as: increased cognitive workload. Work and family life balance can also be challenging and create conflicts as our home offices and family life now can collide.

New work structure ”Quality of working life” will change with our new style of working. We need to work with a redesign of The Nordic model.

Human relations will change with remote work. We need to focus on implementing social organization structures to keep interactions up as the social aspect is such a crucial factor for many employee’s satisfaction, motivation and thereby improvements overall. The socio-technical system (STS), looks at how the connection between people and technology in job designs increases job identification with less management control.

Occupant satisfaction and well-being

In the United States, almost half of the workforce work from home. 35.2% report that they have started with this as a result ofCOVID-19 The younger employees work more often from home than the older employees, and the transition is greatest among IT, managers, and other professional groups1.

In the United States, the number of people working from home increased from two to nine million in the period 1988 to 1998.

In US About 45 million persons are working part time from home2. The population in the US by 2019 was 328,2 million3.

Psychological comfort Functional comfort Physical comfort

Working from home has been a trend over long time In the period from 2001 to 2011 the number of persons working from home increased worldwide from 9.2% to 10.3% (Gower,2013). In 2013, surveys showed that 88% of the organizations had some form for remote work. Figures from 2014 show that 13.9% of all employees in the UK worked more than 50% of the time from home4.

Habitability threshold Discomfort Environmental comfort model of workspace quality

The proportion of highly educated people is increasing In Norway, about 40% of the workforce today have occupations which requires a college or university degree. 2/3 of the employment growth from 2007 to 2008 were in occupations that required some sort of education level either on college or university education level5.

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1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Brynjolfsson et al, 2020 McClay, 2013 Bureau of the Census, Eurostat, Verdensbanken Felstead & Henseke, 2017 SSB, 2008, 2009

I EDITORIAL I

What do we know about working remote?

Pros: • Increased productivity.

• Reduced absence related to sickness.

• Increased flexibility.

BUT • Increased feeling of isolation.

• Increased static load.

• Increased stress due to little guidance.

Work – Family – Leisure • Clear tendency for an increase in the number of working hours.

• Tendency to start work before one is healthy.

• The flexibility of work might be exaggerated.

• Employee`s feedback regarding working from home • Works more efficiently.

• Fewer interruptions.

• Reduced stress related to business travel.

• Increased mix of work and leisure.

• Work and family issues might collide and create challenges and lack of personal space and time for relaxation and other activities split up.

Recovery and work • Work includes increased activity and increased stress levels for most people.

• Increased requirements for self-discipline. © iStock

Cons:

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I EDITORIAL I

• Work environment factors affect the stress level and thus the need for recovery.

• Fatigue and / or exhaustion is a growing problem in working life.

How to improve the situation?

Vicious circles: increased stress response

Work habits

• Reduced recovery over time has been linked to increased levels of adrenaline and cortisol before, during and after work-related effort6.

• Increased stress affects the sleep pattern as further reduces the ability to recover.

• Everyday life consists of habits and automated actions.

• Provides help with self-regulation, although this is seen as a limited resource.

• Determine a permanent workplace.

• Fixed working hours if possible.

• Reduce the number of distraction sources.

• Set realistic sub-goals.

The companies with the greatest success have developed detailed program for working from home, greater awareness around ergonomic facilitation and better work habits9.

Self-regulation Self-regulation refers to the ability individuals have to change their own behavior.

• Has great significance for adaptation and flexibility7.

Extensive use of self-regulation in an area will lead to less ability to self-regulate on other areas8.

Other matters of importance • Danger of reduced person – organization fit.

• Employee management versus achievement.

• Who is responsible for data security?

• Is the home the job or the job the home?

• Who has HSE – responsibility?

Attention and concentration • We are evolutionarily adapted to the face to face contact.

• Other forms of communication require greater attention control.

• Gives increased need for recovery.

• Risk of quick «good enough decisions».

• Reduced number of learning-cues will make things harder to remember.

• Break up the learning into smaller chunks and vary the methods.

• Small pauses and breaks are underestimated.

Physical facilitation • Work overtime require organized job environment.

• Stress problems occur over time, and it is often difficult to understand what the cause and effect is.

• Laptop is not a good tool for prolonged screen work.

• Lighting is often an underestimated risk factor.

Avoid isolation • Learning is best in a community.

• Allain yourself with someone else, it provides higher motivation.

• Social Media – can give a sense of community – how to encourage professional communities?

• Get enough physical activity.

What is the conclusion?

6) 7) 8) 9)

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Sluiter et al., 2003 Baumeister & Vohs,2007 Muraven, et al., 1998 Harrington & Walker, 2004

Remote work allows for number of possibilities. However, it must be carefully planned to maintain and to take care of employees’ rights and requirements. The opportunity to use remote work is a positive experience, but extensive use gives to a larger degree negative consequence.

I CEO REMI ERIKSEN I

Meet Group CEO and President Remi Eriksen As the CEO of DNV, I would like to share some reflections on 2020 and the start of 2021. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, we started this year from a position of strength, building on our very strong performance in 2020. And 2021 is proving to be a very exciting and important year for our company and society at large.

Remi Eriksen enjoying life at sea.

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I CEO REMI ERIKSEN I

ANNUAL REPORT 2020 We published our Annual Report for 2020 in April. The Annual Report tells the story of DNV in 2020 – something that I personally am proud to share publicly. In 2020 DNV employees dared to rethink customer relationships and how we deliver services, we shared encouragement and frustrations in working from home, and we showed great care for our colleagues, families, and wider communities. Even though 2020 was a tough year for businesses, our company’s strong financial result is a testament to the hard work and dedication of all of you around the world.

The Annual Report is not just about our financial performance; it is a comprehensive publication that contains lots of useful information about DNV that customers often ask for in bid processes or supplier qualification surveys – such as our approach to data security, how we benchmark our health and safety performance, and details on diversity.

In the annual report you will also find DNV’s sustainability performance. It details DNV’s carbon footprint, our usage of renewable electricity, and how we aim to reduce energy consumption. You will also find examples of how our projects with customers contribute to their sustainability performance.

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ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE In 2020, DNV recorded revenue of almost NOK 20 billion in 2020, which was very close to the target for the year. The EBITA margin was 11.9%, which is better than target. And cash flow from operations was especially noteworthy at 185% of target. This strong result activated the profit share scheme.

As a result of this, we have paid out NOK 546 million of our earnings to employees in profit share.

This outstanding performance in an historically difficult year shows the strength and resilience of you and our company. It indicates that our strategy to 2020, to create a more digital, agile and efficient company, put us on the right path to manage even extraordinary times.

In 2021, the revenue development for the first three months has been good. We recorded a revenue of NOK 5.3 billion, which is 4% better than the first quarter of last year, and 10% better than target. It is good to see that all BAs are growing year-on-year, and that our order intake is strong too.

Earnings were also good. EBITA was NOK 445 million, which is well above last year and well above target. In addition, our cash flow from operations has improved as we continue to reduce our accounts receivable and work-in-progress.

I CEO REMI ERIKSEN I

The success we had in 2020 and now into the first quarter builds on all of the good work we have done over the past few years to develop our company and make it robust. I am proud to see that we are off to a good start with our strategy: “Growing in the decade of transformations – enabled by exceptional people.”

STRATEGY We launched the new DNV Strategy that will guide us through to 2025 at the Senior Management Council (SMC) meeting on the 13th of January. It is a customer centric strategy, with ambitious goals.

According to the Strategy Ambassadors, the response to the strategy has been positive. The focus on ‘exceptional people’ and the imperative for individual development and growth are welcomed. Employees are also excited about the attention to the energy transition and decarbonization for our customers.

In addition, employees are inspired by the more explicit focus on sustainability – both internally and externally – and on particular SDGs. The ambitious growth targets and focus on customer centricity in the strategy are also considered exciting.

At the same time, there are some concerns about the growth targets being too much of a reach, including the amount of resources required for inorganic growth. There is also a need for more clarification about how we will bring our people along in the new strategy, how we will execute the new ‘hero role’ for key account managers (KAMs), and how we can improve cross-BA collaboration.

I am proud to see that we are off to a good start with our strategy: “Growing in the decade of transformations – enabled by exceptional people.”

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY One of the top-level goals in our 2025 Strategy is to enable our customers’ aspirations through superior customer experience.

Customer centricity has been a central element also in the previous strategy – so how can we become even more customer centric?

The first is to create more connecting points into our customers’ organization. By this I mean to not only focus on the contacts that we know already, but to broaden the relationship through more contacts within our customers’ organization.

And, of course developing relationships with people in companies that are not customers of DNV today. This means meeting with new people, and also connecting with the networks that other DNV colleagues have.

Second, I would like customer facing people to be able to talk about broader topics and not only their own section’s or department’s area of expertise. This will lead to richer conversations with customers, and more opportunities for DNV. So, I expect you to read up on topics and expand the conversation – and bring in expert colleagues to deepen the conversation when appropriate.

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I CEO REMI ERIKSEN I

The pandemic has been very challenging. However, it has brought with is some positives, too – more time. I have had much more time with my wife and children, more time for my favourite activity, cross-country skiing, and more time at sea in my boat. The pictures should need no explanation.

Third, we need to step up the sharing of customer information within DNV. Our CRM – or customer relationship management tools play an important role in enabling this, and we will be making a step change with the rollout of Salesforce.

But it is also about our attitudes and behaviours – including what kind of information we enter into the tools and how we use them. By sharing information and working together, I am confident that we can increase our business with customers – and through that see growth and a greater impact.

Let me share an example of a customer relationship developed over decades with BW, the leading global maritime company – which has turned into significant business volume for our company over the years – and which has recently put us in a position where we were invited to form an important industry wide collaboration initiative. The Foundation Det Norske Veritas has teamed up with the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore and five other industry leaders to establish a maritime decarbonization centre in Singapore.

Not only will our Maritime business area benefit in many ways, but our Energy Systems business area will also benefit from initiatives related to ports and other shore-based infrastructure, fuel and power suppliers, grid operators and authorities – which supports our positioning, access to customers, and the further growth of our services in a very important region. This is only one example among many, where we have taken customer centricity to the next level.

NAME CHANGE TO DNV With the launch of the new strategy, we also announced a change of our company’s brand name. The reason for changing our name is to simplify. Five consonants in a row is not an easy name to pronounce – and consistency in how the name was spelled by our customers and other stakeholders was not there.

I understand that some colleagues find the change of our company name to be sensitive or difficult. I want to emphasize that we are making this change to take our company forward – not to go back. We would never have been as successful as

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we are today if it had not been for all legacy organizations that make up our company today – a company with highly skilled people. As we move forward, we unite under the name DNV. DIVERSITY & INCLUSION An important part of our 2025 strategy is to strengthen our approach to diversity and inclusion (D&I). I believe this will make a difference in our business thinking, our relationships with our customers, and our overall success as a company. We will have an inclusive process for establishing our D&I ambitions and for designing plans to meet them.

As a first step, a random selection of 2000 DNV employees has been invited to share their perspectives and opinions on diversity and inclusion. This survey will be followed by a series of virtual workshops around the world.

CODE OF CONDUCT We published an updated Code of Conduct in April. Following our new strategy, we took a fresh view to create a Code of Conduct that reflects who we are as a company and at the same time is best practice in terms of how it is presented.

Our Code of Conduct defines what is expected of each of us to ensure that we always operate according to the highest ethical standards and in line with DNV’s Values. In addition, last year we launched our new vision of being a trusted voice to tackle global transformations. DNV’s business is built on trust, and every one of us has a role in protecting this trusted position we have built over more than 150 years. What we do when faced with difficult decisions defines who we are as a company.

I expect all employees to familiarize themselves with the Code of Conduct and use it to guide your behaviour when you are uncertain.

COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic continues to take its toll. I think most of us have struggled at some point with hours of backto-back Teams meetings. And I know many within the DNV family have now, unfortunately, been infected with COVID-19.

I sympathize. As mentioned in my Yammer post on 15 January,

I CEO REMI ERIKSEN I

I also received a positive test for the virus. I am grateful and touched by all of the kind well-wishes I received on Yammer, WeChat, in text messages and by e-mail. My sickness was very mild, and I was fully recovered end of January. I was fortunate – but the disease can be very dangerous, particularly the new variants. So please, maintain COVID-safe behaviours – both to protect yourselves and others.

Around the world, well over 170 million people have tested positive, and more than 3.3 million have lost their lives due to the disease. At the same time, vaccination is picking up. Across the world, more than 900 million people have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. So, there are many more people that have been vaccinated than have tested positive.

But the vaccines are not evenly distributed across the world.

This is problematic because the world will not be safe until everyone is safe. We support the WHO’s recommendation, “that everyone, everywhere who could benefit from safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines should have access as quickly as possible, starting with those at highest risk of serious disease or death.” Ensuring that everyone who can and wants to be vaccinated will be a challenge, but I am positive. As Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

ON A PERSONAL NOTE The pandemic has been very challenging. However, it has brought with is some positives, too – more time. I have had much more time with my wife and children, more time for my favourite activity, cross-country skiing, and more time at sea in my boat. The pictures should need no explanation. •

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I CFO KJETIL M. EBBESBERG I

CFO Kjetil M. Ebbesberg I am 49 years old, married to Mette and we have two children: our son Nikolas (22) and our daughter Helena (18). Nikolas studies Computer science at the University of Oslo and Helena is a second year student at a high school in Oslo.

We also have a dog, a Great Dane named Athena (8). She is the joy of the entire family. For a GD she is rather small, however still weighs 65 kg. We were not supposed to get a dog, despite heavy lobbying from the kids for years. Then one beautiful summer day at the parade street of Oslo my wife spotted this beautiful Great Dane, she fell in love (again…) and suddenly, the vote for a family dog turned three against 1…

As to personal interests I have always been very interested in music and beyond listening at home I often go to rock concerts with friends or with family members. I try to stay reasonably fit and my preference is playing football and bicycling, which I regularly do with friends. Or else I run or go skiing during the winter (mostly cross country, but also downhill).

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I also enjoy doing building work on my house – inside and outside. I find that really relaxing as I then get to use my brain for different tasks than I usually do. Now, however, I am moving into an apartment in the center of Oslo and I guess I will have less opportunities for those kinds of activities. My most favorable time-off activity, though, is to spend time with my family. I have realized that kids grow up fast. Our youngest is soon moving out, following her brother during next year. I am therefore glad that we have prioritized spending time together the last 20+ years.

After finishing high school, I moved out at the age of 18 to join the military academy where I spent two years. I chose to do that mainly because I wanted to make something extra out

I CFO KJETIL M. EBBESBERG I

of my mandatory military service of one year. Thereby, I got a leadership education at young age and got to explore and develop myself in ways I would never have done otherwise.

Being stationed as a sergeant in Northern Norway I also met my future wife – so it was a fortunate choice in all aspects.

Mette and I moved to Bergen where Mette took a master’s degree in art history and I took a master’s degree in economics and business administration. My studies at Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen was no coincident – it was a choice I had in mind since quite early on from my high school days. I have always been interested in economics – both concerning businesses and societies – and I showed interest in commerce from I was a quite small boy. It could maybe have to do with my grandfather being a tradesman – I do not know.

For a young professional to get the opportunity to work on large industrial projects and strategies, and to frequently present this in front of the Corporate Management, was a dreamlike start of a professional career.

Anyway, I often found ways of creating small business opportunities when I was young. At around seven I started selling blue clay in my neighborhood that I extracted from a road development site nearby. I went from house to house to offer my services, whether it was painting houses, moving lawns, or other jobs a young boy could manage. Later on, as a teenager, a friend and me spotted an empty space in the nightlife market in my hometown – so we rented a local nightclub and started arranging alcohol free discotheques for teenagers below the age of 18 and further expanded “the business” by arranging parties for students at the teacher’s education college.

history in my hometown Notodden, where it was once founded and started its first industrial development back in 1905.

Hydro had by 1996 developed into a conglomerate of different industrial businesses – Oil & Gas, Fertilizer, Light Metals, Petrochemicals and Pharmaceuticals to mention a few – all based on energy one way or the other. I got the opportunity to join at the corporate headquarter as an analyst in the planning and strategy department.

For a young professional to get the opportunity to work on large industrial projects and strategies, and to frequently present this in front of the Corporate Management, was a dreamlike start of a professional career. Starting at the corporate center also gave me an excellent view over the then 15 different divisions of the company, to scout for my next, desired step.

I identified the Extrusion division as the possibly most commercially oriented of them all, with a very strong and clear management philosophy of breaking down a global industry into local businesses (“kingdoms”), managed with a large degree of freedom by local MD’s. After three years at the corporate center I got the opportunity to join the Extrusion division as business controller for its Extrusion International business unit and moved with Mette and our then 1-year old son to Lausanne, Switzerland. After some time in that position,

Celebrating the 17th of May, the Nathional day in Norway.

My four years in Bergen was as I had expected. I liked the studies and the life as a student. Although I was serious about my studies, I also appreciated the free life as a student, with lots of socializing and student activities. Mette and I lived together in a small apartment and since she studied art history at the University, we were part of two quite different student societies and enjoyed the mix of different people we could thus socialize with. I combined my studies at NHH with parts of an MBA as an exchange student at University of Ottawa, Canada, where I got to know a lot of students from around the world, some of which I still keep in contact with.

When finalizing my studies in 1996, I initially signed up to join a consulting company. However, I ended up accepting an offer from Norsk Hydro (or Hydro for short), a company for whom I had very positive feelings. Partly due to its role as an industrial pioneer and locomotive for developing many of the most important industries in Norway, and partly because of its

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I CFO KJETIL M. EBBESBERG I

I moved sideways to become the business controller of the Building Systems BU, managed out of the same location.

It was an adventure to move abroad for a small family – and Mette had if fact lived in Lausanne before, so she knew the city well when we arrived.

My time with the extrusion division gave me exposure to a tough, but fair commercial culture. I learned the importance of running businesses based on an outside-in perspective and of delegating authority for making decisions as close as possible to the customer – in combination with a strongly enforced accountability. I also saw the difference people and management make – in driving through values and building a company culture.

Following a couple of rewarding years with Extrusion we returned as a family back to Oslo in 2002 when I got the opportunity to take on the CFO role of a newly formed midstream business division, Metal Products. Hydro had decided to carve out the cast houses of its upstream division (primary) and downstream divisions (extrusion and rolled products) and to form a mid-stream business aiming at commercializing a process step which other players merely saw as an integrated “support” step in their up– and downstream businesses.

Adding metal trading and recycling we made a new business division which created significant value to Hydro, based on an added-value strategy, including commercial services on top of its cast house product portfolio – and building up global leadership positions, with a total turnover of USD five billion. After four years I moved from the CFO position to head one of the business units within the division, my first operational line manager role, in 2006.

Family picture from Nikolas’ gratuation at the University of Oslo.

By then I had really seen the importance of and value from creating unique business models that is adapted to the business you run. In a large company like Hydro one can easily fall into the trap of trying to manage all businesses in the same way. That can be detrimental.

Grate Dane, Athene (8) is a great joy to the hole family.

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In 2007 I had spent eleven years with Hydro – I was 35 years old and I came to a cross-road where I decided to try out life outside of Hydro when I was offered the position as Group CFO of one of Norway’s largest retail chains, Coop. That was a tough decision to make personally – given my strong ties with Hydro and the opportunities I had been given. Nevertheless, I decided to make the jump – into the unknown. I did not know the retail business, nor the organization, but I knew that if I am to leave Hydro it must be for something very different.

It was different. I was lucky to join in a period where major changes were about to be initiated, and I got to play a central role in major restructuring of both the company’s wholesale business and its property business, as well as to lead one of the biggest acquisitions in Coop up until then. Fantastic opportunities to get to know the business and its organization fast.

After two years at Coop I felt I had been working there for five – extremely interesting, personally developing and fun! From a very international organization focused on business to business

I CFO KJETIL M. EBBESBERG I

to a completely Norwegian and very local one focusing on end customers!

Then, in 2009 Hydro got a new CEO. He called me and asked if I would come back to Hydro to take a role in his new management team. I was to get responsibility for the Metal Markets business area, where I earlier had been the CFO. My heart was still beating for Hydro and even if I felt very engaged where I was, it was an offer I could not refuse.

That started my second round of 11-years at Hydro, which consisted purely of line management and operational responsibilities; eight years as head of two of Hydro’s business areas, and in-between those two roles nearly three years as plant manager for an aluminum rolled products plant in Holmestrand, Norway. I was probably the first-ever non-engineer to manage that 100-year old plant, with 400 employees, so there was probably some scepticism when I started, but that soon faded away.

I found it extremely motivating to be responsible for a cornerstone company within a small community and with short distance to very competent and engaged employees – enabling me to use and develop yet new sides of myself as a leader. And to see the business flourish and come into a position where it gradually performs better than ever before. I am still in frequent contact with employees there, whom I regard as friends for life.

I was probably the first-ever nonengineer to manage that 100-year old plant, with 400 employees, so there was probably some skepticism when I started, but that soon faded away.

My last assignment in Hydro was to lead the Rolled Products business area, with approx. 6.000 employees globally, headquartered close to Düsseldorf in Germany. Thus, the family would need to move abroad again – which was an idea that rang well with my then 16-year-old son, who was about to shift to high school anyway, while my 12-year-old daughter was less enthusiastic about it. Nevertheless, we agreed to do it and after half a year alone in Germany my family joined me at the start of the school year of 2015. Following a challenging initial three months also my daughter gradually became more positive to the new life and by the time my family moved back to Norway a year before me in 2018 she did not want to move.

The whole family look back at the years in Germany with joy and good memories, and the kids have many friends from around the world today that they will probably bring with them for life. A highlight from my close to five years in Germany was when Bundeskansler Angela Merkel confirmed our invitation to open our newly built automotive product plant in 2017 – something she rarely does. She also shed light on

A highlight from Germany when Bundeskansler Angela Merkel came to open the newly built automotive product plant in 2017.

our 100-year anniversary when she came. I remember the CEO of BMW (admittedly my favorite customer, being a long time BMW enthusiast) told us that Merkel had turned down the invitation to join their 100-year anniversary the year before…

Having done most of what I could achieve in Hydro I once again thought that if I should do something else, I should consider doing that now. I therefore decided once more to make a leap – and this time I got the opportunity to join DNV as the new Group CFO. That brought me back to my CFO roots, which for me is an excellent platform to learn a new business and organization and a role that I have always enjoyed. I believe Remi wanted to find a CFO which had a broad leadership background and I am very happy that he saw that in me. I started on April 1st, 2020, just after the global lockdowns from Covid19 had started to take effect and it was a start and onboarding very different from what we had planned. I could not travel around to visit our locations and customers, but on the other hand, it gave me the opportunity to learn how my new company works through a crisis and I could bring the experience I have from managing earlier crisis during my career.

DNV has really impressed me, even beyond my high expectations. Not only by the way the Covid-crisis has been managed – but also the general level of competence I see throughout the organization. And, the values and integrity are exactly as strong as I expected before joining, something which to me is very important. Having now been part of developing the DNV strategy for the next five years I am extremely eager to take part in delivering it – and I look forward to the day when we can again travel so that I am able to visit DNV around the world and meet all the people that I have up to now only met on Teams also face to face. I think we have a bright future with lots of opportunities, if we do our things well, living our purpose to the full. That really motivates me! •

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I LUCY CRAIG I

Lucy Craig Director, Growth, Innovation & Digitalization The driving element throughout my career has been to work for a more sustainable future and make a positive impact on the environment. When I graduated from university, there were not many opportunities in renewable energy, but after a few years of gaining broader engineering experience – and a very formative year doing voluntary work in Nicaragua – I was lucky to land a job as an electrical engineer at Wind Energy Group (WEG) in London, part of the Taylor Woodrow construction group. Wind energy at that time was in its infancy.

WEG had just commissioned a wind farm in California and was developing a novel concept 2-bladed wind turbine, which we then installed in the first UK wind farms. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of a team taking innovative technology through early stage testing to what we would now call a “minimum viable product”.

Wind development at that time was dependent on government support and in the UK, after some initial public investments, the prospects for building more wind farms were not promising. So, when I was offered the opportunity of a research post at Manchester University related to the electrical design of wind turbines I decided to take it. The research work was carried out jointly with Garrad Hassan (GH), a small wind energy consultancy which had been established by Andrew Garrad and Unsal Hassan, who had also worked at WEG before leav-

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ing to start their own business. I was offered a job with Garrad Hassan after I completed my PhD – one of 30 employees, and one of seven in the Glasgow office. It was another exciting time: while the UK wind industry at that time was almost non-existent, Garrad Hassan had already gained an international reputation and I worked in projects across the globe: supporting customers with their early repowering projects in California, new wind farms in Italy, Portugal and the Canary Islands, a research project with one of the major OEM’s (now part of Siemens Gamesa) in Denmark and for a World Bank funded project in Cape Verde. Apart from the astonishing speed of developments in wind turbine technology since those early wind farms, information and communication technology has also developed very rapidly. At that time, mobile phone coverage was limited or non-existent at remote wind farm locations and often the only way of communication back to the Glasgow office during my travels, whether from the mountains of Portugal or the beaches of Cape Verde, was using the hotel’s fax machine in the evenings. So, if I had a question I wanted to ask someone back in the office, it would take at least 24 hours to get the answer – very different from today!

Wind energy in Spain started taking off in the late 1990’s and I was asked to move to Spain to set up the first office for GH outside the UK. That early work experience in Nic-

I LUCY CRAIG I

There is an African proverb which I often repeat to myself, especially when it takes longer than I would like to get things done: “If you want to go fast – go alone; if you want to go far – go together.” aragua where I had learned Spanish had given me a strong qualification for the role! I was very happy living in Glasgow, but I agreed to go to Spain for six months. Those six months ended up becoming 16 years. The wind industry was growing fast in Spain and there was plenty of work in supporting the building of new wind farms across the country. Supported by government incentives, there were many large portfolios being sponsored by major Spanish players – it was a fascinating time to be working in the Spanish wind sector. I am also very proud that most of the team that I recruited in those early days are still with DNV and are leading our very successful renewables business in Iberia and Latin America. As the team in Spain grew, we also started to work in Portugal and established an office there. Our customers in Spain and Portugal then started exploring opportunities in Mexico, Chile and Brazil and so we followed them and set up offices there. With the acquisition of Garrad Hassan by GL in 2009, the team in Spain expanded further with the Measurements team in Madrid.

The solar industry was also growing rapidly in Spain in the early 2000’s. Our customers increasingly were expanding into solar power and so we started to develop a business in Solar.

Following the merger with DNV, I developed the new solar strategy for DNV GL – our acquisition of GreenPowerMonitor in 2016 was an important element of meeting those strategic goals.

I was fortunate that my family was willing to move to the Netherlands and we swapped our mountain boots and skis for bicycles. As a family we have explored many different parts of the Netherlands on the excellent network of “fietspaden”, as well as making the most of living in Central Europe to take our bikes several times to Germany and enjoy some mountaineering trips to Norway and the Alps.

With the power sector now on a track towards decarbonization, the next big challenge is decarbonization of the entire energy value chain, including energy use in transport, industry and buildings. I am excited by the new opportunities which open up to us now in Energy Systems, combining the capabilities we have from the oil & gas sector with our experience in power & renewables to support our customers in tackling the transformation of the energy sector. In my new role as Director of Growth & Innovation, there are four pillars to my responsibilities: enabling growth and scaling of new business through product and market ventures; improving automation, efficiency and better use of data across all our services, as the foundation for developing more digital business models; investing in customer-centered innovation, through applying the principles of the innovation framework and above all, ensuring quality and health and safety in all we do.

One of the key elements of my role is collaboration. I have a relatively small team, which works across Energy Systems through our collaboration networks –through the service area and innovation networks, and in QHSSE. There is an African proverb which I often repeat to myself, especially when it takes longer than I would like to get things done: “If you want to go fast – go alone; if you want to go far – go together”. •

My move to Spain was also important for me at a personal level. I am a keen mountaineer and from Zaragoza it is a 2-hour drive to the highest mountains in the Pyrenees. I discovered the pleasures of mountaineering in good weather – battling the elements is usually a factor of hillwalking in Scotland. I met my husband, Fernando, when I started ski-mountaineering the first winter I was in Zaragoza. Our son Daniel also enjoys mountaineering and now aged 11, he is starting to set the pace when we are in the outdoors.

After the merger between DNV and GL, I was offered a post as Director of Technology & Innovation at Energy’s headquarters in Arnhem, and I moved to the Netherlands. My responsibility expanded beyond renewables to managing our innovation portfolio and service governance also in power grids and energy management. Solar and wind technology are now relatively mature and cost competitive – it is now more economic to build a new wind or solar plant than a new fossil-fueled power station in most parts of the world – and with the scaling of renewables, integration in the power system became the key challenge. So, understanding how we can best support our customers in this important area was a new and inspiring goal.

Hiking with the family, enjoying mountaineering in good weather.

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I KRISTOFFER ENGSTRÖM I

Kristoffer Engström Head of Section, IT Security Management, GSS IT I was born and raised in Malmö in southern Sweden, I actually thought I’d never leave, but who controls fate? Me and my brother were raised by two golf playing parents (they actually met on a golf trainer course in the early seventies), but even though both me and my brother started playing golf at a young age, that activity was never as enticing as playing football and the pitch was where I spent most of my time growing up.

As all young football playing kids I dreamt of playing professionally, and probably held on to that dream a bit too long, but I never had that grit (and probably not enough talent either) to take that step to the big scene. I did play until my early thirties though, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Now getting a bit older, I’m truly happy that I started playing golf at a young age, because that is now a real passion. We’re lucky to have such a good VBIL golf club that gives us excellent opportunities to enjoy the beautiful game.

I think that Oslo is a great place to live and have thought so ever since I moved across the border as a 26-year old, back in 2003. It gives you that unique combination of sea and forest at the doorstep that I doubt you would find in many other capital cities in the world. It also gives you the full seasonal changes with warm summers and full on winters. From where I live in Nydalen I can just jump on my bike and hit the trails in no

time or run from the doorstep and spend most of that run in the forest.

Our family of four, Martine, myself and our two children Iver (5) and Vilja (2) are moving to Tanum in Bærum towards the end of the year, to a house that is being built at the time of writing. We’re looking forward to get settled, to get a bit more space and hopefully to get even closer to nature. As a family we enjoy outdoor life and as often as we can we spend time at Martine’s family’s cabin at Tyin, just at the brink of Jotunheimen. We absolutely love all seasons and what they have to give in that wild, dramatic nature.

It’s been a remarkable year to say the least, full home office setup for both of us in what feels like a too small apartment in Oslo. We both thought that families like ours, with both kids still in kindergarten, were the lucky ones in pandemic mix. No home schooling, no bored teenagers, not being single looking for your future partner, the kindergarten was kept open and we were able to keep a somewhat normal work-life from the home office. Then suddenly February 2021 hit us with another wave of infections and with that an on and off closed kindergarten with parts of it being quarantined, and when it was open it was only open from 8.30-15. The home office days

One of the joys about life is travelling. This picture is from NY.

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I KRISTOFFER ENGSTRÖM I

suddenly got quite a lot shorter which meant working evenings to a larger degree. And as if that wasn’t challenging, our family of four have been through just over thirty COVID-19 tests in 2021, all negative though. I for one am looking very much forward to that light at the end of the tunnel becoming stronger and stronger.

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE AND WORK EXPERIENCE I have a Diploma in Computer Engineering, a path that has led me to where I am professionally today, but looking back at it, it is rather strange that I chose that path. I have little patience for, or interest in technology and I think my colleagues and managers throughout my DNV career have realized that a long time ago. So, my main focus throughout my 14 years in the company has been IT Service Management or process related work. Process design, process implementation, process improvement and so on. I have been a line manager since 2012 when I took over as the lead for the Global Service Desk (8989), a role I kept for three years. I’ve been the GSS IT Incident Manager, the IT Change Manager, Regional IT Manager for the Nordics and in 2016 I was asked to lead the project to get GSS IT ISO 27001 certified, which eventually led to a career twist, now focusing on information security rather than IT Service Management.

MY ROLE AS HEAD OF SECTION, IT SECURITY MANAGEMENT My team’s tasks are clear in some areas, while they’re a bit blurry in others but our main responsibilities lie within governance, risk, and compliance. We want to enable protection of DNV information across all domains and ensure protection of DNV information on the VerIT platform. Day-to-day tasks consist of various security related analyses whether it is related to services, acquisitions, suppliers, applications, or customers.

There are two balances that we find challenging for the information security landscape. The first is the balance between being agile and being compliant. We obviously want to be a competitive company, developing new services and putting them out there fast, and we want to allow everyone to be able

I spend a lot of time outdoor. This is a self portrait in the hammok.

to do so. But by allowing shorter time to market, we also open for more experimentation and on the other side, more vulnerabilities (technical as well as legal or regulatory). The other balance is providing great service and having to say “No”. Even though my team operates within governance, risk, and compliance, we are still part of the GSS organization and want to provide great service to our DNV colleagues. Trying to regulate while also trying to offer a swift and precise service can be contradictory.

This year we’ve seen big changes organizationally wise for information security with the buildup of Group IT. I see this development as very refreshing and Group IT has become the sibling we never knew we had, or needed. There are great things in store for the future collaboration between GSS IT and Group IT. SOME FINAL WORDS I’ve always found it to be fulfilling to work for a company that wants to safeguard life, property, and the environment. It is certainly something that I do value and maybe increasingly so the last few years with the current state of climate change. I thoroughly enjoy being able to say that I work for a company that tries to live up to that higher purpose. It makes me genuinely proud!

I’m also very proud to be part of GSS IT and the deliveries that have come and are coming from us. I’m specifically impressed with how we in GSS IT have been able to contribute to DNV’s overall business performance by providing an increasingly digitalized VerIT platform during the pandemic.

Kudos to all GSS IT employees!

Together with my wife enjoying our summer vacation before the pandemic.

There are many aspects of DNV “life” that I’ve come to enjoy, but two things stick out; the ability to work on a global scale with the complexity that it brings, and the pleasure of being able to collaborate with colleagues of many different cultures.

Throughout my 14 years here I have weighed other external opportunities, but I have always come back to these two aspects as being very important to me. •

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I CODE XX I OF CONDUCT I

DNV’s new Code of Conduct When the decision to revise DNV’s Code of Conduct was taken in late 2019, Group Compliance took it up a notch from the typical legal policy document. Through its modernized language, images and visual elements, the new Code of Conduct speaks not only to DNV’s People, but also to everyone involved in the business of DNV.

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I CODE OF CONDUCT I

DNV’s expectations. These are clearly set off in each chapter. We also included the expectations for behaviour and responsibilities for employees and managers.

And we have included a visual guidance on ethical decision-making.

Some topics have been further clarified, and some are now addressed in individual chapters, e.g. fraud, export control and sanctions, human rights, diversity and discrimination, harassment, health and safety, confidentiality, IT security and personal data protection.

Last but not least, it is important to us that the Code speaks to all People working in and for DNV. Therefore, we made sure that the images used reflect the diversity of our People, including genders, ethnicities, ages and functions.”

Gesa Heinacher-Kindemann

TEXT: GESA HEINACHER-LINDEMANN AND KONSTANZE FELSNER

Gesa Heinacher-Lindemann, Group Compliance Officer, explains the process of developing and deciding the new Code of Conduct was taken.

“We involved internal and external resources to learn about best practice in the industry and to develop ideas for an approach that fits DNV’s Purpose, new Vision, Values and now also the new DNV Strategy 2025. Different options were first discussed in the Group People Leadership team.

Based on the input we gathered, we decided to take a fresh, digitalized approach in line with DNV’s new values and strategy. We felt it important to create a living document, which is ready to evolve with DNV’s changing needs and reflects the new direction as a trusted voice in an era of disruptive change and global crises.

We aligned this new approach and wording closely with stakeholders, content owners, Group Communications and EWC. The finalized wording was then reviewed and approved by the

Group CEO and the Board of Directors.

Me and my team are quite proud of how well we managed to work on this project with our various stakeholders even though we were at the height of a global pandemic.”

WHAT IS NEW TO THE CODE OF CONDUCT? “DNV’s Code of Conduct is not intended to be a static document that sits in a drawer for the next five or so years,” Gesa explains.

“Moreover, we did not want to create a document that merely ticks off the legally required content. While of course legal requirements need to be addressed, we wanted something more: An inclusive Code of Conduct, which is giving clear guidance, is clear on expectations, is visually pleasing and easy to use. We also intended to create a document that appeals to our People when it comes to the language used. This is why we decided to use a modernized, non-legal language style, and for each topic include a quick and easy orientation on

IN WHICH WAYS IS THE CODE OF CONDUCT AVAILABLE? Next to the DMS publication, there is a version of the Code of Conduct available that is suitable for external sharing. This document can also be found on the dnv. com website. More information can be found on a dedicated intranet site in the Group Compliance Gateway.

Furthermore, a new informative and easy-to-use e-learning on the Code of Conduct has been launched which highlights responsibilities, explains expectations and the use of the ethical toolkit, and includes a compliance declaration. The training is mandatory and all employees are asked to declare their commitment to the Code of Conduct.

• DMS publication: DMSG-0-2 • Download the Code of Conduct (suitable for external sharing) • Mandatory training course on the Code of Conduct • Group Compliance Gateway on the new Code of Conduct Translations of the Code will soon be available in Chinese, Czech, Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. •

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I AIMILIA EVDAIMON I

Aimilia Evdaimon Quality Manager in Digital Solutions Aimilia joined DNV nine years ago and has over 20 years of experience with management systems focusing on risk management and process optimisation from different industries. Now, she is the Quality Manager for Digital Solutions.

Growing up in Athens, Aimilia’ s favourite place in Greece is Santorini. That is where she spent the summers of her youth.

“My father and his family are from Santorini and we were fortunate to spend three months every summer on the island.

I was harvesting wine grapes and helped in producing the family’s wine. If you ask me what my dream is, I will probably answer, being a wine producer in Santorini,” she laughs.

Even though the Norwegian climate is not quite alike Greece’s, Aimilia loves the nature and the closeness to the water.

“We recently bought a sailing boat and I can’t wait to go on a trip with my family,” she says.

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Challenges in a male-dominated maritime industry Aimilia started her career in the maritime industry back in 1998 in a support function in the technical department at Sea World Management and Trading Inc., helping to develop a maintenance system and spares inventory.

“The maritime industry was known for its low number of female workers. Blame it on the traditional mind set of the ‘male dominated’ industry or the lack of awareness. But I was really determined to show that a woman can have a successful career in that domain as well. That was my main struggle and bet during that time,” explains Aimilia.

I AIMILIA EVDAIMON I

JOURNEY IN DNV In 2012, Aimilia moved to Norway and landed a job in DNV as a Senior Engineer in business area Maritime. In 2017, she earned a master’s degree in Shipping and Logistics from Middlesex University with distinction. Recently, she became Quality Manager of Digital Solutions and works closely with the Executive Leadership Team (ELT).

BUT WHAT EXACTLY IS QUALITY? “Quality is often considered as identical to ‘product conformance’ but it is so much more than this. Quality is about remaining true to our customers, to our promise, from the beginning to the end. There are many quality dimensions such as product quality, business quality and organisational quality,” she explains.

Aimilia’ s goal is to drive a culture of continuous improvement and customer centricity ensuring high standards of quality of all dimensions in collaboration with the Product Line Directors and ELT. “The challenge is to bring the quality function as close to the business as we can. Our new way of working helps us to meet the increasing pace of market changes and needs while being able to maintain a high level of quality,” she says.

Amilia has a strong personal connection to DNV’s purpose of safeguarding life, property, and the environment.

Looking back, Aimilia has not only distinguished herself in a male-dominated industry, she has also shown that gender should not matter. •

… Blame it on the traditional mind set of the ‘male dominated’ industry or the lack of awareness. But I was really determined to show that a woman can have a successful career in that domain as well. …

After a short period, she moved to the safety department where she eventually became the Head of Safety and Quality for a bulk carrier fleet.

“When I was the only female on board on a tanker ship, I remember that the pilot of the ship thought that I was the wife of someone. When I told him that I was the ship superintendent, he answered that a woman on board would bring bad luck,” remembers Aimilia.

Aimilia is not only a strong advocate of gender equality, she has also a strong personal connection to DNV’s purpose of safeguarding life, property, and the environment.

“I am strongly motivated by the expertise and diversity of people we have in our organisation. Working for a company with such a strong purpose makes me proud, not least because making the world a better place for my son is my ambition.”

Aimilia loves the nature and the closeness to the water.

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I FRANK BØRRE PEDERSEN I

Frank Børre Pedersen Program director in Group Research and Development From May 1st, Frank Børre Pedersen is the new programme director in Group Research and Development with responsibility for ”Shaping the future of Digital Assurance”. We met him to learn more about his new role.

After 25 years in the company, five different CEOs and many different strategies, Frank Børre is back to basics, working with research and development. He can look back at 18 years in the business area as a consultant, key account manager and head of department before he moved to research in 2014. With the new DNV strategy we also have a new research strategy. In this new research strategy “Shaping the future of Digital Assurance” is at the core and a new research program has been created to deliver on the goal. In his new role, Frank Børre is heading the new programme. We asked him to tell more about the new research strategy and share more about his time with DNV. How has the new strategy been received as you see it?

I have experienced many launches of new strategies and they always create a lot of excitement. However, this time I think

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it is more than just excitement. The new strategy focusing on “Shaping the future of assurance” has hit a nerve in whole of DNV – not just in research. First of all, I think the “Shaping the future” creates a very forward-leaning aspiration that many people appreciate and want to be part of. It is much more exiting to “shape” than to “follow”. And also, the clear focus on “assurance” as a common description of what we do and how we create value has been very welcomed. Now we see a clear red thread across the entire company, covering services, industries, competence, and technologies. When I started in 1996, we were 3500 people, focusing on only maritime and oil&gas and with a very Norway centric business. Now that we are truly global, operating in more industries with more services, this common description of what we do is extremely important to cater for collaborations and joint delivery to customers. And since DNV is a knowledge-based company, a common understanding of what we do and how we deliver value is needed.

I FRANK BØRRE PEDERSEN I

to digitalization, as we will increasingly collect sensor data, use remote inspections, drone surveys, etc. And finally, the way that we process the information in our assurance process itself will also change. We will be able to use models, data, artificial intelligence (AI), etc to improve it, automate it, make it realtime, and so on. And with all of these changes driven by digital technologies we will also see new business models emerge. And to make that a success for DNV we must fundamentally understand how we create value with our assurance services. Then we are in a good position to move to new business models that creates more value for customers, more value to stakeholders and society, and also to DNV. This is a large ambition that goes beyond my programme. So, we will collaborate closely with both other programs in Group R&D and also with the business areas and customers.

What kind of professional competence and work experience do you have?

Spending time with the family is good quality to life..

We cannot really scale unless we understand these commonalities across the company. So, I think the new strategy will be a competitive advantage for DNV going forward as it will help us operate as one company.

The new strategy focusing on “Shaping the future of assurance” has hit a nerve in whole of DNV – not just in research.

How do you see your new role contribute to the new DNV strategy?

In Group Research and Development, we are very excited about the new strategy. A lot of what we have been working with over the last years related to the digital transformation and decarbonization has found its place into the new strategy.

In this is how it should be: Research should keep a longer focus looking out for future trends and opportunities for DNV. In research we have defined a strategic goal to “Shape the future of digital assurance”. As the programme director I am responsible for this goal. I am very excited about this, because I believe that digitalization will have huge impacts and change the way we think about assurance today. To succeed, we must shape both the digital transformation of assurance and also shape the assurance of digital assets First, the assets themselves become more cyber-physical or even purely digital, like a digital twin. Second, the way that we collect information about the asset (inspection, surveys, etc) will also change due

Being a physicist, I have a passion for trying to understand how things work. Whether it is an asset, a project, investment, or an organization. And having worked for DNV 25 years I have now an equal passion for trying to understand how things fail.

And I think you have to combine these two perspectives to make sure there is a proper balance between value creation and risk. I joined DNV right after I earned my PhD in 1996. I knew the company a bit from before having grown up in the vicinity of DNV and read about it in the local press. I started in the Space and Defence section working with reliability of satellites and project risks for large procurement projects in the Norwegian Navy. In 1998 I became part of a new large JIP called “Integrated Uncertainty Management”. In this JIP we developed the RP-A203 Technology Qualification which has become a de-facto standard in the industry ever since. Interestingly, in 2020 I had a small part in developing the RP-A204 Qualification and assurance of digital twins. Some of the same ideas were re-used, but also many new ideas had to be applied since digital twins are purely virtual replicas of physical assets.

So, they perform and fail in different ways then their physical counterparts.

Børre hiking with his daughter and her friend.

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I FRANK BØRRE PEDERSEN I

this was our SCORE project – an acrynom for Statoil COst of REbranding. At the time Statoil and Hydro had merged and there we public discussions about how much it would cost to rename and rebrand all Statoil and Hydro assets – from offshore units, to onshore terminals, to gas stations, to coffee mugs and paper envelopes. Statoil trusted us to use our in depth understanding of their technical assets to prepare a rebranding plan with associated costs. We did and the public discussions ended.

Sometimes managers get most of the attention, but Frank is aware of his team with exceptional peeople.

I am very glad to see that the focus on “exceptional people” is so central in the new strategy.

Another unique project was started overnight in August 2001 when suddenly all minibanks in Norway failed to operate.

DNV was hired in to investigate what had happened and why.

It turned out that the service provider hosting all the hard drives storing the bank transactions had erroneously formatted the operating hard drives and not the backup hard drives as intended. How could this have happened without any warnings? Well, the problem was that there were too many warnings. The day before, a civil construction company had cut a fiber optical cable in Oslo used also by the service provider.

So, the warning signals were massive to begin with. The additional ones warning about the formatting were simply lost in the crowd. Such complex system failures are often the case when we have larger accidents.

In addition to quite technical projects, I have also had the pleasure of working more broadly with project risk and enterprise risk, where we go beyond pure technical performance.

I find this very exciting as we then often work directly for the management in the customer organization. An example of

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Tell us a bit about yourself I am originally from Oslo and grow up not so far from the head office at Høvik. My family also spent three years in Montreal in Canada, so I had the chance to study at college there.

After that I moved to Trondheim in Norway to study physics at NTH, where I took my MSc and PhD. After that I met my wife Heidi and we now have two children, a 17 year old boy and 19 year old girl. When we got married, we decided to buy a large house together with her parents. While we have separate parts of the house, we live of course quite close together. When the kids were small that was truly helpful for Heidi and I as we were both in full jobs. Now, 15 years later we can return the favor as now it is Heidi and I looking after her parents. For us this “generation house” has worked well – even if it does require some rules-of-the-game to protect privacy and family life. Interestingly my brother has also ended up living in a house with his in-laws. So, our friends joke that he and I miss the normal mother-in-law gene that would prevent this from happening.

Finally, tell us about some issues that your burn for I mentioned previously that I was appreciating the combination of “knowing how things work and knowing how things fail”. And I believe such dualities exist in many of our professional areas. For instance, with the new data revolution, we have the chance to combine our traditional technology insight with the insight provided by data. It is not a matter of either-or but combining the two. Physics-based models combined with data-driven models outperforms each of them individually.

In a knowledge-based company like DNV people and our competence is a core asset. So, I am very glad to see that the focus on “exceptional people” is so central in the new strategy. And I am proud to work in a company that keeps investing in people, research and innovation and know that this will help us stay relevant and competitive for the future.

Finally, I think recognition is important. And sometimes managers get most of the attention. A recent example from my own unit is the NASA Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) Challenge. A team from my unit entered the competition against 18 other teams from leading institutions around the world.

DNV was one of only five teams to submit a solution that qualified, before being confirmed by the NASA organizer as the ‘best of the best’. Sometimes you are just lucky to be manager for such exceptional people. •

I NEW STRATEGY I

The announcement – the new strategy TEXT: KRISTIN DALHAUG

On the 12 January, the new strategy for DNVGL was announced by Remi. New strategy, new organisation and a new name. Maybe the news of the new strategy and the new organisation was lost in the news of the new name? – not only two letters and a new variation of blue In principal a small change – two letters to be removed and some minor changes to the brand graphics – or maybe not so small after all?

The purpose of a brand name is identification: To differentiate a particular product, service, or group of services from other similar brands. To ensure that the brand name is known and widespread, the brand name and the accompanying logo must be placed on a prominent place on the product. All our former brand names were well known in their time – Germanischer Lloyds – GL, Det Norske Veritas – DNV and the latest brand name DNVGL. DNV GL was not only a name, the brand and the name were used wherever DNV GL worked and on all our deliverables – Applications, Customer Portals, Certificates, contracts, emails etc. etc.

RUN AS YOU HIT THE GROUND The timeline for the rebranding was ambitious; the new name and new brand

would be effective from 1. March and this were announced only six weeks before. In Maritime we understood this to be the date when, at least for the customer facing applications and documents, we should be ready for the new name and the new brand.

To be able to deliver to the ambition, there were little time to discuss and agree on mandate – scope and timeline. We had to start to run as we hit the ground, so to speak. Several activity streams and projects were started, in Maritime, at Group level and in GSS IT.

THE WORK – FROM 12 JANUARY TO 1 MARCH There were application owners and process owners to consult, legal issues to resolve, there were maritime organisations to inform and class systematics to be challenged, there were approval stamps to be designed and ordered and new technical updates to be written.

Rules documents had to be rebranded and content needed to be updated and new certificates templates to be tested and certificates to be re-issued, there were key customers to meet and formal letters to be sent. There were regulatory bodies to convince, applications to update, test and release; new graphical brand to implement. We informed and engaged through meetings and presentations. We aimed to reply to all requests for clarification in a coordinated manner, and most of all we wanted to ensure that both internally and with the customers the business was disturbed to the least degree possible.

We promised to deliver, we did that and more – On 1. March Maritime´s main applications were released with new brand, the certificates had new logo and the processes were ready for the re-issuance of certificates.

All forms were updated and ready for use, certificates, reports, and contracts. 104.000 changes were done to 1 773 forms. In the process we were able to improve problematic visual quality issue on some certificate forms and to improve the quality on data. We developed and released a robot to help the mass re-issuance of certificates for a specific flag´s requirements.

FROM 1 MARCH UNTIL 3 QUARTER 2021 All is not done, yet. There are still big and important rebranding activities going on. Rebranding of some applications and web addresses, email addresses and not the least we have the publishing of the rebranded ruleset, but now we have more time and we can rebrand in connection with other planned releases.

As a conclusion to the six weeks run, it should be highlighted that the resourcefulness, engagement, willingness, and competence of all those engaged directly in the project and the openness for change in Maritime was, as always, the most important instrument for delivery to success! •

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I MATTHIAS WEHNERT I

Matthias Wehnert Head of Sales Enablement in Energy Systems Salesforce as our new support tool for customer relationship management My name is Matthias Wehnert. I am 41 years old and live in Hamburg, together with my wife Natascha, who is a doctor, and two little daughters Greta and Charlotte. Hamburg is our city of choice – we like the city’s maritime charm, the kind of people who live here and the proximity to both the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. I’ve spent almost four years of my life living in the UK, first in Scotland, where I studied, and later in London, where I worked for DNV GL. I like running, meeting family and friends (COVID-19 permitting) and doing some hands-on work in our house and garden. I’m also a passionate choir singer (again, COVID-19 permitting). At present, I am on parental leave, spending a lot of time with my kids, especially my youngest daughter of nine months.

What kind of professional competence and work experience do you have I’m a process engineer by education, and also hold a degree in management and computer science. I joined the company eleven years ago when I started as a consultant for improvement projects at Germanischer Lloyd (GL) in the Maritime business. GL was at the time a customer of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where I had had my first job, focusing on the health and real estate sectors as well as post-merger integrations. This experience was very useful in the merger of DNV and GL in 2013 where I managed the integration of DNV’s and GL’s businesses relating to power and renewables. When the integration activities were mostly completed, I moved into our newly formed Business Development (BD) function where my first task was to create an overview of all opportunities in the new Business Area Energy – our first combined sales pipeline.

Your role in DNV GL as Head of Sales Enablement I started in my current role back in 2016, when Ditlev Engel became CEO of Business Area Energy. Having been a customer of ours in his previous role, he brought a fresh approach to customer centricity to our BA. Many elements of that approach are dealt with by my team and me: we run an annual “Customer Relationship Strength Indicator” (CRSI) survey with our Key Accounts, to learn on how we can improve relationships, services and processes. The results of this survey feed directly into our strategy and operations. We have introduced a Contract Review Board (CRB) to create better and more consistent proposals. And we constantly improve our processes and systems to embed customer feedback and

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improvements into everyone’s daily work. The main focus in this respect is currently the introduction of Salesforce, our new CRM system, which – I am sure – will enable us to move to the next level in terms of customer centricity. Its go-live is planned for June.

Being in the new Business Area Energy Systems does not mean too much of a change of the content of my work, but it does mean a large change in scope: we are twice the amount of colleagues (also in our new BD department), serve more customers and also have the opportunity to serve these customers with better integrated offerings.

Important issues you are burning for I am passionate about many things, but if I had to mention one, I’d like to contribute to making the world a better place.

How? Well, I like to do things right and to do the right things.

Regarding the latter, I’m particularly proud of our new strategy which very clearly mentions what we are going to focus on in

Decarbonization has been on DNV’s and its legacy companies’ agendas for many decades, even before it became “en vogue” – and I’m very much motivated by what we’re doing to play our role in this.

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the coming years as well as – perhaps even more importantly – what not. In today’s world, there is hardly any other topic more important in the mid to long run than decarbonization. Decarbonization has been on DNV’s and its legacy companies’ agendas for many decades, even before it became “en vogue” – and I’m very much motivated by what we’re doing to play our role in this. Regarding “doing things right” I feel I am in a perfect place to improve our operations in a way that helps our customers and ourselves to navigate through the energy transition successfully, thus having a direct impact on the environment and society. I believe that we can have the biggest positive impact as a company if we are competitive ourselves. This means innovation and superior solutions to grow – but it also needs efficient processes and systems to stay cost-competitive.

I also very much enjoy working with clever people. Luckily, both at BCG and DNV there was and is no shortage of those!

We must not underestimate the difference we (can) make by combining our technical expertise with everyone’s passion for what we do.

The coming years will be exciting for everyone in DNV and particularly in Business Area Energy Systems. For the coming months, I’m curious to see how everyone will pick up Salesforce is going to be a key enabler on our path towards

customer centricity. I am sure that in a year from now many colleagues will wonder how we managed without it! Beyond, I am really looking forward to seeing how fast the world will adopt green technologies and electrification on an even larger scale. So much has happened already and yet we’re still at the beginning of a technology revolution. A revolution we’re well equipped for. •

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I CECILIE GUDESEN TORP I

Cecilie Gudesen Torp

Cecilie is a city-girl, and the whole family likes to travel. This is a family portrait from Paris.

Managing Director for DNV Product Assurance AS I am a “city girl” and love to meet friends for coffee, dinner, shopping or strolling around. I am 46 years old and live in Oslo with my husband and 2 children, 11 and 15 years old. In our free time, we also like to spend time visiting our cabin in the mountains where we enjoy outdoor activities. In the summer, we like boating and to visit Fredrikstad, where both me and my husband are from, to meet family and relax by the sea.

In our family, we like to travel. During 2012 to 2015 we lived in Busan, South Korea, where my husband was the regional manager for Korea and Japan in DNV Oil and Gas. I worked with the certification of medical equipment for DNV Business Assurance. That was an amazing time. To live and work abroad, connecting with new friends and travelling in Korea and Southeast Asia. Personally, this experience has been important and taught me a lot about intercultural relations and different ways of living and working.

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE AND WORK EXPERIENCE I have always been enthusiastic about technology and started out by taking a Cand Scient/M. Sc. in Physics at the University of Oslo. During the last part of my studies, I also got very interested in Medicine and studied additional topics within biology.

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This combination got me into my first job at Ullevål University hospital, with a strong and interesting environment for medical device technology. We worked with the early stages of digital x-ray technology and image quality optimization. After this, I joined the Norwegian radiation authority (Statens Strålevern) where I focused on radiation safety related to Computed Tomography (CT) scanning. When DNV had an opening in Product Assurance CE-marking Medical devices, I tought it was a good opportunity to look at the technology from a different angle and to work with manufacturers. In 2001, I joined DNV and the job turned out to be the most interesting journey I could imagine. I have now worked in DNV with CE-marking of Medical devices for 20 years. I have had many different roles and been a part of the development of the service and global network in DNV. It has never been a boring day, always a new customer, people, technology, interpretations and discussions.

MY ROLE TODAY Since 2019, I have held the role of Managing Director for DNV Product Assurance AS. My main responsibility is to head the Notified Bodies that DNV has in Norway, also being responsible for our accreditations. I work very closely with Bjørn Spongsveen, who is responsible for the Industrial Noti-

I CECILIE GUDESEN TORP I

fied Body services, while I keep my attention on the Medical devices’ services. Since I joined DNV, there have been many initiatives around growing the Product Assurance business.

DNV has historically been a Notified Body for CE marking of products since the mid 90’s. In 2012, DNV formed a joint venture with Nemko for Product assurance services. The initiative was a result of development in the markets and the expectations on growth. During the 6 years of this joint Venture, we grew our business both organically and inorganically. In 2018 DNV decided to further invest and bought the shares from Nemko, becoming the full owners of DNV Presafe AS, today DNV Product Assurance AS. DNV has built a global function and deliver our product assurance services through DNVs global network. We have a lot of different competencies working within this field, from all types of engineers to medical doctors and nurses. Our main markets are India, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Europe, North and South Americas. We are also looking into new and exciting markets in Australia and Malaysia. It is important to ensure growth, quality and trust, in all our markets, always focused on our customers.

I think we in DNV play a very important role in the society assuring that medical products are safe. Today, with a global population that is growing bigger and older, health technology is key.

Cross contry skiing is a must during wintertime in Norway.

MAIN MOTIVATIONS AT WORK Working with product safety has motivated me since I started my career. I think we in DNV play a very important role in the society assuring that medical products are safe. Today, with a global population that is growing bigger and older, health technology is key. Especially during this pandemic, we have all got a reminder how vulnerable we are, and dependent we all are on access to safe medical devices and medicines.

There are so many talented people in DNV and it is amazing how you can always find experts in all types of technology areas. This is a great asset in our organization for the teams working with medical devices and technologies that spans from simple face masks to x-ray machines, surgical robots or implants made of advanced materials. This means that we must put together broad teams containing both engineers, auditors, and clinicians. I feel honored to work with customers who are leading manufacturers, big and small. I get my energy from meeting with customers and understand their needs, learn about their products and technologies and to certify their products.

In DNV, I was introduced to “never compromise on quality and integrity”. This has been, is and is will be my key values and I believe this is like a compass guiding to the right decisions. •

Testing new technology is one of Cecilies favorite things to do.

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I KENNETH VAREIDE I

Kenneth Vareide CEO of Digital Solutions Kenneth Vareide’s journey in DNV started in 1996 as a technical trainee after graduating in Naval Architecture from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Since then he has held several managerial positions across the company’s business areas and regions, which eventually led him to become CEO of Digital Solutions in 2019.

Family on the top of Hallingskarvet.

Since then a lot has happened and with a new strategy launched this year, the ambitions are getting even higher.

Kenneth is known for his collaborative leadership style and preaches the power of teamwork whenever he can. What exactly his ambitions for Digital Solutions are and why collaboration is so important, he will tell us soon.

But first, let’s go back in time…

As the son of an engineer, Kenneth understood that math and physics were important subjects in school, and it came naturally to him. Working with other students who were struggling with these subjects, he found that in collaborating he gained something as well.

“Collaboration came very naturally to me from a young age, and it’s really been a theme throughout my life. I think work-

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You are always just a phone call away from an expert. Anywhere in the world, working on any subject, you are part of an organisation that has the answers. ing with other students early on sparked something in me, and I saw great benefit in working with others, getting inspiration, and finding new ways of approaching tasks,” he says.

His collaboration skills nearly led him into a teaching career, but Kenneth’s own teacher at the time was very clear with him.

He was destined for a life as an engineer.

I KENNETH VAREIDE I

And so, Kenneth went on to attend the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, where he earned a degree in Naval Architecture. He says that the curriculum for that degree was basically straight from the DNV archives, and that many of the students went directly from the university into the company. Kenneth was one of them, and with a little negotiating and a bit of luck, he was placed in Houston for his traineeship. A couple of weeks after arriving in Houston, he was sent off to Keppel AmFELS’ yard in Brownsville to carry out upgrades on the rig.

“While being on the rig, we had to conduct an inclining test, a test performed on the rig to determine its stability and the coordinates of its centre of gravity. I remembered that we got some strange results and I had to decide whether we should accept the results or not. I called the Høvik office and even though it was out of working hours I got hold of someone in the stability department and asked for help. 30 minutes later, I got a phone call back reinsuring that the results were good to go.”

This incident contributed to Kenneth’s realisation that he was part of an organisation that is rich of knowledge, competence, and expertise.

“You are always just a phone call away from an expert. Anywhere in the world, working on any subject, you are part of an organisation that has the answers,” he continues.

Throughout Kenneth’s career, he had great leaders in DNV from whom he gained both knowledge and inspiration. All of them had one thing in common; they looked after the company for the next generation and served its strong purpose of safeguarding life, property, and the environment, while taking care of the employees – the heart of the organisation.

“As a firm believer in the power of collaboration, my ambition is to create a culture based on teamwork and trust that creates opportunities to use all available resources and skills. I want to bring the best that the company has to offer in terms of competence, expertise, services, and products to our customers.”

our business, to grow our software business and to implement an efficient digital operating model offering superior customer experience,” he explains.

As part of the new strategy, the Product Line Director role has been established. The five Product Line Directors will be introduced on the following pages. The introduction of the new role does not only mark the beginning of Digital Solutions transformational journey, it is also a measure to improve collaboration across the organisation.

“The Product Line Directors are part of the executive leadership team and have the ownership for product and business development through closely monitoring customers and market needs. The ambition behind establishing that new role was to align all operations across the customer journey and to work closely with all our functions and units,“ he says.

THE BAKER When Kenneth is off work, you can find him either at the soccer field cheering for his son’s team or at the sports hall, where he acts as an assistant coach for his daughter’s handball team.

“Since my start in DNV, I’ve been all over for the company, from Houston to Korea. This makes me appreciate the time with my family even more,” he says.

A quick glance at the photo library on Kenneth’s iPhone will reveal more photos of bread than people. Baking bread has become something of an obsession for Kenneth, and he prides himself on making fresh loaves for his family each week. It can be an arduous process, taking a great deal of time and patience to produce the perfect loaf.

“I am still trying to master the perfect pizza. Italians would probably laugh at me, but I am getting there. I am even considering buying a wood fired oven,” he ends. •

Baking and ingenieering. Two important things in life.

DIGITAL SOLUTIONS NEW STRATEGY In the beginning of the year, Digital Solutions launched its new strategy with the ambition to enable customers in digitalising and managing business critical activities in a sustainable, cost-efficient, safe and secure way.

“We can see a tough business environment and faster update of digital technologies, not least due to the ongoing pandemic.

Digitalisation is inevitable and taking the benefits of it will help us generating a competitive advantage.”

Kenneth believes that technology and great people are a winning combination and again, collaboration plays an essential role here. ”Great organisations, like any sport’s team, can’t rest on the shoulders of a single person. We need to work together and break internal silos in order to succeed, especially in times of change. Teamwork is essential to our new strategy to expand

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I TONY ALFANO I

Tony Alfano Product Line Director Pipeline in Digital Solutions A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MYSELF I am currently living in Columbus, Ohio with my wife of 15 years and our three highly energetic boys ages 9, 5, and 4. I have lived in Columbus since graduate school for Mechanical Engineering. I was lucky enough to land a fantastic job after graduation at a local consulting company, CC Technologies who specialized in pipelines. While the extent of my knowledge of pipelines were limited to a few chapters on thin-walled-pressure vessels in school, I was intrigued by the breadth and depth of the challenges you could face as a consultant.

Many things have changed since that time, including becoming acquired by DNV. This acquisition really opened the door to even broader challenges and the ability to collaborate with colleagues across the globe. I have always felt a strong personal connection to DNV’s purpose of safeguarding life, property,

Tony studying corrosion and damaged portions of a pipeline.

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and the environment and this has been a common focus in the roles I have had since joining.

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE AND WORK EXPERIENCE If you have never studied them, pipelines may seem like a fairly simple asset to maintain. After all, they are just big metal tubes, right? As with anything you study, the more you dig into the issues, the more complicated things can be. Maintaining the integrity of pipelines is particularly challenging since they are most often inaccessible (buried or subsea) and can be quite long. Take a single joint of pipe; this pipe has perhaps 15 attributes you need to know from construction (size, age, material, coating, manufacturer, weld method, etc.), another ten attributes from the latest inspection (severity of cracks or corrosion, dents, etc), and another 25 attributes from outside data sources such as the type of soil it is buried in, proximity to seismic activity, or the number of potential fatalities which would

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damaged portions to these pipelines that remain un-remediated, as well as the potential for additional damage to occur before the line is next inspected.

As part of my personal interest, I wanted to further study those damaged portions which we were leaving in the pipeline and help clients understand the associated risk which remained.

So, starting around 2010, I began to focus on developing pipeline risk models to help evaluate what could happen to these assets and how severe the potential consequences could be.

This required gathering even more data about the assets and performing significantly more calculations than what we were able to do with simple Excel tools.

Based on the shear scale of the data and calculations we needed to perform, I have had a consistent need for software.

This was the basis for the ongoing working relationship I’ve had with the Digital Solutions team over the years. Our combined teams have been able to provide significant value to our clients by giving them the information they need to ensure the safety and reliability of their systems and this has been incredibly rewarding.

Based on the shear scale of the data and calculations we needed to perform, I have had a consistent need for software.

This was the basis for the ongoing working relationship I’ve had with the Digital Solutions team over the years.

occur if the pipeline fails. In this example, that brings us to 50 things you need to know about that single joint of pipe.

Now recall that any given transmission pipeline can easily be 100 miles (160 km) long which would be about 13,200 separate pipe segments, leading to a total of 660,000 separate data attributes for a single pipeline which need to be maintained and studied to ensure the safe and reliable operation of these assets.

My experiences in DNV have all revolved around this challenge. I started as a pipeline integrity engineer whose responsibilities are to ensure that any identified damages (e.g., corrosion, cracks, dents) to pipelines are remediated before the pipeline leaks or ruptures. As maintenance funds are finite, it is not possible for a pipeline operator to repair everything, so the focus is always on those features which could fail before the line is next inspected. The result is that there are always

MY ROLE AS PRODUCT LINE DIRECTOR The simple explanation I give when asked about this role is that the role of the Product Line Director is to determine the destination. The software engineering team then plots the course, and we work together to perform any necessary course corrections along the way. Hopefully that quick nautical analogy helps clarify the demarcation in responsibilities and emphasizes that the transformation of our products will certainly be a team effort.

My role as the Pipeline Product Line Director combines my passions for pipelines, business development and technology. I am both humbled and excited to work with the talented Digital Solutions teams and worldwide pipeline experts to continue to innovate our products to ensure even more value is provided to our clients.

IMPORTANT ISSUES I am dedicated to helping our clients safeguard life, property, and the environment. The challenges they face increase every day based on fluctuations in supply and demand, aging assets, population expansion, and the ongoing energy transition to name a few. Our product line must adapt to meet these ongoing needs if DNV is to remain as a trusted partner. We have developed some incredible relationships with our clients, and I look forward to working these partners to help steer the development of our next generation of products. •

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I KOHEILA MOLAZEMI I

Koheila Molazemi Product Line Director, Plant As a young woman, Koheila Molazemi decided to study engineering over medicine despite her family’s traditional line of work. Having said that, she is not a typical engineer. That is unless most engineers love discussing philosophy at the dinner table and listening to a wide range of music, from jazz and blues to rock and heavy metal.

“I come from a family of doctors and surgeons,” says Koheila.

Her family would have loved for her to continue the family line of work in medicine. “But I liked mathematics and logic, so I chose to become an engineer,” she says.

After high school, she managed to get accepted to the prestigious Sharif University of Technology, the country’s leading institution for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, located in Tehran. She majored in industrial engineering and during her career pivoted torisk management and health, safety and environment.

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Koheila is very passionate about her work and proud to have chosen a career where she can practice ‘medicine of the industry.’ She believes working in safety and HSE is about safeguarding life, not saving one life at a time, but by the hundreds or thousands.

UNITED NATIONS PROJECT Working as an HSE consultant in Iran, she came to learn about a very interesting United Nations environmental project in a rural area north of Iran, and she ended up volunteering for the UN. The project was to build biogas units, using domestic

I KOHEILA MOLAZEMI I

waste to generate energy. The villagers had been cutting down forest areas to burn for their energy supply. Koheila would spend time commuting on the five-hour drive back and forth from Tehran during her weekends as the UN project manager.

“We didn’t just parachute in and out of those villages. We helped them learn how to build and maintain the units themselves. It took almost five years to complete,” she says. In total, biogas units were built in 18 villages in that environmentally sensitive area. “This project was very close to my heart and helped to shape what I stand for in life,” she says. “I’m still in contact with the people we built these units for.”

Working for the UN led to opportunities for new projects with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Koheila was involved in a large environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) project with DNV for INPEX for a large field development project in Iran. In late 2004 she received an offer to join DNV Abu Dhabi, where she continued working as an HSE consultant within the oil and gas industry.

CONSULTING SERVICES FOR OIL AND GAS Koheila now has more than two decades of experience in consulting services in the oil and gas industry, working for major international and national companies. Her areas of work have been risk management, technical safety, asset risk management and enterprise risk management, including project management and carrying out environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) studies and health, safety and environmental impact assessment (HSEIA) studies.

Before becoming Product Line Director in the Digital Solutions business area, she was Technology and Innovation Director in BA Oil and Gas, involved in global governance, maintenance and digital transformation of services, including advisory and assurance services One perspective she has is working as a woman in the oil and gas industry in the Middle East. Over the years that she worked in Abu Dhabi, she has gone through an interesting journey of being a sole woman in the customer meetings to a more balanced and diversified working environment. “During my time in ME, I tried to provide equal opportunities, hire and empower more female employees,” she says. “It’s important not to give up and to be part of a change of the mindset.”

For the last six years, Koheila has been living and working in Norway. “After ten years of living and working in the Middle East, Norway has brought me a whole range of new and very rich experiences, both workwise and personally,” she says.

“I have a funny story,” she says. “It was the first Christmas Eve that we stayed in Norway, in 2017. We went out for a nice dinner and soon noticed we were the only ones on the E18 motorway driving to Aker Brygge. We realized that everything is closed here on Christmas Eve, unlike UAE. We ended up having burgers in a gas station at Fornebu!”

Why has she taken on the new role as Product Line Manager for the Plant ecosystem? “That’s an interesting question,” she says. “I’ve been working with oil and gas for over 20 years.

We’ve been using a lot of the products that I’m now respon-

During my time in ME, I tried to provide equal opportunities, hire and empower more female employees. It’s important not to give up and to be part of a change of the mindset.

While working in the UN as a project manager, Koheila’s team helped the people learn how to build and maintain the biogas units themselves.

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I KOHEILA MOLAZEMI I

sible for. It’s interesting to learn more about the Digital Solutions business areas, advisory products, how to scale them, and how drive the digital transformation of our products. I have formed a strong passion for the energy transition. We’re transforming our products to also build a strong position in the energy transition market. This brings the DNV purpose to life,” she says.

LIFELONG LEARNING Changing roles and responsibilities is part of a lifelong learning process. “It’s important that we move back and forth in functions, so we don’t get too rusty in our understanding,” she says. “It’s healthy to get back to operations, sales, working closely with customers, et cetera – this gives me a lot of energy.”

At home she loves spending time with friends and family. Her husband is an Iranian writer and translator. “We come from two different worlds,” she says. “He comes from the world of philosophy and history.” They are both avid readers, and have discussions about wide-ranging topics in daily life. The most recent book she’s been reading is Michael Foley’s “The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to be Happy.”

WORLD OF MUSIC How does she attain happiness in the age of absurdity? “I have a big interest in books, travelling and photography, but most of all in music. I listen to a lot of jazz, blues and rock music, including heavy metal. We have enjoyed going to fantastic concerts, like Iron Maiden, Joe Satriani, Metallica, and others during our time in Abu Dhabi and Oslo. I was at a Megadeath concert three years ago, and it was just fantastic to see those bands live. I grew up with their music back home!”

She is perhaps not a typical heavy metal fan, either. She practices yoga several times a week. “My goal is to stand on my head in a year. Standing on my head, I can see our almost-upside-down world normally,” she says philosophically.

She loves living in Norway. In fact, there are many aspects of Norwegian culture that she values as closer to her own way of being. “I love Norway fascinating nature and learning about amazing “cabin life”. There are many fundamental principles here in Norway which are significantly important to me, like trust, equality and transparency,” she says. •

Koheila likes listening to a wide range of music, from jazz and blues to rock and heavy metal. This picture is from a Iron Maiden concert.

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I CHRISTIAN WOOD I

Christian Wood Product Line Director Structure & Renewables

“My mother always encouraged me to follow my interests, and increasingly the challenges that intrigue me are the human ones. How do we coordinate teams with different backgrounds, psychologies, priorities and group politics, and researching and working on the strategy around this is fascinating Leadership is something I’ve gravitated towards from an early age, and in whatever I’m doing, professional or hobby, I have often taken up some form of leadership position” he says.

Christian holds an Masters in Aerospace Engineering and an Engineering Doctorate in maritime fluid dynamics from the University of Southampton. In the latter he investigated in flow phenomena and modelling validation in the flooding of damaged ships.

“From an early stage in my undergraduate degree I was intrigued by fluid dynamics. I moved into engineering consultancy at Frazer-Nash on completion of my Engineering Doctorate at Southampton. Starting as an engineer in the fluids and acoustics group I worked on an array of projects across the world, typically with performance or integrity of novel engineering designs, or trouble-shooting and root cause assessments arising from complex fluid dynamics and heat transfer phenomena. I came across Sesam in this capacity, using the software in consultancy projects, and eventually worked together with DNV to contribute a third party module,“ he explains.

Born in Australia, growing up in the UK, Christian is temporarily residing in Brazil after the onset of pandemic related travel bans and restrictions. When Christian is off work, he spends a lot of time with his partner and 18-month-old daughter on the beach, pandemic restrictions permitting.

“When an option I’m attempting to maintain some level of fitness with walks, occasional open water swims and surfing.

Back in London, I’m a member of a watersports club in the docklands where I sail, windsurf, and paddleboard. Prior to the pandemic I competed in short-handed offshore sailing races, and this is something I will be getting back into” he says.

Driving change towards a lean and agile product centre team that is set up for innovation will drive significant improvements in our customer journey.

Christian is passionately curious, the majority of his bookshelf and internet browsing is around learning things adjacent or aligned with his current work interests. In his career to date that has gone from physics and engineering, onto to software and sales, and now into leadership, strategy and management topics.

CHRISTIAN’S NEW ROLE AS A PRODUCT LINE DIRECTOR Christian joined DNV in 2018 and has been the Global Business Lead for the wind turbine design software Bladed. Prior to that he was the Area Sales and Account Manager for Structure in the UK & Benelux. Now, he is the Product Line Director for Structure and Renewables.

“My current task is to build a very effective product management function with clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities under the new way of working, and to drive organisational change to fit this new way of working” he explains.

He says that driving change towards a lean and agile product centre team that is set up for innovation will drive significant improvements in our customer journey. “I’m looking forward to building the product line team, so we can really tackle the market, by gathering industry needs, digesting market intelligence and trends, and feeding the learning into product strategy and backlog to ensure we are working on the software developments that will make the right product at the right time.”

Looking into the future, Christian sees the proliferation of our API economy, where we can aim to build ourselves into the digital transformations of many engineering and renewable energy organisations.

“In my new capacity I aim to put our software as critical components for our customers tackling the energy transition and sustainability challenges. In addition to producing the right products at the right time, our commercial success will be heavily influenced by customer journey and user experience, and these will be areas of focus,” he ends.•

I RON HOWARD I

Ron Howard Product Line Director, Electric Grid Ron has always enjoyed discovering new paths and envisioning new ways and doing things. “My career is stamped with the creation of new things,” he says matter-of-factly from his home office in Oregon. “I’ve always have been interested in driving change for the better.”

Ron Howard has done everything from operating an IBM mainframe computer, writing software code to travelling the world as global product manager of mobile computing solutions for utilities.

But his interest in computers and programming hasn’t kept him permanently locked to his desk. His lifelong passion has always been keeping active and experiencing nature. Athletics have constantly played a part in his life, whether this has meant playing American football, basketball or simply running.

“I’m into the outdoors,” he says. “It’s a passion of mine. I love to fly fish. Brown trout, steelhead...”

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His home state of Oregon, on the US west coast, offers plenty of opportunities for getting out and about, including fishing and hiking. Howard grew up in the university town of Eugene, Oregon. “I live in the greatest place on earth, it’s so beautiful.

Oregon is a magical place,” he says.

He and his wife love to travel, and even have a marlin fishing trip scheduled for Hawaii for this July. Upon inquiry on whether his wife likes marlin fishing, the answer is swift: “No, but she likes going to Hawaii.” They also regularly travel (in normal times) to New York to visit their son, who works in Manhattan.

I RON HOWARD I

There’s a lot of wisdom there – I can see things from many angles, from a unique perspective.

FROM SOFTWARE TO UTILITIES AND BACK Ron attended Portland State University, where he studied information systems and quantitative analysis. For his graduate studies, he headed off to University of Oregon, where he earned a Master’s of Science in information management. The first years of his career were spent in Portland at NW Natural, a large natural gas distribution utility, where he started as a computer operator and ended as chief enterprise application architect. There he designed and deployed an enterprise mobile mapping solution for the utility, among many other things. The system reduced the cost of distributing map products to employees while providing better information for improving processes. The solution gained national attention with the utilities industry.

nity for our products and a new energy to grow this business.

My thoughts are ‘What can I do with all of this energy to make this happen?’”

His strengths are his experience and the wisdom that comes from it. “Wisdom allows you to envision the implementation of a solution in detail, from the strategic level all the way down into the weeds,” he says, “and understand what it takes to get it done.”

“There’s been a lot of progress in the journey to modernize our Electric Grid software, and now we can ratchet it up,” he says. “We have this great opportunity to grow faster and do more than we’ve ever done. It’s going to be a really fun ride – for me, our customers and our employees.” •

In 2006, Ron joined MapFrame Corporation as director of product management. “We were rock stars,” he says. “We were one of first companies to deploy mobile GIS systems to investor-owned utilities at scale.” The company was subsequently purchased by General Electric, when Ron became the global product manager for mobile computing. “That’s when I started traveling the world,” he says.

In 2014, he finally joined DNV’s Electric Grid team in the Digital Solutions business area, working with the Cascade market-leading software solutions for asset performance management and analytics as principal product manager.

Athletics have constantly played a part in Ron’s life, whether this has meant playing American football, basketball or simply running.

SEEING THINGS FROM MANY ANGLES “I’ve been in utilities and computing since 1984. I’ve seen so much,” he says. “I was a utilities employee, interacting with executive staff on a regular basis, and then was working for a software company, producing software for the utility industry.

Those two areas of experience combined are really helpful in understanding the use of technology in the utilities space.

There’s a lot of wisdom there – I can see things from many angles, from a unique perspective.”

As the Electric Grid Product Line Director, where does he see Electric Grid going?

“I’m looking at growth,” he says, noting how important it is to make sure that the customers are aligned with our roadmap.

“I’m really excited about the focus on customers and the commercial side of product management. There’s a lot of opportu-

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I DEBORAH WOOD I

Deborah Wood Product Line Director QHSE in Digital Solutions Deborah Wood’s love of mathematics and bringing scientific calculations and methodologies together with real life situations has been the basis of a varied career, working in coastal engineering, oil and gas, and now with software and QHSE in Digital Solutions.

There has been one constant goal throughout Deborah’s work life, which has ranged from modelling tsunamis and working with harbor structures to working as regional manager of the Americas region for Digital Solutions. “My goal is to inspire and motivate people to contribute to make the world a better place,” she says.

FLUID DYNAMICS, MATHEMATICAL MODELLING Her background is within fluid dynamics, mathematical modelling and computational fluid dynamics. Originally from Manchester in the UK, she studied mathematics at Cambridge and attained a PhD in mathematical wave modelling from Bristol University.

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She began her career within coastal engineering. “I was modelling waves, calculating pressure pulses from crashing waves” she says. This modelling work was important for example for the design of breakwaters, for modelling waves crashing on oil platforms or for modelling coastal damage.

THEORY AND REALITY “It has always been a passion for me to do scientific analysis and bring that together with real life situations, always combining the theory with experiments or real-life experience. I’ve always liked the practical element,” she says.

She came to Norway for the first time in 1999, taking a research position at the University of Oslo. In 2009 she joined

I DEBORAH WOOD I

Deborah together with her colleague Koheila.

The strategy gives us a stronger position for the future. I’m really looking forward to being a part of making this happen.

DNV, having previously worked as department manager of an R&D group at ABB /Aibel. There she was head of a team working with innovation, patenting, prototyping, building offshore solutions and handing over to sales.

At DNV, she has held several different positions, first in the subsea section in Oil and Gas, then as Head of Department for Pipeline SURF and Materials. In 2018, she became the Digital Solutions Regional Manager of the Americas, responsible for identifying new market opportunities and managing sales and delivery activities for the various software ecosystems. Last year, she returned to Norway to work on the 2021-2025 DNV strategy for Group and for Digital Solutions. Now, she is taking care of the QHSE product line which includes the product Synergi Life.

uct Line Directors, who are part of the Executive Leadership Team, to drive the overall vision, business development, customer experience and results for their lines.

“I love the varied challenges that come my way,” she says. “I come from outside the product line, and I’m still in ‘finding out modus’. My advantage is that I have a fresh pair of eyes.

We’re at a very exciting place in the path forward, and in the SaaS journey. I like to learn and I like working with people.

I’m a big believer in teamwork. It’s important to bring the team together and set a direction,” she says.

FINDING A CLEAR FOCUS “One of our challenges is that there are so many opportunities. We will really need to focus, but it’s not clear to me yet what we will focus on. Which industries should we focus on?

What should the tactics be to win? And we need to update and refresh those tactics in a changing market.”

What does she do in her spare time? “My life is my family,” she says. Norway is her adopted country. She and her German husband have an 8-year-old daughter.

“I’m really excited about our new strategy. In particular, there’s a lot of focus on two things very close to my heart: the customer and our people. I’m also very excited that the strategy looks at the two global transformations that are happening, that we’re going greener and also more digital. The strategy gives us a stronger position for the future. I’m really looking forward to being a part of making this happen.”

“I like socializing with friends. Of course, that’s a challenge these days. I like good food and wine and I like to try new things. I’m not good at skiing and not very sporty, so my adopted country is not always a good fit in that way. I love travelling, and Norway is a good base for that. I can’t wait until it’s safe to travel again.”

DRIVING THE OVERALL VISION The Product Line Director roles have been introduced as part of the new Digital Solutions strategy. The aim is for the Prod-

She was very touched recently when her daughter was explaining to a friend what her mother does in her work, saying proudly: “Mummy works to make the world a better place.” •

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I CIRCULAR ECONOMY I

The Circular Economy and Sustainability Strategies TEXT: LAURENCE IVARSEN

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I CIRCULAR ECONOMY I

The over-exploitation of natural resources required to achieve economic growth and development has had a negative impact on the environment while also causing these resources to become scarcer and costlier. So, it’s easy to see why the idea of a circular economy that offers new ways to create a more sustainable economic growth model is taking place across the globe.

• 90% of raw materials used in manufacturing in Europe become waste before the product leaves the factory.

• 80% of products made in Europe get thrown away in the first six months of their existence.

• $ 700 million is the annual material cost savings in the fast-moving consumer goods industry with the implementation of a new circular economy.

Here is some reflection point that we will use in an upcoming membership meeting • Resource efficiency in the postpandemic era • The circular economy challenges – and opportunities – posed by Covid-19 • Re-thinking business models to achieve zero waste • The key ingredients for a winning circular economy strategy • Real-life examples of business model transformation to eliminate waste • Overcoming key challenges on your single-use plastics journey • Harnessing innovation to switch to alternative materials • Engaging employees to create a ‘plastic-free’ culture We support the plastic reduction project, and it will not be successful without our participation and commitment. •

WE’RE GETTING RID OF PLASTIC AT DNV According to the World Economic Forum, if no action is taken, there will be more plastic waste than fish in the oceans by 2050. Among the five options of managing plastic waste: reduce, reuse, recycle, recovery and landfill, the most favored option is to reduce consumption as far as possible. Andreas Fischer, Director of Global Real Estate Management and Procurement will lead the implementation of the project. The first steps are: • To replace single-use plastic cutlery in kitchens, coffee shops, and kiosks with reusable/environment friendly ones • To replace single-use plastic bottle water/drinks for meetings and seminars with reusable ones • To replace single-use plastic cups at office areas with sustainable ones You can read more about this on our intranet.

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I MYSTERY COFFEE I

Have you signed up for Mystery Coffee yet?

Mystery Coffee is a great opportunity to take a break and connect to great DNV colleagues from across the globe

Sina dating Alexandra Maciolowska, Senior Approval Engineer from Høvik.

TEXT: SINA MAROLD AND METTE KJØNØ Many of us are working from home for more than a year now and are missing the chat by the coffee machine or canteen.

“It is very important that we stay connected and find new ways of meeting new colleagues, to be inspired, to exchange ideas and to build our network – Contributing to keeping our competitive edge as individuals and as a company. At the same time, we must not forget to take breaks to maintain our resilience. Mystery Coffee is a good opportunity to do both,” says Chief People Officer Gro Gotteberg.

Sina, our HR colleague in Hamburg, was the lead in testing this out in Maritime before Mystery Coffee went global for all Business Areas. “Thanks to Mystery Coffee I have met passionate colleagues with great expertise from around the world

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who I might have never met otherwise.

I learned about the service at a birthday party of a friend and fell in love with it as I am a curious person who always likes to network, getting to know new people and new insights. Luckily, our flat hierarchies in DNV allow that an idea of a single employee can be rolled out globally. It is a true strength of our company that one individual can drive change.” says Sina.

“Many of us feel even busier working from home, taking less breaks and interacting only with colleagues for specific jobs and projects.” Sina continues. “I missed my colleagues who I met in the hallway or at the coffee machine for a catch up, but I never found the time in home office, for many months balancing work and closure of kindergarten due

to COVID lockdown. Now, I really need to take a break when my Mystery Coffee reminder pops up. Very often I feel energized for the rest of the day after meeting a proud colleague and realizing that I work for a truly international company. And by the way, that is also the feedback I am getting from my “dates” and Yammer posts.”

“Although I am physically stuck at home, I made a world tour in past months having very refreshing coffee breaks with colleagues in Japan, China, India, Germany, Norway, UK and US. And it works even I do not drink coffee.” jokes Torgeir Sterri, Regional Manager Maritime West Europe. “Many of my Maritime ELT colleagues have signed up to have an ear on the pulse. I very much recommend the initiative as you can build a bigger

I MYSTERY COFFEE I

Maria Isabel Garcia, Mexico and Thormod Fjell, Høvik.

Sina Marold, Hamburg and William Alvarenga, Miami.

Sina Marold, Hamburg and Jun Hee Heo, Busan.

Allan Krosgaard, New York and Amit Mital, Høvik

Now, I really need to take a break when my Mystery Coffee reminder pops up. Very often I feel energized for the rest of the day after meeting a proud colleague and realizing that I work for a truly international company.

network in DNV which enriches not only you individually but is also a critical success factor for our business. I am looking forward to meet you soon!”

come out of it stronger! With Mystery Coffee growing global across all BAs, I am even more keen to continue my participation!’’.

Amit, our colleague in Høvik, enjoyed about ten Mystery Coffees since signing up. ‘’When I read about the initiative in Maritime, I chose to sign up even though I was with Group and nobody seemed to have any objections! It provided me a great opportunity to connect with my Maritime colleagues in different parts of the world. Apart from getting to know new colleagues, I re-connected to four colleagues who I knew but had no contact for some time. It also provided a great insight into how we in DNV have all being dealing with the new reality these last 18 months, understanding that we are all in it together and that we will

“From the first time I read about the Mystery Coffee initiative I felt really curious and excited about how this will work.” remembers María Isabel Garcia, Project Engineer Energy Systems from Mexico City. “I have to admit that on my first “date” I was really nervous and excited at the same time. The idea of talking with someone that is a “stranger” was a little bit challenging but also a very satisfactory experience. It is like learning to ride a bike: once you lose the fear to fall, the rest is very easy. So far, I have really enjoyed that I always learn something new, whether it is work related, or about a country or even a language.

I feel that through these interactions I am more connected to the organization and believe that it could help in the merger of Energy Systems by making us feel closer. I hope that Mystery Coffee remains even after the lockdown and the pandemic ends.”

So, don’t be shy and just try it out. There is always a topic to talk about like hobbies, family, other cultures, local COVID situation, DNV’s new strategy or current work and projects.

HOW TO SIGN UP? It is very easy: Just go to the Mystery Coffee page (dnv.mysterycoffee.com) and provide your name, company email address, location, business area and frequency that you would like to meet. An algorithm will assign you to a Mystery Coffee date and inform you both via email.

Enjoy and have an inspiring conversation! •

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I JON GRIMES I

Jon Grimes Head of People and Leadership Development Hello, I’m Jon Grimes. I’m British and live with my two children in the ancient town of Warwick, in the UK. Warwick dates back to 914 AD and was originally built on the banks of the River Avon to defend the country from the invading Danes, but these days more likely to welcome them as tourists!

I’ve worked for DNV for the last 12 years, originally being recruited into the Loughborough office to help with the integration of Noble Denton and Garrad Hassan into the GL organisation, but quickly ended up working in Hamburg for the next five years, before working in Høvik for the last seven years. I think of myself as the eternal optimist, but with a pragmatic drive to get things moving WHERE DID I COME FROM My career started in Retail Line Management, having joined Sainsbury’s, a major food retailer in the UK, as a Management Trainee. I spent five years running successful teams and departments with significant P&L responsibility at an early age, working around the UK in numerous roles. In a career move worthy of the DNV career model, and taking my leadership experience from these roles, I seized upon an opportunity to join one of their Regional Training teams. I spent a number of years designing and running training programmes developing some of Sainsbury’s 10,000 leaders in their style and skills. This eventually led to me heading Behavioural and Process training for the Sainsbury’s Group, based in London for over 140,000 colleagues in retail, banking, supply chain and logistics.

From there I next moved to E.ON, a little known brand in the UK at the time, who had just acquired a number of power generation, energy distribution and retail businesses in the UK and had grand plans to rebrand them, and to make their mark in the UK. There I headed up their Learning and Development function, helping their Board Teams to define their Purpose, Vision and Values, and helping the organisation to better communicate with each other through dialogue skills and improving processes through the implementation of LEAN methodology.

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MY ROLE AROUND HERE In my view, I have one of the best roles in DNV. Being the Head of People and Leadership Development offers me the perfect mix of supporting the business in achieving its goals, by supporting its people to be brilliant. Who wouldn’t want a role like that? With our new strategy, I have the wonderful task of looking into our Employee Experience, defining what it is to work here, what makes it so unique, and looking for ways to keep enhancing this. Quite a legacy to help maintain and indeed improve, but also a great opportunity for us to look at who we are and what we should be, given our plans for the future. An employee experience encompasses so many pieces, it’s impossible to define this for each individual, but there are some traits that define DNV as an organisation, and these are the ones we are looking to recognise and develop.

For many years my team have delivered some of the now famous face to face Journey programmes for our leaders.

Given our situation over the last 12 months, and taking the opportunity to change, we now run these virtually and still welcome around 400 learners onto these programmes every year from around the world.

I JON GRIMES I

Over the coming year we’re looking to extend our digital learning out to all colleagues, as part of the employee experience, and to offer more opportunities for people to develop in some of the key behavioural and business skills we need. In the past we have rolled out the Digital Transformation Programme, in conjunction with INSEAD Business School, and we are looking for opportunities to run similar programmes in the future, allowing everyone the opportunity to understand a little more about what our future might look like.

these days, as we all move to search and access learning online, in the moment, from trusted sources. Development is done when it’s needed, it’s far less about booking yourself on a course and learning in a few months’ time, it’s about having something you don’t understand or want to know more about and exploring the learning in the moment. The hunger and want for learning is constantly growing, how we deliver it when it’s needed is our new challenge.

WHAT ARE THE IMPORTANT ISSUES COMING UP As a business we have some ambitious plans in place in our strategy, many of which rely on things we already know well, but increasingly there is a list of new skills, business models and approaches that we need to explore and develop ourselves, in order to make the most of the opportunities we’ll need to keep growing and developing as a business. So, we still have much to learn, but our challenge is less about the content we need to learn, that’s relatively easy to source, our challenge now is how we learn.

We have a great opportunity here, to align our learning into the work, into our daily routines, so it becomes less of an “event” and more of a continuous flow. We are already developing MyLearning, our learning management system, to align our material and make it accessible to all. We are using new software and bringing in new partners to refresh the look and feel of our crucial learning programmes, and we are creating learning paths to help everyone to understand what is available to help them develop and where to get it from. We also continue to explore other integrations where learning will sit within the production systems we use, for immediate access and comprehensive learning.

The hunger and want for learning is constantly growing, how we deliver it when it’s needed is our new challenge.

Bold plans, and not achieved overnight, but we are looking to build an Employee Experience here, not just place a few learning modules on a platform.

The 70/20/10 model for learning is now increasingly well known and understood within DNV, but we still have work to do to align all of our development to it to ensure we live it.

Learning preferences are changing driven by situation, need and opportunity. We are learning less from structured events

FINAL WORDS… DNV has long led the way when it comes to having the best knowledge in our industries, and many new starters to DNV still cite that one of their main reasons for joining DNV are the development opportunities. So, we have a proud legacy to uphold, and bold new ways in which we can deliver it. How exciting is that! •

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I HVO I

New tasks, new skills My formal background is as an Archivist. As main safety delegate I have received additional HSE training. Due to the COVID pandemic I have had the chance to expand my skills in a new direction. I have learned how much work it is behind a live event, how to book an artist and that help comes to those who asks.

TEXT: ELLEN MARGRETHE PIHL KONSTAD

After closing the offices in spring 2020 and realising that it would take some time before we were allowed to open again, the Norwegian COVID team started discussing the home office situation.

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How could it be improved?

THE HOME OFFICE SITUATION Firstly there was the initiative to improve the home office physically – the “NOK 3000,-“ scheme. It was up to each employee to decide what would be the

best improvement in his/her situation, within the predefined limits. Those limits needed to be identified, proposed, discussed and decided upon, while being within the law so that it would not trigger additional taxation for the employees. Several internal expertise

I HVO I

was identified and approached, in order to make sure we did it right. This also meant developing a FAQ on the scheme, which also was updated several times based upon the questions received to the COVID mailbox.

In addition, the lunch “Stretch and Bend” initiative was launched to try to counter the passiveness of working from home.

How to re make traditions digitally In late October, questions regarding Christmas where staring to come into the COVID team. Would we be allowed to meet up for the usual “Julebord” and what about presents?

This task was split in two, and as HVO I was part in handing both.

Firstly, how to arrange a COVID friendly “Julebord”.

Tasks to be decided or investigated prior to the initiative; budget, would it trigger any tax issues for the employees, information to all line managers on how this may arrange locally.

Secondly, how to create Christmas spirit at the home office. A Christmas committee was appointed. The goal was to create an Advent as close to the one we normally would have in the Office in December.

With four weeks in December, four events were planned for: 1. “AKAN is handing out Twist and pamphlets during lunch” was converted to “Taste of Christmas” – a lunch talk on non-alcoholic beverages with sommelier Ingvild Tennfjord.

2. The various Lucia processions became an evening event with an ensemble filmed in the DNV Villa.

3. The annual Christmas Greeting last day before the holyday normally done in Big Blue became an event for all of Norway when it was filmed, even the ceremony of receiving a gifts from the DNV kindergarten was included.

4. And to kick it all off, a brand-new event that may become a tradition – a concert.

Deciding upon the events was the easy part, how to put the plans into action brought a very steep learning curve.

How to find and book artists, how to plan for filming at the office in a COVID friendly manner, and how to host live events. In my naivety I thought we could host everything as Teams meetings, but soon learned that was not the way when hosting anything with more than 200 participates. Luckily, we had some very helpful colleagues who came Santa to the rescue.

Another tradition is presents / gifts.

This year we decided it was time to try something new. That each employee could choose from a variety of gift. More on this later.

DNV also has a long charity tradition to give to a Non-profit organisation. This year this was combined with a photo competition, the winners where to donate money to a Charity of their own choice.

Who know that it was so much work following up the recipient so that we actually could give them the money?

When planning for the giving of physical gifts we thought that the office would be partly opened after the Holydays. When we realised that the shutdown of the office would be prolonged, we needed to come up with an alternative. Luckily, we had Nina Caspersen who came in as Santa’s little helper. In close dialogue with the COVID team, a voluntary scheme of “picking up your present” was set up.

Nina has handed out 880 gifts so far at Høvik and are planning for a round two before the summer.

spirit, and an intimate jazz concert was decided upon. Working on this I learned that a microphone is not just a microphone. In my naivety I thought that the only difference was how good it was to catch sound. Now I know that they are also differences in how they capture the voice plus a lot more aspects that I wouldn’t even be able to explain. Solveig has not only an amazing Steinway grand piano in her living room, she also has her own professional mic. Luckily, it was possible to pear up with the film crew’s camera gear.

Lessons learned being part of these initiatives: • Get the best people to become a part of the committee/group/team • Reach out to colleagues, they will do their best to help and guide you, (and the guys in internal communication are just great.)

• To plan for more time between filming and sending the event – four hours is not enough even if you have the best camera man filming and editing the video.

• There is a right way to write a FAQ, but we do not have a FAQ template. (as far as I know) • If you are to invite all of Norway to a “Stretch and bend” session, turn off the send reply function or you will be spammed with replies.

• Not having 12 different options for Christmas gifts, three or four may be enough, and to have a very strict plan for handing out the gifts during a pandemic with offices closed.

• And last but not least think as Pippi – “I have never done this before, but I bet I’m good at it”. The learning curve may be steep, but you will land. •

FURTHER INITIATIVES Winter turned into spring, and there were still no signs of being allowed back to the office. The COVID team therefor, for the first time in the history of DNV, decided to send a “Påskehilsen”/ Easter greetings home to all employees in Norway.

Tommy also wanted a digital Easter event. He wanted something to lift the

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WORK AND PLAY HARD AND ENJOY EVERY DAY!

Hvordan bli medlem av VEFF

How to become a VEFF member

• Kontakt veff-kontoret: VEFF@dnv.com • Du finner også informasjon på www.veff.no

• Contact the VEFF office: VEFF@dnv.com • You will also find useful information on www.veff.no

Editor: Nina Ivarsen. Design and layout: Bodoni, 128400

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