Project portfolio management using Easy Project in energetics - innogy Czech Republic

Industry:

Oil and Gas

Headquarter:

Czech Republic, Prague

Number of users:

255+

Innogy's business focuses on the supply of natural gas, electricity, and heat to customers, combined heat and power generation in district heating plants, and clean mobility solutions.

Previous state

innogy implements a wide portfolio of projects not only internally but also through a network of external suppliers. The overall high number of interested users placed high demands on implementation procedures and it was no longer appropriate to expand the existing systems.

For this reason, innogy was looking for a comprehensive tool for project portfolio management, an integral part of which would be the possibility of integration with third-party systems.

The key parameters for the selection of the new system were, in particular, the allocation of people to the planned activities, the development of individual tasks, the cost view of the plan in relation to reality, and online interactions between users.

Expectation

Easy tracking of time worked
Monitoring the time and financial demands of tasks and projects
Intuitive work with the application
Additional development of functionalities to a minimal extent beyond the standard functions

Requirements

Involvement of external staff in reporting
Integration with other applications
Additional development of functionalities for the innogy environment

Energetic sector

16 European countries

41 branches in the Czech Republic

800+ employees in the Czech Republic

innogy Czech Republic with Easy Project

"Thanks to Easy Project, we can better track planned activities, evaluate the current status of the project/task portfolio almost online, their finances, and in the future, we can build on better IT capacity planning so that we can respond flexibly to market demands," says Martin.

Preparation

Date of implementation - 2018/2019

The implementation phase was preceded by the initial phase of defining the basic requirements, which we incorporated into the test environment in the form of Proof of Concept (PoC). This verification phase was planned by innogy for two months and its goal was to get acquainted with the application in real operation. The initial phase as well as the implementation itself took place using weekly sprints, in which the supplied components of the application were being closed and new requirements were being planned.

Settings

Thanks to the initial phase, innogy was able to switch to production application immediately. We set up landing pages, user roles, and rights, project structure, tasks, and budgets. This was followed by the synchronization of Easy Project with the Service Now tool for entering change requests. Thanks to this synchronization, it is not necessary to enter requests into two systems. The request is entered into the Service Now system and based on this, a task is automatically created in the project within the Easy Project environment (on a daily basis), with which it is then possible to perform all standard operations in the Easy Project environment just like for a task created directly in the Easy Project environment.

Server

Due to the speed of the actual implementation, a solution built and operated on the Easy Project cloud environment was chosen, also due to the fact that it is possible to switch to a cloud environment that uses innogy for its other applications at any time.

Training

We were the first to implement user training, which was followed by more detailed training of managers. During the implementation, we worked closely with the application administrators who are now able to operate most of the application themselves without the need to consult with our specialists.

Testing

For effective testing, we have set up a test environment for innogy, which contains real data from the production environment and allows all changes to be carefully tested before deployment to production.

Objectives and benefits

The implementation of Easy Project brought:

Unified tool for monitoring and recording projects and tasks
Easy record of time worked
More accurate records of resources and finances
Significant reduction in time between work reporting and budget projection
Automatic reports of external experts

The most used Project Management tools by innogy Czech Republic

Worked time tracking

Worked time tracking is the key to effective management and planning. Employees can thus effectively use and report their time, and managers can monitor and plan the time spent on projects.

Budgets

Budgets are used to create project budgets and control expenditures, revenues, labor costs, and overall profitability.

Alerts

To keep employees informed of all relevant updates and upcoming deadlines.