Energy I was commissioned to re-organise the planning processes and merge two divisions into one so that they used standard process. There are over 80 planning staff located at 8 nuclear power stations, one coal fired station and three supporting business units throughout the UK.
The first task was to examine the existing processes and procedures, in addition a health check was carried out on the Primavera infrastructure, including a thorough assessment of data integrity and schedule integrity. A report was compiled which detailed an agreed scope of work required to prepare the infrastructure so that it would provide a stable working environment. This paper was presented to a team of senior managers and senior planners from the various sites. The proposal included a roadmap for upgrading the P3e infrastructure together with a programme containing details of the processes that were required to standardise the way that the tool was utilised by both divisions. The scope of work was agreed then presented to the planning community through a series of seminars.
The processes were prioritised in line with business needs. The first priority was to standardise system defaults for calculating performance criteria such as EV, CPI and SPI. This was followed by process documents defining how schedules were costed, resourced and maintained. The processes defined the methodology to be used to meet the requirements of the company’s life cycle gates (a sub-set of Prince) and where applicable, followed the guidance specified in the PMBoK. This work is on-going, the high priority tasks have been completed success fuly and the Company now has a standard process for managing projects throughout the Engineering and Projects Divisions. Circa 17,000 pages of reports are produced each month for all staff, from portfolio managers down to work package managers. To supplement the deployment of Primavera applications I presented myPrimavera to senior managers. myPrimavera provided an ideal environment for all participants in the divisions to view live schedule data and assist them in managing day to day work. Major emphasis was placed on resource and cost management. A roadmap was produced detailing how the application would be piloted. Role based training courses were designed and presented to 30 users and the application piloted for three months. Regular newsletters were produced detailing progress and circulating issues and solutions that users were experiencing. At the end of the pilot a questionnaire was distributed to gather information on how successful the pilot was. This has been analysed and is being used to formulate the way ahead in stage 2 of the pilot which involves full deployment and roll-out in a single department.
As part of this assignment I also produced a roadmap of how the Primavera application should be developed within British Energy. This roadmap includes integration with Legacy systems such as time recording, finance and work management. Development of third party applications includes Risk Management, Report writing, Estimating and Work Management applications.
I was asked to help set up a corporate steering group to standardise the utilisation of Primavera applications throughout BE. At present there are circa 350 users utilising 6 separate databases, the objective was to merge all projects into a single database and standardise project management practices throughout BE.