Gas Networks Ireland enhance project portfolio analysis over a 5 year planning horizon

Category: Cases

The challenge

Gas Networks Ireland needed to improve their portfolio selection capabilities, including supporting its requirements for identifying and optimising the selection of projects in line with available funding and resources. Gas Networks Ireland had a project management tool in place from a 3rd party vendor but it did not adequately meet their requirements around portfolio analysis. Having worked on Business Resourcing, Advisory, and Software Development projects for over 10 years, Gas Networks Ireland turned to emagine for advice.

Discovery Phase

emagine was deployed to comprehensively examine the organization's existing processes and provide recommendations for improvement. Additionally, they sought our expertise in conducting a detailed analysis to identify potential failure points within these processes.

- Understanding the Scope
  emagine held a kick-off meeting with the Gas Network Ireland Business Team to understand the scope of the engagement and current challenges that needed to be addressed by a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Tool.

- Current Processes
  emagine gained an understanding of the current project and programme processes, that the chosen PPM Tool would need to support.

- Requirements Gathering
  emagine completed a requirements-gathering exercise ahead of their initial engagement with the Gas Networks Ireland project team.
- Requirements Review
  emagine categorised those requirements and consolidated them into a detailed log for analysis purposes.
- PPM Tool Selection
  5 PPM tool vendors were reviewed using a standard scorecard created by emagine. The results were evaluated to create a comparative feature list of requirements grouped by vendor to enable easy comparison.

Implementation

Following on from the PPM tool selection exercise, Gas Networks Ireland selected Microsoft Project Online as the tool which best fit the requirements of their PMO for portfolio analysis. They also selected emagine as their implementation partner as they use their tried and tested APEX project management methodology in delivering and implementing Microsoft Project Online.

emagine provided a fully project-managed end-to-end development effort, including design, development, configuration, testing and deployment as well as training and communications. emagine’s APEX is a unique Methodology that we have developed that contains a combination of the best-of-breed multiple industry standards of Project Management (PM) and Business Analysis (BA). emagine have built an international reputation for ‘Taking the chaos out of Project Management’, using our unique APEX Methodology.

Summary

Taking 6 months from start to finish, Microsoft Project Online resolved Gas Network Ireland’s main challenge which was to outline resource scenarios over a five-year period and identify the availability and capacity of different resource types. The solution allowed them to capture resource requirements on a projectby-project basis and perform analysis on these projects over a 5-year planning horizon and perform ‘what if’ scenarios for additional resources or start date modification for projects

Our organisation has worked with emagine for many years and it’s grown into a key partnership that continues to help us to deliver on our strategic business objectives. Personally, I’ve always found emagine very easy to work with and our organisations have developed a strong collaborative working relationship.

Rickard Lucey, Gas Networks Ireland

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