More Portfolio, Project and Resource Planning Efficiency

 

The Company: Swissgrid is Switzerland’s national electricity supplier. As the owner of the supply grid, it is responsible for the safe, reliable and profitable operation of the country’s ultra-high voltage network. It has more than 400 highly qualified employees from 17 countries at its offices in Laufenburg, Frick and Vevey. It is also a member of the European network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) and handles various tasks in the area of coordination and grid usage for European electricity.

The Challenge: Swissgrid took over running the electricity transmission network in 2013 at which point the complexity of its mission and responsibilities increased significantly. The company is in charge of all of the maintenance, expansion and replacement of the supply network. As a result, the company needed to accelerate the transformation it had already kicked off in 2010. An important part of this change was adopting a more professional approach to its portfolio, project and resource management in order to keep pace with sudden growth in the size of its project portfolio.  

The Solution: Swissgrid’s PMO is a department in its own right and the centralized management location for strategies and policies that form the foundation of professional, efficient and standardized project execution. The PMO’s responsibilities also included the revision of methodologies and processes as well as the introduction of a PM tool and ensuring operation, staff training and expansion plans for it. The integration of Microsoft Project Server with SAP, along with the products used for resource planning and coordination between project and line managers, has created a highly professional environment conducive to successful projects.   

The Benefits: Team managers always have a complete overview of the workload, tasks, actual hours worked and absences of their staff. Project managers can plan their projects better, as they have much more reliable resource data. And the integration with SAP means that master data are always up to date. Project monitoring is easy with a variety of reports generated from information in various databases. The solution used at Swissgrid enables the company to produce project reports about deadlines, costs and resources much faster and in more detail.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

“The integrated PPM system has enabled us to manage our portfolio and projects in a much more professional way. Our resource planning is also much more transparent and efficient now.”

Thomas Dinkel, PMO Leader, Swissgrid AG