Ladina Schubert
Professional Consultant
Initial situation
The assignment focusses on the digitalisation of the cooperation between different departments. Each department has its own tools that work perfectly within their department but are not cross-functional. Therefore, there are a lot of media breaks between different departments. Our task was on the one hand to eliminate those media breaks and on the other hand to expand the functionalities of the tools with cross-functional features to enable data-consistent project engineering. Another main task was to develop a strategy for more efficient use of existing data in the area of project engineering.
The entire project engineering area has a lot of data that is managed in different tools. The data is sometimes insufficiently linked across teams and departments which has negative effects on the process and quality.
Aims of the project were:
- Identification of relevant topics to prioritize, development of measures to anchor and further develop these topics in the project and its environment,
- Promoting inter-departmental cooperation,
- Actively integrate employees into the change process and accompany them in the process.
Process
The project started in 2019 and will be carried out until 2023. A team of three ERNI consultants and three representatives from the customer were working on the outcomes. This year we are working on more concrete topics in specified groups with the customer. Up to now, we were working mainly on the customer site and had a team day once per week where we give updates on recent developments. Furthermore, we are conducting workshops to further develop initial ideas and to foster cooperation within the team.
Solution
The process resulted in the creation of a status quo analysis of the existing tools and a strategy on how to further develop the existing tools towards interdisciplinary cooperation. We carried out interviews and workshops to define requirements for interdisciplinary data-consistent project engineering. Therefore, we integrated the most important project engineering tools into this project; together with the tools’ product owners, we identified synergies, networked with superordinate projects, ensuring that the further development of the tools contributes to data-consistent project engineering.
The customer benefits from our support in creating the vision and concrete goals of the project promoting mutual understanding of the business and IT side to achieve cross-domain goals. IT projects receive support in optimizing their customer benefit by networking with users from the business.
This case study is part of our Digital Business Consulting offering.
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