Project portfolio management is the process of managing and controlling a collection of projects in an organization to ensure that they support strategic objectives and maximize overall benefits.
If this overarching project coordination is missing, it can lead to that,
The European Energy Exchange (EEX) is part of the EEX Group, a globally operating group of companies specializing in international commodity markets.
As part of the Group, EEX offers contracts on power, natural gas and emission allowances as well as freight and agricultural products and is one of the world's leading exchanges for trading in energy and energy-related products.
Central project management within the Group is handled by the clearing subsidiary European Commodity Clearing AG (ECC) .
The aim of the project was to replace the existing project portfolio management tool used by EEX and ECC. Due to the upcoming database migration and the associated challenges and risks of possible data loss, EEX and ECC decided to discontinue the use of the previous tool after weighing up all the options. Data maintenance was also very time-consuming for the responsible project managers. Due to the long time intervals between the actual status and documentation in the tool, it did not provide up-to-date evaluations and was therefore not compatible with agile working methods. Furthermore, the previous configuration for the "Flight Level" method introduced for the coordination and implementation of projects also needed to be continued in a new tool.
Since the actual project planning for the company projects and the organization of operational activities already largely took place in the Jira system, it made sense also to map the project portfolio management in Jira. The project management team had the following goals in mind:
As XALT has already been supporting EEX and ECC as a customer for several years and has successfully implemented various IT and business processes in Jira, it was obvious to develop a solution together.
It was crucial for the successful implementation of this project that TEAM XALT had a holistic understanding of project portfolio management and the Flight Level methodology in order to bring the business view together with the IT side. This was the only way to set up the workflow in Jira correctly.
Another challenge in this project was to create a solution for resource management within project portfolio planning in Jira, although the Jira software is not designed for this application. For EEX and ECC, however, this was an absolute must-have of the new solution, and therefore, the full know-how and creativity of the XALT consultants was required for the technical implementation.
The experts at TEAM XALT were very happy to take on this challenge, safe in the knowledge that Jira offers them the flexibility and technical requirements to map various processes.
The project started with evaluating the existing project portfolio management tool and the requirements for mapping the flight level. TEAM XALT then defined the requirements for the new solution based on the existing system and process configurations.
In the planning phase, the work steps for implementation in Jira were then defined and prioritized. The work packages were divided as follows:
During the project duration of around five months, TEAM XALT took an agile approach together with EEX and ECC. The features were prioritized and processed on the basis of the Jira Advanced Roadmap. A cross-functional team coordinated progress and the next activities in daily stand-ups.
Implementing project portfolio management and project management in Jira has led to significant increases in efficiency, both for users and at the management level. Acceptance and the associated use of Jira within EEX and ECC are also higher, so Jira has become an integral part of daily work. The existing Jira know-how of the users enables the joint further development of the project portfolio management tool and the coordination of work at the delivery level. These results summarize the advantages:
Reduced workload:
More transparency and security for decision-makers:
Efficient resource planning based on up-to-date data:
The resource planning in Jira developed by TEAM XALT according to customer requirements offers
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