The DMOW (Departement Mobiliteit en Openbare Werken) is the Flemish government’s department for mobility and public works. They are responsible for maintaining and improving the Flemish roads, waterways, and airports to ensure that traffic stays flowing safely. Agile Architects helped the department to integrate IT projects and expenditures into Planview, their existing resource management application. Read on to find out more!
Challenge
The DMOW needed a technical advisory partner to support them in implementing their IT expenses and projects into Planview. They already used this application for the business side of their organisation, but they wanted to add a functionality for managing IT advisory and budgets for their various projects.
The DMOW required a partner that could align all stakeholders’ opinions and visions. Planview consultants would handle the executive implementation work, but the project itself could use a guiding hand and a clearly defined structure.
High-level planning
We started this project by clearly outlining the different phases in a high-level planning. This included an estimated timeline from analysis to completion. The planning spanned seven months from its analysis to the end-to-end review, and consisted of the following phases (with governance spanning the entire project):
- Stakeholder analysis (January)
- Workshops and process definition (January through April)
- Implementation and testing (May through June)
- Migration (June)
- Documentation and closing (June and July)
Because of the DMOW’s management through consensus, the stakeholder analysis was rather complex. We set up three separate workstreams: technological and IT advisory councils (enterprise architecture), financial parameters (budget), and content and methodology (scope).
We then split up each of these workstreams into three to four dedicated working groups: one for each subdomain. For example, the financial parameters workstream consisted of the build/CAPEX and run/OPEX working groups, in addition to the policy workgroup that was part of every workstream.
Workshops
Once we had divided the workstreams and working groups, we got to work by organising and guiding the workshops. Each workstream gathered for three workshops, where we modelled the requirements and solutions through post-it notes and BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) schemes.
We organised the workshops in the same steps as the DMOW’s portfolio management process to ensure a familiar flow for its business stakeholders. Each workstream had a workshop for the as-is and idea phase, one for the project request and proposal phase, and one for the Project Initiation Document (PID) phase. Of course, we remained flexible: sometimes we had to add stakeholders or organise additional workshops to allow for sufficient discussion of certain complicated subjects.
Implementation, testing and documentation
As we mentioned above, we did not handle the Planview implementation. This was done by a Planview expert, hired by the DMOW. However, we provided some test scenarios, so that the DMOW could run their own tests. Based on those tests, the project documentation was delivered internally.
We also helped to set up a schedule where all implementation activities were covered. We followed up on its progress in several small sprints. Thanks to this approach, acceptance from the business increased with every delivery, which resulted in a smooth implementation.
Results
We helped the DMOW with an in-depth business analysis. Through workshops, the analysis resulted in a set of comprehensive process schemes that matched the project approach. Each step described the desired changes in Planview, the required data, how to introduce them, and how it would benefit the overarching solution. Together with our guidance, this ensured that the project kept running smoothly.
Overall, this project focused more on business analysis than enterprise architecture. This was a very satisfying case for us, because we could display our expertise for stakeholder management and business analysis.
