Background

Appreciating the huge potential of e-commerce to improve its Industrial Gas Turbine business, Alstom launched a company-wide vision - underpinned by a White Paper - to develop and sustain its e-commerce programme.

The company actively encouraged its teams to undertake e-commerce initiatives but needed to extract maximum value from these projects, despite limited financial and manpower resources. A priority for Alstom was developing a collective vision for its group-wide e-commerce initiatives that would encourage collaboration across the different business units.

Atmaana's role

Atmaana's first objective was to find out whether Alstom's people were undertaking, monitoring and evaluating the projects in the same consistent way across the company. This involved a 'health check' of all current e-commerce projects and subsequently working with senior managers to implement a project prioritisation methodology and improved ways of working in the teams.

The health-check involved undertaking a comprehensive review with a small strategic group drawn from various business units, and involved the following activities: -

- Running structured workshops to develop a vision for global e-commerce and a methodology for establishing an implementation roadmap.

- Tailoring Atmaana's project prioritisation methodology for use by Alstom, enabling multi-functional, multi-level company teams to develop key criteria for project prioritisation, balancing best return against deliverability. (Atmaana has used this tool successfully in a diverse mix of sectors including retailing, service and automotive, and in corporate, functional and operational environments.)

- Tailoring Atmaana's project management methodology as a basis for reviewing current e-commerce initiatives against best practice project and quality management.

- Comparing Alstom's vision statement to findings from the fieldwork and highlighting any gaps.

Deliverables

Atmaana's deliverables comprised:

- The definition of key attributes for the e-commerce vision statement. This has helped Alstom evaluate existing and future projects.

- A refined Vision Statement which added sections to help teams, including statements on "what 'good' likes like..."

- Agreed weighted project selection criteria.

- Projects prioritised with defined strengths, weaknesses and risk assessments for each.

- Project plans for all aspects of mission critical e-commerce initiatives, including risk assessment, contingency planning, training, communication and change management.

Client benefits

- Alstom now has a robust framework and an effective approach for managing all change programmes and individual projects. These enable the company to apply its limited resources in the most appropriate manner.

- Alstom has demonstrated to its new owners, Siemens, excellent examples of robust planning and rigour in its process of creating and delivering e-commerce projects.

- The multifunctional workshops, facilitated by Atmaana, enabled effective knowledge sharing across diverse business units, building consensus for a new project management toolset.

To find out more about the Alstom project, or Atmaana's extensive range of services, contact Harish Natali