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Archive for the ‘Project Management’ Category

Nord Pool Gas web relaunch

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

The gas exchange Nord Pool Gas was established in 2007. It is owned by Energinet.dk and Nord Pool Spot. Since its very first trade in March 2008 Nord Pool Gas is organizing the physical trade of natural gas by offering a transparent and competetive market place to producers, retailers, energy companies, trading representatives and large consumers.

Offering comprehensive information on the Danish gas market as well as its rules and regulations, the Nord Pool Gas website is considered to be a junction for all its participants. Nord Pool Gas decided for a relaunch of its website to meet demands of suppliers, trading companies and end users: Nord Pool Gas wants to provide its custmers an easy access to information on the Danish gas exchange, the market and its possibilities. The web project has been realized under project management of Speicher 210 and in close cooperation of Nord Pool Gas, the designer Jutta Häuser as well as the Software development company 4Morgen GmbH.

At the new Market Data section website visitors receive an overview on latest as well as historical prices. Furthermore Nord Pool Gas is offering a price calculator to its end users. This tool is calculating historical monthly gas prices based on Nord Pool Gas’ “pure commodity” exchange prices. Please feel free to visit http://npgas.com to get to know to Nord Pool Gas’ new website.

The Speicher 210 team would like to thank all project participants for supporting and encouraging the web project.

Tags: Business, News, Technology
Posted in Project Management, Projects, SP210 | No Comments »

New Online Store of Skicentrum Heemskerk

Monday, December 5th, 2011

Just in time for the start of the winter: Skicentrum Heemskerk launched its new online store at http://skicentrumonline.nl. Speicher 210 has realized the web project in close cooperation with egoactive B.V. and Traformats.

We’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to all project team members for the great commitment and performance throughout the project.
And we wish Skicentrum Heemskerk all the best with their new web shop.

Tags: Business, Technology
Posted in Projects, SP210 | No Comments »

Michael Wolf is Certified Business Professional – CBPP®

Monday, October 10th, 2011

CBPP® certifications is an initiative of the gesellschaft für organisation e.v. and its affiliated companies in Austria and Switzerland. CBPP® certs have been conducted in Germany for the first time in 2010 . Its primarily aimed at business process management professionals who focus on process design or process organization. Both the seminar and the certification exams are based on the BPM CBOK (Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge).

Michael Wolf has recently attended a 1week CBPP® seminar and taken the examination. The gesellschaft für organisation e.v. informed all participants on the results in advance by eMail:

Dear Mr Wolf,

you have succeeded! Congratulations on passing the examination. [...]

Tags: Business, People, Technology
Posted in Business/IT Alignment, Project Management, SP210 | No Comments »

Nord Pool Spot web project 2010/2011

Friday, August 12th, 2011

The Nord Pool Spot group is the largest energy exchange in Europe and has offices in Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Tallin and London. The exchange is providing its customers both intraday and day-ahead markets. Actually, 350 companies from 18 countries are trading on the market (August 2011). In 2010 the Nord Pool Spot group had a total turnover of 310 TWh*, which includes auction volume in the UK market N2EX.

In contrast to specialized web applications of the Nord Pool Spot group, such as the trading system Elbas or the UMM platform*, the Nord Nord Pool Spot website is considered to be a junction for all market participants: At Nord Pool Spot’s website overall and individually processed market data, statistics and market information is displayed and available via download.

Fig.: The former Nord Pool Spot website.

Nord Pool Spot had performed customer surveys and personal interviews of website users. The investigation showed that market participants and visitors critized the usability of the website. Nord Pool Spot considered the old layout, as for example tables, to be cumbersome and critized the speed of automatic update of dynamic content. And hence, the Nord Pool Spot group has opted for a web relaunch, with the objective of meeting individual requirements and needs of different user groups.

Under the project management of Michael Wolf, the web project has been realized in close cooperation of Nord Pool Spot with

Speicher 210 (overall PM; support web administration, web editor and test),
full-service agency Creuna (design & support texts),
Making Waves (development, implementation) and
JF Software AS (interfaces to external data bases).

In the scope of the soft launch on May 5th, 2011 Nord Pool Spot provided the opportunity for market participants to get to know with the new website before the offical switch.

Fig.: Nord Pool Spot's new website

Today, 15th August between 14:00 and 15:00 CET, both sites will be switched: The new website will officially take up the position of the elder one: www.nordpoolspot.com

Director Communications at Nord Pool Spot and sponsor of the web project Siw Hauge says

“I will use this opportunity to thank project manager Michael Wolf and the project team for creating a great corporate website that we hope our customers and users will find a transparent and user friendly source of information in their daily work”. (Source: Exchange information 2011/040).

Speicher 210 would like to thank all people who have supported and encouraged the web project 2010/2011.

Glossary

TWh:
Terawatt hour is a larger measure for work and thus also energy.
1 TWh = 1 000 000 000 000 watt hours.

UMM:
Market participants and Transmission system operators (TSO) are obliged to disclose all information that is price-sensitive. An example for this information might be a production failure of a power station. With the UMM application Nord Pool Spot is providing a platform where market participants can publish those Urgent Market Messages.

Tags: Business, Hello world!, News, Technology
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PROJECTWAVE – Project communication

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Communication is essential for successful cooperation of project participants and, hence, one of the most important factors leading to the success of a project. At PROJECTWAVE a new excerpt of Michael Wolf’s work “Project communication with Google Wave”, dated March 2010, has been posted. Besides the definition of the term “communication” the excerpt deals with the different dimensions of project communication.
The blog post can be found here: Blog-Post auf PROJECTWAVE.

We hope you enjoy reading and have a nice weekend

Speicher 210

About PROJECTWAVE
At the blog PROJECTWAVE excerpts of Michael Wolf’s work “Project communication with Google Wave” are published. Here the communications principle as well as basics of projects and project work are described. Based on these fundamentals Michael Wolf takes a critical approach to requirements and risks of project communication. In his work he is showing the fundamental organization of project communication using Google Wave as well as problems, limits, possible enhancements and development of the application.

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New website of Nord Pool Spot AS: Excellent ranking in June issue of “Europower”

Monday, June 20th, 2011

The new website of Nord Pool Spot AS has been tested in the June issue of the Norwegian trading newspaper “Europower“: The Scandinavian power exchange received best possible rating for its new website; especially its user-friendliness is highly commended. Until its launch in August 2011, the new website is available under http://www2.nordpoolspot.com/.

We’re proud of this ranking, that has been achieved through both, the successful project management by Michael Wolf and the excellent cooperation by all project participants.

Tags: Business, Hello world!, News
Posted in Project Management, Projects, SP210 | No Comments »

Book Sharing 2.3 – Junkies, Zombies, IT projects

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Dear readers,

we hope you’ve had some relaxing holidays and a good start into 2011. Some of you have already told us interesting stories of their holiday and travel experience :)

We are facing a number of challenges and interesting projects in 2011. That is why we are going to introduce to you a (not that typical) reference book on project management:

Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior

Tom De Marco, Peter Hruschka, Tim Lister, Steve McMenamin, James Robertson, Suzanne Robertson

We guess, most of you have already been part of a project team. And maybe you know one or another book dealing with project management. You might like the following reference book:

The six principals of the think tank Atlantic Systems Guild have scrutinized quite a lot of projects. In their book „Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior“ they show how specific behavior patterns of team members and managers might have an influence on the projects success.

Unlike other reference books, you will not find check lists nor tedious theories or definitions. You may expect a series of humorous short stories on every days project life, that support readers in recognizing patterns and abstracting them. Pattern recognition enables us to notice repetitions, similarities as well as regularities in our environment. The maybe most decisive ability is to think in abstract terms: The abstractive ability enables us to shape useful information out of general results, insights or generalized conclusions by omitting insignificant details from observations. Thus project members are able to make a distinction between behavior that’s supportive or harmful to the success of a project.

When reading this book you will maybe recognize that you have already met a project team that has some similarity with “The Munsters”. Do you know the saying “A shut mouth catches no flies”? In “Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior” you will learn something about the impact of silence on project results.

Best,

Speicher 210

Tags: Books, Opinion, Thoughts
Posted in Blog series, Project Management, SP210 Book Sharing | No Comments »

SP210 blog series – Project Management

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

Continuous further development and innovation have lead to an increase of priority given to Information Technology. At the beginning considered as “service provider”, IT is now a business booster. Information Technology as engine for operating efficiency, in turn, is often depending on innovation. Great importance is attached to the three main factors “budget, time and quality” when companies are realizing IT projects. Thus the importance of IT project management was increasing, too.

We’d like to give you an insight into our daily work as project managers in our blog series “Project Management”. It’s not a scientific essay; it’s just some information and our comments as well. The last entry dealed with approaches and procedure models. We gave you an insight into classical project management and mentioned in our last article that in the course of time a need for more flexibility has evolved. Following up, we’d like to give some information on agile project management.

Enjoy it.

Part 3: Agile Project Management

Due to globalization projects are tending to become more and more characterized by multinational oriented organizational structures. Short-time changes and shortened project durations are part of the everyday project life. To comply with the common need for flexibility agile models have been introduced. Agile project management (APM) is, in a sense, the counterpart to the traditional, classical project management. As with traditional procedure models, there are different APM methods, too. Their aim is to make controlling as well as management of processes and projects agile, that means more flexible and dynamic. (more…)

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RFQ Tool 2.0

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

SUM=, one of the largest independent printmanagement service providers in Europe, commissioned Speicher 210 with the extension of RFQ 1.0. This web-based application had been developed to optimize the Request For Quotation process. The main objective of the follow-up project was to optimize as well as to extend the RFQ-tool so, that users were able to configure biddings rounds in more detail. The project had been carried out in close cooperation with the Software developers of 4 Morgen GmbH and SUM=. Speicher 210 has been responsible for project management including planning, analysis of business procedures, requirements management, coordination as well as documentation.

The recently relaunched Management application RFQ 2.0 is optimizing the entire bidding process. Users’ authorizations are determined according to their role within the application – site administrator, executive officer or supplier.

Some functionalities that are available to users are for example:

Creating and managing tender items and organizing them within tender groups
Address administration
Creating and managing individual and global values and value lists
Creating and managing customized forms for receiving offers and estimates
Automated e-mails, e.g. for sending bidding round invitations
Quote comparison, vendor comparison, vendor rating including Excel export function

Individually configurable fields offer more space and ways in creating requests for quotation. Executive officers can create and manage customized query-entry-forms with just a few clicks, also by using global or individually created value lists. An integrated reporting tool makes it easier to compare quotes or to create vendor ratings.

Tags: Business, Technology
Posted in Business/IT Alignment, Project Management, Projects, SP210 | No Comments »

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