Establish the right foundation for your project
The success of a project often depends on whether it is initiated with the necessary groundwork. The Danish government’s IT project model ensures that the foundation is in place before a full project can be launched.
In many organisations and companies, digitalisation is high on the agenda, often as part of the overall strategy. Digitalisation can help create simpler and more efficient workflows and ensure, for example, that reporting is automated and optimised. The Danish Agricultural Agency has a strong focus on digitalisation, which can, among other things, help streamline Denmark’s reporting to the EU on a wide range of subsidy schemes.
Read the full case on how the agency created the foundation for a strategic platform project.
Challenge
The Danish Agricultural Agency has four strategic focus areas in its 2022 strategy. One of them is ‘digitalisation at the centre’, which is about making better use of data and increasing automation. Under this focus area, the agency has launched a number of projects designed to help achieve the goals set out in the strategy. One of these projects is called ‘better data governance’ and aims to provide the foundation for optimising business intelligence. The project is intended to enable the agency to extract more value from existing data through data enrichment, filtering and data consolidation. The data originates from several different specialist areas (for example area subsidies, project subsidies, island support) and systems. The plan is to establish a stable data environment by building a staging environment. A staging environment makes it possible to enrich data, and it can be used directly for reporting purposes. Data from the staging environment is made available to the agency’s data warehouse (DW) for reporting. The specialist systems, staging environment and DW already exist today, but the ambition is to achieve higher efficiency, greater automation and more opportunities.
The Danish Agricultural Agency uses a modified version of the Danish government’s IT project model. This model places particular emphasis on the initiation phase ensuring a full mapping and clarification of needs. It is essential to establish a clear definition and direction for what the solution must include (scope) and how the specialist systems should integrate across the organisation. According to the project model, no project can be initiated before a project foundation has been created. The project foundation (which is the project’s main document and governance basis) ensures that all relevant stakeholders agree on the central elements of the project. These include the project background, purpose, desired benefits, budget, scope and organisation. The project foundation is used throughout the entire lifecycle – from the initial idea phase to project execution and final evaluation.
Solution
The agency established a project initiation group consisting of steering committee members, the project owner and a number of internal stakeholders (including representatives from operations, DW and IT). The group worked intensively to define and refine the scope, purpose, project objectives, etc., thereby creating the project foundation based on the project’s initial idea basis. The work was carried out through a series of meetings and workshops, ensuring that all areas of interest (including relations to the specialist systems) were taken into account.
The responsibility for facilitation, organisation and consolidation of results lay clearly with the project manager. In particular, the facilitation of the individual meetings and workshops proved crucial to maintaining momentum and ensuring the group remained motivated throughout the process. The organisation’s strong focus on the importance of digitalisation also meant that the meetings were given high priority – and it quickly became clear to participants and stakeholders that everyone’s contributions were vital in ensuring high quality in the future system.
The analytical and clarifying work in the initiation phase resulted in a project foundation with six concrete project objectives for the final project:
- A concept model for the most commonly used concepts related to reporting, including the development of definitions for the cross-organisational concepts used within the agency – for example ‘what is a case’, ‘what is a field’.
- Data models to create an overview of data relationships for the data in the upcoming staging environment, including a mapping of data that can help streamline work in the DW system.
- A data dictionary describing the meta-information for the data used. This includes information such as type, format, properties, purpose, relations to other data, etc.
- Process descriptions of business workflows related to, for example, the use, creation and modification of data. These are necessary to ensure that changes in the individual specialist systems are reflected across the remaining systems and to support the use of the models.
- Data delivery agreements with data owners, ensuring clarity on which data must be delivered where, when and in what quality.
- Establishment of the staging environment to support the data warehouse system in handling extraction, enrichment and transformation of data from the specialist systems.
The members of the project initiation group agree that the work of defining the scope, purpose and project objectives – while simultaneously ensuring clear boundaries – has been essential in ensuring that the final project can deliver strong results for internal stakeholders and at the same time meet both national and international reporting requirements and expectations.
Result
The Danish Agricultural Agency is now working on the main project based on the established project foundation. The expected outcome of the final project is that the agency will have created a platform to support reporting. The actual value of the platform project will be realised through other projects and areas that will use the reporting. The platform project therefore forms (part of) the foundation for enabling the agency to achieve the goals under ‘digitalisation at the centre’, which focuses, among other things, on standardising and digitalising the agency’s core processes.
Facts
- The project foundation was created in 7 weeks
- 8 people participated
- The total project budget is DKK 4.7 million
- kaastrup|andersen was responsible for the facilitation and project management of the work to establish the project foundation
The process of scoping the project objectives and defining the project foundation gave us new insights, as well as a better understanding of the cross‑organisational needs within our agency. After this thorough preparatory work, we feel fully confident about initiating the actual project.
Henrik Berg
Unit Manager, Data and Analysis
