A Leading UK Energy Company

Project Brief

Barnsnape Consulting have worked with this energy company over approximately twelve months to lead the definition of the programme to de-risk the management of its £7 billion of direct costs for energy.

Our brief was to provide a number of leadership roles to take the programme from being a well understood business concept, but with no definition, through to being a programme that was ready to implement.

What Barnsnape Did

The purpose of the programme was to deliver a new business design and hard wired operational processes and controls to better manage Direct Cost risks arising from Energy Pricing Risk, Energy Volume Risk, Liquidity Risk and Cash-flow Risk.

To achieve this the overall business scope of the programme included:

Costing and Pricing
Demand Forecasting
Portfolio Management
Settlements
Underlying Consolidated Data Platform for all supporting information.

This programme will also incorporate the cultural and organisational change needed to embed a more disciplined working environment and leverage the technology investment to exploit market and customer opportunities.

To help to achieve this, Barnsnape rapidly deployed a team with a mixture of specialist knowledge and programme skills to bring to life the business ambition. The roles undertaken included:

Programme management. To exploit the business opportunity, the benefit from the programme needed to be rapidly delivered. The programme was led throughout using Rapid Systems Delivery principles to achieve an accelerated delivery using a small team, with light project documentation, moving at pace to lead the project.
Business lead. Working with the business to establish the functional requirement and an optimised end to end process that would meet the business need and integrate with the wider company.
Analysis of the risks and contingencies for the delivery of the programme, enabling ongoing management of contingencies based upon a meaningful set of quantified risks.
The programme evaluated a number of IT solutions in search of an Integrated Application Suite and a shortlist of SAP, Oracle and Ventyx was evaluated. Oracle was the preferred strategic solution.
The programme was estimated ‘top down’ by experienced consultants who had a feel for similar programmes and also ‘bottom up’ using Function Point analysis. Resolution of discrepancy between the estimates gave confidence in the overall estimates that was subsequently borne out when completive bids from the Systems Integrators were received.
Building the business case for delivery of the programme. Based upon the earlier stages of work to prepare a compelling executive level sanction paper enabling sanction for the entire programme.
At the end of the definition activities Barnsnape undertook as readiness review to independently confirm that the programme was ready for a Systems Integrator to come on board to deliver the main programme phase.

During the delivery phase of the assignment Barnsnape Consulting have taken over the assurance of the overall programme delivery and business outcome.

Outcome and Benefits

Barnsnape mobilised quickly with a broadly skilled team to create this programme. The benefit was that by mobilising quickly, in a right first time manner, enabled the business opportunity to be maximised and the inherent risk to the business to be removed as quickly as possible.