American Electric Power uses Acumen Suite to Support Project Management Maturity
American Electric Power (AEP) is one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, delivering electricity and custom energy solutions to nearly 5.4 million customers in 11 states.
AEP owns the nation’s largest electricity transmission system, a more than 40,000-mile network that includes more 765-kilovolt extra-high voltage transmission lines than all other U.S. transmission systems combined.
The Project Controls & Construction group at AEP supports company-wide generationrelated projects of all sizes, ranging from $10 million to $1 billion or greater.
After using several disparate systems to manage these projects, the group was struggling to easily obtain project information and sought out a solution to consolidate their data and improve the quality of their schedules.
A Look to the Future
The AEP team plans to expand their capabilities by implementing Acumen Risk (another component of the Acumen suite), as well as integrating data from Acumen Fuse with their EVMS System currently in development. Finally, the Project Controls & Construction group plans to educate internal and external groups on their new processes and the benefits gained by incorporating Acumen Fuse into their project management toolset.
Challenges/Objectives
♦ Because Project Controls & Construction (PC&C) team typically work with many different subcontractors, they were having a hard time checking the health of their fully integrated schedules on a regular basis.
♦ Project information was in many different places, and the team was using more than 15 different filters in their existing software at any given time.
This amounted to a huge amount of work for the Scheduler to integrate all applicable information and updates to prepare for weekly check-in meetings and ongoing baseline reviews.
♦ Project Controls Supervision also had a hard time investigating the quality of schedules, as they were relying on disorganized data in multiple places; and Project Management didn’t have a simple view into the quality of schedules.
Solution
♦ AEP investigated available tools that could help them consolidate data and improve overall scheduling process – ultimately deciding to implement Acumen Fuse.
♦ Using Acumen Fuse, the Principal Scheduler and other key contributors developed new processes around the tool.
They used the S2 Diagnostics tab to identify the key metrics or general “health checks” they would use for each schedule, and customized additional metrics to meet internal PC&C requirements.
♦ The team also adjusted their P6 archiving process so they could leverage the detailed forensics capabilities of Acumen Fuse and gain insight into schedule changes made over time.
♦ All of the new parameters have been saved as a standard workbook that is used across the entire PC&C group.
Benefits
♦ Since implementing Acumen Fuse, AEP has experienced the following key benefits:
»» A defined process for checking the quality of schedules
»» The ability to use AEP standards to check each point, helping to enforce their internal guidelines and procedures
»» Customizable metrics so that changes in processes and procedures can be considered
»» Expanded modules that accommodate Project Management maturity
»» The ability to use Acumen’s forensics capabilities to analyze changes in schedule
