Swedish agricultural policy is about to undergo the biggest change in modern times. The Board of Agriculture is applying the project as its working method for the change process – in Antura Projects!
The changes are being implemented in several projects coordinated within the confines of a joint program. The program aims to prepare and examine all organizational processes, cover new regulatory requirements, and on that basis build an entirely new IT platform from the ground up to support this reform. In other words, the board has a massive infrastructure initiative on its hands.
Tomas Nilsson is the chief architect at the administrative unit of the Management Division and programme manager.
“We try to stay on the cutting edge when it comes to both working methods and technology,” Tomas explains. “As a result, we looked actively for a powerful project tool to enable us to run our projects more efficiently. I met Antura at an industry event for IT management and decided we would follow up with a meeting here at the Board of Agriculture in Jönköping. My network of project leaders immediately saw the benefit of Antura Projects, so we decided to perform a feasibility study in partnership with Antura.”
Tomas continues: “We laid the groundwork early on for the massive effort we knew was ahead of us. However, we were – and actually still are – utterly dependent upon decisions made within bodies like the EU Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, and our national political bodies. As a result, the final targets were moving at first, which imposed especially high demands for flexibility and versatility in our chosen project management tool. The problem was that we did not have the time to wait for those decisions. It would have jeopardized our capacity to reach the goal, even though that lies several years ahead of us.”
“The pilot implementation went smoothly, much due to the fact that the Board of Agriculture already had methods and procedures that could be immediately implemented in Antura Projects,” says Anders Haglund, Antura’s liaison with the Board of Agriculture. “There were also a great many organization-critical projects that were simply waiting to move in, which made the implementation both urgent and widely supported,” Anders concludes.
After the pilot period of six months, which enabled a thorough evaluation of Antura Projects, the Board of Agriculture decided to finalize the process with an order against a framework agreement with the Swedish state. The system is now in full-scale operation and is being used on an ongoing basis for practical project work, scheduling, reporting, and follow-up.