Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) delivers world-class services of electricity and water that meet the highest standards of availability, reliability, and efficiency. DEWA serves over 800,000 customers across Dubai, a flourishing global city considered as a leading hub of business activity in the Middle East and Northern Africa regions. Since its inception in 1992, DEWA has evolved and grown, measuring and adjusting the ways it serves its customers and integrating project management across the organization. Dubai has experienced unprecedented growth over the last two decades that transformed the city and propelled its gradual rise to global business prominence. This growth added complexity to the already daunting task of providing water and electricity services to consumers and businesses in a region with a population that exceeds two million.

"To keep pace with this growing demand for water and electricity services, the advent of green technologies, and the push toward renewable energy, DEWA strives to achieve the leadership vision which was translated into the federal and local strategies." As more and more projects were initiated, DEWA's leadership discovered that standard project management practices were not being observed across the organization, leading to decreased efficiencies, tempered innovation, redundant data, and an increased administrative burden on employees. At the time, DEWA relied on its 40 employed PMI certification holders to reinforce project management good practices. Because project ideas and strategies must be linked with data, workflow, and business processes, and because the complexity within projects is increasing, DEWA needed a way to measure, integrate, and streamline its project processes and ensure consistent practices organization wide. DEWA's leadership established a dedicated team, including senior management representatives, to begin implementing SAP software for its portfolio and project management and enterprise asset management systems. DEWA launched a multi-phase implementation project that concluded at the end of 2015. The first phase began in October 2009 with a focus on customer services.

Phase II followed in January 2012. It focused on procurement, stores, finance, and human resources. The third and final phase comprises enterprise asset management generation, projects and portfolio management for generation, transmission and water, fleet management, business preparation and consolidation processes for the financial department, and a project system for business support projects. Initiated in March 2014 and launched in September 2016, phase III aimed to standardize, simplify, and automate the enterprise asset management and portfolio project management/ project system processes. As a result of this implementation, DEWA is now more efficiently managing projects that support its strategic plan and the four distinct perspectives in its balanced scorecard: financial, internal processes, customers, and the support of learning and growth. Through DEWA's commitment to the delivery of sustainable electricity and water services at world-class levels of reliability and efficiency, and its continued appreciation of the value of project management, the United Arab Emirates, represented by DEWA, ranked first in the world for getting electricity in the World Bank's Doing Business" 2018 report.

Questions

Comment on the following aspects of the case study:

A. Based on the problems that DEWA identified, state the problem and indicate the approach they used in trying to address this problem. (4 marks)

B. Explain why it would be important for DEWA to develop a dynamic project team and why they would want to include senior management representatives. (4 marks)

C. Outline THREE (3) things the project manager would look at (before starting the project) to determine the scope of this project. (6 marks)

D. State THREE (3) things that the project manager would include in the project plan for DEWA and explain any ONE (1), clearly highlighting its importance to the project. (6 marks)