The Tallinn Environmental and Municipal Services Department (KEKO) has a broad function and complex workflows. How do you manage hundreds of investment projects and create transparency in a structure where resources are shared? Ave Habakuk shares her experience of modernising the department’s operations and implementing PlanPro software.
The Environmental and Municipal Services Department (KEKO) has a large and broad area of responsibility – our portfolio includes everything from street construction and maintenance to preserving biodiversity in the city and cemetery services. In terms of Tallinn as an organisation, our complexity can be described this way: whilst most departments are responsible for implementing one area of the “Tallinn 2035” strategy, KEKO is responsible for three and contributes significantly to two others. Beyond the diversity of sectors, the content of our work is highly varied – we’re responsible for strategic planning, sectoral policy development, implementing investments, and maintaining the built environment. Additionally, roughly a third of the organisation deals with granting building rights. In total, KEKO operates with just over 100 people.
From 2023 onwards, the department underwent a major period of self-reflection and rethinking activities, during which we restructured around matrix management. The department has three services, each responsible for a specific process (such as maintenance or strategic planning), but these services run horizontally through the organisation and support those processes. For instance, the playground service involves people from six different departments.
Before implementing PlanPro, the department didn’t have a unified work plan. There was no environment from which to get an overview of planned investments or the status of their implementation; nor was it possible to view one department’s tasks in the context of services. Complete chaos reigned. The main challenge was the inability to see what a neighbouring department or service was doing. Yet because resources were shared between them, any coordination was impractically manual.
Before implementing PlanPro, the department didn’t have a unified work plan
Implementation began gently – all departments were given the task of entering their next year’s plans into PlanPro. I didn’t micromanage or demand a strictly defined format, but rather emphasised that each department could decide for itself how to make the software useful for them. Some recently joined department heads had previous experience using PlanPro – I began using their setups and work practices as examples to spark interest in others. Over the course of the year, as we became better acquainted with the possibilities and took advantage of continuously added new functionalities, I offered department heads solutions for customising PlanPro to free their desks from information coordination tasks.
Our first major success was creating a workflow for tracking investment projects. KEKO has approximately 600 investment projects in various phases on its books at any given time – from street reconstructions to playground constructions. As my background is in product management, once I became familiar with the urban street construction process, I quickly realised that tracking investment projects in a Kanban view would be helpful. Each phase an object must go through was described as a status, creating columns. We agreed that project managers would report at least once every fortnight on what had happened with objects in active development.
The Kanban view allowed anyone – whether a department head, a colleague from another department, the head of the agency, or the mayor – to quickly check the status of a project and find the person responsible to ask for details if needed. The first sweet victory after implementing this approach was seeing how the head of the design and construction department’s calendar cleared up, and instead of mediating information, they could start working on substantive development.
KEKO is now beginning its third year with PlanPro, and the progress has been tremendous. We now have plenty of internal best practices to use as examples and inspiration. The city organisation more broadly has become more skilled users, and completing each period and reflecting on it has provided ideas for how to do better next time. Implementing PlanPro has certainly helped create connections to how we contribute to Tallinn’s strategic goals. This value will certainly grow in the future, but the initial win has been a better understanding of how we use resources.
KEKO is now beginning its third year with PlanPro
I must continue to acknowledge that, in my view, PlanPro isn’t ideal project management software for a KEKO-type organisation – each of our project managers simultaneously handles several large, complex projects with many parties, and the software’s navigation and filtering capabilities aren’t always sufficient for us. However, PlanPro is an excellent documentation environment, which is very important functionality for our organisation.
In addition to using PlanPro for creating and monitoring work plans and building our investment information workflows into it, I’ve recently helped create several solutions related to contract tracking. For instance, in the maintenance sector, different services have numerous ongoing contracts. Previously, we lacked an environment where we could add clear summaries of changes to a contract or comments about shortcomings (to do better next time). Nor could managers get an overview of expiring contracts to plan preparation for new procurements.
We need an entirely different kind of contract tracking for granting building rights. We sign infrastructure construction contracts with developers, and there too are several recurring phases. First negotiations, during which the contract goes back and forth between us, the legal service, and the developer, and later, once the contract is signed, we must monitor its fulfilment. I helped build a workflow in PlanPro that allows us to understand what phase each contract is in and whose hands it’s currently in.
I’d also recommend others start gradually – be patient, find working use cases, and talk about them publicly. It’s worth having the main user speak with colleagues to discover and create different solutions in PlanPro. Appetite grows with eating – we’ve just started implementing use of the risk module, we’d like to adopt the budget module, and we’re constantly considering whether one process or another could be supported by a workflow created for it.
Tallinn Urban Environment and Public Works Department makes sure there is a functional and pleasant living environment in the capital, organizing environmental and nature protection and providing public services in the utility sector.
Loe rohkem PlanPro vestluste tarkvara võimaluste kohta siit: https://planpro.ee/en/project-management-and-task-management/
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