Regionalwerke AG Baden simplifies project work with Stackfield

About Regionalwerke AG Baden

With passion, Regionalwerke AG Baden supplies the Baden region (Switzerland) with fresh drinking water and energy and offers its customers practical energy solutions and services. The company prioritizes the needs of its clientele and offers a professional and reliable service.

Marcel Kühni has been with the company for over 20 years and is involved in numerous projects in his position as IT security manager. His goal is to drive digitization forward and simplify project work in the company.

The initial situation

Due to the digital transformation, Regionalwerke AG Baden was confronted with a large pool of projects (such as the introduction of a smart meter or the expansion of IT/OT systems). Communication between the project participants was mostly happening via email and there was no central data repository for the documents either, which made collaboration difficult. In addition, a central overview of the status, deadline and priority of each project was needed. An appropriate collaboration tool would therefore bring advantages, as Kühni envisioned. Thus, in 2020, he set out to find a suitable software, quickly came across Stackfield, and was immediately impressed by the possibilities it offered in terms of project management, communication, and data protection.

First experiences

After Kühni was convinced by the tool thanks to a successful testing phase, Stackfield was initially deployed in a small team on a project basis. Due to the small number of users, the rooms remained manageable for the time being, so that everyone could familiarize themselves with the platform at their leisure. Fortunately, Stackfield was very well received by the team. Word spread quickly, and other employees contacted Kühni and asked for access. This way, its use slowly spread throughout the company.

A customized room for each use case

To get the most out of each room, Kühni gives a lot of thought in advance to how the content should be mapped and structured. Depending on the intended use, other modules are activated, custom statuses and labels are defined, and custom fields are added, for example in the "IT Project Portfolio" room. Here, each project gets its own task. Using the list view in the tasks module, Kühni builds a grid structure that makes all relevant information visible at a glance. Using the room settings, Kühni has defined specific custom fields so that further details can be added to each task. The task card remains structured, as each piece of information has a field designed for it. In the list view, each custom field is displayed as a separate column. This way, Kühni maps, for example, the category of the projects ("Kunden-Prj" = Customer Projects, "IT-Infrastruktur" = IT Infrastructure, etc.) or the client in the overview.

Cross-department project work

With approximately 150 project rooms, Regionalwerke AG Baden uses Stackfield on a very large scale for projects as well as for team coordination. The platform not only facilitates projects within a team or department but also acts as an interface between employees across the entire company. This has made a lot of things easier, according to Kühni. Since each user is only included in projects that are relevant to that person, information remains easily and quickly accessible. Exchanges between project team members are no longer done by phone or email, but via the Direct Messages or topic-based, for example in the comments section of a task. With Stackfield, this is such an intuitive process that Kühni has few internal support requests and therefore rarely needs to contact Stackfield's Support.

Managing externals with Stackfield's user roles

Working with externals takes a large part of project work and can be easily managed with Stackfield. External people are added to the organization and the corresponding room with the user role Guest. This way, they can participate in the project and work on the tasks along with everyone else, however, they do not have any other access to the rest of the organization.

More transparency towards management

Another advantage of Stackfield: Projects can be mapped transparently. This is a great help for management as they can easily follow the progress of work and have an overview of ongoing projects. If special reports are required, Kühni compiles them. To do so, he uses the filter functions in the room to create a view that displays all the necessary information and then exports it. He then forwards the export directly to management.

This is what makes Stackfield special