Product Owner, Project Manager, IT Strategy Consultant

Vorwerk is an international diversified corporate group headquartered in Wuppertal. The main business is the direct distribution of household appliances (Thermomix and Kobold brands), complemented with financial services (akf-group) and cosmetics (JAFRA).

The goal of the project was to launch the new Thermomix (a smart kitchen appliance) model TM6 and its cloud-based recipe and feature platform called "Cookidoo".

Pascal joined the project after the launch of the TM6 as a product owner for several important verticals and systems within the Cookidoo ecosystem. He was responsible for a large development team (15 developers) completely staffed by an external supplier to Vorwerk located in Essen.
Already from the onset the stakeholders made very clear that they were dissatisfied with the delivery of the external supplier team and were actively working towards reducing their responsibilities in order to be able to replace them. Pascal quickly realised that the low output and quality of the deliveries from the team only partially were due to factors the team could control; low quality of the requirements, unrealistic expectations, and an inefficient planning process exacerbated these problems significantly. In addition to splitting the large team into three sub-teams of more manageable sizes, he therefore invested a lot of time in improving the quality of the requirements, managing expectations, and improvements of the planning process. He also prioritised freeing up time for the development team by making sure that self-service solutions for the second-level support were developed, by supporting a global quality improvement initiative, and by ensuring that continuous improvement became a part of everyday work. After some initial adjustments, these efforts led to a significant increase in the team's productivity and the quality of its deliverables. After a few months, there was no more talk of reducing the team's responsibilities and after half a year, the team was regarded as a role model for its way of working in securing the quality of its deliverables.

Keywords: Product Owner, JIRA, Confluence, SAFe

Pascal has been working as a subject matter expert in two technical due diligence (TDD) projects for venture capital clients evaluating whether to acquire a target company or not. The typical project is a two-week analysis of the target company’s digital product or state of IT capabilities (or similar/both), leading to a report to be used as a decision basis together with similar analyses of other areas.

Keywords: Entertainment Industry, Finance, Technical Due Diligence

Ringier is one of Switzerland's largest internationally active media groups with an integrated and diversified value creation chain and a yearly turnover exceeding CHF 1 billion. Their current strategy is based on media, e-commerce, and entertainment, with a strong emphasis on digital value creation.

In order to cater to Ringier's specific needs in the absence of a commercial offering fitting these, the Ringier Data Team built a central data platform leveraging AI technologies and journalistic semantics for in-depth analysis and personalisation of media content.

Pascal took over the role as the product owner for the data platform two years into the project. He was responsible for maintaining and prioritising the product backlog, managing the development teams in Munich and Minsk, interfacing with business stakeholders, and coordinating the efforts around the creation of a new web front-end showcasing the capabilities of the platform. One of the applications implemented using the data platform was an advanced content recommender for logged-in users on the “Blick” web page and mobile apps.

Keywords: Product Ownership, Business Development

Vattenfall is a leading European energy company whose main products are electricity and heat. Vattenfall delivers energy to millions of customers in the Nordic region and northern Europe.

Vattenfall Sales were in the midst of a strategic move from the sales of commodity products only (electricity and heat) to decentralised energy solutions such as photovoltaics and heat pumps. In the course of this work, the business model was revised with the goal of becoming a provider of tailor-made holistic energy solutions matching the individual customer's needs.

The assignment was to act as a link between the global business development and the Swedish sales organisations within the area of Internet of Things (IoT). The idea was to support the establishment of a technical platform having the ability to support future business models and customer offerings as well as catering to Vattenfall's operational and other internal needs (such as reliability/predictive maintenance).

As a business architect, Pascal analysed and documented existing capabilities and technical solutions either in place or under implementation globally within Vattenfall. He created a capability model for the business to be able to specify and classify the needs and requirements for future solutions, created a strategy, and was part of a global task force coordinating and driving the work within the solution sales area.

Besides his role as a business architect, Pascal also supported the propositions development team as a business developer within the areas of photovoltaics and batteries.

Alltid, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vattenfall, needed help in finding a new supplier to develop and maintain their systems and to ensure GDPR-compliance with very short notice. Pascal was tasked with driving this process as a project manager from Alltid's side by the acting CEO of the company and managed to find a new supplier and get a team in place within only two weeks. Subsequently, he coordinated and monitored the hand-over from the old to the new supplier as well as the start-up and implementation of the GDPR project.

Keywords: Business Development, Project Manager, Negotiation, IoT (Internet of Things), Business Architecture, Digitalisation, IT Strategy

The Public Health Service and Healthcare Administration (Hälso- och sjukvårdsförvaltningen, HSF) is responsible for ensuring that residents in Stockholm County have access to good and safe health- and dental care. This involves procuring and following up on healthcare services, but also knowledge support through various e-health services and responsibility for contagious health issues. Every year, the Stockholm County Council procures health- and dental care for approximately 50 billion SEK. HSF has ca. 630 employees.

The Healthcare Procurement Commission (VBU) covers a large part of HSF's core tasks with the processes of contracting/procuring, reimbursing, and following up on health- and dental care. The approx. 40 systems within VBU are managed according to pm3 and are divided into 4 administrative objects.

Pascal was involved in the establishment of the line function "VBU Development" by assisting its manager in establishing a project pipeline including a formal process for the evaluation and prioritisation of project ideas, recruiting employees, and onboarding them in their new functions. When the line manager left for a new position, he acted as an interim manager for three months until the new line manager started. He also worked as a solution architect in the same line function with the analysis of project ideas and participated in a variety of projects and assignments. Among the results of these assignments can be mentioned the following:

• Significant increase in the business organisation's IT procurement maturity due to better understanding of IT and digitalisation
• Production of quality assured decision material for VBU’s steering group allowing prioritisation of various projects and project ideas based upon a fixed set of criteria
• New process for executing system development projects established and tested
• Project aiming at digitising predominantly manual processes using a BPM tool established
• Produced and agreed upon strategies and policies on different levels
• Improved cooperation with other entities around strategically important initiatives leading to significant progress

Keywords: IT Strategy, PM3, Project evaluation, Projektil/Uppdragil, EA, Enterprise Architecture, SOA, TOGAF

The Public Health Service and Healthcare Administration (Hälso- och sjukvårdsförvaltningen, HSF) is responsible for ensuring that residents in Stockholm County have access to good and safe health- and dental care. This involves ordering and following up on healthcare services, but also knowledge support through various e-health services and responsibility for contagious health issues. Every year, the Stockholm County Council procures health- and dental care for approximately 50 billion SEK. HSF has ca. 630 employees.

The Health Procurement Commission (VBU) covers a large part of HSF's core tasks with the processes of contracting/procuring, reimbursing, and following up on health- and dental care. Its IT support was outdated and needed to be renewed to enable HSF to support the processes required by SLL's Future Health Plan (FHS).

As an IT strategist and solution architect in the project VBU IT Systems, Pascal has been responsible for the development of an IT strategy and a target architecture that served as a base for VBU's future IT systems.

Keywords: IT Strategy, EA, TOGAF, SOA

The Swedish Enforcement Authority (Kronofogden) is a Swedish stateowned administrative authority, which is responsible for ensuring that unpaid debts are paid. The Enforcement Authority was previously part of the Swedish Tax Agency, but since 2008, with its more than 2,000 employees, it has been an independent authority under the Ministry of Finance.

Despite its separation from the Tax Agency, the Enforcement Authority's IT systems were still developed and maintained by the Tax Agency's IT department. On November 1st, 2013, however, the Enforcement Authority's own IT department was created and took over development and maintenance of its own IT systems.

Pascal worked as an integration architect closely with the Enforcement Authority's chief architect, IT architect and relevant solution architects to establish a vision and strategy, designs, guidelines, and instructions for integration. Other tasks included helping to find suitable and cost-effective work and organization forms for integration work within the new IT department.

Keywords: SOA, ESB, Web Services, Java, JMS, .NET, ETL, Batch, Certificates, Guidelines and Policies, Patterns, Demand analysis, Technical Quality Assurance

The Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) is an independent Swedish authority under the government. The National Tax Agency's main tasks include taxes, public records, and creditor ships. With its around 10,800 employees, the Swedish Tax Agency is one of Sweden's largest authorities.

The Swedish Enforcement Authority was previously part of the Swedish Tax Agency, but since 2008, with its more than 2,000 employees, it has been an independent authority under the Ministry of Finance. Until the last October 2013, the Swedish Tax Agency's IT department handled the development, management, and operation of the Enforcement Authority's IT solutions.

Pascal worked as an integration architect within a unit that provides a service bus for the Enforcement Authority. Since the information handled by the Swedish Tax Agency and the Enforcement Authority is very sensitive, the requirements for safety and traceability are extremely high, which places great demands on the integration solution. In this role, Pascal has simplified and adapted the architecture of the service solutions to the requirements of the Enforcement Authority's integrations, supported and actively pushed the integration work for various projects and worked with the Enforcement Authority's IT and Solution Architects to establish a common view of how integrations should be built, managed, and operated.

Keywords: SOA, ESB, Web Services, WSDL, XSD, Java, Ant, JAAS, EJB, Kanban, PM3, Certificates, Oracle Service Bus (OSB), Oracle WebLogic Server, Eclipse, Rational ClearCase, Quality Center

Norsk Tipping AS is the national lottery in Norway, founded in 1948 and located in Hamar. The company offers a wide range of lottery, sports, and instant games in the Norwegian market.

Norsk Tipping needed to replace its legacy JCAPS-based integration solution and asked Netlight to organise a seminar for their integration developers, presenting different potential new integration solutions and how these fit their needs.

Pascal used his network at Netlight to collect all relevant integration knowledge and competence within the company, planned the seminar together with the client, and held the integration seminar with Norsk Tipping. He presented different potential technical solutions and approaches matched to the client's needs, wove in his own and his colleagues' collective experience, and talked about trends and important architecture and design patterns to consider. The seminar was highly appreciated, both by the client and the participants.

Keywords: Integration Patterns, System Integration

The Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) is an independent Swedish authority reporting to the government. The National Tax Agency's main tasks include taxes, public records, estate inventory and creditor work. With its around 10,800 employees, the Swedish Tax Agency is one of Sweden's largest authorities.

The Tax Agency decided to establish an Integration Competence Centre to centralise the agency's IT competence within the integration area, thereby increasing the quality of its integration solutions over time.

Pascal was involved in the establishment of the Tax Agency's ICC. This involved developing guidelines for integration work at the Swedish Tax Agency, preparing a product evaluation for a new integration platform, supporting projects in their integration work, and last but not least, supporting the agency's integration head architect.

Keywords: SOA, ESB, Web Services, Java, JMS, .NET, ETL, Batch, Certificates, Guidelines and Policies, Patterns, Requirements Analysis

Netlight is an independent, value driven consulting firm in management and IT. In 2012, Netlight had offices in Stockholm, Oslo, and Munich. Netlight has been a reliable supplier of qualified consulting services since 1999 and employed around 300 consultants at the time.

The management of internal projects - further developing Netlight's internal systems - places great demands on leadership, initiative, and flexibility, as consultants can disappear on assignments with a few hours' notice.

Pascal led the internal projects at Netlight which, at the most intense time, meant leading 10 projects in parallel with 23 consultants involved. In this role, Pascal produced significant improvements to various internal systems, processes and environments related to internal system development, and was involved in the introduction of a new business system.

Keywords: Project Management, Kanban, Agile Project Management, Scrum

If is the Nordic region's leading non-life insurance company with approximately 3.6 million customers. If has 6,900 employees and is owned by the Finnish Sampo Group.

External Connections was a project aimed at building a proof-of-concept for a new integration solution against one of If's insurance core systems. The new solution was to enable communication and information sharing with external parties in a safe, uniform, and controlled manner. The project's proof-of-concept demonstrated that the proposed technical solution could not be realized due to performance problems in the underlying system and the project developed an alternative technical solution. In this way, huge costs due to discontinued implementation work that would have been the consequence of an implementation without prior proof-of-concept could be avoided.

In his role as project manager, Pascal led a team of up to 11 people, both IT and business resources, and communicated with two reference groups of a total of 14 people. He has also been in close contact with external stakeholders (insurance brokers, partners) to verify requirements and coordinate cooperation.

In his role as the architect of the project, Pascal developed the architecture of the new integration solution. The insights gained in this PoC are the foundation of further work on developing a full-scale production solution.

Keywords: SOA, Project Manager, Scrum, Kanban, C#, WCF, SpecFlow, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behaviour-driven Development (BDD), Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft IIS, Windows Server AppFabric, MS SQL Server 2008

Edenred is the world leader in prepaid coupons and offers solutions that enhance people's well-being and improve the performance of organizations. Famous brands include Ticket Rikskuponger, Ticket Student Card and Delicard.

Netlight helped Edenred to build a web portal solution for the new product Ticket Rikskortet - Reimbursement Coupons - and an integration platform based on Microsoft BizTalk 2010 for the Swedish and Finnish operations. Edenred received a modern and well-functioning integration platform that, in addition to the project needs, also satisfies the needs of the business and IT of a platform in support of several business processes that span over multiple systems.

Apart from the management of the project developing the new integration platform, Pascal was also responsible for the architecture, analysis, design, development, and testing of both the integration platform and the integration solutions built on it, as well as the documentation of the system prior to handing it over to the maintenance organisation.

Keywords: Technical Project Manager, XML, XSL, C#, WCF, Microsoft BizTalk, Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft IIS

Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) is Sweden's premier bank for large companies and financial institutions and is at the forefront of business- related services in Norway, Denmark, and Finland. In Germany, focus is on customers in the medium-sized segment. SEB is a universal bank in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

The Output Management project was a strategic ECM (Enterprise Content Management) effort within the One IT Roadmap. Its goal was formulating a strategic architecture for output management/customer communication spanning over all business divisions.

Pascal worked as a strategy consultant and platform architect in the team who helped the customer developing a business vision for the area and presented an as-is analysis of architecture and system landscapes, a conceptual target architecture, and a gap analysis. The customer thereby received a solid decision base for the selection of a system vendor and for launching one or more implementation projects.

Keywords: Information Gathering, Research, Interview, Requirements Analysis, Rational Unified Process (RUP), ISIS Papyrus, StreamServe, Adobe Central Output Server, Adobe LiveCycle, IBM Content Manager OnDemand, FileNet P8, FileNet Panagon, Mobius ViewDirect

Nordea is with its approximately 11 million customers and approximately 1,400 offices the Nordic region's largest financial group and one of Europe's ten largest full-service banks measured in market capitalization.

The Nordea Transformation Programme aimed at building a new integration layer between banking and business systems, based on a SOA architecture. The program included, among other things, data modelling for virtually the entire core business.

Pascal worked with data modelling as well as in a project management support function. The project greatly benefited from Pascal's experience in data modelling and the project manager appreciated the efforts for project monitoring that Pascal performed.

Keywords: XML, Rational System Architect, MS Project

If is the leading property and casualty insurance company in the Nordic region with approximately 3.6 million customers. If has 6,900 employees and is owned by the Finnish Sampo Group.

The goal of the Automated Claims project was the development of a common Nordic process for automated claims management from start to finish, i.e. from claim registration over decision-taking and payment to closing the claim. This included a new web-based solution for customer interaction, an automated business process running on WebSphere Process Server, business rules implemented in ILOG JRules, interfaces and services against internal and external systems, as well as integrations with existing front-end systems for interaction with claims handlers. The solution resulted in a clearly increased use of the Internet channel for claims filing, increased customer satisfaction, and reduced workload for claims handlers.

If's automated claims management solution became a major success and is further developed and adapted to more product lines and areas. The number of claims reported via the web have multiplied leading to significant cost savings for If as well as increased customer satisfaction due to the quick and smooth claims handling.

As the solution architect for two key projects, Pascal was responsible for the development of the overall architecture and the design of a large part of the solution, including major parts of the new business process. In this function, he had overall responsibility for coordinating the development work carried out in several countries and projects simultaneously in close cooperation with the various project managers. He also drew up a data model for the claims domain used by the new claims management process throughout business areas, customer segments and countries, as well as by the integration services. In addition, he was responsible for the preparation of the solution documentation prior to hand-over to the maintenance organisation.

Keywords: SOA, BPM, BPMN, Java, XML, XSL, Scrum, IBM WebSphere, IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, IBM WebSphere Process Server, IBM WebSphere Integration Developer, IBM Rational Software Architect, Rational RequisitePro, Eclipse

Gambro is a global medical technology company that is leading in the development, manufacture and distribution of products and treatments for renal and hepatic dialysis, treatment of myeloma kidney and other extracorporeal treatments for chronic and acute patients.

The assignment was an SAP roll-out project at a factory in Florida with associated integrations. Existing ERP systems were replaced by an SAP installation and a new integration solution was built towards systems that needed to exchange information with the new SAP system. The integration was built mainly in SAP XI, but also included ETL flows via LSMW.

Pascal took over the responsibility for the integration solution half-way into the project and optimized and quality assured the solution. Apart from the actual development, challenges included coordination between the development team in Sweden, customer IT in Colorado, and the architect located in Australia. When Pascal left the project, the customer had a robust and optimized integration solution.

Keywords: Java, ABAP, XML, XSL, XPath, SAP, SAP XI 3.0, SAP ECC, SAP WebAS, LSMW

Vattenfall is a leading European energy company whose main products are electricity and heat. Vattenfall delivers energy to millions of customers in the Nordic region and northern Europe.

This was the second release of mySAP Utilities / SAP IS-U with associated integrations (more detailed description of the original project see below). The focus of the integration project was on developing several new integration interfaces and optimizing a number of existing ones.

Pascal was responsible for all integration work, including new integrations and optimization of existing ones, leading a small team of himself and another developer in Málaga, Spain. Performance improvement measures for the most under-performing integration interface resulted in an around 12 times faster execution time. Stability, reliability, and manageability of the integration solution improved significantly.

Keywords: XML, XSL, C#, ABAP, ALE, BAPI, IDoc, SQL, Microsoft BizTalk, Visual Studio, SAP ECC, Websphere MQ

Vattenfall is a leading European energy company whose main products are electricity and heat. Vattenfall delivers energy to millions of customers in the Nordic region and northern Europe.

The BiljEtt project consisted of the roll out of mySAP Utilities / SAP IS-U with an associated integration project. Several existing integration solutions were replaced by a central integration hub built on Microsoft BizTalk; in addition, IS-U was integrated with an existing SAP R/3 system using ALE.

In addition to a brand new mySAP Utilities solution, Vattenfall built the largest existing integration solution on Microsoft BizTalk in Sweden at the time, thus providing a modern, reliable, and unified platform that worked well with the new SAP system.

Pascal was responsible for the design, construction and testing of multiple integration clusters that integrated the new SAP system with around 40 other systems (internal and external) as well as for all integrations between the new and old SAP systems (bookkeeping transactions, exchange rates, etc.). He was involved in the restructuring of the integration platform for improved performance, the preparation of the client's maintenance organization prior to deployment/handover, as well as operation monitoring for three months after deployment. In addition, he was responsible for the communication and cooperation with two external suppliers.

Keywords: XML, XSL, C#, ABAP, ALE, BAPI, IDoc, SQL, Microsoft BizTalk, Visual Studio, SAP ECC, WebSphere MQ

Ericsson AB is the technical leader in the telecom sector and creates the future of mobile broadband and internet communications. The company provides innovative solutions in more than 140 countries, helping to create the most powerful communication companies worldwide.

Pascal worked in the AM (application maintenance) team in a Global SAP release project as a system developer in the SAP SD (Sales and Distribution) module, with quality control of forms in different languages (Swedish, English, French, German, Spanish), as well as with integrations between two SAP systems. The SAP release meant great quality improvements and new functionality in systems and forms.

Keywords: ABAP, RFC, SAP ECC