Building NEMO – Adapting our technologies throughout Covid

Project Manager and Agile Team Lead Dana Taylor presented at the Engie Agile Summit today, where leaders within the group discussed using agile tools in this difficult period of Covid-19.

Here at Storengy, we have embraced Agile for many years, and our emblematic customer extranet NEMO has been developed using Agile methodologies since inception in 2017 (even receiving an Innovation award in 2018)!

NEMO (Nomination & Energy Management Online) is a business and customer-driven system, created by a very small team at Storengy UK – a select few key business stakeholders and one full stack developer – in response to evolving UK gas market-specific requirements. It is the core business application for the Commercial/Marketing operations.

Having these capabilities in place has allowed us to adapt how we work during the lockdown. For example, we use OneNote to capture feedback in real-time, as well as to share and access essential aspects of workshops; we utilise Teams for our meetings, and we use JIRA and screen share for all our story captures and prioritisation sessions.

Over the last twelve months, Storengy UK has focused on performance optimisation and automation. We have developed the ability to feed live data from the gas plant in a secure way to inform the commercial, operational, and trading team as to what the “live” gas storage capacity is.

Not only that, we can deliver actionable updates with audio-visual feedback provided to the operators to ensure a fast turn-around when significant nominations/changes occur. All of this provides the business with less electricity consumption, which reduces cost and emissions, as well as faster commercial response to opportunities – which increases profit.

Feedback and having the best product is important to us, so the Commercial/Marketing team constantly engages with our customers to identify any development requirements or improvements that are suggested.

We are on an ongoing journey of development, and NEMO’s continuous evolution perfectly matches the evolving needs of the business. Due to the dynamic gas market in the UK, there was no off-the-shelf product we could easily buy and adapt, which is why the business decided to develop in-house.

Agile allows us to empower the business and its users to take charge of the development process. This way of working has enabled us to continue thriving throughout the pandemic, and we look forward to the year ahead.