ENGIE is a major player in the energy transition, operating in 30 countries and supported by nearly 100,000 employees. The Group covers the entire energy value chain, from production to sales, with a clear ambition: to accelerate the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Since 2020, several ENGIE entities have been using Tabsters. Today, 10 departments within the Group use the solution, with 2,000 resources entered into the tool, 1,820 projects tracked, 476 unique users, and an international presence.
Within the Group, ENGIE Direction Grand Public (DGP) serves as ENGIE’s commercial showcase in France for offerings aimed at residential customers. It is within this highly cross-functional business context, which is facing significant transformation challenges, that the Transformation & Projects Department has chosen to structure the management of its portfolio using Tabsters. The partnership with ENGIE DGP began in 2023 and now involves 140 users.
The Transformation & Projects Department at ENGIE Grand Public was looking for a solution capable of managing its entire project portfolio. Before deploying Tabsters, teams were working with a multitude of Excel files, PowerPoint presentations, and tracking systems that varied from one project manager to another. This fragmentation made consolidation, standardization of practices, and transparency for sponsors and decision-makers extremely difficult. Everyone worked with their own formats and tracking metrics, which made comparing projects more time-consuming and complex, especially when consolidating multiple progress reports.
The challenge, therefore, was to establish a common management framework capable of:
This focus on consistency was all the more important given that the Consumer Division operates in a cross-functional environment, with projects that combine business, IT, change management, acceptance testing, field deployment, and coordination among numerous stakeholders. The need for project management therefore goes beyond simply monitoring technical execution and also involves alignment, governance, and the ability to bring all stakeholders on board with a shared understanding of the project.
ENGIE DGP conducted a market benchmark in 2023, followed by a six-month comparative proof of concept (POC) between two solutions, including Tabsters. The selection process was structured around a detailed evaluation grid, with a particular focus on ease of use, flexibility, native consolidation capabilities, and actual alignment with business use cases. The team deliberately sought to put itself in the end-user’s shoes by testing the use cases themselves within the tools under evaluation, in order to assess both the functional promises and the practical ability to deploy the solution across teams. Following this POC, ENGIE DGP selected Tabsters and decided to pilot it on a real-world project before rolling it out company-wide.
Following an initial rollout on an SAP migration project with a strong business component, ENGIE DGP has expanded the use of Tabsters to its cross-functional steering teams. The solution is now used to structure projects, assign tasks, and track risks, decisions, actions, and budgets, while generating standardized reports for project management teams, project steering committee other governing bodies.
The use of Tabsters at ENGIE DGP is also based on a key principle: not to confine teams within an overly rigid framework, while still establishing a common methodology that provides sufficient structure. The solution has thus made it possible to implement a methodology tailored to the types of projects undertaken by the DGP, while maintaining enough flexibility to encourage adoption. This approach played a central role in the tool’s gradual adoption beyond the project management department alone. Project after project, the teams on the ground recognized the tool’s tangible value and began using it more widely in their own work.
Tabsters is also used to generate various management views as needed: project dashboards, batch views, portfolio views, data anomaly tracking, consolidated schedule views, medium-term workload tracking for teams, and visualization of interdependencies between projects. The solution thus serves as a reporting tool, but also supports management, helps project managers develop their skills, and facilitates coordination between teams, particularly through shared access to meetings, decisions, risks, and monitoring data.
The rollout of Tabsters at ENGIE DGP has yielded several major benefits:
Beyond these immediate benefits, Tabsters helps teams move away from ad-hoc, fragmented management toward a more mature, rigorous, and action-oriented approach. The solution provides a clearer view of a project’s status, makes it easier to anticipate deviations, and helps identify the actions needed to stay on track. This ability to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach is one of the solution’s key benefits in the complex, cross-functional environment of ENGIE DGP.
In this video, David Marques, Deputy Director of Project Management at ENGIE’s Consumer Division, discusses how his teams adopted Tabsters, from the initial benchmarking phase through to operational deployment and the gradual rollout of the solution across several departments within the division. He shares the factors that led to the choice of Tabsters, the practical ways it is used on a daily basis, as well as the benefits observed in terms of standardizing practices, improving management quality, generating reports, and enhancing the skills of project teams.
