OC01The challenge
The utility was implementing a new enterprise work and asset management system to replace a fragmented estate of bespoke systems, spreadsheets and heavily customised legacy technology.
The problem was that its three operating regions had been separate companies, merged over a decade. Many operational and maintenance processes were not aligned between regions, and some were applied inconsistently within a region.
Designing a single system on top of three different ways of working would simply have automated the inconsistency, at considerable expense.
02My role
I was the people and process programme manager on the client side, owning the process alignment workstream across six directorates.
That included specifying, procuring and managing the external delivery team, and reporting progress to the programme leadership.
03What I found
Asset information was spread across many systems with no common reference, so nobody could see a consolidated view of an asset's status and history.
Project managers were spending a significant proportion of their time searching for historical drawings and site information. Where it could not be found, contractors were paid to survey it again.
Data below ground was well managed. Data above ground was not properly archived or catalogued, with some drawings from the 1930s to 1980s existing only in hard copy.
04What changed
We mapped the as-is processes, then validated them by spending time alongside the people running them, in the field and in the office, capturing where the documented version and the real one diverged.
Those differences were taken back to regional process owners and quantified, then separated into what business-as-usual could resolve before the new system arrived and what genuinely required system change.
The output was a set of aligned to-be processes, deliberately designed generically because the target system had not yet been selected.