Effective Utility Management Framework – More than Just an Assessment Tool

Conceived by the industry, for the industry, the Effective Utility Management initiative (EUM) is proving to be an excellent organizational framework to help water and wastewater sector utility executives, governance boards, policy makers, and regulators focus on ways to assess, audit, measure, monitor, govern, train and guide staff toward improved utility performance across the board. EUM has become an easily adaptable framework to plan and implement utility change management initiatives required to address a number of needs facing utilities. While there are many management approaches being used across the utility industry in the United States, like Balance Scorecards, ISO and other programs, EUM offers the ability to incorporate existing management systems and helps to bring order to a number of varying organizational optimization needs. The body of work contained within this study involves the processes, methods and outcomes associated with adapting the EUM framework to help enhance 5 separate utility organizations' existing management programs. The study discussed how added benefit was achieved from the EUM initiative to help drive each organization's unique performance improvement strategies to a higher level.The five case studies included in this body of work involves two organizations whose desired EUM adoption outcomes included guiding Management Audits (St. Louis MSD, Wilmington, DE Utilities), one whose EUM adoption was to train its senior leadership and unite their staff across departmental barriers (ReWa - Greenville, SC). Additionally, one case study includes EUM adoption as a pathway to develop a performance measuring and monitoring system (Providence Water), and the final case study reveals how using EUM as a mechanism to develop governance policy priorities for its Governing Board (Madison Water, Madison, WI) helped to establish prioritization of Board policy development.