Bridging The Gap Between Engineering and Operations For Peak Performance

Engaging the experiences and insight of internal staff is the key to building organizational agility and efficiency within water and wastewater utilities. Using human-centered design tactics, the City Utilities of Fort Wayne (City Utilities) engaged a cross-departmental team to build a better model for capital project delivery by tackling the functional gaps between operations, engineering, and maintenance crews – common to most utilities. Through a series of work sessions, City Utilities identified organizational and culture-related challenges to effective internal partnerships, and then constructed a roadmap for overcoming these challenges to maximize the value of capital projects and improve operations. City Utilities, a platinum award winner for utility management, is a regional utility that serves a population of approximately 240,000. The Utility has 107,000 customer accounts and annual revenues of $159 million. There are 362 FTE's who provide water treatment (72 MGD, rated capacity) and distribution (1,435 miles), wastewater treatment (100 MGD rated capacity) and collection (1,430 miles), and storm water management. The Utility has a combined sewer system and is under a consent decree.
City Utilities has a legacy of engineering excellence with a demonstrated commitment to engaging all capital project stakeholders, however similar to other organizations, maintaining effective communications between engineering, operations, and maintenance staff through the development, design and completion of capital projects can be difficult. In some utilities, this lack of collaboration has grown into departmental cultural identity. Based on a global survey, 80 percent of utility professionals feel unempowered to bring ideas or new insights to their organization (WRF 4642). Cultural barriers to collaboration are the prime culprit for this issue. This issue costs utilities in the near and long-term. Organizational silos can create inefficiencies in operations, decrease staff performance, and increase turnover in the workforce.
Leveraging a recent organizational design review, City Utilities hosted collaborative sessions to identify the draw backs of silos and develop concrete actions for building a better approach for leveraging the insights and strengths across departments. Acknowledging the need to navigate the touchy subject of culture and identity, City Utilities engaged Arcadis to facilitate a series of work sessions that leverage human-centered design tactics to breakdown the challenge into manageable pain-points that could be addressed by the utility. Arcadis worked with City Utilities to select key stakeholders that represented a wide range of experience and perspective across engineering, operations, and maintenance departments. Based on a series of interviews, the team created engineering and operations personas to summarize the perspectives of staff while disassociating the challenges from stakeholders. Personas compile individual experiences into a composite representing the thoughts, words, actions and feelings of key stakeholders. Effective use of personas conveys stakeholder experience without personalizing the challenges and tap the power of storytelling for collaborative solution development.
Using the composite personas of Operations & Maintenance (O&M) and Engineering stakeholders, Arcadis facilitated a series of work sessions to develop a new approach to collaboration using the capital projects' process and key decision points for plant and pipeline projects. Separate facilities (i.e., plants) and linear assets (i.e., pipelines) work groups were formed to develop journey maps for each persona that captured the process followed for project development, delivery, and transfer of ownership. Work groups used the personas to break down the journey maps into incremental steps as well as evaluate current performance of decision points. From this process, the team identified pain points in the process that could be turned into a powerful opportunity for collaboration. Work groups studied these opportunities to identify contributors to organizational silos. Specific factors included limited time-availability of key staff, delegated engagement, limited preparation, unclear reason for engagement, uncertain authority, and assumption that changes can be made later in the process. In addition, it was realized that Engineering and O&M stakeholders held different priorities as it relates to assets. For example, operations and maintenance staff often value system reliability and efficient operations as key project priorities, while engineering staff often must prioritize cost and regulatory compliance while designing a project. These project priorities and the associated reasons were not always communicated effectively as projects took shape, leading to frustration between operators/maintainers and engineers. The work groups identified five key points in the planning, prioritization, design, construction, and transfer of ownership phases that maximized the impact of cross-departmental collaboration. Using these five points and design thinking tactics, the work groups developed a range of ideas to maximize the value of cross-departmental partnerships for the capital program. Through a series of brainstorming, sharing, and voting sessions, the groups shortlisted ideas for development into critical success factors (CSF). Solution teams were formed to further define near and long-term actions, as well as needed resources for each CSF. The actions were compiled into a roadmap that sequenced them into those that can be implemented immediately, those with prerequisites, and those that are longer term aspirations to maximize the value of collaboration through the project delivery process. In addition to the roadmap, the work groups identified guiding principles that frame the way in which the team collaborated. Each of the seven guiding principles also had concrete actions identified that serve to build a culture of collaboration beyond the capital-related process. Using the CSFs and guiding principles, City Utilities is now scripting and piloting each collaboration point identified by the work groups to demonstrate how Operations, Engineering, and Maintenance staff should work together. This presentation leverages IBM and IDEO-based design thinking tactics in a meaningful case study to equip utility managers to address the complex challenge of engaging staff in discovering opportunities to improve operations. Participants will be introduced to specific tools such as stakeholder analysis, persona development, journey mapping, idea development, change management practices, as well as lessons learned that will help utility managers avoid common mistakes. By leveraging these tools, utility managers will be able to leverage the power of internal staff to improve operations.