1. Business Challenge
The Distribution division of a major electric utility had a mandate to improve the operational effectiveness of its day-to-day business, specifically focusing on the planning, scheduling, execution, and management of its portfolio of maintenance, customer, and project work. Leadership cited challenges in completing the planned annual maintenance work programs due to increased levels of customer driven work. Additionally, actual unit costs and OM&A related expenditures regularly exceeded budget targets, resulting in frequent surprises in business results, both spend and work accomplishments. This resulted in a strong top-down focus on variance reporting.
Distribution’s work programs and projects were centrally managed by a Work Management group, which acted as an interface between the asset management function accountable for defining the division’s planned maintenance and capital work and the operations centers responsible for planning, scheduling, and executing the work. Work Management was responsible for reporting on program and project progress, the forecast outlook, and risks. However, expectations developed through leadership reviews led the Work Management team to believe that they were responsible for work program delivery and the explanation of unit cost variance. Attempting to better control the work programs, Work Management had fallen into the trap of operating beyond their lane in trying to direct activities of other functions, which was counterproductive as it created tension with these other groups and kept them from focusing on the more strategic aspects of their role.
The Engine Room was engaged to support the Work Management function by assessing the current state and making recommendations for how they could reorient their focus to better fulfill the role of synthesizing information and communicating insights back to the various functions and leadership about how the business plan, the annual budget, and work execution were coming together.
2. Actions Taken and Tools Used
Following a thorough discovery process that involved interviewing all the managers across the Work Management group to understand their current state processes and challenges, it became evident that as a team they were overly focused on retroactive reporting as well as trying to manage activity that was inherently outside of their control per the organizational structure. To help them come to this realization, The Engine Room conducted a series of workshops as a guided discovery process with the management team with the objective of clarifying Work Management’s mandate and outlining how the role should evolve over time. Aspects of this process included the following:
| Challenging Role Perspectives: Reviewed Work Management leadership feedback on their primary accountabilities and challenged these based on industry leading practice and the reality of their organization structure. Confirmed which accountabilities were appropriate to carry forward, wholly or in-part, and those they needed to shed. The conclusion was that Work Management controlled neither the budget nor the resources executing the work, thus they could not possibly be responsible for program and project delivery. |
| Aligning on Role Focus, Challenges and Guiding Principles: Identified key aspects of the work manager role per leading practices, discussed specific challenges such as navigating an environment where there is a shared resource pool, and worked through specific “what if scenarios” for how a work manager should approach situations according to the refined accountability framework. This was completed for each of the different Work Management sub-teams, Planned Programs, Customer Demand Programs, and Projects. |
| Defining “A Day/Month/Year in the Life of”: Developed detailed descriptions of the key accountabilities and corresponding actions that work managers would routinely undertake in a typical day, month, or year. This was defined for each of the three Work Management sub-teams to provide a guide for the future state. |
| Rolling out to Supervisors: Having reached consensus on how Work Management leadership wanted to reorient their group to a refined mandate, they identified some challenges to immediately initiating this transition given the coordination required with other functions. After a period, the guided discovery journey of the leadership team was shared with the next level of Supervisors through a series of workshops. |
| Implementing Work Management-Wide: Oriented individual Work Management sub-teams to their future state mandates through a series of customized role clarity workshops. |
3. Business Results
With the entire Work Management function now oriented and more aware of the foundational elements of their role go-forward, they were able to direct more focus on their primary function – proactive analysis of work programs/projects and advising other groups and leaders about risk and performance improvement opportunities so that groups like the Operations Business Centres, Design Services, and Lines Operations can take the appropriate follow-up action.
The Work Management team became more empowered to focus on their core value-add functions such as delivering quality “so what” analysis, forecasting resource capacity per the business plan, and escalating risks and improvement opportunities to relevant stakeholders while redirecting unrelated colleague requests to the appropriate responsibility centre. As a consequence, other functions were required to assume greater accountability for the performance of their teams in the execution of work programs and projects.
The Engine Room supported the Work Management group through the early adoption phase by providing one-on-one and small group coaching to address specific issues. We also hosted a regular forum for Supervisors where they could bring their observations and questions from their teams to share and learn from other teams. From this we observed evidence that Supervisors were coaching the right kinds of behaviour within their teams and self-policing corrective actions, which indicates sustainable results.
Specifically, for the Work Management group this meant:
Doing More of This:
- Integrating information about the strategic plan, budget, and work execution results to inform work release decisions and rate filings.
- Delivering quality analysis. Forecasting financial performance, assessing program/project health, identifying risks and opportunities, and communicating insights to leadership and business functions.
- Assessing the impact of policy changes on programs and directing commercial decisions as necessary.
- Identifying trends and reasons for program unit cost variance.
- Hands on project management.
- Assessing longer-term resource capacity per the business plan and making recommendations back to Distribution leadership and Asset Management.
- Supporting process work with subject matter expertise as appropriate as a Process Consultant.
And Less of This:
- Feeling responsible for program delivery.
- Feeling responsible for unit cost results and making funding decisions.
- Facilitating, informing, defining and documenting process changes in other functions.
- Moderating technical decisions.
- Directing the actions of others outside of the Work Management accountability structure.
- Training others on their own business processes.
The Engine Room supported the Work Management group through the early adoption phase by providing one-on-one and small group coaching to address specific issues. We also hosted a regular forum for Supervisors where they could bring their observations and questions from their teams to share and learn from other teams. From this we observed evidence that Supervisors were coaching the right kinds of behaviour within their teams and self-policing corrective actions, which indicates sustainable results.
