1. Business Challenge
The Work Management teams within the Transmission and Distribution divisions of a major electric utility had responsibility for managing the work defined in the strategic business plans developed by Asset Management. That included planned maintenance programs, development project work, and forecast customer demand program work. Work was planned and scheduled by regional planning and scheduling teams and executed mainly by internal project and Lines teams.
The Work Management groups analyzed program and project performance and delivered insights about the portfolio of planned and demand work to inform work priorities and capital allocation decisions. However, they lacked the capability to reliability forecast the resources required to deliver on the business plan across a multi-year horizon. There were attempts at high-level “sense checking” of business plans at the management level, but there was no estimate of resource demand by program and geography. Consequently, the business did not have a reliable means to proactively anticipate the scope, scale, timing, and location of potential resource imbalances so that the organization could avoid them becoming an issue.
Furthermore, the company was repeatedly unable to complete the planned work outlined in the business plan (up to 50% of some planned program work in some cases). In part, the cause was increased demand for customer-driven work. However, the more significant issue was the inability to see and react to shifts in resource requirements in time to make adjustments. That led to Transmission and Distribution business units falling behind on priority maintenance work and increasing reliability risk.
The Engine Room was engaged to support the Work Management groups in developing a multi-year resource forecast capability to deliver a holistic view of all Transmission and Distribution work, including committed and planned jobs, as well as probable work and inter-business unit requests. The resultant forecast model needed to allow for assessing Design and Lines resource capacity imbalances over a 36-month rolling period by work program/project for each operations centre within a geographic region.
2. Actions Taken and Tools Used
The Engine Room engagement to develop, validate, and deploy the new strategic resource forecast model for Transmission and Distribution Work Management followed a straightforward process, including:
| Requirements Definition: Conducted the initial discovery phase involving Work Management stakeholders representing each work-type sub-team to define the requirements of the resource forecast model. A series of working sessions defined scope considerations, including work types, program requirements, and projects (committed, probable, and potential). Then for each work element, the demand outlook, forecast timeframe, granularity, resource types and levels for supply-side outlook, and regional forecast with operating centre breakdown were considered. Requirements were validated with other Transmission and Distribution business functions to confirm requirements were fit for purpose. |
| Methodology Definition and Data Gathering: Collaborated with Work Management leads representing each sub-work type (planned maintenance programs, customer demand programs, and projects) to define relevant forecast methodologies. Collected the relevant historical and business plan information to inform forecast assumptions. Developed basic resource supply method and collected current and historical information (staffing levels by level, billable ratio, etc.) to inform supply-side resource forecast assumptions. |
| Base Model Development and Testing for a Pilot Region: Developed an Excel-based model to calculate resource demand by individual work program and project on a quarterly basis over a multi-year period. Build supply-side forecast for in-scope resource types. Built resource balance templates to compare resource supply and demand by resource type and operations centre, which also rolled up to a regional summary with a tabular and graphical data presentation. Conduct quality assurance review to validate all forecast calculations and review with relevant stakeholders for feedback. |
| Full Division Model Build-out: Based on the pilot base model, the model for the remaining geographic regions was built out, and a division-level regional summary for resource supply/demand balance was compiled. Refined supply-side forecasts for Lines Operations based on revised data input and methodology were included. |
| Business Plan Update and Findings Review: Updated the model with the final company-approved business plan and reviewed resource capacity findings with senior leadership. |
3. Business Results
The initial iteration of Work Management’s new strategic resource capacity planning tools delivered immediate benefits to several teams across Transmission and Distribution.
Firstly, Work Management was able to objectively confirm that the annual business plan was significantly underfunded because there was limited capacity to complete planned maintenance and project work beyond the baseload of forecast customer work. More resources were required to execute the plan. Furthermore, it showed the breakdown across regions and operations centres, highlighting those with a significant forecast shortage compared to those in balance and those with a surplus. This new analytical capability allowed Work Management teams to recommend funding redirection on the business plan to Asset Management. They also suggested potential short-term resource reallocation opportunities for Design Services and Line Operations management. Ultimately, this analysis was the basis of a business case by Work Management for the Division to expand the scope of its contract work.
Beyond Work Management, several Operations groups used capacity planning insights to confirm the assignment of new resources to operations centres. The Distribution division also accepted a large tranche of work from a region in the Transmission division.
Ultimately, the forecast models were transitioned to the client for their go-forward use and maintenance following a knowledge transfer workshop and a detailed User Guide handover. The intent was always to build the initial model in a simple tool like Excel so that calculations were transparent and readily facilitated knowledge transfer. With time, once the model matured, it was expected that the client could transition to a technology that could leverage automation to streamline the update and analysis process further.
