25 Sep Utility Performance Improvement Case Study
One of the nations largest provincial utilities was targeting specific improvements in Safety, Reliability and Efficiency in order to meet internal metric targets and increase reliability and service to provincial ratepayers.
Actionable Approach
Using a multidisciplinary approach focused on process improvement, enhanced use of data, metrics and information and targeted leadership coaching focused on work execution, The Engine Room supported this organization in exceeding their performance expectations.
Safety – The most effective enabler of world-class safety is a highly engaged workforce. The Engine Room coaches used Leadership Acceleration to provide direct and immediate feedback to frontline leadership focused on:
- Positively resetting field safety expectations.
- Crews significantly involved in safety meeting prep and delivery.
- Providing leadership tools to guide the building of a safety accountability culture.
- Process improvements to streamline cascading safety communication.
- Improving safety meeting preparation, focus and management.
- Aligning dashboards to safety actions on leader’s individual calendars.
- Effective job-site visits (for feedback and coaching).
Efficiency – To impact efficiency Engine Room coaches focused on Vision & Strategy and worked directly with leadership at all levels including foremen to increase time on tools for skilled line crews through:
- Increasing frontline leadership time in the field and improving the quality of field visits.
- Raising awareness of metrics for leadership and crews to drive desired behaviours.
- Proactively dealing with performance issues and challenging circumstances.
- Establishing business review meeting structures to anchor results based expectations.
- Matching crew capacity to available work on a daily basis.
- Aligning 80% of leaderships tasks/actions to dashboard targets
- Supporting leaderships use of data and scheduling tools to manage crew productivity
Reliability – With a primary focus of providing reliable power and service to ratepayers The Engine Room coaches drove Process Excellence by working with managers and crews to improve outage response times and work on preventative actions that may impact the grid through:
- Providing tools to guide the building of a response time accountability culture.
- Communication and outage prevention action planning via revised meeting structures.
- Establishing controls for system component failures.
- Regional crew asset re-organization based on data and metric trends.
- Creating reliability improvement teams to strengthen large scale system improvements.
- Introduced a “fix it now” policy with immediate repair actions and documentation.
Results
“One of the most significant improvements I can attribute to this process is the sense of understanding and ownership that my team and I now have in our respective positions. This has given us the ability to manager our department and progress in a much more consistent and accountable manner moving forward. We have already started to recognize the improvements that this has made.” Dale Conway – Gaming Department Head
“In the gaming industry the critical issue is aligning employees and manager’s behavior and practices (especially those with the opportunity to impact the customer experience) with the overall business strategy and you helped us do that particularly around creating consistency amongst middle management given that they occupy the critical space responsible for ensuring that customers see consistent practices on the gaming floor.” Jovica Perovic – General Manager
“Duncan coaches in such a way that empowers managers to not only take ownership of their roles, but to think forwards instead of backwards. He changed our mindsets from “whose fault is it?” to “who is accountable and how do we resolve it?” This alone has created immense efficiencies amongst our team.” Kristine Jones – Marketing Manager
“Your coaching has made a big difference and I am pleased with what you have accomplished in a short period of time. So much so that your concentrated effort with staff has endeared them to you so much that they do not want to see you go. I feel the same way and as such am looking forward to retaining your coaching services so as to allow you to continue to work with me, Jovica and our management team.” Stan Walt – President