Digital Grid Services

Digital Grid Services (DGS) is a data and analytics tool built to help a $7b company’s operations team and field technicians provide smarter, more reliable service to 3 million customers of electricity and natural gas.

Summary

The DGS initiative launched in parallel to an ongoing advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) deployment, which I also project managed. Because of my interest in digital innovation, I jumped at the opportunity to interview operations leads and senior directors, write requirements, and design the new solution from scratch with the help of my manager, Yibo Jia. Additionally, I monitored the real-time data and led daily standup calls with developers in the global delivery team to prioritize and outline the work to be done.

Challenges

Our project lead encouraged us to dream big, but because of the various data dependencies and silos, most of our ideas had to be eliminated. Until a future effort to implement a data lake could be put in place, our solution would have to integrate with multiple repositories containing approximately 8 million meters– a technical challenge in itself. Then, in order to scale up our small side experiment, we had to get buy-in with everyone from field services to the operations team to executive leadership.

HIGH-FIDELITY MOCKUPS

Solutions

We kicked off by running informal brainstorming sessions with the client, which everyone began to look forward to– it was fun to shift our thinking from being practical and analytical to a more abstract exercise. These evolved into relaxed interviews, as leads came by to unwind and vent after the work day and tell us about their latest challenges and pain points. Additional working sessions helped us understand how to build tools from an executive, operational, and field perspective.

Next, we discussed the priority and feasibility of each idea to develop a roadmap and sprint log. It started with achievable, easy wins and rolled up into more complex analytics once technical dependencies were resolved. We used an agile “factory” approach, so that while the developers worked on one design, I would document requirements, create mockups, and hold feedback sessions for proposed future dashboards.

Finally, to market and build momentum for the tool, the completed dashboards went on a special “roadshow” with the internal departments.

Learnings

Make it fun. The DGS team and the client were having so much that we often asked ourselves, “are we even working right now?” In retrospect, they were the most productive meetings! A playful culture can lead to more successful collaboration when team members can unlock new ideas through humor and genuine connection.
If something seems “self-explanatory,” you haven’t tried explaining it yet. When I started meeting with our global developers, I realized that simplifying my design visually didn’t necessarily make it less technically complex. After talking through the problem and learning from other team members, we determined that walking through a story from a first-person POV was a better approach.