FIRST RESPONDER TOOL
Digital Factory partnered with Electric Operations to reduce company spending on shunts: temporary installations that restore power to customers during a “no-lights" event.
But shunts are dangerous, and the The New York Public Service Commission (PSC) mandates they be inspected every 10 days for defects.
With Con Edison laying roughly 1,500 shunts a year, these inspections demand significant person-hours.
The team had six months to streamline the shunt removal process to drive down inspection costs.
The large project scope meant roles were fluid, with each member contributing beyond what their titles demanded.
I collaborated with a consultant designer for the MVP, after which I assumed responsibility for product design and user research.
GOALS
1. Have a removal plan for every shunt at the time of installation
2. Facilitate a swift permanent repair of the damaged electrical structure
3. Acclimate EO crews to using digital tools and to working with IT
IN-HOUSE TEAM
Me – Product Designer/Product Manager
Francine N. – Electric Operations Supervisor/Product Manager
David F. – Product Analyst
Note: Digital Factory didn’t have dedicated product managers. The responsibility was split between an SME and Product Designer.
CONSULTANTS
Janul H. – Change Manager
Hongqiao L. – Product Designer
Lahiru T. – Lead Engineer
John C. – Scrum Master
DISCOVERY
Between 1880 and 1960, more than 170 individual electric, gas, and steam companies across New York City “consolidated” into what is today’s Con Edison.
Far from uniform, the grid that powers NYC is actually a patchwork of different electrical services with their own maintenance and repair requirements.
Our first challenge was to eventually accommodate the different "services" & shunt workflows into our solution.
But for the first project iteration, we would identify and focus on those shunts that were most common and most costly.
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A low-traffic shunt
Queens
A high-traffic shunt
Manhattan
DOCS AND REPORTS
To understand the problem’s scale and “on-paper” shunt processes we combed through docs and joined electric ops meetings.
Quantitative reporting was scant, dispersed, and manual.
With the help of the Business Cost Optimization (BCO) team, we stitched the picture together.
We learned that:
~60% of shunts are laid in Queens and Brooklyn.
The average duration of a shunt was ~50 days for high-traffic and ~120 days for low.
Customer availability was the the cause for delayed shunt removal in over ~70% of cases.
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The shunt removal workflow
Electric Ops Procedure - 5033
SOFTWARE AND SUPPORT
The backbone of the shunt removal process was the Control Center, whose clerics and Work Managers would use a suite of legacy tools, called Work Management System (WMS), to advance shunt removal work.
But without an API that worked across the system, processing a shunt was incredibly manual.
Calendar management system, part of the Work Management Software Suite.
YARD VISITS
Half our time was spent at the yards – local hubs where Electric Operations crews began their shifts.
A lot of different roles touched the shunt process. This varied between yards, owing to their unique operations and cultures shaped by their respective boroughs.
11th Ave Yard
Manhattan
Days at the yard could be hard.
Our research couldn’t interfere with customer work, which meant arriving at 5 AM to meet with crews before their 7:30 AM appointments.
The union crew members also viewed us “management” employees with a healthy skepticism, leading to some tense moments.
Someone threw a chair at Janul, allegedly, but I wasn’t there for that meeting.
REALITIES OF THE FIELD
Customer no-lights are similar enough in broad-strokes to have a standard process for laying a shunt, but the field had its subtleties.
Most no-lights are reported:
1. In the morning, when people wake up to find that their power went out while they slept.
2. After a weather event, where multiple building structures are without electricity.
New York City is wild.
In the first case:
After giving Con Edison any required access to the property, the affected customer usually leaves for work, school, etc.
In the second case:
Depending on the magnitude of the weather event, multiple crews are laying multiple shunts across their borough-territory.
In these instances, they won’t attempt a repair. But when it is all-hands-on-deck, crews other than Emergency Services are also laying shunts.
This meant the hurried nature and volume of installations caused crews to miss a detail or two when relaying info to the Control Center.
CRAFTING THE MVP
We returned to the yards with concepts to test, most of which resonated, but a few stood out as clear favorites.
Coupled with business and operational metrics, we aligned our vision with EO crews, admins, and leadership in an all-day vision workshop.
THE FIRST RESPONDER TOOL
The First Responder Tool was a tablet app that captured important on-site info.
Once a shunt is in place, we already have a plan to remove it.
STANDARDIZED INFO COLLECTION
No more playing telephone between clerics and crews.
ON-SITE CUSTOMER SCHEDULING
Guarantee customer availability for the removal appointment.
ALL SHUNTS, ONE SYSTEM
So no shunts falls through the cracks.
HOW WE GOT THERE
The First Responder Tool was the finishing layer in what was ultimately an effort to facilitate improved coordination between crews.
It would only be as effective as Electric Operations efforts to realize its new potential.
A RENEWED COMMITMENT
Working backwards from our KPIs, we coordinated service level agreements between Electric Ops teams that would reduce the time a shunt could remain in a team’s backlog.
Managers were held accountable for lapses.
Service level agreements held shunt removal crews accountable for their part.
LEGACY SYSTEM INTEGRATION
Working with the WMS team to build APIs for Work Management System enabled the First Responder Tool to automate shunt tracking and crew scheduling.
The WMS team was used to working in waterfall, so collaborating with Digital Factory, who were agile, represented a significant shift for the direction of Con Edison’s IT department.
HIGH SCENARIO COVERAGE
It was critical to cover a high percentage of shunt scenarios at release for the sake of getting Queens and Brooklyn on board.
They had the highest volume of shunts, the highest average shunt age, and were the most culturally resistant to process change.
We wanted to reinforce habitual usage of the tool, and didn’t want to give a crew a reason to revert to the old workflow.
It wasn’t a panacea, but small things add up.
New shunt removal workflow.
CONCLUSION
After releasing the MVP, we would spend the next few months bouncing between the yards to onboard Electric Ops crews and supervisors, collecting direct feedback, and offering support.
AFTER 5 MONTHS
90% tool adoption across all 5 service territories and a 33% reduction in the average shunt age.
We would later expand the tool's feature set before handing it off to a different team to maintain.
