In 2024, a significant disruption hit my utility’s service territory. The operational response was strong. The public communication was not.
Customers were frustrated. Regulators were not pleased. Government officials at the state level took notice. It was bad.
Weeks after the dust settled, leadership reopened the operations center. Not for another emergency, but to demonstrate that we were taking the feedback seriously and rebuilding trust. Hundreds of millions of dollars in commitments. Thousands of assets to install and miles of infrastructure to harden.
I found myself in a room full of executives building the reporting infrastructure to track our progress. The solution wasn’t technically sophisticated, a BI report connected to a spreadsheet the executives filled out, but it got the job done. It gave everyone internally a single place to check progress. It became the source of truth. The numbers shared publicly came from that report.
That was the first mile of a long marathon.
Shortly after, leadership started talking about phase two. They wanted to track progress in real time. The problem: we didn’t have the infrastructure for it. The current method was pulling extracts from the source system and stitching everything together in spreadsheets. Time consuming. The opposite of real time.
Enter David. He’ll figure it out.
I spent two weeks doing the data engineering and came out with a durable pattern to count asset installations in real time. Poles. Underground cable. Automation devices. Didn’t matter what it was, the pattern held.
The report had an executive summary on one side and a calendar view on the other showing daily progress against the goal. Users could flip between daily, weekly, and monthly views. It included a static daily target and a comparison of actual performance, ahead or behind. People loved it. I was proud of it.
Then came the request: can you make the target dynamic?
A few weeks later, I had a pattern that recalculated the performance target every refresh cycle based on previous performance. The report wasn’t just tracking progress anymore. It was showing how the target shifted in response to what the crews were actually delivering. You could watch the math respond in real time.
Most asset classes hit their targets without issue. Two didn’t.
For one, the sheer volume of the commitment meant the daily target kept climbing. Leadership brought in significant outside resources. As the vendors started executing, that daily target dropped fast. We hit it.
For the other, the process was more complex. The right device to the right location, programmed correctly, staged in sequence. We added status queues and stage-gate checks to the report. The granularity gave us what we needed to stay on track. We hit that one too.
The reporting infrastructure didn’t deliver those assets. The crews did. But when the data reaches everyone clearly, when the target is visible, when progress is honest, when the gaps are surfaced early, the organization responds. Leaders make decisions faster. Resources get moved. Work gets done.
That is not a technical outcome. That is what trust looks like when it is being rebuilt, one honest number at a time.
The setting changes. A utility territory, a factory floor, a production line running behind. The pattern does not.