Upgrading an  Outage Management System

The company’s Outage Management System (NMS), was originally built in 2019 and was used by a small group of employees: about 30 dispatchers, and occasionally by Customer service reps and damage assessors during storms.

As part of a major upgrade, NMS would soon be used by hundreds of linemen in the field, who needed faster, clearer, real‑time outage information to work safely during high‑risk electrical work, especially when shutting off or rerouting power throughout the grid.

Fixing an electrical outage is a complex process that is accomplished by various technology and multiple people, starting from when a customer reports an outage to when a lineman goes in the fixes the outage, and finally when our dispatcher closes it out in NMS.

I partnered with Change Management on this project to do conduct current state research. We conducted XX interviews with dispatchers, linemen, damage assessors, and customer service representatives to understand:

• how the current restoration process works

• where existing workflows break down

• unmet needs for storm situations

Mapping out what we discovered:

Based on all the data I gathered from these interviews, I created a process flow diagram that highlights the technology used at each step in the restoration process and who is using it. This was incredibly useful at aligning the project team on a complex process.

There were a lot of stakeholder groups impacted by this project, and as the sole UX researcher/designer, I didn't have time to tackle it all on my own, so I decided to focus specifically on the lineman experience because:

• They were the largest stakeholder group

• They also were the most impacted because all the other stakeholder groups had used NMS before, while this would be brand-new to them

Linemen get their daily orders (including outages they need to fix) through he Salesforce Field Service app. In order to have a seamless user experience, instead of having to bounce between two different apps for similar jobs to complete, we needed a Salesforce integration. However, this was not possible due to a months-long backlog with the Salesforce team.

I helped with an interim solution:

Working with the tech analyst, we were able to come up with two possible solutions until we could get the integration we needed. Both were not ideal from a user experience perspective, so I mapped out both processes and highlighted how they impacted the linemen's experience.

I presented this visual to the project's steering committee, and successfully conveyed the complex processes to them and got alignment on the direction of the project, since it was their decisions to make.

Based on the findings from my focus groups, we were able to make the NMS app safer and provide relevant information to linemen at a glance.

Because I gathered feedback ahead of development, the team was able to implement the configuration at a much lower cost and catch potential issues earlier, such as the Salesforce configuration and address it quickly.

Project launch and stats TBD.