Revisiting the Steps to Effective Utility Management: Part III
In January 2010, EGP continued a review of "Effective Utility Management: A Primer for Water and Wastewater Utilities" by defining the five "Keys to Management Success". This month EGP will visit the five steps to assessing your utilities current performance that will support utilization of the "Keys to Management Success".
- Assess Current Conditions – Make an assessment of your utility's systems and approaches for each Attribute (discussed in EGP's November 2009 newsletter) on the following 1 to 5 scale. 1 = effective, systematic approach and implementation; consistently achieve goals. 2 = Workable systems in place; mostly achieve goals. 3 = Partial systems in place with moderate achievement, but could improve. 4 = Occasionally address this when specific need arises. 5 = No system for addressing this.
- Rank the Importance of Attributes – Rank the importance of each Attribute to your utility, based on your vision, goals and specific needs. They should be ranked 1 for the most important Attribute to 10 for the lease important. Your analysis for this ranking should be independent from your analysis of rating in Step 1 above.
- Graph the Results – Set up a graph with the rating of Attributes on the y-axis, from higher to lower achievement, and the ranking of Attributes on the x-axis, from more to less important. (The Primer includes a sample graph.)
- Choose Attributes – The goal of effective utility management is to establish high-achieving systems and approaches for each Attribute. Those that have low achievement and are very important are good candidates for improvement. On the other hand, some utilities will focus on improving high achievement and high importance Attributes due to their long-term importance; or focus on Attributes that would lead to early successes to build confidence in effecting change.
- Develop and Implement an Improvement Plan – Once you choose to improve one or more Attributes, a plan must be designed to develop and implement the determined improvements. Your plan should include (a) a "gap" analysis that identifies the reasons for not achieving its goals, (b) development of a utility-specific strategy that considers how to incorporate customer interests, (c) specifics needed to implement the strategy, (d) Utility-specific measures to track progress toward achievement of the goal and (e) a time frame for when to measure the progress and need for potential effort. It may be useful to implement a project manager that sets guidelines and follows through to goals.
In our July 2010 newsletter, we'll explore the measurements of performance. As always, EGP PLLC is available for your water and wastewater utility's financial audit and consulting needs.
Adapted from "Effective Utility Management: A Primer for Water and Waste water Utilities" issued June 2008
At EGP PLLC, our personnel have a 25 year history of providing professional services to municipal water and sewer departments. We believe that we have more experience with municipal water and sewer departments than any other firm in the state and would like to provide our expertise to your company. Our firm continues to meet all educational requirements to perform governmental audits, including Single Audits under A133.
