The Challenge

Pacific Northern Gas’ (PNG) goal is to fulfill its customers’ energy needs in the safest, most reliable, and efficient manner to maximize customer value. To progress towards this goal, PNG – along with AtlaGas (AUI) and Heritage Gas (HGL) who are all members of the TriSummit Utilities Inc. umbrella embarked on a business transformation to implement a new Customer Information System (CIS).

This collaboration allows the three Canadian gas utilities to standardize while supporting changing regulation requirements in the provinces they serve.  Additionally, the newly implemented CIS Solution will allow the utilities to enhance their business processes by adopting industry leading best practices and technology to deliver integrated customer service in an efficient and effective manner.

To ensure that the project objectives were being met PNG engaged Propel solutions to conduct an independent Health Check of the CIS Project to provide recommendations to ensure that project resources and stakeholder engagement practices were effective.

The Objective:

Propel Solutions was engaged to conduct a Health Check of the project which included the following activities:

  • Stakeholder Analysis – Propel conducted one on one interviews with key project stakeholders from PNG to assess the current state of the project, pinpoint key challenges, and identify opportunities to improve the project delivery approach.
  • Meeting Effectiveness Assessment – Propel attended 28 hours of project workshops to observe meetings firsthand to evaluate current structures and to provide an unbiased review of best practices from each of the stakeholders. Scorecards were completed to highlight overall meeting effectiveness against best-practice criteria. The resulting analysis formed a baseline for recommendations to improve workshop facilitation and participation.
  • 360 Project Review – Propel conducted a holistic review which included a deep dive of lessons learned from previous utility customers who underwent CIS implementations and other participants involved in the project. The resulting analysis was used to form a baseline of key project opportunities to evolve the project schedule.
  • Change Management Analysis – Propel (who is licensed to employ PROSCI Change Management) provided insight into the effectiveness of the current change management activities as well as conducted an ADKAR Assessment of the current level of engagement of the project stakeholders. Propel then provided a roadmap and framework to assist the project team manage the people side of change.
  • Project Scorecard – Propel evaluated project effectiveness against five key pillars – People, Data and Systems, Vendor Management, Project Management, and Change Management. This provided PNG with an overall scorecard to assess the current state of the project. Recommendations and quick wins were made to support a successful implementation of the CIS.

The Results

The Project Review and Health Check provided PNG with a baseline measure of the current state and identified opportunities to review project roles to maximize resource effectiveness.  Additionally, Propel identified opportunities to leverage best practices for vendor management, and increase buy-in from employees and customers through concentrated change management efforts.

Stakeholder engagement remained high throughout the analysis, leading to over 50 opportunities for improvement being identified.  Propel provided actionable recommendations to close the gaps identified to meet the project objectives.