Utility Executive

Managers and executives at water & wastewater treatment plants, consultants, and others interested in utility management will find this publication indispensable. Utility Executive focuses on such pertinent business issues as public private partnerships, capital financing options, strategic planning methods, public outreach approaches, and staff development.

Volume 12, Number 6    November/December 2009   NEWS The H1N1 Challenge: Is your utility prepared for a swine flu outbreak? Perhaps it’s because of the relatively mild nature of the virus so far. Or maybe it is memories of the bird flu scare that came and went 3 years ago with little impact. Whatever the reason, only one in three organizations is currently prepared to deal with a widespread swine flu outbreak, according to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health (Boston) released in early September.

2007 Author/Subject Index 2006 Author/Subject Index 2005 Author/Subject Index

This includes water and wastewater utilities, which have been designated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as critical to the nation’s security and economic vitality. According to the Harvard study, these “critical” businesses are no more likely to have a pandemic plan in place than nonessential ones.

And that’s a concern, emergency planning experts say.

Utilities See the Light

A wastewater treatment plant considers many things before investing in new technology: cost-effectiveness, system requirements, and state and federal regulations, to name a few. But when they invest in a renewable energy such as solar power, saving energy and improving their environmental footprint are usually the two biggest reasons given for the technological shift.

FEATURES

Creating High-Performing Teams 

Why some teams fail to get off the ground, and what you can do to prevent that from happening
David M. Mason

Have you ever given a team an assignment, only to have it fail to achieve the results you were seeking? I have. I have witnessed teams that seemed doomed from inception, while others blew the doors off of expectations.

The process of creating teams may not be as intuitive as it may seem at first. I’ve learned some tough lessons from some very unpleasant experiences that I’ve had the misfortune of creating. I’ve learned that several steps that make teams successful also can lead them to failure if not handled properly. They include

• defining the objective;
• setting realistic expectations;
• identifying the teams’ and members’ roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority;
• identifying the right composition of the team;
• communicating what’s going on to others throughout the organization; and
• choosing the right place to start the work.

Looking Past the Low-Hanging Fruit

Using asset management techniques to find the best and most proficient way to improve O&M efficiency
Steve McNicol, Dan Stark, and Cal Leckington

Operations and maintenance (O&M) efficiency in a wastewater facility is often defined in terms of labor hours and the variable costs of chemicals, energy, and solids disposal. Reducing the time and–or cost of these factors is generally considered the measurement of efficiency. We also recognize that meeting service levels for health and safety targets and responsiveness to our customers, as well as meeting regulatory requirements and other similar measurements, are all part of O&M efficiency.

But how do managers determine which areas within the organization need improvement? And when improvements are made, how is the apparent success or failure of these efforts measured?

Some managers make the right improvements due to instinct, experience, or just common sense. But without a rigorous method for prioritizing options and measuring results, there is no way to verify that a more urgent task is being left undone. To take the guesswork out of improving O&M efficiency, we can simply borrow the methodology generally used for managing the physical assets in our public works organizations.

Determining Service Levels Using Reliability-Centered Maintenance

Scott Maring, Dan Siler, and Scott Haskins

Things break. It’s a fact of life that every utility must reckon with. In recent decades, utilities have applied a variety of maintenance strategies to keep both failures and their associated costs to a minimum. Following the lead of private industry, some have used preventive maintenance approaches that call for routine checks and equipment overhauls on a preset schedule. If a device can be repaired just before it fails, they reason, they can minimize the risk and cost of failure.

Others say that maintenance is about managing the way things fail. Rather than overhauling equipment when it may still have useful life, these organizations
have developed maintenance approaches that require people to monitor the condition of each system component to determine when a repair is necessary and then take the proper actions to maintain it.

This reliability-centered approach to maintenance requires a formal process to determine a maintenance strategy for every asset. But as the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati recently discovered, such an approach has other applications as well.

BRIEFS

Quick updates on news of interest to the utility management professional.