So, this is my first real post after returning from a long hiatus. I was moved to this posting by the staggering incompetence I’ve witnessed over the past 5 days from our local electricity provider, Public Service of New Hampshire, better known as PSNH. Actually, I think it stands for:

“Pretty Sure Nothing’s Happening”

or

“Purely Stupid No-Good Hacks”

First things first. You may have heard about the devastating ice storm that blew through New England last Friday. In its wake, about 1/2 million people were left without power, some 350,000 of them were PSNH customers. I’m one of them, and 5 days later, I’m still without electricity. Before I launch into the reasons for this post, I want to make perfectly clear that I do not include the countless crews (from all over the region) who are working night and day to restore power. They are the heroes of this catastrophe; many of whom do not have power themselves, yet continue to press on to restore the region to normalcy. They require our thanks, and certainly don’t deserve to be tarred with the brush that I’m about to use to paint the management.

FYI – the real reason I’m writing this, is that I read a few weeks back in the WSJ, that certain companies were starting to pay attention to the things that were being written about them online. Some of the more progressive companies were even reaching out to the offended (negatives do generally out-number positives), and while they can’t always make things right, they at least try to:

  • Understand why the person had a bad experience, and to a certain extent, show some empathy (in some cases, perhaps a coupon is offered)
  • Try to take something away from the situation such that processes can be changed to mitigate future problems

Now, I’m under no Pollyanna-ish misconception that PSNH is progressive or enlightened enough to be tracking its online reputation (hell, from what I’ve seen, I doubt management can read, let alone work a computer) but hope, as they say, springs eternal. Maybe someone up the food chain will Google PSNH, and see my little screed, and take something away from this about how the public would like to be treated when disaster strikes.

I think everyone can agree, that when you have 300K+ people without electricity, you’ve got a big project ahead of you. I’ve been managing projects for 15+ years, and one of the first things you try to do is get your arms around the scope of the problem. You try to understand what resources are available, then you lay out a plan (and rough schedule) for how to implement things. This is high-level of course, we haven’t talked about risk management, project costing, communications and other important project management concepts, but this is the basic idea.

Now I assume that PSNH was blind-sided by the scope of the damage from this storm. I’m therefore willing to cut them some slack as they went about surveying the areas affected and getting an idea about what they were up against. But hey, this effort should have been completed by Saturday afternoon, Sunday at the latest. From a resourcing perspective, they did what all utilities do in emergencies, called in help from other areas – and a great response too, from as far away as Canada! As of yesterday, they have hundreds of crews out there cutting down trees and repairing lines, and as I’ve said, the guys on the ground are the real heroes.

So, assuming that the people (managers) who are responsible for restoring power are doing their jobs, they have some sort of plan by which this will be accomplished right? One other thing we should talk about here to bring everyone up to speed is the concept of triage. You’re probably most familiar with the term from watching a TV show like MASH. Triage basically means deploying scarce resources where they will do the most good (e.g. get the most bang-for-the-buck). In MASH, that might meant withholding medical care from someone who was too far gone to have a good chance of survival and instead deploying Hawkeye and Trapper John to try and save the limbs of someone who they felt had every opportunity to recover and lead a full life. Sometimes (especially in the medical arena), triage isn’t pretty, but choices have to be made – you’ve got 20 wounded soldiers, and 3 doctors/6 nurses, someone has to go to the back of the line.

We do something similar when we’re building software. In the weeks before we ship a version, we meet to triage the bugs that are found in testing. On a system of any size, we might find 100-150 bugs in final test. Don’t kid yourself, not all of these are going to be fixed (with no disrespect intended to Joel Spolsky). What happens is some group of people meets regularly and decides which bugs are severe enough that you wouldn’t ship the release if they weren’t fixed. A bunch of factors figure into this: the impact on the user, what workarounds are available, reputation damage if it gets out, etc. Bottom line is there’s usually a pretty objective criteria for the triage process, and I assume that carries over into any other types of triage that may occur.

Take PSNH and the recent outage. I’m sure that some type of triage was in play, as it should have been. For example, I can imagine a triage scenario in which areas with Hospitals or Primary Care facilities were prioritized for power restoration over residential customers. I could further see Police Stations, Prisons, and major electrical sub-stations being pretty high on the triage list. So, if you’re lucky enough to live near a hospital, you probably get your electricity back pretty quickly. After the obvious high-value targets, it gets trickier. You might decide that it’s worth sending 2 crews out for 2 hours to restore 40,000 homes rather than 1 crew for 3 hours to get 30,000 back online. As I said, the deeper you go, the more subjective the criteria by which you deploy resources.

So, now that we’ve talked about triage, let’s talk about incompetence. Nobody likes to feel (pardon the pun), powerless. If we assume that PSNH managers are not stupid (a point I’m somewhat willing to concede), we must assume that all of the project management things I’ve spoken about have occurred, including triage. We also have evidence to suggest that progress is being made as power is being restored daily to more and more households. So, the burning question I have is, if you’ve done all of these things – Why in the name of good sweet Christ can you not tell me when I might expect to see my electricity restored?

The fact that PSNH refuses to provide information about when I might have my power restored is anathema to me. I can only assume one of two explanations:

  1. PSNH has not done any planning, they’re approaching the problem by letting the ground crews fix whatever they want, whenever they want, sort of like a pack of feral dogs, or the gangs from A Clockwork Orange. If this is the case, they’re not only incompetent, they’re also stupid.
  2. They have a plan, and they’re not sharing it. In this case, not only are they incompetent, they’re venal and petty

I’m inclined to assume that we can rule out number 1, so I’m forced to wonder why they’re reluctant to share plans for the continuing, remaining restoration efforts. My theory is probably not going to be a popular one. Basically, my guess is that after the high-value triage targets have been addressed, PSNH starts to be influenced by political arguments. The mayor or city council of Derry, NH might have some pull with the Governor’s staff, and while PSNH should answer only to the Public Utility Commission, I’m not naive enough to think that a well-placed call from the Governor’s office might not cause them to favor one town/area over another. Now, you may think I’m a conspiracy-theory loving nutcase (and you may be right). If so, there’s a really easy way to prove me wrong – simply publish a timeline by which the remaining afflicted will have their power restored. I’m not asking to jump the line. I’m not even asking for a date-certain that I’ll have my power back. But I can’t imagine it’s too damned difficult to let me know something along the lines of: We expect to have power restored in your area by Thursday afternoon. I mean, if you’ve got a plan, this should be simple enough.

A little transparency into the process will go a long way. Until then, I can only assume that PSNH is managed by a team of incompetent morons who don’t understand the impacts their decisions have on their customers. Scratch that, in this case we feel less like customers than captives – not like I have a choice when it comes to electricity providers.