HRG assistant vice president Ed Ellinger co-authored an article with Capital Region Water’s lead engineer Jeffrey Bowra for the May 2021 issue of Water & Wastes Digest. The article discusses their work together on several phases of water main rehabilitation in the City of Harrisburg and offers 7 tips for maximizing success on pipeline rehabilitation projects. Read it here
Clean water is essential to life, and life is priceless. But sometimes the cost of clean water can be too high for a community to bear. When it is, a mix of grants and forward-thinking design can make the cost more manageable as it did for the residents of a small village in Central Pennsylvania recently.
Kelly Township is a rural municipality in Union County, Pennsylvania, with a population of approximately 5,000 people. The Village of Kelly Crossroads is located in a remote area of the township and consists of 47 homes along Crossroads Drive, SR 1004, and Fort Titzell Road, SR 1003. These homes had historically used on-lot disposal systems for their sewage.
An on-lot disposal system, commonly referred to as a septic system, is a 3-stage treatment process that happens on the site of the home, rather than at a community treatment plant. Sewage collects in a septic tank on-site, where solids and scum are separated from the water via settling and flotation. Pipes then carry the water to the soil where it is absorbed into the ground and purified in nature.
Unfortunately, these systems have a high rate of malfunction, and Kelly Crossroads was no exception. As part of an Act 537 Plan update in 2010, the township confirmed that almost half of the on-lot disposal systems in Kelly Crossroads were malfunctioning. Another 45% exhibited signs of suspected or potential malfunction. Only 6% of the on-lot disposal systems in Kelly Crossroads were functioning properly.
This map shows the location of all the on-lot disposal systems in Kelly Crossroads, and the colors indicate how well each system was functioning. As the map shows, some level of malfunction was widespread throughout the system.
To make matters worse, the township had good reason to believe that these malfunctions were contaminating residents’ water supply. A portion of the homes in Kelly Crossroads relied on wells for their water, and more than half of those wells tested positive for coliform bacteria, an indicator that human waste had come in contact with the water supply.
The township has an obligation to protect the public health, so it needed to address these malfunctioning on-lot disposal systems. Unfortunately, on-site repair was not an option for approximately 70% of the systems. HRG analyzed several alternative approaches and determined that the most cost-effective option was to retire the on-lot disposal systems and replace them with a low-pressure system connected to a package treatment plant.
Cost-effective does not mean low-cost, however. Connecting new homes to a public treatment system is always a costly endeavor, and the cost to connect Kelly Crossroads was estimated at more than $1.6 million. Each homeowner would have to cover the cost of connecting to the system and share in the cost of building the infrastructure it required. This would amount to several thousand dollars in fees per home, a significant burden for an area where the median household income is approximately $55,000.
HRG helped the township obtain nearly $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rural Utilities Service, 75% of which was grant money. This funding has dramatically reduced the cost of sewer service to the community.
(Learn more about the USDA’s Rural Development Program here.)
HRG designed the system for future expansion of the user base in order to make the project more cost-effective. Capacity is available to connect an additional 5-10 homes if they are constructed adjacent to the system through extension of the LPS system only. Adequate space is also available for future expansion of the treatment plant facilities if more capacity becomes necessary. Planning for future needs now helps to minimize costs down the road.
Construction began in August 2017 and was completed in August 2018. Residents began utilizing the public system in June 2018.
A home in Kelly Crossroads with a recently installed grinder pump
Though the investment is significant, there is no better investment a community (or its residents) can make than in its own health and safety.
Municipalities like Kelly Township want to ensure their residents have clean water, but they are sensitive to how difficult monthly bills can be for residents to pay. They need an engineer who can deliver high quality infrastructure, while helping the community find ways to afford the improvements they need.
A firm with a dedicated team of financial experts can skillfully position the municipality for grants as HRG did for Kelly Township. At the same time, HRG’s water and wastewater professionals designed the system to accommodate future expansion in order to minimize costs moving forward.
Our wastewater treatment professionals are creative problem-solvers, and our financial specialists are experts in water and wastewater financing. We have extensive experience with programs like the USDA’s Rural Development Program, whose support is crucial to ensuring rural communities have quality water and sewer service.
SPECIFICATIONS:
The new 13,500 GPD package wastewater treatment plant serving the Kelly Crossroads community
Regularly replacing deteriorated concrete manholes is an expense (and inconvenience) that most sewer systems have learned to live with, but what if they didn’t have to?
We recently incorporated polymer concrete manholes into the design for two of our clients and wanted to share the benefits of this technology with other clients who might be considering manhole repair projects in the near future.
The West Goshen Sewer Authority wanted a long-term structural solution to the hydrogen-sulfide-based Microbial Induced Corrosion (MIC) in its system. We designed 60-inch polymer concrete manholes to replace the severely deteriorated, precast concrete manholes they had on a 30-inch interceptor because polymer concrete is known for its corrosion resistance and 50-year life expectancy.
The Lower Swatara Township Municipal Authority wanted to rehabilitate a 48-inch, precast concrete manhole downstream of a force main discharge. Like West Goshen’s manholes, this one was also severely deteriorated due to hydrogen-sulfide-based Microbial Induced Corrosion. Therefore, the corrosion-resistant properties of polymer concrete seemed like a natural solution, but the polymer provided an additional advantage: Its superior strength allows for thinner walls. Lower Swatara’s manhole was located between a state road and a land development project that would be changing the finished grade at the manhole. They needed to rehabilitate the manhole to a new finished grade while minimizing bypass pumping across the state road. The new polymer concrete manhole insert was sized to fit inside the existing manhole, and bypass pumping was unnecessary.
Polymer concrete has existed for several decades, but, for most of that time, it was too expensive for sewer systems to use. Technology has advanced, and the price has come down significantly. Leading edge systems are considering its benefits more and more. Chief among those benefits is corrosion resistance.
Wastewater contains bacteria that naturally produce hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S). This gas leads to Microbial Induced Corrosion (MIC), which eats away at conventional concrete.
To prevent this, sewer systems traditionally use sulfate-resistant Portland cement, which can provide moderate resistance against MIC. In severe situations, sewer systems use concrete additives, coat the concrete, or line it with PVC or HDPE. Polymer concrete provides sewer systems with another option to prevent damage where high levels of H2S-based MIC is present.
A badly corroded manhole
Many manufacturers produce polymer concrete for sewer system applications. Some use steel reinforcement, while others use fiberglass rebar. Some provide a 50-year warranty for their manholes.
But polymer concrete can be used for more than manholes; it can also be used for pipes and other structures (such as wet wells), too.
An engineer can help you evaluate whether polymer concrete is the right choice for your sewer system and what type will perform best for your particular needs.
Call us to discuss the condition of your sewer system and whether polymer concrete could benefit you.
Matthew Cichy, P.E., is a senior project manager in HRG’s water and wastewater group. He is an expert in sewer system design, construction, and long-term asset management. His experience includes water distribution systems, wastewater collection and conveyance systems, pumping stations, and water and wastewater treatment plants.
This article was published by Pennsylvania Municipal Authorities Association in the August 2017 issue of their magazine, The Authority.
Construction equipment has become a familiar sight to the residents of Middletown Borough in recent years. New businesses are popping up alongside historic buildings in the borough’s downtown business district – thanks, in large part, to a major revitalization effort spearheaded by local government officials.
And it all began by replacing the area’s water and sewer facilities.
The success of Middletown’s revitalization effort illustrates the key role infrastructure plays in building and sustaining great communities. Borough officials and local business leaders wanted to enhance economic development by attracting new businesses to downtown Middletown, but water and sewer problems threatened to kill the success of their efforts before they’d begun. Many communities could’ve seen their dreams derailed by an obstacle like this, but the borough persevered because of strategic planning and the collective effort of a community united behind a common goal. The borough’s story illustrates how communities can overcome barriers and successfully address aging infrastructure in order to enhance economic development.
The Borough of Middletown has the distinction of being the oldest community in Dauphin County. The town was first laid out along the Susquehanna River and Swatara Creek before the Revolutionary War, and brick sewers in the historic downtown area were first installed not long after the Civil War.
Some of Middletown’s water and sewer lines dated back before 1900.
Unfortunately, the sanitary sewer and water facilities located in the downtown business district were not supporting current demand (and they certainly weren’t adequate to meet the demands of new development). The condition of the assets were a risk to the downtown revitalization efforts. In addition, cross-connections between the sanitary sewer system and the storm sewer system led to surcharging and sanitary sewer back-ups.
These challenges made it hard to keep existing businesses downtown and attract new ones. In addition, the borough was planning a streetscape project that would place numerous aesthetic improvements directly above the aging water and sewer facilities. The community did not want to see their investment in these improvements threatened by excavation to repair the sewer and water facilities soon after construction was complete.
Borough officials asked Herbert, Rowland & Grubic, Inc. to design upgrades to the water and sewer facilities in the heart of its downtown business district (along South Union Street from Spring Street to Ann Street). This project was to be the first phase of its downtown revitalization plan. It included:
HRG began design work in 2013, and construction was complete in 2014. They accelerated the project schedule to reduce stress to the existing local businesses. With the risk of failing water and sewer facilities mitigated, Middletown could begin Phase II of its revitalization effort: improving the streetscape (with new decorative paving, curbing, sidewalks, and street trees) and providing traffic calming devices to promote pedestrian access to the businesses.
New sanitary sewer manhole
New sanitary sewer
New water main and valves
Efforts to revitalize the downtown business district had generated excitement in the community. Local leaders, business owners, and residents understood that these infrastructure upgrades were vital to attracting new business to the area, and they embraced the investment this project would require.
The former Middletown Borough Authority, the borough, and the Middletown Borough Industrial and Commercial Development Authority led the revitalization effort and engaged the public throughout the process. They held numerous meetings with the public and with local stakeholders to communicate the vision and direction of the project. The project team worked extensively with the owners of local businesses along South Union Street, soliciting their ideas and accommodating special events to minimize disruption to business activity.
Thanks, in part, to these open lines of communication, the project team was able to maintain water and sewer service to the existing businesses in the area throughout the project (despite having a confined working area due to the presence of numerous other utilities).
The engineers also coordinated extensively with other project partners to ensure a smooth transition from Phase I (water and sewer improvements) to Phase II (streetscape enhancements). For example, they coordinated extensively with the streetscape design team to ensure that the water and sewer improvements would not conflict with proposed streetscape facilities, and they worked closely with the landscape architect to ensure that above-ground features like hydrants and manhole covers were installed at locations that would not impact the streetscape visual design concepts. This saved the borough money and ensured that above-ground features would not have to be relocated during Phase II to achieve the aesthetic goals of the streetscape enhancements.
Detailed records about the location and depth of sewer laterals by HRG’s resident project representatives during construction of Phase I provided further cost savings. This information was used for deciding the depth of stormwater facilities in Phase II, reducing design fees in that phase. It also prevented costly change orders that often come from unknown utility locations.
It didn’t take long for all of this activity to generate interest from developers and business owners in opening new ventures in the area. While the project was in its construction phase, a developer proposed a 100-room hotel with retail space on the first floor just a block away from downtown. The developer also expressed an interest in working with the team behind the streetscape design to develop other projects in the area. He specifically mentioned the downtown revitalization efforts as one of the factors in his decision to invest in the area.
Patrick Devlin of the Tattered Flag Brewery and Still Works also mentioned the flurry of activity downtown as a factor in choosing to locate his business in the old Elks Building. The brewery opened in December 2016 and was recently named the New Business of the Year by the Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau.
Business investment like this is expected to continue in Middletown and the surrounding communities. The new sewer infrastructure mitigated a known risk, increased efficiency, and gave the borough additional capacity for the anticipated development.
The water and sewer improvements were completed two weeks ahead of schedule and almost $400,000 under budget. This new infrastructure proved to have a much lower maintenance and operations cost than the aging infrastructure it replaced, and it has drastically reduced infiltration and inflow into the system. During an early phase of design, engineers found and eliminated a cross-connection between the aging sanitary sewer and the borough’s storm sewer system. By eliminating this cross-connection, they were able to prevent approximately 500,000 gallons of stormwater from entering the sewer system during a typical rain event. In fact, since the project was completed, the system has not experienced a single sanitary sewer overflow, and no sewer back-ups have been reported along North Union Street. (You can read more about the correction of this cross-connection here.)
Investing in a project of this magnitude is hard for many communities, but Middletown’s story shows it is possible and the benefits are wide-ranging. When well planned and executed, updated infrastructure lowers maintenance and operations costs, enhances the quality of service to a system’s customers, and helps to attract growth and investment in the community. When citizens and business owners join forces with the local government and think creatively, the seemingly impossible task of upgrading our aging infrastructure while promoting economic development becomes possible!
Josh Fox, P.E., is the regional manager of water and wastewater services in HRG’s Harrisburg office. He is responsible for the completion of studies, designs, and construction contract administration for a wide variety of water and wastewater treatment facilities. He served as project manager for these water and sewer improvements in Middletown, which were honored by Dauphin County in 2017 with a Premier Project Award.
As our water systems continue to age past their useful life and utilities face increasing budget pressures, the terms asset management and capital improvement planning have become buzzwords in the industry. However, as utility managers struggle to squeeze as much out of their budgets as possible, it is hard for many of them to justify the additional expense associated with developing and implementing an asset management program. Just like with any other purchase, they want to be sure the benefits outweigh the cost. So what are the benefits of asset management and capital improvement planning?
An asset management and capital improvement program helps you identify exactly what maintenance and repair work is necessary without guesswork. Why allocate money toward cleaning out pipes selected at random, when you could target that money to the pipes that need it most (and use the savings to accomplish other system goals)? Why replace pipes simply because of age when they may be in perfectly good condition? Many factors besides age can cause the deterioration of infrastructure.
Photo by TheeErin. Published via a Creative Commons license.
Knowing which infrastructure is most likely to fail (and correcting deficiencies before it does) can save you major expenses later in the form of property claims, water loss, etc. Knowing which failures would be the most catastrophic helps you target money toward their prevention as a first priority. With the budget limitations of municipal utility management, you might not be able to prevent every system failure, so it’s important to know which ones have the potential to cause the most financial damage and impact the most customers. This way, you can focus your efforts on preventing those first. If a failure does occur, a good asset management plan will include a proactive response plan, allowing you to respond quicker and more efficiently (thereby reducing damage and disruption).
Asset management and capital improvement planning is all about proactively investing in measures to extend the life of your infrastructure. These small investments can extend the life of an asset by several years. Over time, the money you save delaying replacement will far surpass the money you spent to maintain the asset, and your customers will have enjoyed better, more consistent service for this lower cost.
Finding and detecting failures in the system like leaks can prevent water loss and the wasted energy consumed to treat water that never makes it to a customer.
Proactively maintaining your assets ensures they function at peak performance for a longer period of time and are replaced before they fail. This means your customers receive top quality service without disruption and are happier for it. In addition, many asset management solutions include optional customer service applications that make it easier for customers to submit service requests and track them to completion.
Rate increases are never popular with customers, but they are easier for them to accept when they are backed up with clear data showing exactly what improvements are needed and why.
Competition for funding is fierce, and government agencies are under pressure to make sure the money they invest is used wisely. As a result, they’re more likely to award funds to utilities who have clear documentation of the project need, its benefits, and a plan for getting it built, operating it, and maintaining it at optimum levels over time.
Many utilities have been considering the option of leasing or selling their assets as a response to growing financial obligations in the public sector. A comprehensive asset management system provides documentation of the value of your assets, so you can ensure you are in a position to negotiate the best possible deal for you and your customers. Potential investors will be more comfortable making a significant investment if they fully understand the value and the risks they’re assuming. (For more Insight into the utility leasing trend, see our article on calculating fair annual rental value.)
Every manager must take careful stock of his revenue and his expenses, but not all expenses are created alike. There is a difference between a cost and an investment, and asset management is clearly an investment in your utility’s future. In essence, it helps you provide better service at a lower cost with reduced risk and improved financing options. How many investments can you make that provide that kind of return?
Each year, water and wastewater utilities send uncalculated dollars down the drain because of leaks and system failures, but asset management could provide the savings they need to respond to the creeping threats of aging infrastructure, water shortages, and increasingly stringent regulations.
Last year, UCLA filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for $13 million in damages sustained during a water main break on campus in 2014. This break released 20 million gallons of water onto Sunset Boulevard, flooding the street, campus buildings, and athletic facilities.
The lawsuit is just one of many claims the utility has received from people and businesses impacted by the water main failure; and it’s a reminder of the often hidden and forgotten costs utilities face when their infrastructure fails.
Every day, U.S. utilities produce 34 billion gallons of water, and 22% of it is lost through leaks. That’s billions of dollars in treatment, energy, labor and operations costs that cannot be recouped. These leaks cost the average utility more than $100,000 per year in revenue, but water main breaks like the one at UCLA can be even more costly.
Each year, there are approximately 240,000 water main breaks in the U.S., costing utilities an average $500,000 per break.
Much of our water and wastewater infrastructure is old and has far exceeded its life expectancy. Some pipes date back to the Civil War era! The cost to replace this infrastructure will be high, but, as these examples demonstrate, so is the cost of doing nothing.
As utilities struggle to budget for the replacement of aging systems, they continue to face increasing cost pressures from federal mandates. While the EPA establishes new limits on different contaminants (often requiring utilities to acquire new technology or improve their facilities), funding has not kept pace with these new demands. A report by the Water Infrastructure Network indicates that federal funding on water and wastewater systems has declined by more than 70% since 1980. As a result, local utilities have had to shift more of their revenue from operations and maintenance to new capital expenditures, leaving them even more ill-equipped to respond to an aging system.
At the same time, conservation efforts and improved technology have led many Americans to reduce their water consumption. While this is great for the environment, it translates into lower revenues for utilities – even as water acquisition costs increase (because utilities must turn to more expensive water sources once the least costly sources run dry).
With rising costs and shrinking revenues, utilities need to carefully manage every dollar to ensure the maximum return on their investment. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the cost to make the improvements our water and wastewater system needs to keep functioning over the long term is more than $1 trillion. While there is plenty of work to be done, there is simply not enough funding to do it all at once. Therefore, ASCE recommends assessing the condition of every pipe and valve to determine the risks of failure and properly allocate funds where they are needed most. The need for asset management and capital improvement planning in the water utility industry has never been greater.
Asset management is a systematic approach to minimizing the cost of owning, operating, and maintaining your infrastructure at acceptable levels of service.
It is not a computer system or GIS, though these are often valuable tools employed in an asset management program for record-keeping and data analysis. Depending on the needs of your utility, an effective asset management system could be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or as robust as an enterprise level solution integrating all of your inventory, operations and maintenance, billing, and document management functions. The solution can include mobile interfaces for supporting field crews and even interactive applications to enhance and promote public interaction and transparency.
While utility managers often reject implementing a large-scale asset management program because they think it will cost too much, the truth is: asset management is an investment designed to cut inefficient or wasteful spending and stretch your budget further.
It is about optimizing how you spend your budget dollars in order to make sure they are providing the largest possible return on investment: reducing the life cycle costs of each asset you own while maximizing the service that asset provides over time.
A proper asset management and capital improvement program will help a utility identify areas where money is not being spent wisely and reallocate those funds where they can be most beneficial.
It will also help you recognize and evaluate options for keeping your assets functioning for a longer period of time, so that you don’t need to invest in expensive upgrades or replacements as frequently.
An asset management program involves:
Creating an inventory of what you have and its condition
Establishing your goals.
Prioritizing what’s most critical and directing resources to those needs first.
Measuring the results.
Analyzing those results and repeating or revising the cycle.
It is a circular process that never ends. Many things change over time: the condition of your assets, regulations and the business climate you operate in, the number of users you serve, etc. A good asset management and capital improvement program helps you plan for these changes in advance and respond proactively before they become threats to your bottom line.
Because of the tight financial constraints under which most utilities operate, they often take a reactive approach to budgeting for maintenance and replacements. As an asset fails, they make room in the budget to fix it or replace it, but this reactive approach will not be sustainable over the long-term. Our infrastructure is too old, and too much work will be needed to be able to pay for it all at once. Utilities need to plan for this inevitable future now, so that they can begin saving the money they will need in the coming decades.
Photo by Connie Ma. Published here under a Creative Commons license.
Proactive approach vs. Reactive: By monitoring the condition of your assets and planning for their maintenance and replacement in advance, you avoid the high costs associated with failures like this middle-of-the-night water main break.
Though the financial obligations associated with aging infrastructure, increasingly stringent regulation, and shrinking grant programs can seem overwhelming, asset management and capital improvement planning can help. Asset management helps you find the waste in your spending programs and put those dollars to better use. It helps you recognize potential threats to your system and minimize risk (thereby minimizing the financial damage those threats can do). It also helps you improve service to your customers and achieve buy-in from them when the case must be made for rate increases.
Investing in asset management and capital improvement planning can be hard to justify when utility budgets are stretched so thin, but the savings an asset management program can produce will more than pay for the program over time. Those savings, in fact, may be crucial to meeting the coming challenge of replacing our aging water systems and addressing the possibility of spreading water shortages.
In business, there’s an old saying: Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. With asset management, you spend money to save money.
HRG has extensive experience in asset management for municipal clients, particularly in the areas of sanitary and storm sewer systems. Read more about our asset management experience.
This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of Keystone Water Quality Manager. It is reprinted here with their permission.
We’re all familiar with the phrase “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” This is paraphrased from an exchange between Alice and Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice, you know you need to get “somewhere” because changing regulations, increasing costs, aging infrastructure and customer growth affect the way you provide your service. Each year as operators, managers, and board members, you’re forced to establish budgets, adopt rates and policies, and make recommendations that have long-lasting effects. You may use the best information available at the time but can’t be sure that you’re adequately prepared for what’s just around the corner.
Strategic planning is a tool that helps to identify where you need to go and the best road to get there by exploring the fundamental values and principles that support your utility’s policy and operating decisions. Properly done, it looks at all aspects of the utility’s operations in order to see if they reflect the needs of your customers, ensure regulatory compliance, and generate sufficient financial resources to be sustainable. This is not just a financial plan focused on replacing existing facilities or acquiring new ones, but a comprehensive look at the factors that will drive both short and long-term events and an identification of strategies to address them.
There are five basic elements in a strategic plan:
However, there can be as many additional elements as the utility feels is necessary to properly address the needs of all its stakeholders: its users, employees, and the community at large. Some of these elements may take a long time to complete, while others can be accomplished relatively quickly. For some, a good deal of data will be needed, while others will simply reflect widely accepted industry practices and preferences. The plan could take a month or a year to complete, depending on the level of detail believed to be required. However, one of the benefits of the planning process will be simply identifying the stakeholders and discussing the elements of the plan with them. The ability to identify areas of consensus and concern is a hugely important and valuable outcome of the plan.
Before you can begin the process, there are some preparatory activities that should be completed:
Authorization
The first task in strategic planning is obtaining the authorization to move forward with the process at all. It is important to involve all of the decision-makers in the strategic planning process, and discussing the scope of the plan and its benefits is one of the best ways to achieve “buy-in” for the entire process. Without buy-in, it will be difficult to fully implement the resulting plan.
Identification of Stakeholders
Another important step is to make sure the process considers all relevant points of view. This may seem easy, but, when you actually begin to list them, the number of people and organizations relying on your utility to be well-managed and provide affordable, high quality service is probably greater than you think. While some seem obvious, consider the following examples:
• Current users
• Employees
• Regulatory agencies, including PA DEP and US EPA
• Municipal government, conservation districts and planning agencies
• The Chamber of Commerce or local economic development agency
• Future users, including land owners and developers
This is not intended to be a complete list, only a guide, and not every group will require the same level of involvement in the strategic planning process, but understanding how each group might be impacted is important.
Determination of the Plan’s Time Frame
Strategic plans are generally long-term, usually five years, but a different time horizon may be more useful if you are aware of some specific event likely to occur just beyond the five-year planning period. If a significant expansion of the utility appears likely, five years may not be long enough.
Organization
How will the strategic plan be organized? Who will guide the process? Is it to be done by an outside professional or internal staff? What is the schedule? What will the final plan look like, and how will it be disseminated? Does it need some type of formal adoption or approval? If so, by whom?
In essence, visioning asks the question: What will the organization look like in the future? Visioning will supply the context for the other elements of the strategic plan. For a wastewater utility, the visioning process may actually be one of the most involved elements of the plan since this is where you try to get a peek at what’s around the corner. Unlike some businesses where visioning is a projection of some blend of marketing prowess, economic predictions and industry trends, each utility is unique because the factors that drive future events will impact it differently.
The task is made a bit easier if you divide visioning into an external scan and an internal scan. Although they may be related in many ways, the external scan looks at:
(Increased economic activity in nearby communities should also be considered since it may impact your service area.)
The internal scan will focus more on:
These are but a few of the areas that need to be considered in some detail.
The visioning process is almost as diverse as the elements themselves. Clearly, information from outside the utility is necessary. This may include individual interviews with consultants, suppliers and community leaders. Telephone calls, questionnaires, online surveys, and specific messages printed on bill inserts can also solicit feedback from targeted stakeholders. Regardless of how it’s done, the result should be a clear and concise statement that reflects the major trends that are likely to drive the future direction of your utility. But, before you can get too specific, you should develop the broad organizational goals. This is best done with a mission statement.
Drafting Your “Mission Statement”I know the idea that you can somehow cram the entire essence of an organization into a couple of tightly worded sentences seems impossible. Some mission statements will run on for several paragraphs, but do they really provide more information about the philosophy or principles that govern the utility’s operations? Usually not. Instead, the discipline of packing an organization’s values into a few words may actually provide a better understanding of its goals. Here is an illustration of a short but insightful mission statement for a wastewater utility, courtesy of the Lancaster Area Sewer Authority:
“To provide quality service and apply technology to process wastewater so as to protect and enhance the environment and health and well-being of the community at a reasonable cost.”
The mission statement should not simply be a collection of carefully chosen words that project an image that isn’t consistent with the utility’s values; rather, creating the mission statement should foster a deeper understanding and commitment to those values. This, in turn, provides the benchmarks that measure success.
Identifying “Critical Success Factors”The visioning process should identify the broad goals and major initiatives that need to be incorporated into the strategic plan. It is not important to determine their feasibility at this point; detailed examination of alternatives will be done later. Simply decide if they are consistent with the mission statement and are not mutually exclusive. Some likely success factors might include:
These are only illustrations; the vision and mission statements will help dictate the critical success factors that should be included in your plan. The key here is to keep the success factors general in nature but focused on specific identifiable outcomes. Another important consideration is quantifying what it means to be successful and the metrics for measurement.
From the above illustration, achieving greater transparency is a success factor, but what exactly does that mean? What is it that should be more transparent, and what are the limits of what is made publically available? Can it measured by the number of visits to your website, or does it mean the creation of a website? Is it measured by a fewer number of requests for specific information or telephone inquiries? How about the development of a newsletter? Is that something that most customers believe would be useful based on data collected during the visioning process?
Some critical success factors may not be determined directly. In the example above, data may not have been collected on customer’s preferences during the visioning process. In that case, the success factor of achieving greater transparency will need to be defined by some other precedent activity to measure the benefits of transparency, or it may be determined that transparency is simply a virtue for its own sake whose benefits may not be immediately measurable. In that instance, the precedent activity may be to look at industry practice and see how your current practices can be improved.
If you are getting the idea that developing the critical success factors is a time-consuming process that requires a lot of effort in order to be done correctly, you’re right. This is often the work of several individuals and should involve a team approach at least to direct the work. Care should be taken to assign responsibility for completing an assignment to someone who is involved in the overall planning effort. If not, they may not understand the actual goal and may simply complete a task.
Developing critical success factors, defining them, and providing metrics for measurement is at the very heart of the strategic planning effort. While strategies and actions will provide the “to-do list” and ultimately become the basis for the final report, they will be driven first by the critical success factors you’ve defined.
This step is where the plan is actually created. Critical success factors identify the areas where some action seems warranted; they take our broad goals and further define the “somewhere” we want to go. The next step is determining how to get there.
Again, using the transparency example, probably everyone will agree that organizational transparency is desirable, but someone might disagree with the type of information that is made available or with the level of training that may be necessary to organize and screen information. Cost is always a consideration when implementing changes.
Because there are generally many facets to each critical success factor, it is important to have several individuals involved in formulating the strategy for evaluation and implementation. This is often accomplished by group meetings, where each critical success factor is discussed. Questions will likely arise that cannot be answered without some further investigation, so tasks must be delegated to a smaller group or an individual for follow-up. In fact, most of the early efforts will be directed to developing the process to obtain the necessary information and assigning someone to gather and analyze it. The analysis is essential so that the success factor can be implemented in a way that achieves its intended purpose. It also provides documentation for any critical success factors that cannot be implemented.
Once the strategy for implementation is determined, specific detailed actions for implementation should be prepared. One of the most important decisions in this stage of the process is timing. You want to think about the best time to launch a new initiative or modify or eliminate an existing one.
Another important task is to identify someone to champion the implementation. Maybe there is one lead person or several depending on the type and number of tasks. If achieving the critical success factor requires technology changes, someone involved with maintaining that technology should be involved in the implementation. This may seem obvious, but sometimes third parties are retained for implementation, resulting in a loss of buy-in from those who will be responsible for making it all work.
Even though this article opened with a reference to a fairy tale, there should be no fantasy about implementation. It’s just as much work as each of the other elements — maybe more, since there are now clear ideas on how each goal is to be achieved and, of course, the devil is always in the details. Regardless of how thorough the analysis was, complications can be expected. Another frustration usually is that it takes longer to accomplish than originally believed.
In order to avoid this, one of the first steps to implementation is to determine the schedule. Unless there are very few and straightforward critical success factors, some effort needs to be expended in prioritizing each success factor for each of the broad goals identified in the vision. Often, once the strategic plan is formalized, a sense of urgency to implement its objectives is inevitable. This is understandable since the reason for the plan is generally to improve the utility’s operations, so why would you want to delay?
For one thing, it’s important to remember that the plan itself looks at a five-year time period, so that not all benefits will be immediately available. Also, events are constantly changing, so some of the fundamental assumptions that went into the plan may change. This may not affect the plan, but the implementation schedule should allow time for monitoring external changes nonetheless.
Another important consideration is the time staff has available to implement the plan. While the plan is being implemented, all other work must continue. Even if some of the heavy lifting is assigned to others, the utility’s staff needs to be involved at each step if they are expected to achieve the plan’s goals and provide necessary feedback.
Communicating the Plan with Your StakeholdersOkay: you have the vision, you’ve determined the critical success factors, you’ve developed strategies for implementation, and you’ve created the implementation schedule. You have assigned staff to implement the various strategies in order to monitor progress and make sure that each strategy achieves its desired goal. One question remains: What does the final plan look like? Is it a printed document, a slide presentation published on your website, or an internal spreadsheet that serves as a checklist for monitoring implementation?
Like all the other aspects of the plan, the process that rolls out the plan is determined by the goals of the strategic plan itself. If the plan is centered on internal improvements, then employee meetings with handouts may be the most effective means of communicating the plan’s objectives and the strategies designed to implement them. If there are elements of the plan that are service-related – that impact your customers or the community at large – more formal printed materials may need to be prepared. Meetings with important relevant stakeholders may also be useful, especially if there are some financial impacts associated with the plan that they are expected to share.
The only thing that’s constant is change. Absent a crystal ball, tarot cards, or an Ouija board, a well-thought-out strategic plan is the best means of seeing the future. Even if it misses the mark, knowing why it missed and what parts of the utility may be affected is an important benefit that makes the exercise worthwhile. At the very least, developing the plan will require policy-makers, managers and staff to consider each other’s points of view and understand how the customers and community view your utility.