Reliable Emergency Wildfire Communication
Sempra Energy / San Diego Gas & Electric
Services
Software Delivery Management
Client Management
Product Management
Requirements & Backlog Definition
The Challenge
Following the 2018 wildfire season, the California government expanded its regulatory requirements for public utility companies. Specifically, the government called for a larger percentage of utility customers to be notified when energy companies needed to preemptively shut off their power in potential wildfire conditions, or a Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) event.
For San Diego Gas & Electric (a division of Sempra Energy), that meant that they needed to go from sending messages to under 2,000 customers to 150,000+.
As a part of Made In Tandem, I led a team that was charged with scaling SDG&E’s process and technology for sending these highly regulated, critical communications.
From Manual to Integral
At the beginning of our engagement, SDG&E’s existing process was largely manual, which required understanding slightly different data across multiple systems. Their technology also wasn’t built to scale - if they wanted to notify more than 2K customers at a time, they had to manually export the customer data and upload it into their mass notification platform.
Alongside designers, software engineers, and subject matter experts for their existing tech, I led workshops to define both a minimum viable product (MVP) with the most critical features and a roadmap of potential backlog features. For 3+ years, I worked with SDG&E to iteratively define critical features and build out a system that could scale with their ever-growing reporting needs.
What started as an application made specifically for PSPS events became a core source of truth for SDG&E’s emergency operations. The data we normalized became the base for 5+ other applications and integrations within the SDG&E umbrella.
Key Outcomes
From 37 Steps to Just 10
We were able to reduce the number of steps it took to initiate critical communications from 37 to 10 easy steps.
Scaled 75x
The application we created allowed SDG&E to go from batches of 2K notifications to sending to 150K+ customers together.
>$10 Million Saved
The plaform allows SDG&E to quickly adapt to changing regulations. The result: more than $10 million saved versus their competitors in 2022.