OVERVIEW
Client
Location
- Minneapolis, MN
Industry
- Energy
- Electric power generation and distribution
- Utilities
Technologies
- Enterprise IT
- Networking
- Telecom
- Mass storage
- Backup and disaster recovery
Product(s)
- Electric power service
Project / feature / deliverable
- Infrastructure documentation
- Technical diagrams
- White paper
- Marketing copywriting
- NERC compliance documentation
duration / date
- 9 months / 2007-2008
brief
background
Great River Energy is an electric transmission and generation cooperative in Minnesota. It is the state's second largest electric utility, based on generating capacity, and the fifth largest generation-and-transmission cooperative in the U.S. in terms of assets. The company owns or co-owns more than 100 energy transmission substations and 500 distribution substations in the Midwest region, as well as transmission lines in North Dakota and Wisconsin. It is a not-for-profit cooperative that provides wholesale electricity to more than 1.7 million people through 28 member distribution cooperatives in Minnesota, covering roughly 60 percent of the state.
problem
The company was moving its main office, with more than 400 employees, to a freshly constructed campus elsewhere in the Minneapolis metropolitan area. Project complexity was increased by management's decision to use the physical move as a catalyst to strategically migrate and upgrade IT infrastructure.
solution
Through an ongoing series of interviews, whiteboarding sessions, document drafts, and reviews, I slowly began to build out documentation. The infrastructure documentation included textual explanations, but relied more heavily on extremely complex technical diagrams.
Challenges
Enterprise infrastructure was complex and vast. The company's network was the foundation of most infrastructure, and included both a fiber-optic ring and legacy telecom technologies, spread across five states and thousands of distribution sites.
The timetables and milestones for the project were byzantine. I have never since seen anything quite like this project plan or the Gaant chart used to plot and execute all work. It had hundreds of dependent entries and was so large it was printed on plotter paper for practical reference and covered an entire, office wall.
All documentation had to comply with NERC regulatory standards. Adhering to these standards added significant work and time.
Enterprise infrastructure had never been documented. The data and knowledge related to infrastructure was only recorded in the minds of the IT architects and engineers managing it. Developing the documentation required hundreds of hours of interviews, whiteboarding sessions, writing, diagramming, reviews, revisions, and more.
Finally, the documentation had to be equally accessible to two audiences with very different mindsets and responsibilities: engineers and C-level executives. This blend required a precise combination of business and technical presentation.
Outcome
I spent six months completing the infrastructure documentation. I was ultimately able to distill it into a simple set of documents. Each deliverable covered a key piece of enterprise infrastructure with a textual overview. However, given the extraordinary complexity of the infrastructure, the bulk of information was communicated visually in technical diagrams. The documentation helped support the successful completion of the enterprise migration project. To ensure its long-term value, I also helped roll out an Oracle Content Management System and archived the documentation there.
The CIO was so pleased with the the documentation that my contract was extended. In the months following the completion of the enterprise migration, I also produced a number of ancillary deliverables: a white paper detailing innovative network development as an industry model, NERC backup-and-disaster-recovery compliance documentation, operating procedures for the network operations center, and marketing literature to share the company’s and IT department's mission with partners and the public.
PROCESS
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sCOPING AND PLANNING
Infrastructure and migrations in this project were some of the most complex I have ever encountered. The documentation had to parallel the extensive project plans created by the consulting teams leading the effort. We worked for several weeks initially just to capture the documentation requirements.
INTERVIEW, WHITEBOARD, DRAFT, DIAGRAM, REVIEW, REPEAT
With a doc plan in place, work began. It was a simple production process, but one repeated again and again over the course of six months. Because of the number of documents required, multiple doc sets were managed in parallel to ensure completion by deadline. The company's infrastructure had never been documented in any form, and all the information resided only in the minds of several stakeholders.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
The initial disbursement of the documents was easy, since it encompassed a relatively small team: consultants, IT staff, and C-level executives. However, there were concerns about long-term management of documentation. To prevent losing this knowledge again, I was tasked with developing a procedure to archive assets in a new content management system (CMS).
RETROSPECTIVE
The infrastructure documentation gave key stakeholders in the project new insights regarding the benefits of documentation. Recognizing the value in my work, they asked me to run with the knowledge I had acquired and create a number of related deliverables, including white papers, standard operating procedures, and marketing materials.
deliverables
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assorted deliverables
This gallery includes a a white paper, enterprise infrastructure documentation, and an IT-department marketing poster.
