CHAPTER 02 · DISCOVER
We Learn Your Operation Before We Propose Anything
One day, in the control room. The VP of Operations framed the stakes up front — compliance exposure and a two-person bottleneck on anomaly interpretation. Then we did what we always do: talk to people, watch the work, map it, and rank what we found.
WHAT WE ACTUALLY DID
We Don't Just Run a Meeting
A roadmap session is where it starts, not where discovery ends. Interviews, documentation, the tools already in use — all of it, before we propose anything.
Interviews
31 sessions / 22 stakeholders
We start with the VP of Operations, then work through every shift and role that touches anomaly response — not just the people who signed off on the meeting.
Every session recorded, transcribed, and tagged.
Documentation
58 sources reviewed
SOPs, shift logs, and the incident-report archive nobody had time to mine for patterns.
Indexed so the agents can reference it directly.
Systems & Tools
7 systems mapped
Everything the control room already watches — no new platform to learn, no rip-and-replace.
All seven connected before we proposed anything.
Shift walkthroughs
We sat through live shifts across two regions — watching how an anomaly actually gets triaged, not just hearing about it after the fact.
Process mapping & improvement
Every anomaly-response workflow got mapped end-to-end, then we asked what should change before any of it gets automated.
Adjacent conversations
We talked to compliance, maintenance, and engineering — not just the control-room operators who own the alarm screen.
AUTOMATION MAP
Of 94,000 hours a year spent on manual monitoring and reporting, here's how much we can take off the control room's plate
Stays human — dispatch judgment, regulatory sign-off, anything touching public safety.
Of the 63,920 hrs, here's what each workflow contributes
P1
P2
P3
P4
TOTAL
P1
Anomaly Monitoring & Explanation
28K hrs/yr · $4.1M
P2
Generation-Asset Risk Monitoring
19K hrs/yr · $2.6M
P3
Compliance Reporting Assembly
12K hrs/yr · $1.6M
P4
Maintenance-Window Scheduling
5K hrs/yr · $0.9M
What we picked to build first
Grid anomaly monitoring & explanation
Highest-leverage, lowest-risk: the data already existed across the balancing-authority feeds, the two-person bottleneck was universal across every shift, and a visible win in three weeks would change every later conversation about the control room's compliance exposure.
Committed on the wall. Working session scheduled within 10 days.
12 weeks to the first system live · then ongoing
Discover
Working session, on-site
Grid anomaly monitoring & explanation
Wave 1
Generation-asset risk monitoring
Wave 1
Dispatch prioritization
Wave 2
THE METHOD
Same Approach, Every Engagement
Most AI roadmaps fail the same way — a list of interesting projects with no way to choose which one matters. Ours turns what we actually find on the floor into a ranked, ownable plan.
Discover
What do you repeat? What frustrates you? What runs on a schedule?
→ A named list of the real, repeated work — across every department.
Map & Improve
How does this actually happen, workarounds included — and what should change before we automate it?
→ An end-to-end picture of each workflow, cleaned up first.
Rank & Commit
What ships first? Who owns it? How do we know it worked?
→ A ranked plan with a named owner and a metric on every line.
UP NEXT · BUILD