SmartOperations is the Future

Last week at CWEA Annual Conference, I had some very interesting conversations with leaders of our industry about the future. Here is a gist of my perceptions that I shared liberally with everyone.

The Future of the Water Industry, at least for the next two decades, will be all about Smart Operations. Over the last hundred years, Engineering was leading the show. This was because we needed to invent processes and technologies that can clean water from rivers, lakes, and oceans to make them palatable and safe for human consumption. Once that water has been through the 'human system', we also worked on technologies that will clean the water to a sufficient level safe for reintroduction into nature. We are there; we have figured out the basic engineering technologies that can effectively produce clean water. Yes, there are still some frontiers to conquer, such as trace organics and pharmaceuticals, but engineering on those frontiers will unlikely yield a 'breakthrough' and will most likely have diminishing returns. I am not advocating that engineers and scientists should not spend time on those peripheral problems, it is just that the industry will shift towards effective implementation of what is already there. Operations will take primacy over Engineering.

This is a major shift for the industry, you can compare it to the way water bodies turnover during change of seasons. All major institutions in the water world is currently dominated by engineers, be it the EPA, the major trade associations like AWWA,WEF, WateReuse, the regulatory agencies, the agency leadership, etc. Engineering consulting firms also dominate the direction that the industry takes. But this is changing and this transformation will get faster by the day. Engineering consulting firms are already facing the choice of just becoming Planning firms or to become Design-Build focused companies. Planning firms will develop program level plans and when needed work on 30% design of facilities. Treatment plants of the future will be more equipment driven and packaged than custom designed (as they are now). Design-Build firms will be led by construction managers and engineers will assist them to take those 30% designs to fruition. For engineers, the choice is to quickly adapt to this new model or perish.

Smart Operations will mean redesigning the water and wastewater agencies as businesses and focus on continuous optimization. Most water agencies currently react to water demand and supply stresses and wastewater agencies believe that they exist to maintain regulatory compliance only. Water agencies of the future will get ahead of the supply-demand race and work to control both the issues. On the supply side, focus will be on reliability investments, water grids will become smart grids just like the electricity grid with infusion of software and sensors, and the demand side will see an increased management effort. Wastewater agencies will reinvent themselves to be factories with three designer products to sell - clean water, nutrient rich fertilizer, and electricity. The technologies to get there is already available, the only limiting ingredient is the foresight and confidence of the operations managers.

Water SmartOperations
(C) PROTEUS Consulting

To make this happen, PROTEUS Consulting is working on building bridges between the Water sector and other sectors - Energy, Information Technology, Economics/Finance, and Communications. Before the end of this year you will see Energy and Water Sectors forging new paths, where water sector will act as flexible loads to help balance the grid and in turn get to access a new revenue stream independent of water sales. Software will play a very important role in SmartOperations with business intelligence, knowledge management, gamification, text analytics, data mining, learning networks, etc. taking the center stage. PROTEUS expects to usher the growth of software solutions for the water industry and we will also champion the use of open source code to enable the maximum benefit to these publicly owned and operated water and wastewater agencies. Economics within the water agencies and financing of infrastructure projects will change. Water trading networks, real-time value chain operations, infusion of private equity, are a few initiatives PROTEUS is working on. As for communications, gone are the days when the water industry was churning out calendars with 'save water' sketches, you will find art, literature, theater, cinema, games, and mobile apps flowing all around you. Stay tuned!

Water+Energy Presentation at CWEA Annual Conference 2013, Palm Springs

It was a very good turnout at the CWEA Annual Conference this morning. We talked about the next frontier in Water and Energy Nexus. The reception was very positive. Some people who could not attend my talk caught hold of me in the corridor/hall and wanted to connect and learn about with Proteus' Water+Energy work. I could not have asked for more!

The ideas we present here are new and refreshing. The concept of flexible load on the grid is not in the mainstream, but it will soon become a reality. Discussions are ongoing at the CEC level on how to prepare for the future grid when renewables will change the peak load profile. Water industry stands ready to meet the challenge, to act as a flexible load!

The plan forward is to get pilots going for flexible loads using treatment plants and pipeline networks in all three IOU territories by spring next year. Once the concept is proven, the work will commence on pricing and program development. As the water industry amounts to 20 - 45% of California's total energy use, that is a lot of load that can act as a flexible load on the grid. Welcome to the future!

Text Analytics for the Water Industry

Knowledge management in the Water Industry is archaic, that is if it at all exists. Since the turn of the century there has been dire doomsday predictions of mass retirement of water professionals with 20 to 30+ years of systems knowledge. With the economic slowdown and its effect on public retirement funds, most of those professionals held on to their jobs and now we are seeing the exodus happening. Many water managers are concerned. As their staff retires, they leave with the institutional knowledge and that is quite scary. After all there is no structured method of information capture.

Image courtesy of jscreationzs/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Most of our industry's Operational Intelligence lies unstructured in text-rich data. This data resides in emails, text messages, alerts, notes, chats, reports, and documents (word, excel, powerpoint, database,) etc.  Currently all this data, and hence information, sits virtually unanalyzed and unused. Much of this information  has the potential to deliver operational insights that can be used to make informed smarter decisions in the future.

Text analytics has made great progress in the last decade. Deep language processing capabilities such as summarization, multi-faceted search, and sentiment analysis is mainstream now. Technology is readily available to gather, store, filter, and mine textual information for hidden signals and patterns, trends, and anomalies. And most of this is open-source technology, just the kind of 'fit' public agencies look for.

At PROTEUS, we are working on Text Analytics. With new tools available to handle big data, we can now get access to this unprecedented amount of data and extract value. We no longer have to rely only on models (hydraulic or process) and SCADA information to understand and draw conclusions about our system operations, we can now tap into  a mountain of unstructured and unused complex data and derive insight that can boost our system performance like never before.

PROTEUS model of Operational Intelligence

We believe that once our water clients can crack the code on this cross-enterprise textual data, they will see a significant improvement in operations. Asking the right questions will make all the difference. The more specific and focused the questions can be, the better results can be achieved.

Water managers do not need to do another 'master plan' and set about searching for the data to feed the Analytics engine.  They already have the components to start generating these insights. They can start with existing documents, even with just the organization's email and folders on the server. While every organization is different, we can assure you that results can be seen within just a few months of getting started.

To learn more about how to get the water industry's text analytics initiative underway, on to Smart Operations Intelligence, please contact us at www.consult-proteus.com.

Strategies for Managers to Achieve Excellence in the Workplace

Below is the second of the two presentations I gave this morning at the 2011 AWWA Education Extravaganza. This talk actually flows from the first one. You cannot fix the problems in your organization or the greater society if you have not fixed yourself first. Working on yourself is the first step.

To be an effective manager you have to do two things - set forth a clear set of values and performance (results) expectations, and have a rigorous appraisal system. Additionally, you also have to earn the trust from your team members in order to be able to energize and activate them. That requires two things - be candid all the time, and do what you say (no matter how hard it is!)

Enjoy the presentation below. If you want a copy, please email me at consultproteus at gmail dot com.'

This presentation was also full house, standing room only! I was very happy.  Here too, I look forward to your reactions and input - What do you think? What has been your experience? What are your challenges? Please share your stories or issues with me, I will love to hear them.

I gave two presentations today. Find the first presentation here.

How to improve your work and life - be Happy!

Below is the first of the two presentations I gave this morning at the 2011 AWWA Education Extravaganza  I picked an unusual topic to talk about at a Water Industry event - Happiness and how we can achieve it. It is a topic that no one wants to talk about but everyone seems to be curious about!

As I said during the talk and I repeat here: I am no expert. Most people in the audience and who are reading this are most probably older than me and had life experiences more profound than mine. I do not claim to be any 'guru' in this field or in anything else, I am human. I have my frustrations, my struggles, my fears, and my anxieties; I also have my goals, my dreams and my hopes - just like everyone else out there. I have made some fabulous choices in life, and some really terrible ones. I am in no position to dispel any profound wisdom - what I share here is knowledge that I have gathered during my life experiences. I am just sharing my 'Aha- moments' with everyone - in the hope that it may help someone out there who is looking for an answer.
I have "miles to go before I sleep".....

If you want a copy of this presentation, please email me: consultproteus at gmail dot com.

We had a full house this morning! Standing room only! I was very pleased. I hope I made some connections today, and was able to plant some seeds that will make my audience take the path towards peace in their lives.

I will VERY interested to hear from you - What do you think? What is your perspective? What has been your life experiences? What has been your lessons learned? What are the issues you are working on? What do you struggle with? What do need help on? Can I help you?


I gave two presentations today. Find the next presentation here.

Quality Assurance and Quality Control

I have noticed that many professionals, and even very accomplished managers, tend to lump 'quality assurance and quality control' together as if they occur together and mean the same. In reality, QA and QC are two as different a concept as can be! I hope I will be able to dispel a bit of that confusion.

Every organization seeks to achieve higher quality in their work, whether it is a product or a service they offer. These organizations seek to maximize the ability to meet its goals with a minimum of mistakes, inefficiency, and waste. And why not, this endeavor has many long-term benefits: reduction of costs, a delighted client, good future business prospects, etc. The process to achieve this continuous improvement has several steps and is, however, usually mistakenly termed QAQC.

QA (Quality Assurance) is a set of activities (e.g. a quality audit) that are aimed to ensure that the processes followed in the organization are actually happening properly and meeting the objectives. For example, a document control audit to check if all correspondence is being filed properly at the right place for easy access and future retrieval is a QA exercise. QA also works to develop processes to better handle issues. For example, when a problem has been identified in the project execution, say drawings are being issued for construction without a mechanical engineer's review, the QA manager will then modify the project execution process to include a step that includes a review of drawings by a mechanical engineer. So, the bottom line definition is that QA is that it is process focused, that is, development of methodology and standards. The goal of QA is to find a problem in the processes and make sure the checks are implemented at the right level of detail.

QC (Quality Control), on the other hand, is the set of activities that evaluate the product. So, in the above mentioned example, the mechanical engineer checking the drawings is a QC activity. This activity is focused on finding defects in particular deliverables. In a production line, inspection and testing of a sample would be QC. Here the task is to find if the deliverable / product meets the stated level of detail and specification requirements. To stress the point - this is a fault finding activity.

Now, the confusion arises, I think, is because organizations are not sure about assigning responsibility for these two activities. More often than not, these activities are assigned to the same individual - the project manager. This is not the right approach, and I have seen many cases in my career where the final quality of the project suffers due to this.

In my opinion, the project manager should be only responsible for QA and not for QC. Of course, it also depends on scope of projects. For a $5M or less construction projects, the resources are usually strapped and the PM is forced to do both, and usually manages to do a good job. But, in projects, especially $50M+ construction projects, it will be near impossible for a PM to do both QA and QC and produce good results. There are too many details to consider and the focus shifts away from QA thereby compromising the project. For such projects, the PM should focus on QA and QA only. He/She should have the lead engineer or a third technically savvy engineer deal with the QC part of the project. When setting up the project the PM will need to put sufficient QC check points in his/her project execution strategy to ensure the 'fault finding' is adequately happening on the project and the quality of the final deliverables going out of the door meets (or exceeds) the quality standards promised to the client. His/her job is to constantly monitor the operations to make sure the QC checks and the recification is happening. On projects greater than $150M, there should be dedicated QA manager.

Management Consulting - Half Yearly Report

Proteus Consulting offers the following Management Consulting services to our clients: Project Diagnostics, Project Planning, SWOT and PESTLE Analysis, Organizational Transformation, On-call to address unforeseen issues, Crisis management, Project Process Audits, Long-range Risk Analysis and Scenario Planning.  Proteus Consulting is committed to strengthen our client's organizational and operational structure to enable them address challenges in the future - whatever they may be.


Risk Assessment and Scenario Planning, Encina Wastewater Authority, Carlsbad CA. Proteus Consulting was been invited by Encina Wastewater Authority (EWA) to participate in a series of risk assessment workshops to enable long-range scenario planning for EWA. This exercise was conducted with BHI Management Consulting and was aimed to prepare EWA for emerging risks; test the organization’s long-term strategy and resilience; expand and enrich the planning discussion; create a successful implementation plan; understand and apply change management and motivation principles; apply attention to detail in the risk matrix/risk register; maintain the quality and rigor of the risk assessment process to select the best policy option, implement multiple risk assessments, and resolve contradictory stakeholder agendas.