Load Profile Management System

Addressing industry demands for increased precision in demand forcasting:

Post-deregulation load forecasting is no longer seen as an art, practised by a chosen few. Today, more and more companies are recognizing that getting it right can drastically affect their bottom line.
In today's competitive market, there is a clear need for increased precision in demand forecasts. To underestimate consumption requirements could lead to undercapacity, resulting in imbalance penalty payments, the purchase of potentially expensive spot electricity, and other costly measures. To overestimate could lead to the authorization of a plant that may not be needed for several years.
A realistic assessment of demand has assumed ever greater importance, and with the high volatility of electricity prices, it pays to improve the accuracy of your load forecasts.

Accurate demand forecasting is key to survival in the retail energy market:

Power companies are looking to reduce their need for costly, short-term trading by balancing load requirements to better forecast their customers’ demand for electricity. This reduction is only possible if these same power companies develop more effective means of collating customer demand and develop more accurate forecasting techniques. Not all customers fit neatly into a standard load profile, and poor demand forecasting often leads to inefficiency and sometimes costly short-term trading.
Accurate demand profile analysis is important in making sales to new customers. Deals often depend heavily on usage patterns, and the more precise the demand forecast, the easier it is to determine a suitable pricing structure.
Meter readings, typically captured at 5-minute intervals throughout the day for industrial consumers, provide a wealth of actual demand data, but managing, manipulating and analyzing the high volume of interval load data to create load forecasts is no easy task. Traditionally, power companies have stored meter and theoretical load profile data in a variety of unlinked, disparate spreadsheets and database systems, many of which have insufficient capacity for expansion.

SunGard offers a comprehensive solution for load forecasting and analysis with the underlying time-intelligence technology to get the job done:

SunGard offers a single, integrated system for the storage, management, manipulation and analysis of validated load profile data that provides a basis for precise load forecasting and analysis. It not only improves trading efficiency, but equips the load research team with powerful tools to tailor deals accurately to customer requirements. Built using SunGard's leading fame time-series data management technology, our Load Profile Management System is capable of storing potentially hundreds of millions of interval load data and synthetic standard and generic load profiles at the resolution of your choice.

SunGard Data Management Solutions offer its customers a suite of proven solutions with the necessary underlying time intelligence technology that can meet your business requirements:

1-High performance time-series storage and manipulation capabilities;
2-Statistical data validation and correction routines;
3-Open architecture interfaces to existing systems including relational databases, spreadsheets and mathematical tools;
4-Analytical scripting environment with 250 time-series and statistical functions;
5-End-user desktop analysis and charting tools.

source:
http://www.marketdata.sungard.com/energy/load_profile.htm

Strategic Planning (in nonprofit or for-profit organizations)

Simply put, strategic planning determines where an organization is going over the next year or more, how it's going to get there and how it'll know if it got there or not. The focus of a strategic plan is usually on the entire organization, while the focus of a business plan is usually on a particular product, service or program.
There are a variety of perspectives, models and approaches used in strategic planning. The way that a strategic plan is developed depends on the nature of the organization's leadership, culture of the organization, complexity of the organization's environment, size of the organization, expertise of planners, etc. For example, there are a variety of strategic planning models, including goals-based, issues-based, organic, scenario (some would assert that scenario planning is more a technique than model), etc. Goals-based planning is probably the most common and starts with focus on the organization's mission (and vision and/or values), goals to work toward the mission, strategies to achieve the goals, and action planning (who will do what and by when). Issues-based strategic planning often starts by examining issues facing the organization, strategies to address those issues, and action plans. Organic strategic planning might start by articulating the organization's vision and values and then action plans to achieve the vision while adhering to those values. Some planners prefer a particular approach to planning, eg, appreciative inquiry. Some plans are scoped to one year, many to three years, and some to five to ten years into the future. Some plans include only top-level information and no action plans. Some plans are five to eight pages long, while others can be considerably longer.
Quite often, an organization's strategic planners already know much of what will go into a strategic plan (this is true for business planning, too). However, development of the strategic plan greatly helps to clarify the organization's plans and ensure that key leaders are all "on the same script". Far more important than the strategic plan document, is the strategic planning process itself.
NOTE: Much of the following information is in regard to goals-based strategic planning, probably the most common form of strategic planning.

source:

http://www.managementhelp.org/plan_dec/str_plan/str_plan.htm

Successful Software Management: Ten Lessons Learned

Managers Have Two Primary Roles:

*Get the best work out of your people
* Create an environment that enables people to work

1.Activity
• You can do this with others or by yourself
– What’s your mission? What do they pay you do to?
– Is that different from what you think your job is?
– What do you do about the difference?
• Debrief

2. Hire the Best People for the Job
• A manager’s greatest point of leverage is in hiring appropriate
staff
• “Best” is not necessarily synonymous with “Similar”
• Develop a hiring strategy
• Learn to interview successfully, so you can hire people who can
do the job well (stars)

3. Weekly Time With Each Person
• You need to know what your organization or project is doing
• You need to know what the people are doing, so you can create
performance reviews

4. Assume the Person Knows How to Do Their Job
• You used to know how to do the job
– Do you really still know how?
• You hired the people because you thought they could do the
work. Let them...
– Give them assignments
– Ask if they need help
– Don’t interfere
! Sneak up behind them and ask “How’s it going?
! Micromanagement
! Inflicting advice
• Choose a metric to know when you are stuck
– This works for you too!

5. Treat People the Way They Want to Be Treated
• Everyone likes different projects
– Specific tasks vs. general information
– New complex problems vs. immediate success
• Everyone is motivated by different things
– Money is not the only reward
– Private thank-you’s
– Public recognition
– M&Ms
– Movie tickets
– Team party
– Ask the group

6. Emphasize Results, Not Time
• Hours working do not positively correlate with productivity
• Permit (Force?) people to only work 40 hours per week
– When they work longer, they do non-work things
– Productivity goes down
– If you keep people working only 40 hours per week, they work on work
things

7. Admit Your Mistakes
• Mistakes are embarrassing
• If you admit mistakes, people respect you more
• Don’t deny or ignore mistakes

8. Commit to Projects After Asking Your Staff
• “Can we have this next month?”
• Even if you’ve already considered the request, the answer is “No”
– In the moment, you might confuse this request with another request
– There may be other implications you haven’t considered, since it’s no
longer the same time you first considered this request.

9. Plan Training Time in the Workweek
• Engineering is constantly changing
• People generally like getting training
• Many inexpensive ways
– Brown bag lunches
– Periodic talks from other groups
– Present projects across the company
– In-house tool “user group” meeting
– Outside experts
! Professional consultants or speakers
! Knowledgeable friend or colleague

10. Plan the Work
• Plan what you (your group) can do
– If you want to do more, plan how
• Identify and manage your project portfolio
• Develop strategies for each product
– How little can you do?
• Know what done means for each project
• Avoid context-switching