Insights

Smart DCC and Market Wide Change

Some of the hardest programmes in the energy sector are the ones no single organisation controls. Market wide changes, the kind delivered through central bodies such as Smart DCC and coordinated across every participant, break most of the assumptions that ordinary programme planning rests on. If you are delivering your part of one, here is why they are different and how to plan for it.

By Christopher Fagan

Why market wide change is uniquely difficult

Your delivery risk sits outside your organisation

On a normal programme, most of what determines success is within your control. On a market wide programme, a large share of your risk lives in central systems, in other participants and in an industry timetable you cannot move. You can do everything right and still be held up by a dependency you do not own.

The timetable is fixed and shared

Industry wide dates are set centrally and apply to everyone at once. There is no quiet renegotiation of your own go live. You either meet the shared date or you are visibly the participant that did not.

Testing spans organisations

End to end testing crosses organisational boundaries and depends on other parties being ready at the same time as you. Interface testing that would be routine internally becomes a coordination problem across the market.

Interpretation is collective

What the change actually requires is often clarified across the industry over time, which means requirements can firm up later than you would like, compressing the window to build against them.

How to plan for it

Manage external dependencies as first class risks. The dependencies you do not own are the ones most likely to hurt you, so track them as actively as your own workstreams.
Engage with the central body and the industry early and continuously. Much of the intelligence you need, on timing, interpretation and others’ readiness, only comes from being in the room.
Protect your own readiness regardless. You cannot control the market, but you can make sure that when the shared date arrives, you are not the reason it slips.
Build in float for collective testing. Cross organisation testing takes longer and slips more than internal testing, and your plan should assume it.
Assure independently. With so much risk external and so much reporting dependent on others, an independent view of your true readiness is especially valuable.

The mindset that works

Teams that deliver market wide change well treat it less like a project they run and more like a position they hold in a larger system. They obsess about dependencies, they stay close to the centre, and they make sure their own house is in order so that when the fixed date comes, the delay, if there is one, belongs to someone else.

Our consultants have worked on market wide energy change including with Smart DCC. See regulated markets and energy and utilities, or get in touch.