Xcel's Actions were Successful, If You Ignore They Did Not Have a Plan And Did Not Communicate

“Ring!” “Ring!” I retrieved my iPhone 14, press the answer button, and raise it to my ear. Just as I get my salutation mumbled, a loud “Ding” indicating a received text message rattled my brain. “Hello! This is Xcel and we have a report of an outage in your area. . .” the automated female voice starts off. “End” is press, and I check the text. “Yep. It’s Xcel telling me we lost power,” I inform my wife. Not two minutes before did our lights flicker and lose their illumination, but the microwave and oven went dark. Over the remaining duration of the lost service, I continue to receive both automated phone calls and text messages updates with a frequency that borders on annoying. However, as a project manager myself, I appreciate Xcel’s over communication on events and projects. If you are not over communicating, you are not communicating enough. In the end, I prefer Xcel’s over communication on outages.

That is how my power outages with Xcel have gone except the PSPS in April went nothing like this.

April 6^th, 2024 at 5:17 PM local time. I proceeded to call Xcel’s customer support to inquire about the power outage we suffered since about 1 PM that day. Four hours without power is unusual for us. A nice young lady answered the call. “Huh. I cannot find anything in our systems about the outage. Let me place you on hold while I investigate.” The ensuing 10 minutes elapsed quickly as I chose an impromptu dance party with the hold music rather than allow the situation to perturb me.

“Hello?” She returned to the line. “Sorry for the wait. It took me this time to find out that you were slated to be de-energized at 3 PM today due to the wind.”

“OK. I was shut off at 1 PM, and why did no one tell me?” I asked.

“Yes, they shut you off early. . . and you were not informed about this?”

“Nope.”

“Wow. I’ll make an internal report about this. This is very frustrating for you, and we clearly dropped the ball. It took me 10 minutes to find out the situation, and I work internally for Xcel,” she remarked

“I would think they would, at least, tell you guys on the front line helping the customers,” dismay in my voice with a bit of anger sliding in my vocal articulation.

Then it dawned on me not to get angry. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned some poor accounting intern, who was more interested in his sophomore finals then in major system shut-down project management steps and nuances, having some Xcel exec drop by the intern pool cube farm. At 4:45 PM on a Friday afternoon, everyone else had gone home, and only this poor kid was left to answer the exec’s halfcocked idea to shut down 100,000 customers in less than 24 hours with no plan.

The call ended uneventfully and pleasantly.

“How long are we going to be without power?” my wife inquired.

“Several days,” I grumbled. “Likely, we have the battery backup for the fridge and furnace, and I got the generator to keep us going on everything else.”

“Is it going to get cold tonight?” She asked rather uncharacteristically sternly.

“I think so,” I replied

“We just spent a lot of money on Sunny with his injured eye, and he needs to be kept warm. I don’t want to waste all of that money.”

How could I forget about powering the terrarium in my daughter’s room that was the home of the delightful and “healthy” gecko. If that poor little lizard died, the four horsemen of the apocalypse would be released. Armageddon would be upon us, and it would start in my home.

“Save the geckos,” I cried, fist raised in triumph, to my wife and daughter carrying the 100’ extension cable plugged into the generator upstairs. In no time, I was able to power Sunny’s home and keep him warm. The end of the world had been avoided. You are welcome.

After about 56 hours out, our power was restored. However, it is strikingly clear that many basic and standard project management concepts and processes were ignored or not implemented. This was such a failure, it is almost as if any plan process was ignored intentionally.

Easily identifiable failures observed by external observers (It is really bad if someone externally can easily see your failures).

• Plan. It is abundantly clear that Xcel did not have a plan in place. Never. Never. Never implement an action, especially a major one, which has not been planned. Clearly, Xcel did. Often this means pre-planning actions that may or may never occur. This, to me, seems like something that should have been planned years ago. failing to plan a de-energize action for inclement weather demonstrates an incompetency on Xcel’s part. I consider this inexcusable, completely and absolutely. Personally, I think C-level suite heads should roll over this. This is how bad this failure to plan is.
  
  Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor Performance. (The six P’s). This was piss-poor performance, and as a result, I can tell that Xcel did no prior planning or prep. 100,000 people (and at least one gecko) are at the mercy of Xcel’s seat-of-the-pants bravado.

• Communication. It appears that Xcel informed local news of the event. Few people watch local news on a regular basis, and I am not one of them. If there was a way that Xcel could use some sort of personal communication device to provide a call or a message via text to alert customers. Maybe it could be called a mobile phone and use text messages. Xcel already does this, as my opener indicated. This system was not utilized. Why was it not used? Does Xcel plan to utilize it in the future? If not, why?
  
  Internal communication was insufficient. Not only does it look bad, but it is actually detrimental and dangerous, when the company cannot communicate internally of its plans. To be honest, this is simply shocking to me.
  
  

In conclusion, one could state Xcel’s April PSPS was a resounding success if one ignored the facts that Xcel had no prior plan, did not communicate said plan to its own employees, and did not communicate said plan to its customers.