Redefining how Ausgrid plans and executes work using Google Cloud

Company Overview

Ausgrid is one of Australia’s largest electricity distributors and is responsible for delivering power to over 1.8 million customers throughout Sydney, the Central Coast, and the Hunter Valley.

Ausgrid is the largest distributor of electricity on Australia’s east coast, providing power to 1.8 million customers – that’s over four million Australians relying on Ausgrid every day. Their network is made up of substations, powerlines, underground cables and power poles, spanning 22,275 square kilometres throughout Sydney, the Central Coast and the Hunter Valley.

The Problem

Ausgrid needed to upgrade its existing work management system, as the application user base had grown considerably larger than originally anticipated and the solution had far exceeded its originally intended lifespan. The application had been suffering from several performance issues and there were a limited number of insights that could be gained from the application due to the design of the original application’s data model.  Ausgrid was faced with a fixed budget and an unknown scope, making their usual fixed investment strategy a bad fit for a proposed solution with very few well-defined requirements.

Ausgrid was looking for a solution to these issues alongside a host of new features and improvements that would allow a new group of users to schedule work in an area of the business that is highly dynamic and traditionally very difficult to plan. This would not only drastically transform how work is planned and delivered in those areas, but also allow Ausgrid to align the work scheduling and planning process across the business.

The Solution

In the initial stages, the team worked closely with key stakeholders at Ausgrid to define the MVP for the new version of the application.

The blended Mantel Group-Ausgrid team made use of the Mantel Group delivery framework, utilising agile methodologies to iteratively work through the redesign of the database and data migration from the old application, before the newest version of the application was released to AusGrid’s staff.

This framework also allowed the project owners to continuously track and update the budget and progress towards MVP and subsequent feature releases as progress was made. This introduced clarity about how value is delivered to all stakeholders and users within Ausgrid, and ultimately to Ausgrid’s customers.

In addition to a full suite of manual testing, the Mantel Group-Ausgrid team created automated tests that covered a wide range of scenarios. The result was a smooth and successful cutover and transition for staff that will rely upon this new application every day.

After the initial release of the new and improved application, the team was able to work closely with end users to respond to feedback and deliver new features.

Thanks to the infrastructure uplifts and improvements to the CI/CD pipeline completed earlier on in the project, the team was able to do production releases daily to ensure that any issues were quickly addressed and new features could be rolled out to end-users as soon as they were ready.