BI Solution for a Green Energy
Client
- By Vaibhav Verma

Project Overview
and Highlights

Problem Statement and Objective
The Client is the biggest green energy producer in the India. They own/operate ~5500
MW of Solar and Wind power portfolio in the country. They needed a one stop BI
platform to derive insights from their daily plant operations across the country that would
help them drive critical business decisions/outcomes. The BI product would help them
achieve the following:
● Help the business users track ~300 KPIs (30 KPIs in real time) across plants from
anywhere in the country
● Help track and schedule the equipment maintenance
● Real-time alarm system for prompt action from plant executives
● Generate daily/weekly/monthly reports at equipment, site and portfolio level with
options to automate
● Generate CXO level dashboards with Generation level KPIs
● Help develop predictive analytics capability in future

Key Project Deliverables and Highlights
● Project Duration - 14 months Development (testing and prod deployment) + 3 months Support
● Deliverables - A BI portal with the following features:
1. 160 Solar KPIs and 140 Wind KPIs with customizable granularity and aggregation
2. 10 Solar reports + 8 Wind Reports
3. 18 dashboards customizable at site level
4. Functionality to onboard newer plants of any capacity onto the portal in future
5. Functionality to upload missing/lost data and re-computation of KPIs
● Tools used - Looker (BI), BigQuery (database), Composer (KPI processing)
● Data consumption - ~ 200 GB per day for each plant
● Team Size - BI (8+1), Appdev (4+1), Data (5+1), QA (6)
● 90% of the KPIs had accuracy greater than 95%; 7% had accuracy between 80% and 95%
● Development phase completed with 7 Solar and 6 Wind Energy plants running successfully on
the portal. Support phase ended with 15 Solar and 9 Wind plants.

Project
Management

Project Management Life Cycle

Project Management Plan
A Project Management plan was created during the Project Planning phase of the
PM life cycle, that included the following:
● Project Scope
● Project Schedule
● Resource Management
● Risk Management
● Communication Management
● Change Management
● Stakeholder Management
● Project Governance
● Project Closure

Project Scheduling
Once the project scope and deliverables are identified (jointly with GTM and client
teams - that included scope, dependencies, acceptance criteria etc.), we had to focus
on the scheduling. This was achieved by:
1. Identifying the major tasks and dividing them into sub-tasks that can be
measured.
2. Defining the duration for each sub-tasks
3. Using Gantt chart to prepare a roadmap of the deliverables, with time estimates
4. Identifying major deliverables as milestones
5. Creating product backlog in Jira

Resource Management
A Resource management plan was created to efficiently and effectively identify and manage
resources during the project planning and execution phase. It included the following:
● Resource Allocation - Identified the type of resources required in the project based on work
● Resource Availability - Identified potential resources available to work, their available
bandwidth and other constraints
● Resource Planning (Gantt Chart) - Outlined the schedule and timeline for resource allocation,
including how resources will be phased in and out of the project
● Resource Utilization - Defined how resources will be used efficiently and effectively to maximize
productivity and minimize waste
● Resource Contingency Planning - Listed the procedures for dealing with any unexpected
changes in resource availability or utilization

Risk Management
A risk matrix was created to identify potential hurdles that the team might encounter in
the future, during project execution and deployment. It included:
● Risk Identification - Identified potential risks to the project, including their owners
● Risk Assessment - Evaluated the risks identified in the project, including their
likelihood and impact, to determine the priority of each risk and ETA
● Risk Mitigation measures - Prepared the procedures for reducing the likelihood or
impact of identified risks
● Risk Monitoring - Defined how the risks will be monitored and tracked throughout
the project, including any changes to the risk assessment or mitigation plans
Some of the critical Risks and Dependencies are listed in the next slide. The risk matrix
was shared with all the stakeholders on a weekly basis, along with status updates.

Risks (R) and Dependencies (D) - Examples
Item Criticality Type Owner Remarks/Mitigation
KPI formula/logic sharing from business to
BI developers
High D Client Regular KT sessions with
business users were planned
Data integrity - Ensuring data pipeline from
the client side is not breached
Medium R Client In case of data breach, the
lost data would be uploaded
to the database through the
portal
True values of KPIs to be shared with the
QA team to facilitate testing
Medium D Client Monthly KPI sheets from all
the plants were shared
Congruency in data type across plants Medium R Client/BI
team
Thorough Data
transformation before KPI
computation

Communication Plan
A Communication plan was chalked out to define how team and stakeholders would
communicate during the course of the project. This included:
● The tools that would be used for the communication
● The type of cadences that would be used to communicate the progress of the
project
● The scheduling of the cadences - timing and frequency
● Communication in case of escalation (in accordance with the defined escalation
matrix)
● Communication protocols - format of status reports and updates

● Change Management - This included the methodology to incorporate any
Change Request (CR) from the client during the project execution. A proper
estimate (budget and time) would be provided to the client based on the
assessment of the CR.
● Stakeholder Management - This outlined how stakeholders will be identified,
engaged, and managed throughout the project, including strategies for
addressing conflicts or disagreements.
● Project Governance - This would list down the methods used to track the
project, ensuring the project is on track and highlighting any
hurdles/escalation to stakeholders, through various tools (e.g. Jira, Project
Plan).
● Project Closure - This highlighted the procedures for formally closing the
project and transitioning the deliverables to the stakeholders.

Key Learnings

● The scope of the project was not defined accurately. Hence, there was a lot of
scope creep in the initial phase of the engagement. This was later brought under
control by defining the purview of Change Requests.
● Data processing contributes maximum to the daily portal cost. Hence, data
optimization would lead to maximum cost saving.
● Looker offers great deal of customization. Hence, it is apt for creating complex
visualizations, dashboards and reports at varied granularity and aggregation.
● Frequency of data flow varies from plant to plant (sometimes, type of data as
well). Hence, some transformation might be required to compute certain day-
level KPIs.
● A given KPI might have different formula for different plants. Looker provided
that flexibility in computation of such KPIs.

Thank You!