As part of my role within the Performance Assurance Data & Insight team at Thames Water, I led the development of a comprehensive SLA (Service Level Agreement) Alarm Handling Report to enhance visibility and accountability across operational shifts. This Power BI-based tool was built to address a long-standing challenge: understanding how quickly and effectively alarm notifications were acknowledged and resolved by the control teams.
Project Overview
The SLA Report was designed to track and evaluate alarm performance in near real-time. It provides detailed metrics on user response times, highlights SLA breaches, and supports shift-based performance analysis.
What makes this report effective is its alignment with real operational workflows. Rather than relying on theoretical KPIs, the tool was shaped by ongoing feedback from controllers, managers, and operational customer managers (OCMs), ensuring it meets day-to-day needs on the ground.
Key Features
Dynamic SLA Monitoring: Tracks the time between alarm raised, acknowledged, and cleared. Highlights breaches using visual indicators.
User-Level Access Control: Each user sees only their team's alarms. Managers have broader visibility, making oversight scalable and secure.
KPI Alerts: Automatically surfaces underperformance at the shift and user level. Enables managers to take action promptly.
Shift-Based Filtering: Designed to align with rotating team structures, supporting fair comparisons between different crews.
Custom Audit Form: Enables OCMs to log follow-ups, issues, and reasons behind breaches directly from the report interface.
Flexible SLA Thresholds (for Clean Business Case): For the Clean side of operations (where fixed thresholds are not yet agreed), I built a dynamic threshold simulator to let managers explore different SLA values before settling on targets.
Business Impact
- Improved accountability and transparency across all alarm-handling teams.
- Provided a data-driven basis for performance reviews and coaching.
- Supported cross-team benchmarking without compromising fairness.
- Helped embed a culture of responsiveness, directly aligned with our operational SLAs.
Tools & Technologies
- Power BI for report development and data visualization.
- Azure Databricks (PySpark) for backend processing of raw alarm data.
- SharePoint for documentation and collaborative feedback loops.