We know how foundational data is to a successful ADMS implementation. But good data alone isn’t enough. ADMS changes how your utility sees, manages, and interacts with the grid, which means it changes how your people work, too.
The following are 10 best practices for preparing your business and operational processes ahead of an ADMS implementation, with practical suggestions to reduce friction, expose risk, and build a stronger foundation for change.
1. Map Reality, Not Just Theory
Document how work actually gets done today, not just how it’s supposed to. Include who’s involved, what systems are touched, where handoffs occur, and where things break down. Look across shifts, departments, and locations. Understand that different people may do the same process very differently.
The differences can become embedded in the organization’s culture. It’s important to approach this with positive intent and ensure participants are on board. Process, especially over years and years of practice, can become highly personal and protected. Not everyone is ready for change, and picking apart their day-to-day in this way can feel like a threat to their livelihood. Your silos will start to show their borders here. Review your documented processes too, but also observe reality. In addition to mapping, get out and visit some of the various participants. Sit in the control room for both a day shift and a night shift, and you may notice differences that they don’t even realize are infiltrating their processes. Do this again during a storm response event.
Start with one high-impact workflow and map both the ideal and actual versions. Compare. If any immediate and easy fixes pop out before you even start to bring in a system transformation, that’s great. Finding small wins that can be cleaned up early will help as larger changes snowball from the momentum.
2. Look for Legacy Baggage
Many processes were designed around old system limitations that no longer apply. Some were patched together over time with quick fixes that became permanent. Others are just habits. These inefficiencies tend to stay hidden until a major system change exposes them.
Any time you hear “we’ve always done it this way,” that should trigger further investigation. Keep asking questions from a place of curiosity, and you can shake out some of the legacy habits passed down to your current team by employees long gone. Baggage can show up as macros, sticky notes, spreadsheets, and phone-a-friend calls. Leave your excess baggage behind when you retire old systems.
You don’t need to fix everything now. But you do need to know what’s brittle, what’s patched, and what’s relying on one person to remember how it works.
3. Evaluate Process Debt
Just like technical debt, process debt accumulates. Extra approvals, redundant data entry, unclear ownership. All of it slows you down. Now is the time to simplify. Again, it’s important to understand the whys here. We can’t necessarily simplify away everything that feels bulky; some of it is rooted in safety and regulation and was put in place for good reason. But it’s absolutely a good time to find and simplify anything that is truly in excess and holding back your processes.
Three separate approvals before a switching order is executed? That may be a result of a serious safety issue, or it may be working around a system problem that surfaced 20 years ago. Process debt is every extra step that no one even questions anymore.
If your outage process involves entering the same data into OMS, WMS, and a spreadsheet, that’s a red flag. If your systems can’t keep up with your people, that’s an opportunity to surface inefficiencies and identify process debt.
4. Reduce Roundtrips
Excessive handoffs and circular approval loops slow down response times and muddy accountability. Streamlining doesn’t always mean cutting people out. It may just mean clarifying roles.
Every outage job that bounces from dispatch to the field and back again is a round trip that ADMS will bring attention to. Look for these loops and ask how they can become one-way trips going forward or even become automated so that they are sent to the field based on OMS or predicted fault location outputs.
5. Tighten Up Shift Handoffs
Outage management, switching, and monitoring all rely on clean, consistent transitions between shifts. If handoffs vary by team or time of day, you’re increasing risk and confusion. If those handoffs also involve a hastily typed email, a stack of physical paper notes, and a spreadsheet, there’s probably some room to reevaluate and clean up these processes ahead of ADMS. ADMS doesn’t pause during a shift change; a smooth, efficient handoff is vital to staying on top of emerging real-time situations. You can support this by using abnormal event lists at shift change to show new shift members where the grid is not in its normal state.
6. Run Small Experiments
Before launching sweeping changes, test small adjustments. Try running switching orders without the spreadsheet shadow system, give it two weeks, then assess. If it doesn’t work, revert. If it does, expand. Small experiments de-risk big changes.
7. Create Change Champions
Top-down process changes rarely stick without buy-in. Involve frontline staff in mapping, testing, and refining workflows. They’ll catch problems sooner and be more likely to champion the outcome. The field crew that cheats the system by calling dispatch directly instead of closing out their own tickets should have plenty of ideas about where the process is broken. As will the dispatcher who picks up that work. Bring them into the room.
8. Build Cross-Functional Awareness
ADMS blends IT, OT, GIS, Engineering, Asset Management, Field Operations, Emergency Responders, and Corporate Communications. If those groups don’t understand each other’s roles and pressures, collaboration will be harder when you need it most. There are opportunities to get creative here: host job shadow days, get your teams out and mingling so they are not only getting exposure to the work being done but also becoming familiar with the people in those parts of the organization. Not all of these groups have necessarily worked together as much as they will need to when bringing in ADMS. It’s good not only to shake out and discuss the work but also to get a feel for how people in these parts of the organization interact with one another.
If your IT group has an extensive ticketing process and only makes changes in the middle of the night, and your OT group has a completely different set of rules they have to adhere to and pushes their updates at noon, that’s likely going to cause conflict once the system is shared. Identifying data governance issues with LOBs responsible for feeding a current and accurate power system model to the ADMS will help adapt your whole organization down the line.
9. Start Change Management Now
People don’t resist change; they resist surprise. When you overhaul a process, you’re changing people’s jobs. That takes communication, context, and clear expectations.
An operator who has worked on the same system for 5, 10, even 20 years isn’t just learning a new process; they are breaking muscle memory. What may feel small on a process map can have a huge impact on the people who execute that step hundreds of times a shift. Every process change is a people change too.
10. Learn To Use The Powers of ADMS
The temptation will be to bend ADMS to match your company’s unique quirks and habits. Resist that temptation. Too much customization early on can create long-term complexity and limit future upgrades. Start simple and only add what’s needed.
Process readiness is where technical change meets human reality. Even the most advanced ADMS will fall short if outdated workflows, misaligned roles, or unnecessary complexity are carried forward. By investing the time to map, question, and refine how work gets done today, you make space for smarter, more connected operations tomorrow. This isn’t about throwing everything out; rather, it’s about making room for what comes next. From investment in high-value integrations and applications outside of the ADMS to using the GIS as the enterprise data marshaling tool for current outage statuses and crew statuses.