Observe compliance, practice resistance

Robots from outer space want to take over Earth.

Their plan? Siphoning off the planet’s energy to soften the rock for bot dominance.

The federal government knows. If the public finds out, mass panic will ensue.

The only solution: Compliance.

The fictitious storyline is part of Associated Electric Cooperative Inc.’s latest strategy to train its engineering and operating department employees and protect its bottom line.

“Compliance is a large body of government regulations designed to increase reliability and security in the energy industry,” said Chris Lazzaro, AECI’s manager of engineering and operations systems. “Compliance is high risk because it carries high fines, fines that can run from thousands to millions of dollars depending on the regulation broken and the severity of the impact.”

With $1.08 million in 2011 operating revenues and employing about 665 workers across a three-state region who help generate and distribute more than 20 billion megatwatt-hours of electricity yearly, Lazzaro said there is a lot at stake for the Springfield-based company when it comes to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission’s compliance training.

“Delivering reliable, affordable electricity to rural electric cooperative members is our No. 1 one objective. In focusing on the reliability piece of that objective, we need to be absolutely sure our employees understand their responsibilities – and they do,” said Nancy Southworth, AECI manager of corporate communications, in an email. “Meeting our obligations to the co-op member, the industry and the federal government are high priority when it comes to meeting standards for security and reliability. All employees participate in training every year that reinforces their responsibilities.”

New direction
In 2008, Lazzaro said AECI hired an outside firm for $18,000 to conduct a week-long compliance training program for his 15-member staff. A leader in grid security and compliance, the training is just one segment of AECI’s work to ensure full compliance across the board and ensure employees are equipped to do their jobs properly.

“The trainer read through the regulations with the employees and explained what they meant,” he said. “While this may seem a logical approach on the surface, it had issues. It was a long training and difficult to maintain engagement. It was nearly impossible to apply reading these abstract regulations that required interpretation to an individual’s day-to-day duties.”

Lazzaro said he knew a training makeover was in order. So, he and employee Charlie Evans, the energy management systems team supervisor, started looking at similar industries for ideas.

“We looked at the airline and health care field because they deal with high risk situations and have been around a long time,” Lazzaro said. “These are people that if they mess up at their job, it could kill someone. They had 50 years of research behind their compliance training and knew it could provide us a good framework.”

In redesigning the department’s compliance training program, Lazzaro said the pair worked under two basic principles: Humans are going to make mistakes no matter what, and if you give people duty-based training, they will perform well.

Sitting in a coffee shop, the AECI managers whittled hundreds of government regulations down to a 30-page manual in layman’s terms, but Lazzaro said it still wasn’t enough.

Enter Springfield digital artist Michael Dockery, in 2010, and a robot storyline was born.

“We know the best way to invoke information is to tell a story,” said Dockery, who knew Lazzaro through church. “Stories captivate us; they make us want to remember. It has been a suspicion of mine that you could put any information – like compliance training – into a pretty package with a good story and people would want to remember it.”

Dockery said robots were a natural fit for the story because they could attack physical and cyber elements.

“The process was a true collaborative effort and we were extremely deliberate in our robot creations,” he said of the storyline and gamification of the compliance manual. “We saw value in this work and so did others. From a creative standpoint, that’s rare. Often people would consider this too ‘out there’ to work in an office setting.”

Rather than lines of technical language, the new department compliance manual – dubbed Mortal Peril Edition Vol. 1 – is duty-based and follows the storyline Lazzaro and Dockery created using original artwork to draw the reader in.

In the days before the first redesigned training in 2011, Lazzaro said his employees were none the wiser about the makeover, until he began hanging movie-style teaser posters around the office.

“I was prepared for some skepticism from employees. When I announced the first compliance training, you could register the doubt that this would be productive” he said. “When I let them know robots had invaded and it was our job to help the government protect Earth, they started to crack a smile.”

Using the handcrafted, robot-illustrated manual, a tour of the building complete with life-size cardboard cutouts of robots along the way and a duty-based approach to each compliance element, Lazzaro said his team completed the first training in a little more than half a day.

“It took us one morning with the new manual, and the team actually liked it and retained the information,” he said. “The other way, it took a week and was difficult to recall and apply to our day to day activities.”

Given the in-depth nature of the program, Lazzaro said technical on-site training performed by an outside party typically costs between $15,000 and $25,000 for his 15 employees and he pulled this training off for less than his $15,000 budget.

“We gave them far more than a PowerPoint presentation and AECI paid less then if we hired an outside company,” he said. “Since the first redesigned training, my department has successfully sustained compliance and that saves the company even more.”

Version 1.5
With the 2011 training in the books, what could Lazzaro and Dockery do to top robots in 2012? Time-traveling robots of course.

“Version 1.5 of the manual was created much the same way, with updated regulations and a continuing storyline,” Dockery said.

The new version included local improvisational actor Chad Harris as Brit Beacon, a British soldier from the future sent back in time to use Lord Brimstone – a model weapon AECI had crafted at a movie prop house – to retrieve the glove of power and help save Earth, once again, through compliance.

“I was in character for eight hours straight, but it’s all about keeping up the appearance and really having these people buy into it,” Harris said. “Every little detail is planned out, from the training videos to the scavenger hunt for the glove at the end and even the dog tags given to the employees with their future ranks.”

Tying the training to history, pop culture and a possible future Earth, Harris put on shows and performed sing-a-longs to retain employee interest in between manual chapters.

More to come
The original training program was so successful, the group was asked to speak about their approach during the Aug. 4, 2011, Open Systems International Annual User Group, an industry conference in Las Vegas.

“Like the employees, I think people were skeptical at first, but when they saw what we had created, they bought right into it,” Lazzaro said. “To this day, I still get calls from people asking us questions about how we did it and how to implement it.”

The innovative program makeover has also garnered company support.

“We’re delighted when a manager takes initiative and applies innovative concepts to make the training more valuable in the way Chris and his staff did in addressing their responsibilities,” Southworth said of the department training.

As employees of AECI, Lazzaro said the work is the intellectual property of the company and cannot be resold as-is.

“Even if it could be sold, there is still a problem, because the training is highly tailored to the culture and audience of my department as well as our specific technical systems,” he said. “Not every company has the same energy management system. As a packaged, turnkey solution, it would require a great deal of thought and work to be made pluggable into other companies and may lose its effectiveness.”

However, Lazzaro said the process used to create the program could be applied to a wide range or training situations through the creation of a how-to guide or book for managers and trainers, adding he was invited back to the OSI conference to speak on Nov. 8, 2012.

“Just think how other companies could benefit from this line of thinking,” Harris said. “What could companies like CoxHealth learn from this? What can we teach other businesses with the experience we have gained?”

While Lazzaro said the group plans to pursue their options in the future, Dockery said 2013 would most certainly bring another chapter in the on going AECI robot saga.

“There is always another chapter in the story,” he said with a smile. “The robots haven’t won yet, but they will always keep trying.”