At a glance
My role: Data Analyst, leading the customer enumeration project.
Scale: a team of 20 and 4,500 customer records.
Result: power restored to 1,500 households after 7 years of blackout.
The problem
Parts of the area our branch served had been without electricity for seven years. Before anyone could be reconnected, the company needed to know who was actually there: who the customers were, whether they were homes or businesses, and what they could afford to pay. There was no team in the branch to find that out.
What I did
- Built the team from nothing. I set up the enumeration team, then trained and mentored 20 people to collect customer data in the field.
- Ran the field work. I coordinated data collection, managed the budget and sent daily progress reports to management.
- Made sense of the data. We collected 4,500 customer records. I analysed them, sorted residential from commercial customers, assigned tariff bands and assessed whether customers could afford the service.
- Helped shape the rules. I helped design the criteria for tariff bands and connection decisions, so reconnections were fair and consistent.
- Kept stakeholders on board. I prepared reports and presented our findings to stakeholders, mostly government.
The result
Power was restored to 1,500 households after seven years of blackout.
What I learned
Good data starts long before the spreadsheet. The analysis was only as good as the information coming in from the field, so the time spent training the team paid off more than anything else.