Business challenge
Northern Powergrid engaged with a wide range of customers and stakeholders in their goal to build a customer-led RIIO-ED2 business plan that was informed by expert and public opinion.
When consumer preferences were clear, these were given greater weight, but when these public opinions were not clear or did not align with expert, specialist, or business opinion, Northern Powergrid wanted a tool to help them decide which engagement should take precedence.
What we did
We developed an Excel tool that calculates a weighting score for each piece of engagement. The score is based on multiple aspects of each source of public or expert opinion, including:
- The influence of the customer/stakeholder/expert on our client
- The impact of our client on the customer/stakeholder/expert
- The nature of the engagement
- The number of people engaged
- The number of customers represented.
These elements are scored for their ‘strength’ (out of a total of 100 points), for each customer/stakeholder/expert and for each topic related to the business plan. Further influences on the ‘weight’ are based on the knowledge of the topic being discussed and the relevance of the topic to the customers, stakeholders or experts.
Outcome
Northern Powergrid can use the tool to store the scores for the different elements and calculate the level of weighting that applies. The model is now firmly embedded within the organisation whenever engagement generates conflicting insight .