Submitted for an ETAP (Excellence in Technology) project management leadership award

1.
I hereby nominate Peter Heller for the ETAP Project Management Leadership award.
This nomination is made to recognize Peter for his outstanding accomplishments regarding his
management of DCAS’s Energy Cost, Control and Conservation (EC3) project, which accounts for the
City’s approximately $800 million annual energy expenditures. EC3 is a single web based resource for
the tracking of Citywide electricity, gas, and steam usage and billing. Through the efficient displays of a
broad range of agency‐, facility‐, and account‐specific information, the system helps end users from the
dozens of agencies and organization for which the City pays utility bills to understand and manage their
energy use. Such understanding helps identify billing anomalies, locations with missed readings, old
accounts that need closure, and, importantly, opportunities for energy conservation. The sum total of
the actions can save taxpayer dollars, and reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
Further, EC3 presents a user‐friendly environment that delivers to each agency only the information that
that agency needs, while providing oversight agencies, including DCAS and OMB, with access to all
agencies. It replaced and consolidated various mainframe systems, dating from the 1980s, that were
unable to perform the functions described here in an acceptable manner.
Given the unique manner that each utility uses (there are approximately 40 different billing types), the
large amount of bills that have to be reconciled every month, and the number of end‐users, EC3 was a
daunting and complex undertaking. But from the time of the initial proposal by DCAS’s business partner,
Peter took the lead, from database conceptualization through deployment. He oversaw all aspects of
architectural development, including elicitation of business requirements, guidance of DCAS
programmers, and communication with utilities, cultivating synergistic relationships with them. Three
particular contributions deserve mention: (1) Peter developed creative solution to dealing with frequent
billing adjustments, with a naming period‐specific components for retaining the information for
detailed and audit reports while providing end‐users with seemingly‐transparent revised information.
(2) He devised an approach to monthly timing conventions that allows for different (utility‐specific)
monthly billing periods without hampering the nominal‐month reporting convention that the business
partner needed. (3) He dealt professionally but persistently with the larger utility companies in
establishing certain data definitions and conventions, in the process improving the quality and internal
consistency of incoming data. Overall, Peter demonstrated extraordinary skill in data modeling and
database administration. EC3 would not have been successfully completed without Peter’s focus and
tenacious commitment throughout the entire development life cycle.

2. It is important to note that EC3 was developed almost entirely in‐house. Peter is a 32 year career civil
servant who drew on his wealth of knowledge and experience and that of the other two civil servant
team members who helped make the system a reality. In‐house development enabled the flexibility for
application prototyping, the ability to keep pace with utility changes in data inputs, and continuous
integration to meet new and evolving end user needs over the long term, without the constraints and
additional costs that might otherwise have been incurred. Such development also retains institutional
knowledge in DCAS. The fact that the City is reaping the benefits of EC3 is due to Peter’s leadership as
well as the professionalism of the entire development team.