Augmenting Seattle's PCRA Project Team with TEAM IM Expertise
Embedded SME support gave a great project team the extra capacity to deliver on schedule.
Highlights
- Embedded subject matter expertise in Oracle WebCenter Content and TEAM IM's Modern UI directly into Seattle's PCRA team
- Extended Seattle's project management, technical design, and code review capacity throughout the engagement
- Designed and built five workflows: Amendment, Partially Executed Contract, Contract Expiration, Fully Executed Contract, and DDAI
- Took on full design and development of sprints 7 and 8 via change order, adding parallel capacity alongside Seattle's work on sprints 1 through 6
- Helped a strong project team hit an ambitious timeline
Customer Background
The City of Seattle is the largest municipal government in Washington State and one of the 20 largest cities in the country, serving a population of more than 730,000 residents. As a full-service city government, Seattle operates departments spanning public utilities, transportation, permitting, parks, and public safety, supported by a correspondingly large IT organization responsible for the systems and applications those departments rely on day to day.
Project Details
The Context
The Power Contracts and Resource Acquisition (PCRA) division is a specialized unit within Seattle City Light, the municipal electric utility for the City of Seattle. PCRA manages long-term wholesale energy transactions, power purchase agreements, and the acquisition of clean energy resources needed to meet the region's growing energy demands.
The PCRA application is a critical business system used by contract administrators, managers, and directors to manage power contracts throughout their lifecycle. The application supports contract creation, amendments, renewals, extensions, expirations, approvals, and recurring action items. Users rely on the system's dashboards and workflows to track responsibilities, review required actions, and ensure contracts are processed efficiently and in compliance with organizational requirements.
Because the application supports the management of critical energy contracts and related business processes, it plays an essential role in Seattle City Light's day-to-day operations.
The Problem To Be Solved
Seattle City Light's PCRA application supports important business processes and serves as a critical tool for the Power Marketing team. While the application continued to meet the organization's functional needs, it was built on Oracle ADF, an aging technology platform that had become increasingly difficult and costly to support.
As the availability of experienced resources for the platform continued to decline, Seattle City Light faced growing risks related to long-term supportability, application sustainability, and the ability to efficiently maintain and enhance the system. Users were also experiencing operational challenges that impacted productivity and system reliability. Common issues included system crashes when processing large contract documents, limited administrative capabilities for managing document metadata and resolving workflow issues, and an outdated user interface that created training and usability challenges for both new and existing users.
In addition, the platform was nearing end-of-life, creating concerns around long-term vendor support, increased operational risk, and potential impacts to data management and system stability. Continuing to rely on the legacy platform increased the cost and complexity of maintaining the application and made future modernization efforts more challenging.
To address these concerns, Seattle City Light launched a modernization initiative to rebuild the application on a new Oracle ECM platform using modern architecture and tools, allowing for a more sustainable and extensible platform while preserving the core functionality users depended on every day. The objective was not to substantially change existing business processes, but rather to improve system stability, reduce technical risk, enhance long-term maintainability, and establish a foundation for future innovation and cloud adoption.
Why Solving The Problem Was Important
The modernization effort was critical because the PCRA application supports the management of contracts that are essential to Seattle City Light's operations. As the underlying technology aged, maintaining the application became more difficult and created increasing risks related to support, stability, and future scalability.
At the same time, the project was operating under a firm timeline and ambitious delivery schedule. Seattle City Light needed to modernize the application without disrupting business operations or diverting focus from ongoing project work. Success required balancing immediate delivery objectives with the long-term goal of migrating to a platform that would be easier to support, enhance, and eventually move to the cloud.
By partnering with TEAM IM, Seattle City Light was able to add experienced resources that accelerated development efforts, reduced implementation risk, and helped ensure the modernization initiative remained on schedule while meeting long-term business and technology goals.
How TEAM IM Got Involved
TEAM IM and the City of Seattle have a long-standing partnership built through successful collaboration on several large-scale initiatives, including the Procurement Portal and Utility Assistance Program projects. Combined with an existing support relationship, TEAM IM was a trusted partner for the PCRA modernization effort.
Seattle City Light engaged TEAM IM to provide specialized expertise and additional project capacity throughout the project. TEAM IM's familiarity with the application's supporting technologies and modern user interface framework enabled the team to quickly integrate into the project and provide value across design, development, architecture, and project management activities.
By working alongside Seattle City Light's internal team, TEAM IM helped ensure the project remained aligned with modernization objectives, followed development best practices, and achieved the long-term goal of creating a more maintainable and sustainable solution.
The Method
TEAM IM initially provided project management oversight, including status reporting, stakeholder communication, technical design and architecture support, workflow design, and code review activities. Rather than operating independently, TEAM IM worked as an extension of Seattle City Light's project team, collaborating closely with internal resources throughout the engagement.
As the project progressed, both organizations identified an opportunity to further accelerate delivery. Through a change order, TEAM IM assumed full responsibility for the design and development of workflow functionality scheduled for Sprints 7 and 8. This allowed Seattle City Light's development team to remain focused on completing work planned for Sprints 1 through 6 while TEAM IM executed a parallel development track.
The additional capacity enabled both teams to work concurrently without impacting the project schedule. TEAM IM designed and implemented five key workflows:
- Amendment Workflow
- Partially Executed Contract Workflow
- Contract Expiration Workflow
- Fully Executed Contract Workflow
- DDAI Workflow
The End Result
The modernization effort successfully delivered a rebuilt PCRA application on a more sustainable platform while preserving the business capabilities users relied on. TEAM IM's additional capacity, technical expertise, and collaborative approach helped Seattle City Light maintain momentum throughout the project and meet critical delivery milestones.
By modernizing the application, Seattle City Light reduced long-term support risks, improved the foundation for future enhancements, and positioned the solution for eventual migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The project was subsequently transitioned to the City's cloud team to support go-live activities.
Conclusion
The PCRA modernization initiative demonstrates how Seattle City Light and TEAM IM successfully partnered to reduce the risks associated with an aging business-critical application while preserving existing business processes and functionality. By combining Seattle City Light's deep business knowledge with TEAM IM's modernization expertise, the project delivered a more sustainable, supportable, and future-ready solution.
Building on the success of this engagement, TEAM IM and Seattle City Light expect to continue their partnership on future modernization and digital transformation initiatives.
Working with the Seattle team again was a great experience. Assisting with the project by providing WebCenter Content and Modern UI support gave Seattle peace of mind, which we were glad to provide. We were happy to take on sprints 7 and 8 for the workflow implementation as well. Partnering with Seattle is always a smooth engagement, and this project was no different.
Seattle was very receptive to letting TEAM IM fully design and develop the five PCRA workflows. The City continues to be a knowledgeable, flexible, and pleasant client to work with. Looking forward to the next one.
Value Added
- Added project capacity exactly where it made the biggest difference, without requiring new hires
- Delivered five production-ready workflows for contract and amendment processing
- Gave Seattle direct access to WebCenter Content and Modern UI expertise through its existing support agreement
- Provided a centralized repository for ~900 contracts (200 active, 700 archived).
- Improved searchability including within-document text search
- Robust workflow automation such as approvals renewals processes
- Easy document upload from multiple sources including email and desktop
- Compliance with records retention policy (6+ years post-expiration)
Software and Cloud Services Involved
- Oracle WebCenter Content: Core content management platform for the PCRA workflows
- TEAM IM Modern UI: Front-end interface layer for WebCenter Content
- TEAM IM Professional Services