Restore west coast salmon runs
How does software help restore salmon runs? It can’t plant a tree, count pebbles to determine stream health, or rear smolt. Software can, however, help manage, measure and keep all that work on track.
The Bonneville Power Administration’s Fish and Wildlife program spends over $250 million a year to protect and enhance endangered salmon and other fish and wildlife in the Columbia River basin. It is the largest program of its kind in the world. In order to keep track of that spending and what the spending accomplishes, we built Pisces, a system to unify how contracted work is described and delivered across 200+ environmental services contractors.
Four years into the effort, BPA is able to uniformly track over 28,000 distinct work efforts, gathering metrics, location, environmental impact, schedules, focal species and many other data points for each. This not only allows more money to get on the ground more quickly to benefit fish and wildlife, it means that resource managers and policy analysts can more strategically view where and how the work is getting done, which leads to better, more informed decisions in pursuit of the best possible results.
Managing the location of work in Pisces
This successful project used an innovative combination of business analysis, development practices and software technology to achieve results. Guided by collaborative analysis between our product manager and BPA staff, the Pisces project began with a discovery the core processes and data involved in delivering the varied environmental services that are part of the program.
As we learned more and developed key insights, we formed an agile development team to implement these key discoveries in a software tool usable by all participants in the F&W program (>1200 users to date). With each incremental software update, BPA enjoyed new functionality and streamlined business processes, while we enjoyed immediate feedback which we then rolled into the next update. In the 31/2 years since the first release of Pisces, we delivered over a dozen major releases, each furthering the goal of a more effective and efficient Fish and Wildlife program.
Technically, the system involves a native Windows client communicating with a back end SQL database via Web Services using primarily Microsoft based technologies. The Windows smart client is delivered to all users via the Internet, which minimizes distribution, installation and support costs. The client provides a rich interface that allows users to quickly and effectively accomplish their tasks. Each task has been carefully thought out and designed to gather the appropriate information while being easy to use. The collected data is also available as a dimensional model, separate from the transaction system, to allow for high-level analytics and comprehensive report generation. Integrations to GIS, ERP and other systems tie the application into the enterprise and across organizations.
