Proven to Optimized is a short blog series drawn from lived experience on both sides of the implementation table. After more than two decades working within a utility, I’ve seen how early, well-intentioned market decisions tend to persist long after their original context has changed.
Now working from the vendor side with many utilities at once, I see those same patterns repeat. Markets+ creates a rare pause point before designs, workflows, and integrations get locked in again.
This series explores that moment — what tends to stick, why it does, and how experience can be used before go‑live to move from what’s proven to what’s truly optimized.
Part 1: from the frying pan into the fire
For most of my career, I sat on the client side of the table.
At Salt River Project (SRP), I was part of the team standing up PCI’s solution to support our entry into the Energy Imbalance Market (EIM). That meant seeing the work end to end: configuring the system, integrating data flows, adapting where market rules or tooling fell short, and training users who carried real operational risk. It also meant staying with those decisions through go-live and daily operations. When something looked off in the numbers, it wasn’t academic — it was our responsibility to explain it and fix it.
That experience changes how you think. You don’t just care that something works; you care why it works, how defensible it will be later, and whether touching it again is worth the risk.
Nine months ago, I stepped into a different role: the vendor side. The heat didn’t disappear; it got hotter! Now I’m helping shape solutions used by many clients, trying to reconcile what works best for an individual utility with the reality that scalable products must also be standardized, repeatable, and supportable over time.
From the client side, many decisions made perfect sense: file‑based transfers that were easy to trace, spreadsheet‑driven tie‑outs that made numbers defensible, and manual checks layered in to build trust early in EIM participation. Those approaches were proven.
From the vendor side, I now see those same patterns repeated across implementations — not because teams lack awareness of alternatives, but because once workflows are live and reliable, revisiting foundational choices feels risky. Stability takes priority, and improvement gets deferred.
The challenge isn’t that these safeguards existed — it’s that they often outlive the conditions that required them. Over time, controls designed to reduce risk can begin to add friction, slow adaptation, and constrain how systems evolve, even as the surrounding market matures.
Markets+ doesn’t create this tension — it reveals it. New market design, new integration expectations, and new testing cycles create a rare moment when asking hard questions before go‑live is both acceptable and responsible. After go‑live, those same questions often feel dangerous.
Having lived on both sides, I’ve learned that timing matters more than tooling. Markets+ is one of the few moments where experience earned in earlier markets can meaningfully inform what gets built next — before decisions harden again in the name of stability.
In the next post, I’ll explore how many of these well‑intentioned decisions quietly become technical debt — and why the design phase is often the last safe place to address them.
Want to learn more about Markets+? Check out the following on the PCI blog:
- SPP Markets+ Transmission Integration: An Operational Framework for Balancing Authorities & Transmission Service Providers
- SPP Markets+ Launches Its Implementation Strike Team — What Participants Need to Know
- Why WRAP’s Next Chapter Matters for the Future of Western Markets — & Markets+
- SPP’s Move from SOAP to REST for Markets+ and What It Means for Your Utility
- SPP Markets+: Navigating the West’s Next Market Transition
