Management Quarterly

An effective human resources development plan requires a comprehensive training needs analysis to support it. This is especially true in the electric cooperative industry, where long-range plans are the norm. A two- to three-year program should consider industry growth, services and management needs in the future, as well as goals and means of developing employees, recruitment and promotion practices, compensation and legal aspects. However, the needs assessment process should precede all suc...

Implications for utilities of the National Energy Policy Act and other developments.

The electric utility industry is being restructured to make it more competitive. To this end, the National Energy Power Act of 1992 has introduced amendments to both the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) and the Federal Power Act to encourage the establishment of independent power producers and give such producers access to transmission facilities. These two provisions are expected not only to increase competitive pressures within the industry, but may also raise demand for retail wh...

Job reengineering: a new approach to meet the challenges faced by rural electric systems.

Rural electric systems may better adapt to the changing global environment through job reengineering. This method allows an organization to evaluate its effectiveness by looking at specific operating processes and making fundamental modifications toward closing the gap between present performance and future goals. This approach is an organization-wide movement based upon tried and true methods of work redesign that begins with a re-evaluation of a firm's strategic mission. In the rural electr...

Rural electric power requirements forecasts: detecting and correcting for weaknesses and bias.

Power Requirements Studies (PRS) suffer from two weaknesses in statistical forecasting for small rural electric systems. These are the unwarranted emphasis on trending and the statistical bias called autocorrelation. Such problems may lead to expensive managerial decisions based on faulty results. Since the economic, demographic and other data necessary in estimating factors that affect peak usage levels are scarce, trending has been a popular but flawed alternative, because it does not revea...