My Role and Project Background
I worked for Unisys and the Bonneville Power Administration as a technical writer and training developer from June 1996 through December 1997. My role was dedicated primarily to development of user guides and training materials to support a river system simulation model called Hydrosim. I am including this story in my portfolio because it was my first job after college with a desk and computer and it set the stage for most of what was to follow in subsequent employment. The Pacific Northwest is also a very easy and memorable setting for telling the story of a 20-something protagonist on his own.
Bonneville Power Administration transmission and service area map
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) manages, operates, and
distributes all of the power from all of the federally owned hydroelectric projects in the Pacific Northwest. This includes thirty-one federal hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries, with substations, power plants, and dams on rivers in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. I had traveled back and forth between Minnesota and Oregon every 3-4 months during the first two years out of college and it was very exciting to learn about what was happening behind the scenes at the dams and on the rivers that I had driven past so many times.
Methods and Strategy
My audience for the user manuals and training consisted of analysts and engineers who performed seasonal hydroregulation studies of the Bonneville Power hydroelectric system. The primary tool used for these studies was a seasonal planning model called the Hydro System Simulator (aka Hydrosim). Developed by the BPA Department of Energy Resources, Hydrosim was used by BPA and other agencies and utilities in the Pacific Northwest to simulate river levels and water flow through the dams to determine best case scenarios for producing power as well as for management of other requirements including fish passage, irrigation, navigation, and equipment maintenance. These simulations and studies were completed using an extensive data set and multiple rule curves that could be applied alone or in combination to provide a view of system conditions in the study as if they were occurring on the actual rivers.
My audience was located almost entirely in the field rather than at the Portland headquarters, which made it important for me to visit some of the command centers and dams in order to the meet people who would be using the materials. These visits also gave me the chance to see the operations side of the organization including the control boards, power turbines, and the massive high-voltage lines at the substations.
By spending time on-site, I had the chance to observe some of what happened day-to-day and got to see practical application of the terms, simulations, and maintenance practices that would be documented in the manuals. More importantly, my time spent in the field earned me some credibility with the analysts and made it easier for me to contact people when I needed information. This was 1996-1997 and most of my contacts were old school beyond old school for whom it was more common to have a phone call or make a drive for a face-to-face conversation than it was to send an email. Windows 95 was only a year old and most of my contacts in the field had only it installed on their desktop computer for a few months. There was no such thing as media servers or Google, inserting photos into file rarely occurred because photos were not digital, and large amounts of data including documents or screen shots had to be sent FTP.
With this being the case, my method for completing the project was pretty much the same as might have come out of a State Department or US Army policy from 1920-1990.
Produce a draft using existing content.
Visit the sites being documented. Interview the users. Learn more from what can be observed or deduced.
Produce another draft and share this with users and experts asking for feedback.
Incorporate feedback and share again.
Publish content once vetted and after agreement has been achieved.
Solutions and Delivery
Image from Hydrosim Introduction depicting the continuity equation, which states that reservoir outflow (O) for a time period is equal to reservoir inflow (I) during the period minus the water released from storage (ΔS) minus losses (L).
The solution to this project was the Hydrosim User Manual, which included several sections starting with Section 1: Hydrosim Introduction and four additional technical sections. Content for the technical sections already existed in several procedure documents, which had to be consolidated and updated, but content for the introduction had to be written entirely from scratch through existing content, research, and conversations with the users. It ended up being where I spent almost all of my time.
The introduction section provided the big picture overview of the hydroregulation study process. It included explanations of concepts, data, modeling, and all general information that needed to be understood to use Hydrosim. We went through several drafts and rewrites and were able to get a final draft ready before the December holidays 1996. I incorporated all feedback in January 1997 and we published the manual at the end of that month.
Image from Hydrosim Introduction showing how power generation at a project is a function of the outflow, head (reservoir pool elevation minus tailwater elevation), and efficiency of the project’s generating equipment.
On one hand, delivery was very simple because all I had to do in 1997 was produce a well-organized Word document that could be taken to a printshop and assembled as a user guide. There was not any requirement of producing HTML or posting PDFs (we couldn’t even save to PDF). That said, on the other hand it was and can be complicated to deal with a printshop and all of the choices that go into choosing paper and binding, then packaging the materials and getting them shipped to the correct addresses.