At a recent Executive Steering Committee meeting, one of our utility customers put up a slide about our work together: 47 releases delivered, more than 1,050 pieces of new functionality, 375 test cases at a 100% pass rate, and a production rollout with no open incidents at deployment. Eleven of their departments had a hand in the work.
We didn’t make the slide. They did, for the people they answer to.
What was on the slide
Plus 30+ support tickets resolved, and a structured hypercare period after go-live.
A utility doesn’t put a vendor’s name in front of its executives unless the work has earned it, quietly, over a long stretch of time. That’s what stayed with me, more than any number on the slide. You can’t ask a customer to do that.
No utility celebrates test-pass rates in front of its board. What they were pointing to was a pattern: years of releases that shipped on schedule, tested clean, and went into production without breaking the revenue cycle that runs every single day. That pattern is what they trusted. It’s also the thing almost no buyer gets to evaluate before they sign.
The part of a partnership you can’t see in a demo
Think about how a CIS gets chosen. There’s a demo, where the vendor brings their sharpest people and a script they’ve run a hundred times. There’s a go-live, where that same team shows up at full attention because everyone is watching. Both matter. Neither tells you what the relationship feels like in year three, when the launch is a memory, the original team has rotated off, and your system still has to be right every night.
Year three is where a utility lives with its software. Take a rate change. The council approves a new tier structure in the spring, effective on summer bills. Between those two dates, that change has to be built, tested against thousands of real accounts, and deployed without misbilling a single customer or breaking the month-end close. Now multiply it by every rate case, every new program, every regulatory deadline over a decade. That’s the job. The demo never shows it, because the demo is frozen in time. The slide showed thirty-some of those moments, handled.
That’s the reason this is worth writing down. The work that earns a customer’s trust is the least visible work there is. It happens release by release, ticket by ticket, in the years after the part everyone evaluates is already over.
It takes the whole company
A run like this is never one project team. It pulled in every part of the company:
Management
Development
Assurance (QA)
Services
Support
Operations
Success
When a customer decides their vendor is worth a slide in front of leadership, what they’re describing is all of those teams pulling toward the same outcome, for years. That’s the part you can’t fake and can’t shortcut.
You can demo software in an afternoon. You can’t demo three years of a company showing up.
What I’d take from it as a buyer
If you’re a utility weighing a CIS decision, here’s the practical version. Three questions surface the part the demo hides.
Ask about the last few years of releases for a customer your size.
How many shipped, how they were tested, and what support looked like six months after go-live, not six days.
Ask who will be in the room two years in.
The support model, not the names on the proposal. The team that sells the deal is rarely the team that runs year three.
Ask to talk to a customer who has been live long enough to be honest.
The newest, happiest reference is easy to produce. The one who’s been through the full arc will tell you what you’re actually buying.
For our own teams, this is worth a pause. We spend most of our time on escalations and the work still ahead, which is exactly where the focus belongs. But every so often a customer holds up a mirror and shows you what all of it added up to. This was one of those times, and it was earned.
To everyone who had a hand in it: thank you. It showed.