"Facing challenges is all about planning"

Rethinking projects, especially in terms of planning, has been one of the foremost challenges for both companies and individuals during the COVID-19 emergency. For Terna, most of this was done by the Planning team, whose task it is to plan interventions (such as maintenance or development work) on the electricity grid, ensuring that everything goes smoothly at both an operational and administrative level.

Sofia Padovani has been part of the team at the Bologna Systems Unit for almost two years and, as well as the only woman in her division, she is also one of the youngest: at only 27 years old, the electricity grid manager decided to take her on immediately after graduating in energy engineering. “I uploaded a CV to Terna’s website and was selected. It was on the list of companies I was most focused on, because I already knew of it and had heard about it during my studies, but I still didn’t expect it. In the end, all went well!”, she says.

“I really like it and that is because of the people, my colleagues. Other than the usual jump from the academic world into the world of work, starting at such a large company was not difficult, the culture that we cultivate in the Bologna office is really very welcoming. They are all very helpful and friendly and although I was (and still am) the only woman, I always felt that I fit in. And to think that when I arrived I was also the youngest...”, she says.

Sofia’s work consists of planning Terna’s activities, a large part of which entails power lines to be taken out of service, and then a series of internal steps to define intervention methods and time-scales. “My colleagues and I carry out various activities, but basically we take care of the formal programming. In fact, before planning the interventions we have to liaise with the technicians to get information regarding the duration of the necessary disconnection. Once they identify a suitable time based on the various factors that contribute to the works’ success, we make arrangements with the Dispatching Unit, who are tasked with management of the grid,” says Padovani, “once an agreement is reached we can proceed with the request. Dispatching then receives it and follows it up. However, there are also other issues to monitor such as whether the materials ordered arrive on time or whether the administrative side is carried out correctly. If even one link in the chain is missing, rescheduling can be super complicated”.

In this respect, managing the consequences of the health emergency has led to several problems that have involved rescheduling numerous activities: “We had to reschedule all interventions that could not be carried out during this period; this had a knock-on effect on other activities too. April was taken up with rewriting the annual schedule, which we usually draw up between July and October for the following year. The health emergency obviously led to an upheaval with other plans and we basically had to start from scratch. I don't think that’s ever happened before”.

The work was complicated by an obvious lack of in-person contact, but it did not discourage Sofia and her colleagues, who managed to complete the mission, even from a distance.

“Our work involves continuous exchanges between us and the technical department, almost every hour of every day. Before all this, we could simply move from one office to another, now I’m always on the phone”, says the energy engineer. “In any case, thanks to all the tools and procedures that the company has made available to us, I had no difficulty adapting to this new way of working. It’s really a matter of changing your habits... and being able to give up the stress of travelling to the office is really not so bad after all”.

Sofia is not worried about returning to the office; on the contrary, she is confident that adapting to the new situation will be quite easy. “In Bologna, our offices have space for 2 or 3 people at most, no open space. It was possible to keep our distance even before we started working from home, because of the large spaces available to us. I believe that we will create a hybrid between the technology we have used at home over recent months and our old ways of working, with social distancing and the necessary PPE”. In Italy, control rooms and other operational facilities have been working like this since the beginning of the health emergency.

Sofia is particularly happy about the prospect of returning to the company and for the possibility of seeing her colleagues again, whom she has particularly missed in recent months. “I have missed the relationship between us colleagues a lot, both because we get along so well and because of the habit of working together,” says Sofia, adding that they did manage to maintain some habits, like taking their lunch break together.

“Especially during the first few days of working from home, we made group video calls to each other. At times there were thirty of us and communication was practically impossible without a moderator, but it was enough to be able to see each other for a few minutes and say hello. It was a way to maintain a sense of normality and at least some of our daily routine: a virtual coffee to be all together like we used to be”.