SAM (Smart Alarm Management)
Operational teams rely on alarms to spot emerging risk (e.g., pumping station issues, rising levels, abnormal run times) and trigger timely intervention. In practice, alarms can be noisy, inconsistent and hard to prioritise - leading to missed early warnings, unnecessary site visits, and slower response to genuine incidents. SAM (Smart Alarm Management) aims to improve how alarm data is presented, triaged and acted upon - so we can focus attention on what matters most, reduce avoidable harm, and build trust in alarm-driven ways of working.
Throughout the week we will work on How might we use current alarm data more effectively and prioritise interventions efficiently?
Monday 6 July - Thursday 9 July 202
Newcastle Racecourse, High Gosforth Park, Newcastle upon Tyne NE3 5HP
Kick-start SAM by aligning stakeholders on the problem, agreeing the minimum viable scope for the first release, and producing a delivery plan with clear owners.
Definition of done (for the sprint):
- Provide a comparison of alarm management with and without the solution aiming for an optimisation of operational resource.
- A shared problem statement and success measures (what “better alarm management” means in operational terms).
- Agreed scope for SAM v1 (alarm types, sites/areas, users, and decisions SAM will support).
- A prioritised backlog (must/should/could) and key dependencies/risks.
- An agreed operating model: how we’ll govern decisions, test with users, and measure impact.
Firstly, we will ensure a shared understanding of the problem and current processes associated with alarm generation, triage and response.
We will then use that shared view to confirm what SAM should deliver first and how we will prove it works.
- Explain the draft SAM project plan in detail (scope, milestones, assumptions, dependencies).
- Explore and research what has already been done (internal initiatives, prior analytics, vendor capabilities, lessons learned).
- Hear from speakers from other sectors on smart alerting/alarm reduction, human factors, and operational decision support.
- Work on design of the console/dashboard (what decisions it supports, priority views, drill-down, and actions/escalations).
- Draw up testing and trial criteria (pilot sites/alarms, baseline measures, success thresholds, sign-off).
- Create the stakeholder group and ways of working (governance, decision rights, and user feedback loops).
- SAM v1 scope statement (what’s in/out), including priority alarm categories and target users.
- End-to-end plan for the initial user research phase.
- A prioritised backlog with acceptance criteria for the first build/test cycle.
- Data & integration checklist (feeds, owners, access, and known data quality issues).
- Preliminary technical design for data ingest pipeline
- Control room / operational duty teams (alarm triage + incident response).
- Wastewater network performance / flooding / blockage leads (benefits + priorities).
- SCADA / telemetry subject matter experts (alarm generation, tagging, thresholds).
- Data/analytics (rules, modelling, monitoring, evaluation).
- Digital/IT (integration, security, environments, support model).
- Field ops representative(s) (site reality, false alarms, safety/practicality).
Sprint coordination: Chris Bolt (christopher.bolt@nwl.co.uk)