Overview
In 2013, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) launched a new Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) system intended to modernize decades-old billing infrastructure serving roughly 1.6 million electric and water accounts. The rollout instead produced widespread inaccurate bills and customer harm, leading to class-action litigation — Antwon Jones v. City of Los Angeles — that was resolved through a court-supervised settlement. Under that settlement, LADWP committed to a comprehensive turnaround of its billing operations, backed by a substantial remediation investment, and agreed to independent, court-supervised monitoring of its progress.
In 2015, LADWP engaged tieBridge to provide technical leadership within that independent monitoring effort, with tieBridge President Osman Ahmad serving as Lead Technical SME. Mr. Ahmad brought direct, hands-on experience with the same CC&B platform at the center of the dispute — including his work as Program Manager for a separate large-scale CC&B implementation, and as principal technical advisor for a comparable utility customer-service turnaround — giving the monitoring effort a technical foundation grounded in prior, hands-on CC&B remediation work.
The challenge
- A billing-system failure affecting a very large customer base, unfolding inside active litigation and under intense public and regulatory scrutiny.
- Credible independent monitoring required genuine CC&B platform expertise — not just general program-management oversight — to assess whether LADWP's technical fixes were actually sound.
- Multiple parties with different interests — LADWP's Turnaround Project team, plaintiffs' counsel, and the court — all needed confidence in the same independent assessment.
- The monitoring function had to be structured, staffed, and operating within tight settlement-driven timelines and formal reporting obligations to the court.
Our approach
tieBridge's proposed engagement was structured in two phases. Phase 1, Project Initiation, ran two months and focused on establishing the ground rules before monitoring began: inception meetings with the parties' counsel, LADWP's point of contact, and other key stakeholders to align on the goals and scope of the monitoring project, the terms of the settlement, responsibilities and expectations on all sides, communication protocols and meeting frequency, and protocols for the monitoring team's access to LADWP's systems, data, and Turnaround Project artifacts. That work fed into a mutually agreed Implementation Plan and Schedule, delivered within 60 days of project inception.
Phase 2, Independent Monitoring, ran sixteen months and centered on a disciplined monthly reporting cycle. Each monthly report addressed the LADWP Turnaround Project's progress against the improvements required by the settlement, a Plan-vs-Actual comparison against agreed-upon performance parameters, and tieBridge's independent opinion on key performance issues as they arose — giving the parties and the court a consistent, recurring account of progress rather than an assessment produced only at the end.
Bringing proven CC&B turnaround experience to a high-stakes monitor role
LADWP needed a monitoring team that could tell the difference between a genuine fix and a plausible-sounding one — which meant the team needed real, hands-on CC&B experience, not just monitoring credentials. Osman Ahmad brought both: direct program leadership on a separate utility's CC&B implementation, and his prior role as principal technical advisor for Cleveland Water's customer-service turnaround, where the same class of billing, meter-reading, and collections issues had already been diagnosed and resolved. That track record gave the monitoring effort a technical grounding that came from having done this kind of remediation before, not just from studying it.
Setting the ground rules before the clock started
Independent monitoring is only as credible as the structure behind it. Before any assessment work began, tieBridge's proposed approach dedicated a full phase to establishing exactly how the monitoring would work: what access the team would have to LADWP's systems and data, how findings would be communicated, how often the parties would meet, and what a monitoring report would actually contain. Settling those questions up front — and codifying them in a jointly developed Implementation Plan and Schedule — meant the sixteen months of monitoring that followed ran against a framework every party had already agreed to, rather than one negotiated on the fly.
Impact
- Brought hands-on CC&B platform expertise directly into a court-supervised monitoring process, rather than relying on generalized program-management oversight alone.
- Established a structured, two-phase monitoring framework — protocol-setting followed by disciplined monthly reporting — that clarified expectations across LADWP, plaintiffs' counsel, and the court from the outset.
- Gave stakeholders a recurring, independent account of Plan-vs-Actual progress against the settlement's required improvements, rather than relying solely on LADWP's self-reported status.
- Extended tieBridge's track record of utility billing-system turnarounds — including comparable CC&B remediation work at other utilities — into one of the highest-profile customer billing disputes in the water and power sector.