From Board Policy to Budgeted Action

Overview

LIPA owns Long Island's electric transmission and distribution system; PSEG Long Island operates it day to day under a long-term operating services agreement. LIPA's Board of Trustees sets direction through a series of governance policies — covering reliability, customer experience, clean energy, affordability, information technology, and fiscal sustainability — but those policies needed to be translated into a single, prioritized, multi-year plan of action. LIPA engaged tieBridge, with strategic partner GivingWorks, to lead that effort: to run an evidence-based discovery, build consensus across a complex two-organization ecosystem, and deliver a sequenced, resourced, Board-ready five-year roadmap that management could actually execute against.

The challenge

LIPA engaged tieBridge at a genuine strategic crossroads, where several forces made long-term planning both urgent and unusually complex:

• A set of high-level Board governance policies had to become one prioritized, sequenced plan — focusing limited time, capital, and management attention on what would create the most customer value.
• LIPA, as principal, does not operate the systems being planned for — PSEG Long Island does — so priorities had to be scoped and sequenced across two organizations at once, not set unilaterally.
• Governance was uncertain: the reformed PSEG Long Island contract (adopted April 2022) was set to expire at the end of 2025 — mid-horizon — while a State Legislative Commission studied a potential public-power model. The plan had to hold up under more than one possible future.
• The industry was in transition — a carbon-free-by-2040 mandate, rising expectations for digital service, intensifying storm and cyber risk, and inflationary cost pressure — much of it dependent on aging systems.
• The real risk was a strategy that is admired and then shelved, rather than one that drives budgets and accountability once the engagement ends.

Our work across the engagement

Rather than a single bounded task, tieBridge's role spanned the full arc of the engagement — a continuity that carried context from how priorities were framed all the way through to a plan the Board could adopt:

• Inception & framing — translating Board policy objectives into a working scope and clear decision criteria.
• Outside-in scan — a selective, mission-relevant read of industry trends, technology shifts, regulatory drivers, and best practice, including customer-experience standards set outside the utility sector.
• Inside-out diagnostic — an objective review of LIPA and PSEG Long Island capabilities to pinpoint strengths, risks, and gaps across the strategy pillars.
• Stakeholder consultation — structured input from 90 individuals across LIPA, PSEG Long Island, independent experts, and six industry-leading peer utilities: SMUD / the Large Public Power Council, Florida Power & Light, Orlando Utilities, Salt River Project, Duke, and JEA.
• Executive workshops & a leadership retreat — building clarity and consensus on goals, priorities, and risks at the directional level before the plan was finalized.
• Prioritization & sequencing — mapping interdependencies, sequencing initiatives across five years to respect organizational bandwidth, and attaching indicative investment estimates and risk mitigations.
• Board-ready roadmap — distilling context, findings, and recommendations into a single, persuasive plan for the Board's review and adoption.

Three pillars became five

The engagement was originally scoped around three strategy pillars — Customer Experience, Transmission & Distribution, and Information Technology. As the diagnostic revealed what it would actually take to deliver on the Board's vision and to withstand governance uncertainty, tieBridge expanded the roadmap to five foundational business areas, adding Finance (deleveraging and a "value for money" cost-optimization culture) and Performance Management (the mechanisms and standards LIPA needed to oversee its contracted operator). That expansion answered the two imperatives at the heart of the mandate directly.

A plan built to be executed, not shelved

Strategy documents often end at a polished report. This one was designed to drive operations: the roadmap is translated by management into annual work plans, PSEG Long Island performance metrics, and budgets submitted to the Board, with a detailed appendix sequencing every major activity from 2023 through 2027. LIPA also committed to revisiting the plan annually — so it stays a living instrument rather than a static snapshot in time.

Planning for a future that might not include the current operator

With the operating contract expiring mid-horizon and a public-power model under study, the plan had to preserve flexibility. tieBridge built that in: a Performance Management pillar to strengthen oversight of the current provider, a sequenced separation of 46 intermingled IT systems for Long Island, and an explicit management-continuity risk framework — together giving LIPA the agility to change course if governance evolved.

Impact

• Gave LIPA a single, prioritized five-year plan, adopted by the Board of Trustees by resolution on March 29, 2023 as its long-term strategic plan for meeting the Board's objectives and managing the pace of change.
• Embedded strategy into operating cadence — the roadmap is translated into annual work plans, vendor performance metrics, and budgets, connecting long-term direction to how LIPA runs and holds its operator accountable.
• Structured a roughly $972 million five-year capital investment portfolio across the five business areas, with indicative estimates to inform cost-and-value trade-offs and resource prioritization.
• Sequenced flagship initiatives — from a new Enterprise Asset Management System and Advanced Distribution Management System to modernizing a 1975-era Customer Information System and rolling out Time-of-Day rates, making LIPA the first major New York utility to move residential customers to time-of-day pricing.
• Arrived at the Board with consensus already cultivated — 90 consultations and a leadership retreat turned a strategic document into a shared agenda across LIPA, its Board, and its service provider.
• Committed the plan to annual refresh, keeping priorities aligned with Board policy, evolving customer needs, and industry best practice rather than freezing them at a point in time.

The 5-Year Strategic Roadmap is a public document adopted by the LIPA Board of Trustees. View the public filing.