You are an engineering manager at a regulated electric and gas utility serving 4.4 million customers across three Northeast states. Your organization is deciding how to allocate a $40 million incremental engineering budget next year across three competing initiatives: modernizing outage restoration systems to reduce average restoration time by 8%, accelerating interconnection tooling to cut distributed energy resource approval cycles from 45 days to 25 days, or expanding digital self-service capabilities to raise customer portal adoption from 38% to 55%. Regulators are increasing pressure on reliability and affordability, customer satisfaction has slipped from 74 to 70, and large commercial customers are demanding faster electrification and interconnection support. Engineering capacity is constrained, and each option requires tradeoffs across reliability, customer experience, regulatory outcomes, and long-term growth.
How would you decide where engineering should focus, and how would you align the work with broader business goals and customer needs while making the tradeoffs clear to executives?