Building Mission-Critical Dashboards in 24 Hours with Austin Energy

What do you do when leadership requests a completely new operations dashboard—and the winter storm arrives tomorrow? For Austin Energy’s IT team, this wasn’t a hypothetical. Just 24 hours before Winter Storm Fern required full activation, Larissa Huffman, David Trevino, and Victor Cortez received a challenge: transform their basic incident management dashboard into a comprehensive command center. What followed was a sprint that showcased not just collaborative adaptability and decision-making, but the power of an adaptable platform in the hands of a resourceful team.

In this candid session, hear directly from the Austin Energy team about how they built custom dashboards, integrated live outage maps, created check-in logs, added social media monitoring, and implemented real-time task management, all while working simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes. They’ll walk you through the communication problems they were solving, the features they added on the fly, the challenges they hit (including one team member being brand new to the platform), and the honest reality of building under pressure. This isn’t a polished case study – it’s the real story of what happened when a utility team had to improvise, adapt, and deliver when it mattered most.

Key Takeaways:

Building Under Pressure

• How Austin Energy’s team responded to a 24-hour deadline before Winter Storm Fern
• Managing competing priorities and dividing work across three team members
• Working collaboratively in real-time without conflicts or version control issues

From Communication Chaos to Single Pane of Glass

• Solving notification fatigue, scattered emails, and unclear points of contact
• Creating check-in logs so teams could see who was on duty for each application
• Building live status tracking so departments could update system health in real-time

No-Code Collaboration in Action

• How team members with different experience levels (from brand new to experienced) contributed effectively
• Repurposing existing features from other side rooms without rebuilding from scratch
• Using custom blocks, iframes, CSS styling, and social media integrations

Practical Lessons Learned

• What worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently next time
• Honest challenges including display scaling issues and permission management
• The importance of visual design and user experience even under tight deadlines

Platform Versatility

• Why Austin Energy’s story isn’t about replicating their exact dashboard
• How Veoci adapts to urgent requests rather than forcing organizations into rigid templates
• Real examples of improvisation and creative problem-solving during incident response