Step 2: Incorporate Stakeholder Feedback
HPXML can be a powerful tool to facilitate trade ally/contractor’s choice in software systems, while delivering consistent and reliable data. It provides a great opportunity to improve contractor satisfaction and operational efficiency. To maximize your potential for success, it is important to establish a consistent means to collect feedback from both trade allies and the software community throughout the HPXML process. To start you may want to collect feedback and cultivate support for the HPXML goals you have established for your program in Step 1: Setting Implementation Goals.
Trade Ally Feedback
Consider working closely with your local trade ally network, trade associations, or energy-efficiency contracting network to collect feedback important to your planning process. For example, some pilots have hosted lunch and learning meetings before their design process began. This allowed the program administration team to identify the highest priorities for trade allies and cultivate support for the new program design. Ultimately, this helped focus the project scope to deliver successful results.
When engaging in this process, consider a few key topic areas:
- Pain points for data collection and reporting
- How program goals will impact contractors’ businesses
- Priorities for program design and subsequent rollout
- Early adopters who can assist in testing and give feedback on initial designs
- Functionality and user experience desired from the new program software environment
Identifying a representative group of trade allies that can assist throughout the process will be key in later steps of the implementation plan. Many successfully implemented programs have coordinated with contractors by setting up regular meetings, hosting dinners to collect feedback, or working closely with representatives from local trade associations.
Software Vendor Coordination
As the program administrator, you need to decide on the minimum qualifications for software to participate in your program. It is recommended to begin communication with software vendors as soon as your project plan is developed. BPI WG-5 can help connect you to all of the software vendors that are currently coding to HPXML. Since many of these vendors have implemented in other jurisdictions, they can offer valuable support for a program’s planning process.
Programs that are considering opening the market to multiple modeling software tools, may want to review the varying features of the different HPXML-compliant energy modeling software tools. Taking a demo from each of the vendors is a good place to start to help gain a general understanding of how their tools work and differ from each other. Each vendor takes a unique approach, which promotes innovation and helps contractors deliver high-quality proposals and energy savings feedback to customers. Reviewing how each of the software tools work will give your program in understanding of what the market is transferring now via HPXML. This will enable your program to be well prepared for the next step of determining data needs.
