Chevening Leadership and Influence Essay Example: Distribution reliability engineer at a regional utility

As a distribution reliability engineer at a Kenyan utility, I plan maintenance across six feeder corridors serving roughly 18,000 households and small businesses. In 2022, two corridors kept tripping during evening peaks, forcing welders and kiosk owners to close early and spoil stock. Our schedule followed habit, not outage data. I pulled twelve months of outage logs and ran short sit-downs with fourteen field technicians, mapping which poles, fuses, and transformers failed under heavy load and short rains. From that, I proposed shifting about 15 percent of corridor maintenance spend toward preventive work on the two worst feeders. The harder push was procurement. The lead worried that changing the spares routine would invite audit queries. I wrote a two-page note showing reactive ordering was adding around 14 hours to restoration on the worst corridor, then rebuilt the audit trail with her input across three meetings. The operations manager approved a three-month trial of a pre-positioned spares list, which I owned end to end. Over that season, unplanned outages on the trial corridors fell by about 38 percent and average restoration dropped by roughly 9 hours. The procurement lead said coordination felt calmer; one technician said he stopped dreading Friday call-outs. I was asked to present at the quarterly regional review, two neighbouring teams adopted the spares list in their next cycle, and I now maintain the annual planning memo. I realised my first draft of the note was too technical for procurement, and I still want to handle that translation more cleanly. At an MSc in Sustainable Energy Systems I want to study reliability-centred maintenance and asset-management economics, then bring a refined planning template back to the regional review and pilot it with KETRACO peers across two further service areas.