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Every team has its own culture and DNA, and nobody knows your business better than you do. That said, most teams carry a few blind spots that quietly add risk, usually around where they put their effort and where they assume the value is. This article walks through three parts of aerial OSP engineering that teams tend to overestimate, and three they tend to underestimate. The pattern underneath all six is the same: the industry tends to overvalue what happens at the individua

How a 200-person engineering services team applies the Davey standard across the six utility operating companies, with Katapult Pro as one tool in their kit. Davey Resource Group is the utility asset management arm of The Davey Tree Expert Company, founded in 1880 and headquartered in Kent, Ohio. With 12,000 employees, top-ten employee-owned standing in the U.S., and nearly a century and a half of accumulated practice, Davey has built a reputation across the utility industry

Rolling out new software across a team is one thing when you're preparing for an upcoming pilot and another thing when your client is expecting the deliverable by next week. The common path is trying to figure it out on your own, which can kick off a vicious cycle of trying to play catch-up and feeling frustrated when you can't figure it out. Better than bootstrapping is to send people away to a training, which means flights, hotel nights, and a stretch of days where your cr

A single BEAD-funded fiber route can cross a dozen pole owners before the first splice. Each owner has its own permit process, its own format, and its own clock. The engineering work gets spread across multiple vendors, each collecting field data to its own standard. And every one of those threads has to come back together cleanly enough to defend the build at a federal funding audit. If you run engineering for a regional ISP, a co-op, or a municipal provider, you carry the s

What it means to own your data, hold your pricing, and keep the freedom to leave Every engineering firm and utility has a stack of signed agreements somewhere, and most of them got signed faster than they got read. Software contracts tend to be the worst offenders, because the parts that matter most to you are usually buried where they are easy to skim past: who owns the data, how much the price can climb, and what it takes to walk away. We wrote our software agreement so tho

If you're reading this, your team has probably just signed up for Katapult Pro, or you're doing homework before you do. Either way, welcome! You'll get the login link and the kickoff invite soon. Before all that, we wanted to introduce ourselves, because for the next few months you're going to be working with us a lot, and we've learned a few things about how to make that go well over the past decade. Most of what follows comes from Seth Miller, our rockstar solutions special

On paper, a pole attachment audit looks like a no-brainer. You own the poles, you want to know who is on them and how many attachments each company has, so you hire someone to go look. In practice, these projects stall out constantly: in the RFI stage, in the RFP stage, or in a consulting conversation that quietly dies on the vine. The reason usually has nothing to do with whether the audit is worth doing. Almost every pole owner would benefit from current attachment records.

How two-person, photo-based field crews collect faster, collect safer, and produce a record you can defend. Field data collection matters more than any other step in the workflow. Everything downstream depends on it. Make ready engineering, pole loading analysis, permitting, the deliverable a utility actually accepts, the attachment record a joint use team relies on for years: all of it inherits the quality of what came back from the field. Clean field data means clean design

Understanding the two paths the platform offers, and what you need to have ready before you start. Pole loading analysis is one of those corners of OSP engineering where tools, terminology, and expectations get tangled fast. If you're opening Katapult Pro for the first time with pole loading on your project scope, there's a reasonable chance you're not entirely sure what the platform is going to do for you, what information you need from the pole owner, and what falls to you

A new model configuration for double wood resolution, a mobile overhaul for offline data collection, faster load times, and more. This month's release is a big one. The headliner is Transfer Management, our new Katapult Pro configuration for ongoing double wood resolution. Plus a major mobile sync overhaul, faster load times, and a few new tools and bug fixes. Transfer Management Map and Photo View Example Transfer Management is a new Katapult Pro configuration for ongoing do