Start with what this person will own
"CC&B experience" covers very different jobs. A rate configuration analyst, an OUAF developer and an application lead can all list CC&B on a résumé, and none of them can do the others' work well.
Before you write a job description, write one sentence: the part of the system this person will be accountable for two years from now, when the program team is gone. That sentence decides the role, the interview and the market you're searching.
The six CC&B and C2M roles
Billing and rates functional analyst
- Owns: rate schedules, bill calculation, bill segments and the configuration changes that follow a rate case.
- Signs of real experience: has taken a rate change from tariff to production and can explain how it was tested against real bills.
Customer, payments and collections analyst
- Owns: account and premise setup, start and stop service, payments, payment arrangements, credit and collections.
- Signs of real experience: can walk through a collections or payment process they configured or supported, including the exceptions.
OUAF developer
- Owns: algorithms, business objects, scripts, batch processes and service interfaces.
- Signs of real experience: can name an extension they built, why configuration couldn't do it, and how they kept it maintainable through upgrades.
C2M and MDM specialist
- Owns: meter data, VEE rules, usage calculation and the interval data that feeds billing.
- Signs of real experience: has designed or tuned VEE rules and can explain how a meter data exception turns into a billing exception.
Integration and data specialist
- Owns: interfaces to ERP, payment, AMI and customer channels, batch scheduling, data conversion and reporting extracts.
- Signs of real experience: has owned an interface in production and knows what happens when it fails overnight.
Application lead or product owner
- Owns: release planning, priorities, upgrades, and the relationships with Oracle and the integrator.
- Signs of real experience: has run releases or an upgrade on a live CC&B estate, not only a program phase.
Definitions for CC&B, CCS, C2M, MDM, OUAF and VEE are in our utility hiring glossary.
Program hire or long-term owner?
Program roles and permanent roles look alike on paper, and they aren't. A program hire is measured on delivering a phase: design, build, test, convert, go live. A permanent owner is measured on keeping the system changeable after the program ends: the next rate case, the next upgrade, the next interface.
If the role covers a defined program phase, a contract specialist may be the better answer, and our parent company, Mako Professionals, handles that. If the role is meant to hold the system afterward, hire permanently, and do it before go-live, so the person learns the design decisions while the people who made them are still there. We cover this in more depth in permanent vs contract for core CIS teams and knowledge continuity in utility IT.
How CCS and C2M change the hire
- On-premises CC&B. Your team owns more: environments, upgrades, performance and any custom code. Deeper OUAF technical skills matter.
- Customer Cloud Service. Oracle runs the environment and delivers updates on its schedule. Your team's work shifts to configuration, regression testing and release readiness, so look for configuration-first habits and testing discipline.
- C2M. Customer and meter data live in one product. Favor people who can follow a problem from meter read to bill without handing it off.
Interview questions that test ownership
Résumés list products. These questions find out what someone has actually owned. Ask for one specific example each time, and follow it to the end.
- "Walk me through one rate change you took to production." A strong answer names the tariff change, the configuration that changed, how bills were compared before and after, and what went wrong along the way.
- "Tell me about a billing exception that turned out to start somewhere else." A strong answer traces it across meter data, account setup or an interface instead of stopping at the bill.
- "What's an extension you built in OUAF, and why couldn't configuration do it?" A strong answer explains the business need, the alternative they considered and the upgrade impact.
- "How did you test a change before it was released?" A strong answer covers test data, bill comparisons, regression and who signed off.
- "What was converted from the legacy system on your program, and what would you do differently?" A strong answer gets specific about mapping, balances and history.
- "Which part of your last system did you understand better than anyone else?" A strong answer names an area and gives an example of being the person others came to.
- "What did you hand over when you left your last role, and to whom?" A strong answer shows they think about continuity, not only delivery.
- For leads: "How did you decide what went into a release?" A strong answer covers priorities, regulatory deadlines and risk, and how they said no.
What to put in the job description
- The product and version: CC&B, CCS or C2M, on-premises or cloud
- The processes the hire will own, such as billing and rates, customer service, payments and collections, or meter data
- How much of the work is configuration and how much is development, and in which areas
- The integrations they'll touch, such as MDM, ERP, payment processors and the AMI head-end
- Where the program stands: implementation, stabilization after go-live or steady-state ownership
- Who they hand off to, and who backs them up
- Location, work arrangement and on-call expectations
- The compensation range, if you have one
- Which requirements are essential, and where adjacent experience fits
Where CC&B people come from
- Utilities on the same product. Deep knowledge of one estate's production history, sometimes with less view of how other utilities solved the same problem.
- Integrator and consulting backgrounds. Broad exposure across implementations. Ask what they owned after go-live, not only what they delivered before it.
- Adjacent billing platforms. Billing analysts from SAP IS-U or another CIS can sometimes move into CC&B functional roles when their business process knowledge is strong. Decide up front whether you'll consider them.
- Your own billing operations team. People who understand the business can grow into functional analyst roles with the right support and time.
Common hiring mistakes
- Hiring for the product name instead of the work the person will own.
- Writing the job for the program phase you're in today instead of the steady state.
- Waiting until after go-live to hire the permanent owner.
- Combining functional and technical work into one role that few people can fill.
- Asking for every module, which shrinks the market to almost no one.