Many power systems analysis packages have been developed by companies wishing to meet their own engineering design needs. In contrast to this, IPSA has been from the outset the product of close co-operation between an independent research team (originally based at UMIST, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) and a wide cross section of the electrical industry. Industrial needs were made a priority, from the initial specification of the research objectives to the final, fine tuning of the program for daily use by power engineers.

The IPSA team is in a position to listen to a wide spectrum of interests, to identify a common denominator and to add forward looking modelling facilities from the team's research. In addition, the team's experience in advanced analysis and system design techniques was embedded into the software providing a sophisticated data validation and modeling interface to the analysis facilities. This has made IPSA the unique, advanced, yet broad based, user-friendly power system design tool it is today.