The need for strong infrastructure will never go away. But client priorities might change, and when projects get caught up in shifting demands, civil engineers have to adapt.
Project changes aren’t always convenient, sometimes coming after months or even years of work have been put into a project. When sudden pivots occur, it can be difficult to keep a team motivated. But there are ways to improve morale and even spin setbacks into opportunities.
During a recent Thursdays@3 discussion, two civil engineers shared their strategies for leading teams through major project pivots. Find out below how they navigate these challenges.
Robert Best, P.E., M.ASCE
Principal engineer at Chen Moore and Associates; Orlando, Florida
“Most of my roles have been as a project manager, so one key thing is making sure I stay positive and have a good attitude. Even if you may not have that internally, you really need to do that for your team. A lot of times, they’ll look up to you as a project manager and try to read the room based on how you're reacting or you're feeling. So, one part of it is trying to stay positive, if nothing else, for the rest of your team members.
“Part of that internal brainstorming session is knowing there's nothing wrong if someone provides a solution or idea and someone says ‘that's a great idea, but it's not going to work because of X, Y, and Z.’ We don't just want to be each other's own cheerleaders; we also want to give constructive criticism and poke holes in an idea internally before presenting it to the client. So, open communication internally is key as well.
“… An important thing to reassure people that they didn't waste time on what the previous direction was is taking lessons learned, trying to find the positive and the silver lining of, say, nine months of design getting scrapped. But what did we learn from that? I think there are very few times you'll ever see that effort you put into a project wasn’t worth it. There's some value to everything you've done.”
Drew Thomas, P.E., M.ASCE
Traffic operations engineer at Lochner; Tallahassee, Florida
“I think it depends on how big the pivot is. If you’re starting a project over from scratch, I usually wouldn't recommend using entirely the same team. It's helpful to have a combination of experienced people who worked on the project, and if you can bring in some new members who do see it as a new project, it's really helpful as far as getting the new project off the ground and not feeling like you're recreating the previous one or burning people out with the same work over and over again. Because sometimes, these changes could mean redoing years of work, so accepting some morale loss is really important. Make sure that you know not everyone's going to be happy about that and have some acceptance.
“But there are usually benefits, too. Sometimes, we've had projects get pulled and restarted and changed and it's like we did an entire project without marketing it. But I think you have to balance communicating the benefits with understanding that people might be unhappy that months of work they've done is gone like that. You just have to accept that it will happen.”
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