Driven to Drive Innovation

Our past shapes us all.

I grew up with my dad running his own General Construction Company (I also grew up with my brother and I as his ever-available full-gamut laborers).

Homes, subdivisions, office parks.

Recessions. Retreats.  Rebuilds.

Decades-long high-impact high-stakes entrepreneurship.

A family business.  A business family.

Nature and Nurture.

Civil Engineering was an logical extension of my upbringing.

My first job was for a for three-person Survey and Engineering Design office (The Owner/Principal Engineer, an Engineer four years my senior, and me).  We did it all, from Topo Surveys to running the design plans down to the airport for the contractor.  Effort with clear direct impact.

As the economy was shrinking, we even got on the phone cold-calling developers.

Founding my own business was inevitable.  Nature/Nurture.

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Parent Category: Experience

Category: self

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Connect Design Empower

I'm at an interesting point in my career.

I'm past the point of experimentation.  I know what I value, and I know my value:

Connect.  Design to Empower.  Serve.

I'm good at this. I'll never waver from it.  I don't want to.  I don't think I can.

Connecting is Step 1.  You serve best when you know who you serve and what their needs are.  There are myriad tools to facilitate Connection.

Prioritizing is Step 2.  What do you prioritize?  Growth Opportunities.

Recognizing Adjacent Opportunities is Step 3.  Low hanging fruit.  What do you already know that you can easily apply to make a difference?

I'm most inspired by this ongoing Integration Revolution - the most exciting time I've seen in 35 years in our industry.

It's more than just the lessening of paper at the DOT level - it's Integrated Project Delivery, it's Digital Construction Delivery, it's Digital Twins, it's Reality Modeling.

It's the end of Siloed Value.  The end of the Waste Cycle of: finding it, organizing it, using it  - and then abandoning it.

I want to be a part of driving this revolution:  http://drivetherevolution.net/

This Integration Revolution is also a huge growth opportunity for companies.  More service to existing clients; more clients.

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Parent Category: Leadership

Category: Insight

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Professional Experience

Civil XLr8 (the Connect Edition)

As much as I was enjoying banging on Civil3D (and its Hydraulic extensions), it was clear that I was never going to be truly bi-lingual.  I'm happy to have had a deep dive back in the other half of the duopoly, but Bentley solutions is my home.  It was time to resurrect Civil XLr8.

I've been doing a lot of workspace development (particulary Survey, Sheet Seed development, Annotation - filling in subscopes I had neglected), some training, and business development (see CivilXLr8.com).

My primary focus in the Bentley Ecosystem is helping organizations grow by adopting better practices and broadening internal and peripheral integration with the tools they already own.  The greater efficiency and expanded services footprint = succe$$.  

Parsons Corporation (2021-2023)

In November 2021, I accepted a position at Parsons Corporation as a Supervising Drainage Engineer. My goal was to get back into industry that had changed so much in the thirteen years I had been watching a remote vantage point at Bentley (involved, but not embedded).

Parsons is known for their expertise in Multi-Discipline Live-Collaboration MegaProjects.

I worked on these MegaProjects

• US-183 North Mobility Project, Austin TX: ProjectWise-Managed Roadway&Drainage Rehabilitation.  I worked Drainage using OpenRoads Drainage and Utilities software.
• Edmonton Light Rail Transit, Valley Line West, Edmonton, Alberta: Light Rail Extension through downtown Edmonton.  I worked modeling existing and new Subsurface Utilities using ORD Drainage and Utilities. Note this is absolutely a subdiscipline where moving chaotically-source data to the (extended) OpenRoads Data Model (Item Types) yields huge benefits in schedule, cost and quality.  Utilities is so well-suited for OpenRoads BIM and Digital Twins capability.
• JFK Airport Redevelopment, New York: Multi-discipline $19 billion project.  I worked drainage modeling and design in Civil3D, SSA, AutoDesk Construction Cloud and supporting programs.

Other opportunities at Parsons included

• Leading the drainage portion of a phase of a $570M highway expansion project bid (which we one).   FAST detailed modeling for estimates! (It seems that the Construction firms are in an arms race to fully model a project so that they can get really precise estimates.  This really increases the costs of bidding.)
• Using Teams to share new Best Practices for OpenRoads Drainage

Bentley Systems (2008-2021)

Prior to being recruited to join Bentley Systems in 2008, half of my career had been responsible engineering design and half had been developing training, implementing and training InRoads and InRoads Drainage (Storm&Sanitary).  Half had been as an employee, half had been as a self-employed consultant.

My role at Bentley initially had been to extend our Training Content available for InRoads and then later to transform how we delivered training: to facilitate remote OnDemand Learning.  

Additional major Learning System responsibilities included rolling out OpenRoads Technology, incorporating the Haestad (OpenFlows) drainage software, on-site training and consulting, and managing the Civil Content Development Team.

My current role at Bentley is Blueprints Portfolio Manager for the Design Integration Products (these include the OpenRoads, OpenPlant, OpenBuildings, STAAD/RAM product families and the MicroStation Platform).  Our goal is to transform how the spectrum of value - from short job-aids through large Consulting projects - are consumed by Bentley users.  Our goal is to dramatically facilitate the consumption of training and consulting - similar to how we transformed the delivery of training from Instructor-required to OnDemand self-service.

I have a Bentley page with more detail.

Please see sub-menus under Experience for discipline summaries and highlights, like 

• Drainage Engineering
• Highway Engineering 
• Government Experience

Details

Category: Experience

The Value I Deliver

What do I bring to an Organization?

Elite-level Production Advancement

Bentley Civil Software Expertise in Road, Site, and Drainage Scopes - as broad and deep as anyone - backed by engineering design and production experience.

Workspace/Configuration Expertise - there are two scopes here:  the 12-layer workspace technical stack (files/syntax) and understanding the details of the Engineering Tools.  I've been hacking the tech stack and using the tools for over thirty years.  Includes ProjectWise Integration (CSBs).

Elite-level Systems/Business Transformation

While there are many general training and business analysts, I would argue that few well-practiced Civil Engineers have deeper understanding and experience in these fields and are actively applying their earned insights to directly supporting Civil Engineering organizations.

Training Systems Design/Implementation

I've led a wide variety of training implementations.  Here's my short current recommendation: force compliance (like your HR-required training).   Really consumable, short, focused training, managed and enforced by Learning Management System.  

Training Content/Curriculum Development

The key: really short focused training blocks.  I helped Bentley with their Next Leap Forward in 2013 (which coincided with the first OpenRoads training):  modernizing their Multi-Day Training model to a Two-Hour Modular Training model.  Why two hours?  Because that was the contemporary time slot for workshops at user conferences.  The Next Leap Forward in all training material is MicroLearning: only what you need. 

If I were to pick a cap right now, I'd say: no training longer than 29 minutes.  Why?  "Less than half an hour" can be justified as in-line production billable.  Note: that you need a good Learning Management System (LMS) and active curation (smaller chunks means more chunks to manage and deliver).

Communication Systems

I've been running websites since 1999; simple HTML back then, now full Content Management Systems (CMS).  I prefer Joomla, for its power and extensibility.  Teams, SharePoint..

Litmus Test: No one should need more than five minutes to know who the leads are and those experienced in any specialization.  It shouldn't take more than five minutes to find your corporate or client recommendations for any common workflow.  

"We can find anybody with any skill in two phone calls." 

Not good enough.  "That is hardly a resilient reliable system, and it took you ten years to get to a point where you know who that first call is."

SharePoint: the default communications platform for every engineering organization - but none of the engineers know how to use it.  This is the biggest blindly accepted contradiction in engineering.  I can simplify the learning curve to four easy skills.  (Expect some publications on that shortly).

Mindset 

Paranoid Hyper-Capitalist: Grow or Die!  

Learning Quickly is the best way to succeed.  Learning More Quickly than your Competitors is the way to win market share.  Your Learning Rate is your Primary Leading Indicator of Success.

If something important is not being used, make it easier to use.  Iterate to success.

The Project Managers hold the key to learning (budget and resource availability).  They need to understand the risks, especially to schedule and budget and the hidden risks of using outdated practices and tools.  My job is to explicitly lay out the cost/schedule and eliminate their rightful fear of the risks.  Engineers like to learn, but they don't like flailing.   Systematically, skill adoption needs to be very consumable (29-minutes or less (because less than half an hour of directly-applicable skill adoption over an 8-hour day should be as billable as less than half an hour of reviewing client standards and specifications)).

Succeed at Scale, Sustainably.   Very little of what we do is one-off.  Fix substandard processes AND ENSURE the Better Practices are shared and incorporated across the enterprise.  A properly designed and curated expertise sharing system ensures the breadth and longevity of success.

Examples:  Experience

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Category: XLr8