Interviews with Advisory Committee Members

Matt Colvin – Transportation Trades Dept, AFL-CIO

Pat Foye – CEO, ASTM N.A.

Michael Horodniceanu – NYU

Rich Juliano – American Road & Transp. Builders

Jeff Paniati – CEO, Institute of Transp. Engineers

Karen Rae – Senior Strategic Advisor at STV

Peter Rogoff – Contorta Group (former FTA Administrator)

Denise Roth – Pres. U.S. Advisory Services at WSP

Beverly Scott – Senior Fellow, Transportation Learning Center

Kimberly Slaughter – CEO, SYSTRA USA

The committee members discussed the importance of ensuring agencies are prepared to manage large transit projects.

• Staffing up for a project and developing a culture for project delivery is extremely challenging. Transit agencies should conduct organizational assessments (a comprehensive review of their people, processes, and systems) so they are prepared to plan and build large transit projects. An agency with extensive experience operating and maintaining bus services may need to undertake numerous changes before it is prepared to take on a large capital project.
• State highway departments tend to have “more horsepower and history” in constructing major new facilities.
• When contractors decide whether to bid on a project and how much they should bid, they consider the agency and the project manager. If contractors have a high level of uncertainty about either of them, they are not going to bid on a project.
• In Denver, when there was not a solid prospect to fund future expansion projects, people who were passionate about making changes followed their CEO, Phil Washington, when he went from Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) to LA Metro. They knew he would be successful, and he had a reputation for empowering people and building them into successful roles.
• In the Minnesota’s Twin Cities area, collaboration is inherent in nature of the people who live and work there. People have conflicts, and they disagree with each other, but they are generally nice and work together. Staff can also see career ladders, potential for growth, and numerous opportunities.

• The committee members noted that private consulting firms (e.g., HDR, HNTB, SYSTRA) do a better job training project managers than transit agencies do for five reasons: (1) Solid project managers are the key to a consulting firm’s bottom lines; they make a profit for the firm; (2) They make sure clients and their staff are happy; (3) They are responsible for delivering projects on time, on quality and on budget; (4) If they do a good job and build solid relationships, the client and others will want to hire the firm, again; (5) Since project managers are such an important asset, training is seen as an investment to make them successful. Training involves everything (e.g., understanding different personalities, receiving information, improving communications styles, using a spreadsheet).
• In the public sector, more training is done on the job (e.g., mentoring, trial and error).
• Some public agencies rely on the National Transit Institute’s programs, but they are not as extensive as they need to be, nor as robust as those offered in the private sector.
• Selected agency staff should be given an opportunity to rotate through different departments so they can understand the business from different departments and strengthen interdepartmental relationships.
• Eno and APTA leadership programs are valuable for agency staff.

• Agencies need to document institutional knowledge rather than relying upon people’s memories. At one time, agencies hoped to hire a young professional who would work at their organization for 40 years. For various reasons, that rarely happens today. Because of the turnover, the need to document and transfer knowledge is even more important requiring agencies to change how they think about retaining knowledge.
• When projects move planning to design to preliminary engineering, that usually involves separate departments with an agency. A wealth of information gleamed throughout a project can be lost. Experience should follow the project, which means understand project development and program delivery in a different kind of way.

• The private sector can attract professionals with higher salaries.
• Agencies often must rely on consultants because elected officials are not willing for public agencies to pay high enough salaries to attract talent.
• When transit agencies are building one project after another, it is more cost effective for them to hire in-house staff.
• Using consultants allows agencies to scale up and down, based on their needs.
• There is no optimal ratio to determine the appropriate number of consultants needed for every staff member. The size of the consulting team depends on the agency’s location, the size of its capital program, and the availability of its staff. If an agency has multiple large projects, it can have a larger core staff and develop a pipeline of talent. If an agency is only undertaking one project, it makes sense to have more consultants.

• Agencies need to institute rigorous assessments to understand how employees are managing their work and whether they have the skills and experience to move up.
• Private companies are readily hiring young professionals. The biggest gap they have is finding experienced project managers who can serve as mentors.
• Transportation agencies need more people go into a wide range of fields relating to large projects. Not just engineers, but also planners, financial managers, and architects.

Transit agencies and their stakeholders expect a lot from people who manage projects and deliver it well:

• Project managers have to deal with promises that were made because of political pressure. Often projects have been underfunded and the costs underestimated. Project managers can start their jobs knowing that they are doomed to not succeed because they were not the ones who came up with the funding and cost estimates. Those who insist that a project manager meet a deadline, oftentimes are not aware that the schedules are not realistic.
• • Each project is sui generis (unique) – a one off.

• When hiring a project manager, transit agencies shouldn’t just think about the skills and experience required by one person. No one person has skills to successfully lead a project. They need a strong team with a wide range of expertise, such as legal and financial.
• Technical knowledge is the easy side. Managing multiple sets of stakeholders is hard.
• A project manager is like a football coach; the head coach should not be calling the offensive plays. Managers need to listen and communicate with their coaches. They need to orchestrate, and deal with both the political and technical sides of projects. They must hire the right people, and look at the whole project, not getting too immersed in details and stuck in the weeds.
• Need different level of temperament and greater level of sophistication to manage a large project compared to a small project.
• Best project managers are those who don’t think they can do it all themselves. The most successful ones are relationship builders who hold people accountable. They don’t have an attitude that they are the smartest person in the room.
• Want a phenomenal leader and manager who can build trust.
• Don’t necessarily need to be an engineer. Need to have enough knowledge and experience to understand the project. No engineer has enough knowledge for the entire breadth of a project.
• Need to find someone with a dedicated record of success.
• Sometimes project managers are unsuccessful when they feel like they have to be in charge, and they are the experts. It takes a certain level of confidence and vulnerability to be comfortable in knowing and admitting what one doesn’t know.