ASEM 2015 International Annual Conference Industry Roundtable Report

Transcription

1 ASEM 2015 International Annual Conference Industry Roundtable Report By: Alice F. Squires, with panelists Frances Alston, Harold T. Conner, Jr., Thomas V Edwards Jr., and Donald Kennedy ASEM, the American Society for Engineering Management, is the society that speaks for the profession of engineering management across the world (asem.org). To this end, we have an imperative to lead the evolution of engineering management by forging collaborations between strong engineering managers and leaders across government and industry and leading edge engineering management researchers in academia. In support of this collaboration, we have restored our industry connections with the introduction of the Overcoming Obstacles to Change in Engineering Management industry roundtable at the 2015 ASEM annual conference. The roundtable consisted of panel members who shared their most challenging set of issues in engineering management in an open forum, spurring a valuable discussion on overcoming obstacles, implementing best practices, sharing lessons learned, and celebrating success stories. The panel addressed questions such as: What characteristics or attributes should an engineering manager possess in order to facilitate change in a highly-matrixed environment? What is the value of engineering management when dealing with your government client in convincing them that a chosen path forward is the correct decision? Having upper management support is often mentioned as a critical factor to successfully implement a change. If you have a small team working on a new initiative more or less in isolation, do you think upper management support still matters? What should an engineering manager know about innovation to build innovative capability in the organizational culture? Continued strong government, industry, and academic participation in ASEM will significantly contribute to the growth of the engineering management profession around the world. To volunteer to serve on the industry roundtable in future ASEM conferences, please send an expressing your interest to iac@asem.org, we would love to hear from you.

2 Panel Moderator: Alice F. Squires, Ph.D., PMP, CSEP-Acq Associate Professor Washington State University Engineering and Technology Management (etm.wsu.edu) Dr. Alice Squires is an Associate Professor at Washington State University in the Engineering and Technology Management department and an active member of ASEM currently working as a member of the Technical Planning Committee and as Director of Product Development. Dr. Squires previously served as Manager of Systems Engineering at Aurora Flight Sciences, Senior Researcher and Online Technical Director at Stevens Institute of Technology, Senior Systems Engineer consultant to LM, IBM, and EDO Ceramics, Senior Engineering Manager at GD, Senior Engineering Manager at LM, and Advisory Engineer/Scientist at IBM. Dr. Squires is a contributing author and editor to the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (sebokwiki.org) and the Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering (bkcase.org/grcse). Degrees earned include BSEE from the University of Maryland; MBA from George Mason University; and Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology. Her areas of expertise include Engineering Management, Systems Engineering, Technical Management, Project Management, Systems Thinking, Online Education, and Engineering Education. Introduction to the panelists: As our society seeks to develop and promote knowledge for action, I am happy to introduce you to a panel of distinguished guests with industry experience, that were willing to share their know-how, experiences, needs, and concerns with the society. A summary of the message from each industry roundtable panelist and their perspective on the impact of the industry roundtable follows.

3 Director of the Environment, Safety, and Health (ES&H) Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) "Engineering Management in a Complex Matrix Environment" As Director, Dr. Alston is responsible for providing services, programs, and facilities to the Laboratory and employees to successfully meet its goals in environmental protection, occupational health, and employee safety. She has been recognized for delivering superior performance in complex, multi-stakeholder situations and has dealt effectively with challenging operational, regulatory, safety, and environmental issues. Frances has a B.S. degree in Industrial Hygiene and Safety, a M.S. degree in Hazardous and Waste Materials Management/Environmental Engineering, a M.S.E. in Systems Engineering/Engineering Management, and a Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering. She also holds certifications as a Certified Hazardous Materials Manager and a Professional Engineering Manager. Dr. Alston also serves as the AECOM corporate project manager for LLNL and is an Adjunct Professor with the University of California. She was profiled by the Department of Energy Office of Economic Impact in its Energy series, and is a published author and a Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Management (ASEM). In a complex matrixed environment managers must work together to ensure employees are connected to the functional organization as well as to the matrixed or project organization. This feeling of connection with the home and matrixed organizations can lead to improve productivity, increased retention of staff, and increased employee satisfaction. Engineering managers are most effective in this type of environment if the following skills have been mastered. Must be proficient in the skills of persuasion Must be able to build and sustain relationships A good collaborator. A good communicator Excellent strategist Good leader Possess good project management skills Have the ability to inspire and motivate people The industry Roundtable session received many positive comments from conference attendees. It was a great first opportunity to bring academia and industry members together to discuss issues and explore solutions for issues that are faced by engineering managers. I would like to see the Industry Roundtable be included in future conferences.

4 Harold T. Conner, Jr., Ph.D., P.E. Nuclear Services and Engineering Manager UCOR, URS I CH2M, Oak Ridge LLC Systems Engineering and Change Management in the Department of Energy" Dr. Harold T. Conner, Jr., received his BS in 1968 and MS in 1978 in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tennessee and PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Harold was named the UCOR Nuclear Services and Engineering Manager in April 2015 and joins the Oak Ridge team after serving as the Associate Director for Facilities & Infrastructure at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for over eight years. For more than 45 years, Harold has served as an executive helping support and maintain our nation's nuclear deterrent through his work with some of our most prominent national labs, production sites, and defense contractors including Union Carbide, Martin Marietta, Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, URS, and now AECOM. Engineering management principles of change management and systems engineering are vital in responding to factors that enter into decision making regarding major projects in the Department of Energy (DOE). For the industry roundtable, I shared examples of dramatic change in DOE projects including the Tritium Extraction Facility at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the UCOR Decontamination and Demolition Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The use of formalized engineering management change management and systems engineering approaches enabled those projects to succeed. Change management drives the transition from current to a future state both in time of organizational crisis and when there is an anticipated need for change. Forces for change include technology, customer focus (cost, schedule), politics, public outcry, and globalization. Developmental, transitional, and transformational change enablers include pace and scope of change, the role of publicity, the use of supporting structures, and change sponsorship. In concert with change management, systems engineering uses an interdisciplinary approach to consider the complete problem in every systems decision in every stage of the system life cycle; converts customer needs to system functions and requirements; evaluates alternatives and trade offs; and defines system performance measures to guide design synthesis, system validation, and successful system realization. The Roundtable should be incorporated on an annual basis. I have attended many conferences and have felt the conference did not stress practitioners enough as most talks and proceedings were strictly academic. More of a balance is needed and the Roundtable provided that.

5 Donald Kennedy, Ph.D., P.Eng., PEM Project Control Supervisor Willbros Group Inc Recognizing Different Perspectives" Many of you will be familiar with Don who holds a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering and a masters in agricultural engineering. He worked for 15 years before he learned that management was a legitimate field of study. After attending a few ASEM conferences Don decided to go back to school and get a PhD in engineering management. All his degrees are from the University of Alberta, Canada. Don is a Fellow of the ASEM who studied under long-time attendee, but now retired, John Whittaker. His projects include being project coordinator on a mining machine called a dragline that is currently the largest one of its kind in North America and is one of the largest pieces of self-propelled equipment at ten million pounds. Don recently worked for a year building the largest rail loading terminal in North America with a capacity of 250,000 barrels of oil a day loading onto rail cars. He is a PEM and a Professional Engineer. For the past 80 years, it has been known that workers tend to embrace change. The observation was given the name the Hawthorne Effect. So when management states that a particular program failed because people naturally resist change, this is probably a handy excuse to cover a problem in the implementation of the change, or perhaps in the program itself. People will resist change they see as bad from their perspective. If your idea is a good idea, it is important to continually sell the idea to the stakeholders, as many will not give it the same priority as the people implementing the idea. I thought the panel was well received. I had five people approach me to tell me they enjoyed the panel. I take this as a great sign because I think no feedback is the norm, or at least it is for me.

6 Thomas V Edwards Jr., Associate Professor Director of the Engineering Management Program, Temple University "The Path to Becoming Innovative: Blending Theory and Practice Mr. Thomas Edwards is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Engineering Management Program at Temple University. Tom recently completed an industrial appointment as Vice President of Engineering at ASI Technologies, Inc., previously serving as the Corporate New Product Director for Met-Pro Corporation, and Vice President and General Manager, Met-Pro Systems Division. He previously served in management and leadership positions for Lockheed Martin Corporation, General Electric Company, Morton Thiokol, Inc. and Martin Marietta Corp. Mr. Edwards pursues organizational innovation from the three perspectives of research, practical application, and teaching. His many years of practical experience include driving innovation from top management. Tom is a DPS candidate in Management in the Lubin School of Business at Pace University and holds a Master of Business Administration at LaSalle University, a Master of Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University and a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Drexel University. My industrial experience included the challenge of being a corporate-level new product development director at a medium sized manufacturing company where I led the effort to change the culture to add an innovative capability. I discovered that the extant scholarly literature powerful in areas such as architectural innovation did not provide a roadmap or process to guide this transformation. And the literature did not sufficiently address small and medium enterprises (SMEs) despite that these firms account for 35% of US manufacturing employment and many of our students will assume leadership of these firms given their preponderant numbers (59,000 SMEs versus 3,600 large firms in manufacturing). My observation was that less profitable business units were more committed to developing new products than their more successful peers; that the existence of slack resources to support innovation seems to interfere with the motivation to drive innovation. I challenged the Engineering Management community to support this research that is of critical importance to practitioners. I believe that the panel message was well received. An audience question specifically addressed what the academic community could do to address this. This question led to a great discussion about required instruments to measure innovation that are not dependent on patents and patent citations. I had several side conversations after the panel discussion that reiterated this interest. The reception that the panel discussion received suggests that some part of future conferences should be devoted to aligning academic and practitioner interests.