Becoming a Sustainability Professional to Further Your Civil Engineering Career – Ep 028

Welcome to the Civil Engineering Podcast. The podcast focused on helping civil engineering professionals succeed by exposing them to interesting civil engineering projects and successful civil engineering professionals around the world. Posts Aunt Dany Fasano and Christian Knutson had successful but unconventional civil engineering careers. And now focus on helping civil engineering professionals achieve their goals in work and life. This is the Civil Engineering Podcast, the show for civil engineers who won't be at the next level in their career and professional skills and I'm Chris Knutson, your host for today's episode. It just this finds you doing well wherever you are and whatever civil engineering project you're working on or involved with. Now in this episode I'll be speaking with Denise Nelson from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure about Envision. Now this is the sustainability rating guidance and evaluation system that can use by civil engineers, planners and policymakers who are involved in the planning, design and construction of civil infrastructure. Denise is also going to touch on what the Envision Sustainability Professional Certification is and how it compares and supplements the lean certification, especially when it comes to constructed facilities and infrastructure that as we know is most often uninhabited. Before we dive into the main segment of the show, I want to take a minute to recognize our sponsor, PPI. If you're thinking about taking this civil effort or PXM, I really recommend that you check out PPI with a leader in civil engineering exam prep. PPI is offering a special 20% discount to listeners of this podcast. Just use promo code [email protected]. Again, that's PPI, the number two, pass.com, and use promo code civil for a 20% discount. And I also want to remind you that the Engineering Career Summit 2016 is a go for 12 through 14 May into Orleans. Now if you don't know what the engineering career summit is, well it's the only event designed from the ground up, the transform engineers from educated technical professionals into effective communicators, powerful networkers and dynamic leaders. This event is designed with one purpose in mind to provide you with actionable steps you can take to move your career and life to a whole new level past the blocks that hurdles or challenges you're currently facing. Now it's not a professional organization trade show and it's not a two day PDH cram session. It's an opportunity to connect with other motivated civil engineers just like yourself and hear from successful civil engineers and thought leaders on topics like leadership, networking and communications, business development and a whole lot more. And there's plenty of chances to socialize with other motivated engineers during awesome after session outings so the tickets around the sale now head over to engineering event dot com reserve years today this events right around the corner. Don't waste a minute. All right, now it's time to jump into today's civil engineering conversation with Denise Nelson. Civil Engineering podcast. Now it's time for this week's civil engineering conversation where we talk with a civil engineering professional who has had success and their failure is striving towards a specific goal and need some advice and encouragement. But today's gas certainly doesn't need any advice or encouragement. It's Denise Nelson PE lead AP and envision system of a professional and she's going to be talking to us today about the end the SP certification. She is probably one of if not the most well seated person to have this conversation with us. Denise is the vice president for public education at the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure and her responsibilities include education and training for both public and private sector organizations and overall coordination of messaging and promotions related to envision, which is the guidance and rating system for sustainable infrastructure, which creates public confidence in the process of civil infrastructure development. So she received her bachelor's of science degree in civil engineering from Virginia Tech and her master's of science degree in environmental engineering from University of Cincinnati. Two institutions I know very well and she is a licensed engineer with over 14 years of experience and water utilities and sustainable infrastructure. Denise, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to have this conversation and we're going to be talking over the next little while here about the envision system building professional certification. So I'm just going to ask the question right up front because many of the listeners may have heard of this certification or maybe even haven't heard of the certification they're kind of scratching their head going, hey, what is envision. So can you unpack for us what is envision and most importantly, why should civil engineers even care about it? In vision is guidance for sustainable infrastructure. So what we provide is a guidance manual and some online tools to help people be more prepared to address their infrastructure projects, whether they're in the design phase, the construction phase or even the operations and maintenance phase. We put together a collection of best practices that people can follow, people can consider which of these they want to follow to ensure that they're doing the most they can on their project to support sustainable development. And I would hope that most of the listeners on the episode today understand the importance of life cycle planning and looking at the infrastructure that they're involved with in development for more than just delivering the final product kind of looking at how it's going to interact with within the overall infrastructure infrastructure realm. And that to certainly send is a part of what envision does right. That's right, we encourage people to look at the triple bottom line, which goes beyond the expense, the cost of the infrastructure to look at the impacts to society and the impacts to environment. And we encourage people to look at those triple bottom line impacts over the entire life cycle of infrastructure. For example, there's decisions you can make in the design phase that impact how easy it is to construct or to operate the infrastructure. So you're going to be impacting the influence on the budget on the schedule on the community over the life cycle of the project. And I'm going to ask you in just a moment to talk maybe a little bit more about the triple bottom line because some of the listeners may not be familiar with that terminology. Of course, for a moment here, I'm going to go off on a segue and say that, you know, to a certain extent, we're talking about life cycle costs and even beyond life cycle costs. We're kind of looking at the life cycle costs and second and third impacts, which from my perspective also kind of bring into this a project management perspective, which is cost scope and schedule. So it's interesting that at least in my mind, there's kind of a linkage between the two, but can you talk a little bit more about the triple bottom line? Because as I mentioned that there may be some listeners who maybe aren't familiar with what that concept is and what it truly means. Sure, the triple bottom line concept came out decades ago. And the idea behind the simple catchphrase is when you're talking about a project, people would always say, what's the bottom line? How much is it going to cost me? And developers over time said, well, you can't just pick low cost. You can't only use cost as a metric. I would recommend to look at three different types of indicators. Sure, you can look at cost and the impact to the local economy. But we want you to look at the impact to the society. That's an impact that's a lot harder to put in equivalent dollar amount to, but how is this project improving the community quality of life? And then we also want you to look at the impact to the natural environment. Again, that's another area where it's hard to assign an equivalent dollar amount, but there are benefits there to protecting our natural resources and in making our community a place where people want to live. In my perspective, every important metric in metrics or something that I'm really interested in, and especially as a project manager and somebody who's done a lot of work in strategy development and execution down to the tactical level. I really view kind of key performance indicators as being something that I find absolutely critical to gauging performance, so kind of based off of what you've just been mentioned with the triple bottom line. And some of what envision does, how might it help or how does it help to gauge performance of infrastructure that has been either constructed or is intended to be constructed or implemented in that community. And there's a couple of things that envision can help us with there. First, I always like to point out that for us engineers, we like numbers, we like those metrics that we can compare. We want to compare the apples to the oranges. And envision helps you compare the expensive solar panels, for instance, that you are considering putting on top of a structure. And compare that to the decision to put a green roof, a planted roof on top of the structure, or perhaps just to put a roof that's painted white or some light color that doesn't contribute to the heat island effect. Now, cost basis, of course, the last option is probably going to be the cheapest option in any situation. But when you go into envision and you start to look at these other factors that your decision will impact, you can go to our metrics and you can say, well, envision assigns so many points and you get a total score out of those points for your project. But you can use the points for the solar panel and compare it to the points for the green roof or the points for the light color group to see a relative value to your project and that can help you make the decision. And then once you've gone through decisions like that, envision has 60 concepts to consider, you get a total score. And what we would like people to do now that they're using envision on their projects and they're getting a total score, use that score as a benchmark. So that when they go forward and they make decisions on other projects, they can aim a little higher. They know their starting point and they can track their performance in the design phase, in this decision making phase, so that they are adding more and more sustainable elements to their project. And then finally, we encourage people to track the performance of the infrastructure over the lifecycle. In vision helps you document the decisions that you're making during the design and construction phases, so that in the future, you can ask yourself, is this infrastructure performing the way we intended it to perform. And that's where you really get the value of following up on those decisions, making sure that you're getting the value and using that information to make decisions on future projects. I've been through the envision system with professional certification process. I'm familiar with this. I can answer this question, but I'm going to toss this one over to you, especially because you happen to hold a dual certification between the lead. And the envision sustainability professional. So let me ask this question right now, what's the difference in what does each one of them bring to the table. Well, they are both very good credentials to have. I became a lead AP first. I'm civil engineer, as you mentioned, I worked on water wastewater storm water type projects and my projects would sometimes have a building, a pumping station, a treatment building. And I'm going to do some other type of building feature. So I went out and earned the lead AP credential, thinking that I would be able to use it on my projects. Now, what I learned is that while there are a lot of really great sustainability concepts that are covered in lead, and I could apply those concepts to my projects, lead is specifically geared towards buildings that are inhabited by people. So I'm going to work in the building, whether it's an apartment building or a hotel, places where people spend a bulk of time. So that was not a good description of the buildings I was designing. Nobody wants to stay in a wastewater treatment plant building or pumping station for a long period of time. Why not? They're not sitting there. They're not working there. They don't want to smell the smell sometimes, but they have to keep moving and doing maintenance at many, many facilities. So there are a lot of credits in lead that apply to concepts about the comfort of the inhabitants. We're not transferable to the projects I was working on. So I would just have to skip them all together. And then I would get a total score in lead that was very, very low. And it was, it was discouraging. And it was a shame that I would then have to justify and explain. I did everything that was appropriate for the project, but this lead is not appropriate for this project. And then that's what I heard about envision. And I think that's the same issue that the founders knew that they saw, they saw a need for a rating system that could work for other types of infrastructure. And they specifically wanted to write a rating system that was flexible and could be used for many different types of infrastructure. So envision has a lot of the same concepts as bleed, but the way that they're written and the questions we ask in the way that they are applied to projects is more general and more flexible for infrastructure projects. You could look at a road, a bridge, a tunnel, a water pipeline, a pumping station, an electric grid. You can look at a wide variety of infrastructure. So this brings me to the next logical question, which is let's say I'm a stakeholder and I'm bringing the finances of the table on municipal entity. I've hired your firm to come through and do the design through implementation and execution of the project. What does envision bring me as the in stakeholder to have you apply the rating and the different assessment criteria to the project that you're designing and executing for me. What does this at the end of the day? What does this do for my my bot line? The main benefit that infrastructure owners see when they use envision well, they're several. I would say the top ones are accountability and best practices. So we know that infrastructure owners, unlike private building owners that might go get a building lead certified and then either sell it for a profit or rent it out at a higher rate because it has that certification. Infrastructure owners own the infrastructure today and they're probably going to own it forever. They never have an opportunity to sell it. And even at the end of the infrastructure's useful life, they're going to continue operating it. So what infrastructure owners get is documentation and reference that best practices were used and that conscious decisions were made to ensure that all the opportunities that could be addressed in the schedule and the budget, whatever was appropriate for the community were included. And they can share that information with the city planner, with the mayor, the governor or even with the citizens, the taxpayers to demonstrate good governance. Now, if you're specifically asking about the bottom line, the dollar amount and the impact to the project, we hope that when people are educated on envision and are able to use it effectively that there will be no impact to the project cost. The idea here is that these are best practices. We hope people are using them. Some of them are being used commonly every day already. We hope people are going to learn and be educated and get to the point where they're using these best practices all the time and integrating them into the project. So they're thinking about them during design and during construction so that they don't actually add any additional work, any effort, any time and what you get is a good project. So my view on this has always been it's almost like a checklist of best practices and really kind of a checklist to say, did you consider this aspect in the design and the lifecycle assessment of the project. Do you view it as really to a certain extent being like that? Oh yes, very much. This is another big difference from lead for the people that are familiar with lead. In envision there are these 60 concepts, we call them credits, there each an individual sustainability concept. None of them are required. You can go through the list of 60 and make the conscious decision to ignore some of them or to select. We have levels of achievement so you can say, well, I'm going to take my first step in this area. Maybe it's buying resources from a local provider. Well, we can only get 5% of our resources locally. So that's all I can do. Well, you get credit for that. Of course, you get more credit if you could buy 50% of your materials from a local provider, but we want to make sure people are recognized for the incremental efforts they're making and all of those efforts are the decisions for you to make. As I said, you can ignore credits entirely and they won't be counted against you and you're scoring. So envision is out there to help you with your decision making. You can use envision for free on your projects to do assessments. There is an option to submit the projects for a third party review to earn an award. And there's a fee associated with that because we need to pay the third party reviewer. But that's not required. I SI is primarily a research and education body and we want to put this material out there so that people can be educated and develop better infrastructure. It's like a checklist to help you as a as a civil engineer professional to be able to go through and look at the infrastructure projects that you're implementing and executing to just make an assessment that yes, I've addressed this or I've considered this particular element. In the other the design or the execution of the project and Denise what I have professionally found interesting about the envisions is the same professional process is that from my perspective, it's more than just engineering. It brings in socio economic aspects, it brings in political aspects, it brings in society just as opposed to this. Let's look at it as just the pure numbers aspect of what what is this project do. The view it is the same way or I'd be interested to hear that. Absolutely. Envision was originally designed by engineers, American society of civil engineers was one of our key founding organizations, but it has gone far beyond the reach of engineers. We are out there with planners, with architects, with policy makers, with governors, with regulatory bodies and with financial institutions. We are talking to everybody about how we can go beyond just evaluating one project and getting a score to using the guidance and envision to plan entire communities. That's brilliant, now just you know, I'll kind of footstomp is that as a civil engineer if you're thinking that you know I'm just an engineer I design roads or I'm structural design buildings or bridges that's fine I guess that's you can start at that level. But if you have any intentions of progressing within your career professional career and getting to a level of having increased responsibility and level of impact is going to involve other professionals that are outside of the engineering realm meaning that you are quickly going to bring yourself into interaction with as Denise has already spelled out policy makers, the legal aspect of things, the financial aspect it's going to bring in all the different elements. That are involved in a in a community and I really think that the envision symbol rating system helps to take infrastructure and put it into a multi discipline multi perspective realm which may move it out of just purely the infrastructure engineering realm. And so that's professional it's one of the reasons why I was I was going to originally so it's a I presume it to be a very very effective and very awesome certification to go after. I'm going to roll this back to maybe the beginning aspects of this because you touch on the fact that envision is is linked in with a SE that they were. And so there were a society of civil engineers was you know one of the initiators or one of the founders associated with the envision so if you interested Denise if you could maybe spend a little bit of time and talk with us about how did envision come into existence. And I have a question I love talking about the history here there were three different organizations and many other people out in the industry that saw a need for something like envision there were people at ASCE they have a sustainability committee they have a lot of intelligent people there helping to write guidance and write standards and things like that. And they were growing their sustainability efforts within the society so they were thinking about it the American public works association was also thinking about it they are a collective of the public infrastructure owners so the cities the towns the counties. The people that are in charge of the roads in some cases the water systems everything out there that's public works and then there was the American Council of engineering companies so these are all the AEC firms again very smart people out there seeing a need for a standardized system of guidance on sustainability. The word sustainability gets thrown around so much and it has so many different meanings everybody wanted to sit down and write down what they thought it should be in these three different society specifically we're getting pretty far in the development of what they thought would be good guidance and they realized the other groups were doing the same thing so they very wisely formed an agreement to work together so that there weren't three competing systems out there in the industry they didn't want their. To be more confusion so they decided to work together and because these organizations have a lot of other functions and a lot of other members that they manage they decided to form a new nonprofit the Institute for sustainable infrastructure specifically to manage in vision and so the three societies formed the new society in 2011 and they sit on the board of ISI to help guide the direction of ISI and I. And ISI has a very singular focus and that is develop and promote the use of envision so we are supporting people and using envision on their projects and we are working on revisions to envision that we expect to come out in a few years. Now there was one other major player that I'd like to mention the Zoffness program for sustainable infrastructure at the Harvard Graduate School of Design was working on a very similar type system they were making a rating system for sustainable infrastructure. And so again ISI and its founders saw the Zoffness system and development and said we can have two systems out there let's merge our resources let's bring what came from the engineering services companies and the public works infrastructure owners merge it with the knowledge that we're getting from the Zoffness program which is the planners the architects the researchers at Harvard and bring it together to make one cohesive system. And that came out in 2012 for public review and it was available in 2013 for people to start earning the credential and for people to start using it on projects. That's literally about the same exact time that I picked up my certification myself it's so impressive that all the different organizations along with academia were able to bring this together into one essentially organized effort and that's obviously something that I very much appreciate of in just suppose the fact that that everybody was thinking towards the same end result which is pretty amazing. And so I think that you work for ISI I ask kind of this question because some people maybe think it OK I understand this makes sense I understand what envision is I understand kind of the difference between envision and lead as far as certifications are set. So what does the certification bring to me is a civil engineer if I decide that I want to go through this process and more importantly what is the process if I'm a civil engineer who's interested and says yes this is actually something that I'm very interested in going after this what do I need to do what's involved and what does membership look like. So this would be a decision for the listeners to talk with their companies about whether they're public private academic whatever type of group they're with they can go to ISI and look at the options there for the group membership which comes with benefits that are discounts on training discounts on project assessments. So I think that's really good. And I will also put a plug in here that ISI has recently updated their website. So if you by chance came across ISI's website previously and envisioned the website has been completely read on has been updated. It's Denise. It's awesome. So you guys have done a fabulous job on the redesign. And I recommend that you take an opportunity to go and take a look at that. We're going to have links to the everything that Denise just mentioned. And we'll have those in the show notes for today's episode. You can go and look at those and click on them and they'll take you right there to the different locations. And it's a lot of really, really good information that's out there and really appreciate that. So Denise, I write up. I've got one fun question. It's one that I ask all the guests that come on the on the podcast. And that is if you had a one minute in an elevator with a fellow civil engineer, what piece of professional advice would you share with them? I would say always ask questions. And now you may have heard that before. And I think of this in two different ways. Always ask questions, technical questions, questions to engage people. People love to talk about their work. So whether you're shy or whether you don't have another way to initiate a conversation, asks them one a question. They'll tell you what they do. They'll tell you how they do it. They love to talk about themselves and their work and that creates a connection for you. But the other way to look at it is, you know, don't be afraid to ask for things, for help, for guidance, for an internship, for a job. You know, if there's an opportunity there, it may not be advertised. So don't ever hesitate to ask to inquire. I mean, be polite and be mature about it, but it never hurts to ask. Denise, that is advice that I think is platinum. I'm going to call it gold because it truly is. You're absolutely right. I mean, if you ask 99% of the people that you ask a question of are going to most likely be able to provide some assistance to you. So that is an absolutely brilliant piece of advice. I appreciate you sharing that with us. And thank you so much for joining with me today. Thank you so much. I just wanted to say that I'm a member of this organization and I've had coaching sessions with Anthony Fuzano before. I'm very proud to be part of the group and I see a lot of value in it. So I'm very happy to be speaking back to the group now in this opportunity. I appreciate as well. And now for the group, but just because of what you're doing with with ISI and the work that you've done with the envision. So same professional certification and for all the listeners that are out there, Denise and I are both, you know, we're both associated with the engineering career coach and with Anthony Fuzano. And we both have the whole the ENV SP certification. Denise was kind of a natural connection that we would eventually eventually bring you on the show here to talk about it. So I really appreciate you taking the time and joining with me today. Great. Thank you so much. And everyone, you know, please remember that you can find the show notes for today's episode by going to civil engineering podcast.com. Just look for today's episode on sustainability professional. You're going to be able to find all of the links that Denise and or I have addressed. And there's just a ton of information out there. I just really recommend you go out and take a look at it. Maybe it's not for you. That's okay. But I think if you at least have a situational awareness that it is out there as a certification and more importantly what envision is and what it potentially. Can bring to the infrastructure projects that your firm is working on your company or even your public agency is involved with. I think it's going to at least it's really going to push your expertise and at least knowledge of what is involved to another level. And I truly think that it's worth taking some time to look at that. And I also want to share a note from today's sponsor, PPI. And so engineers often ask me what exam prep materials review courses they should use on the program for the F of your P exam hands down. I recommend PPI. I personally use PPI's materials to pass my own exams. I recently had the chance to demo their civil F and P.E. review courses. And it's why I feel confident recommending PPI for those of you planning to take the next step in your career. The PPI is offering a special 20% discount to listeners of this podcast and you can use promo code civil at ppi to pass.com. Again, that's ppi the number two pass dot com and just use promo code civil for 20% discount. Until next time, I wish you the best in all of your civil engineering endeavors. Thank you for listening to the civil engineering podcast. Be sure to visit civilengineeringpodcast.com where you can listen to past episodes and also submit your project to be featured on the show. 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