Expert Insights for Civil Engineering Project Delivery – Ep 302

In civil engineering, technical skill builds the foundation, but project management drives success. EMI's AEC-PM certification equips you with real-world tools on demand lessons and live PDH webinars, so you lead with impact. Want to go further? Consider our AEC-PM certification course, or attending our live AEC-PM connect, with expert sessions on earned value, AI in project management and risk management. Visit AEC-PM.com or call us at 800-920-4007 to learn more. Again, AEC-PM.com or call us at 800-920-4007, because great civil engineering needs great project leadership. In civil engineering projects, effective leadership and mentorship often determine the success of complex land development and utility infrastructure work. Navigating design challenges and regulatory requirements while fostering team growth is a balancing act that requires both technical expertise and people skills. In this episode, which forms part of our Women in Civil Engineering series, we'll be talking with Debbie Reese, licensed professional engineer and senior VP of California Water Business at WSP in the US. Debbie brings over 30 years of experience managing civil drainage and stormwater disciplines for transportation and land development projects. We're going to discuss her approach to project management, staff mentoring and strategies for delivering these critical infrastructure projects, and part of that being how to build a well-rounded team. If you're a civil engineer, project manager, or stakeholder responsible for land development or utility projects, this episode does offer practical insights to help you lead your teams more effectively and deliver complex projects on time and on budget. Before we jump in, I want to tell you about AECPM Connect, an interactive in-person experience where civil engineers can sharpen their project management and leadership skills, and learn about topics like AI and project management, earn value, risk management, and more. And here's the exciting part. At this event, we'll also be announcing the winners of the AECPM Awards, recognizing professionals who lead with purpose and deliver measurable results. We're trying to raise up project management in our industry and shine a light on it. Just imagine someone from your firm being named AECPM of the year. That kind of recognition can boost your people, your culture, and your firm's reputation in a big way. The event will take place on June 10, 2026 at the Forestgate Country Club in New Jersey. You can register now at AECPMconnect.com. Again, that's AECPMconnect.com. And if you want to nominate someone for the awards, head over to AECPM Awards.com to download the nomination guide before the deadline of February 20. I'm your host, Anthony Fesano, and this is the Civil Engineering Podcast, the industry's leading show for civil engineering professionals ranked as the number one civil engineering podcast by FeedsPod. So Debbie, welcome to the Civil Engineering Podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have you and kind of get to talk through some real interesting civil engineering topics and career related topics and just to kind of get us going. Maybe you can introduce yourself to the audience. Tell me a little bit about what you do WSP. Sure. So my name is Debbie Reese. I am in San Diego, California. And who I am, what WSP calls the Yolpa Business Line Leader for our water business in California. That role entails reading technical pursuits, doing a lot of business development. I also will either tune in or about 28 technical professionals, engineers, who work on projects for our projects within our water team. And then we also support a lot of our other business minds, our transportation or energy. We have multiple businesses across our whole company and any type of project that is a civil engineering type project oftentimes has storm are related items that meet design. And so we support those aspects of other businesses within our company. Wow. Well, it sounds like there's a lot of moving parts in what you do. Of course, I'm working with a lot of different departments. Like you said, stormwater gets involved. And so Debbie, I want to talk a little bit about mentoring. You're right. You've been doing this for a while now. And I'm curious as to what do you think are some of the biggest challenges in mentoring staff for civil and development utility projects in the industry? What tips can you share with us on mentoring? I think one of the biggest things I've learned more recently is the generational differences between my generation and the younger generation coming into the workforce. I don't think this is specific to civil engineering, Mrs. Sarah Lee, but you know, our younger professionals, they've been shaped by the speed of technology. They're very used to getting an answer quickly. And I think at some time they anticipate that their career is going to advance just as quickly. And that can be a challenge. You know, the truth is that experience is built with time exposure in different kinds of situations, different projects, problems that you solve along the way that you you don't get that just by reading a book or learning. Every project is different, right? You may learn something from one project and you have to learn something totally new from the next project. And so each experience offers lessons that help build that foundation of growth and good decision making in engineering. So, you know, trying to keep mentors motivated in their career development and their career grows and keep them patient and keeping them hungry, you know, it's it can be challenging sometimes. But at the same time, you know, is it is a challenge on my side is keeping an open mind that the value and perspective that they bring. They have a different way of thinking a lot of times how they use technology to leverage their strengths and there's a lot to be said about that, you know, technology, especially AI is is changing how we do business and many of the younger generation are head and shoulders way beyond my capability in in using some of the technologies we have available to us. Yeah, it's a really good point. I mean, I think the generational differences can be very impactful when you're thinking about mentoring leadership. We do a lot of leadership development and PM development programs here at EMI for different companies and we often try to build in a session on these generational differences because even when it comes to communication, right, or the way people work or the hours people work, right, things can be really different from generation and generation. And instead of just being opposed to or getting angry at someone because of the way they're communicating, we kind of might need to step back and say they're communicating this way because of their background, right, they're upbringing their experience today. And you know, everyone could think the other person's right or wrong, but the end of the day, it's really just everyone's different. We have to figure out kind of how to work together. So I see how that could be challenging for mentoring as well, because like you said, if you're used to technology moving very fast, you may equate that to your career, but in civil engineering, we all know that you learn a lot on the job. Right, you can't accelerate those experiences in the field and the experiences you get. So you kind of have to almost maybe do some coaching and mentoring on, you know, patients and, you know, letting the knowledge come to you and, you know, getting his interactions with clients and things of that nature to make sure that they're really building that knowledge before they try to leap right to the managerial type position or the project management positions. So true. And sometimes when you get a quick answer, it may not be the best answer. Sometimes you have to let it. Ruminate in your mind, you have to sleep on it, you have to come back to it after a few hours, you know, the age old don't ever pick up something off the printer and take it into your boss's office and put it on their desk, right, you have to sit with it, go check your work and, you know, some some of these practices that takes practice and time and patience. Spend some time with what you just did and look at it, review it yourself and do your own QC before you pass it on. In our past world today is everybody wants the answer right now, everybody needs it immediately and it's so easy just to get it up and get it out and that doesn't always end up with the best product. And I think I think to that point is we want to get the answers out right away, but we have to understand that in our industry, there's a lot of risk, right. If you give someone the answer right away, but it's wrong, I mean, you're talking about, you know, right, I mean, this you could be talking about the safety of the public really at the end of the day. So we need to be patient, we need to understand that we do want to get back to people in a timely manner, but we also need to have the right answers. And that kind of leads me into my next question, which is I love to get your thoughts on approaching project planning and design development to ensure that your schedule works for your project, but also you get the quality outcomes that you want because again, you know, we need to take the time to make sure that we're on schedule, but also achieve in quality. I'm curious if you could share some tips from your experience on how to approach projects in that way. Yeah, so project planning in my mind, it's often about having the right minds in the route, right, diverse teams. often had the best ideas. And most of the time, there's multiple pathways to the same outcome. You can have five different engineers with the same problem, and they'll all have a different way to get to a good answer. And they're all good answers, but they may not be the same. And so relying on your resources, bringing in the right people that have to weigh in on the conversation and plan the project, talking through the steps, understand the information that's needed for each step to be accomplished. All of that is really important, setting in needed milestones, so you can understand how your progress is going. It takes communication, really good communication and collaboration. A lot of times, as the leader of the project manager, I don't have all the answers. Right, so we have to pull the team together to collaborate on the best plan. Once you have a plan with the appropriate inter-mediate milestones, then it's about monitoring that plan. Change management, tracking, regular check-ins with your team, cost tracking, to stay on budget, all of those things. And then, you know, ensuring an outcome that is a quality product, it also takes planning. You have to identify the people who are going to do the QC checks. You have to be applying into the schedule for that to be accomplished. You have to document the process. Taking the time to circle back, sharing the lessons learned, that you discover through the QC process can be very important. The QC process can be very beneficial for the entire team. So that everyone can learn from the project. That way, the whole team is growing. I have a team, like I said, of 28 people, not everybody's working on the same project clearly. So if we have a lesson learned on one project, we try and she learn across the team. So that everybody can grow and learn from that. That's how you ensure quality, just in general, is by sharing those lessons learned. Yeah, I think that's great. And I really like what you said there first around the different perspectives on the project team. I think that's really important. I know when we do our project management training, sometimes people, I think, just want to have like a lot of the same, you know, people from the same office, people from the same region, people with the same ideas. And that's really limiting your project team, because you're going to come up against challenges, you're going to come up against changes on your project, right? Things are going to happen. And you need to have diverse perspectives to brainstorm and collaborate and come up with different solutions. And so, you know, multi-generational teams, right, different communication styles. I think the more varied you can be on your team, the, you know, the more value you could provide to the client and to the stakeholders, because you just have more to pull from, which is, which is really important. And I think Debbie's last point about lessons learned. And this is such a big, in my opinion, pitfall for AEC organizations, is that they don't leverage this effectively. And what we've tried to do with some of our clients is help them build like a, almost like a lessons learned database, right? So if someone's sitting in Florida, they're dealing with a problem that a project manager in California dealt with on the last project. If they had that information, it could be really helpful for them. So what can you do in your organization to really not only do lessons learned and debrief your projects, but then share that information in a way, in using AI now, there are different ways to do this. But you can try to build some kind of database of knowledge sharing database that you can share with your PMs. And that's some pretty good. For those of you that do a lot of project management, we also have a podcast called the AEC PM podcast. And there's a lot of good kind of PM strategies as well that we cover there. So that's some good stuff that you can consider. So Debbie, can you talk a little bit about how stormwater quality, best management practices and low impact development, influencer designs, any of you, any of you see a lot of those things? Yes. And so in stormwater, I think from a waterfall, I think from a really perspective, at least, I don't know how familiar you are with the regulation, but the Clean Water Act of 1972 really reshaped the environmental regulations around water quality. And since then, you know, all of the states have had to implement regulations that manage, how stormwater is collected and treated. It changes the way we think about design. And then we have the same requirements and requirements. And then we have the same requirements. you try and resolve them at the most lowest level immediate as quickly as possible. If they need to be elevated, you have to identify who are the people that are the decision-makers within that escalation matrix. That if a decision can't be made quickly, it gets escalated to the next person. They can solve if it can't be answered, it escalates to the next person. So defining that, I've learned a lot through partnering, working with partnering firms, through construction projects, that having that defined early and sticking to it really helps move things through so that you don't get caught in a circle of decision. Yeah, that last one is really important. In fact, we're working with a DOT right now on a big project management program. So they're taking us through some of their processes and they lean heavily in their construction team on this. They have an issues resolution ladder, so to speak, like a matrix. First of all, before I go into that, the kickoff meeting that Debbie mentioned is critical. A lot of people either don't do a kickoff meeting or they do a poor kickoff meeting, and that's really your opportunity to set your project up for success. But one of the things you can discuss at the kickoff meeting, of course, is this dispute resolution ladder. Basically, what it is is you just, like Debbie said, there's levels and you try to resolve it at the lowest level. You need to do it the kickoff meeting is put names on those positions so that you know, okay, the engineer, the project engineer at this level is Anthony and the contractor superintendent is Debbie. If the two of them can't work out this situation in one week, it's going to get elevated to the next level. At that next level is John and whoever else from the contractor, and they're going to work it out. That doesn't keep going on. And having that clarity at the beginning in the project inevitably something's going to happen on the project. It happens on every project, right? And when that does happen, you have a process for how you're going to handle it. And you could say the same with chaint. Right. You can see the personalities out of it. And it did the motion out of it. And you can just say, okay, we're not going to come to resolution. Let's escalate it. And then it, you know, it really helps. Yeah, exactly right. You just go to the process that you've already agreed to together and you kind of execute on that process. And that can be the same for the change order process, right? If there's a change on the project, what do we do? If we need an addendum, who does it go to? Like all these things you can figure out through your project management plan and your kickoff meeting process. And it's going to make your life a lot easier. So Debbie, there's all the all the kind of rage out there about AI and everything right now. And there are certainly a lot of benefits of it. I'm curious as to what you've seen so far in terms of technology that has impacted your project delivery process or your projects or what, what have you seen so far that has been helpful that has helped you with your processes? Well, clearly, obviously, computer-rated design has transformed how we design projects, right? We could not do the level of computation and evaluation in just display of data without computer-rated design. So that's one thing. When it comes to management and leveraging technology for management, I think teams and Microsoft Teams has really helped in collaborating across multiple disciplines in multiple parts of the country. My prior firm was pretty small under 200 people and one office. We could get up and go to the top to the person working for a boolean global firm like WSD. It's way different. Oftentimes when we're working on projects with people that don't sit in the same offices, you projects that aren't located in the same city where you sit. And so being able to have technology to keep everything in one shareable location, send a quick IAM Teams child, have it in a group chat where you can communicate with a multiple group of people very quickly and easily disseminate information quickly. Keeps everybody on the same page. It helps you manage change. People can't say, well, I didn't even know that happened. It's your stay in-car with your teams and you're reading your emails. You should know that this change has happened and we need to pivot or whatever. So I think that's one tool that's really many difference. And I think the pandemic really made the need for that in the forefront of our business because we were all working from home and we had to find technological ways to communicate better and collaborate better. And so that's really benefit. And it's one of the good things that came out of that horrible situation that you know, we work a lot better together quicker. Also, AI Microsoft's Co-Pilot is a very useful tool to have it record the meeting for you and it will summarize the points of the meeting. It'll put together the meeting notes, it'll put together action items. The recording can be uploaded so that team members that weren't able to attend the meeting can go back and watch or listen to the meeting later. So tools like that are relatively new. I'm not an AI expert, but we'll know that it's really the ability to crunch a lot of data, raw data, and come up with results that can be checked and verified is one of the big powerful tools. Yeah. And again, it's nice to hear from someone who's leading projects, not necessarily AI expert, just what's worked for you, right? Because I think a lot of our listeners are probably in the same boat as you. And for those of you that are interested in some project management AI related topics on our ACPM podcast, we actually talked to a couple of people that were doing some interesting stuff with Co-Pilot, one of them being that they built a almost like a help center, help desk through Co-Pilot for their project managers. You could go on and say, "Where can I find a kickoff meeting agenda template?" Boom, right? Like taking the resources across the company. So there are some things like that that are out there for you. You just have to, you know, do what you can with the resources you have based on, again, the size of your company, the technology that's available to you, you know, and kind of take kind of baby steps with it. All right. So the last question I have for you here, Debbie, before we go into our final hot seed segment is, you've worked with a lot of project managers over the years. I'm curious as to just when you work with project managers, those that are kind of really good project managers, what do you think are some of the skill sets or traits that stand out among some of the best project managers that you've worked with? I think communication and the willingness to not just talk, but listen, you have to be good listener, be good project manager. You have to take in all the input. You have to weigh the pros and cons of different choices that need to be made. You have to have your eyes and ears open for change because that's the number one things you manage projects. It's changing. You need to track those changes. Being organized is really important in having good documentation skills, having tools at your fingertips that you can, whether it's a spreadsheet or a team's list or any number of tools that you may use. One note is another really good tool to organize yourself. Keeping track of all of the decisions that happen throughout the life of a project is really important. But I think communication and organization and people listening skills, probably the top that I would say, "Good project managers now." That's great. All right, so to wrap things up, we're now going to transition into our civil engineering hot seat, where I'm going to ask Debbie a rapid round of questions that will kind of give you a glimpse into some of the daily habits and influences and insights that maybe help to shape her career. All right, so let's jump into it. Strong project outcomes need skilled managers and confident leaders. EMI's corporate training delivers expert led courses in project management and people leadership, plus industry recognized certification and exclusive premium content to take your team even further. Elevate your team's leadership capabilities today. Visit engineeringmanagementinstitute.org and click on corporate training. All right, Debbie, you are officially on the Civil Engineering hot seat. You're ready to go. I'm ready. Okay. All right, so do you have any specific rituals that you practice every day? For example, maybe it's a morning routine or a lunchtime routine or something that you've done consistently on a daily basis that has contributed to your success. Okay, two things. That's a start of the day and end of the day kind of thing. So when I first wake up in the morning, oftentimes that's when all the stresses of the day come upon us, right? The first thing I try and do is really just think about what am I great from for? What do I have in my life that I was so blessed and should be so thankful for having? Because that kind of just sets my perspective for the day. Helps me to rise above the little things that this too shall pass, right? Those little things that we're going to come and go and really keeps me focused and staying positive. I think about what I want to accomplish for the day. What's the one little small success? Sometimes it's a small success and sometimes it's a big success, right? Sometimes it's a big thing on a project that we're about to fit. Just have to get it done today and today is the day. So I think about like what at the end of the day is going to make me feel like I was able to say I did it. I accomplished it and it can be a small little thing with with a coworker. Maybe I need to check up on somebody. Maybe they've had a rough week and And that's the one thing I want to get done today. I want to make sure. I check in with them to make sure they're okay. So that's like the morning thing I think about. And then at the end of the day before I leave work, I try and do a brain dump. What are the top things that came out of my day that I really need to make sure I don't forget to do tomorrow or in the coming days? I try and get all of that out of my brain so that when I get home at the end of the day, I can leave work as best as I can behind, try and enjoy my family and my partner and really just have some brain space so that all that work stuff is not rattle around inside my brain. It makes me have better sleep through the night and then I can wake up the next day and know that I don't have to think about it until I get into the office and look at my to-do list. So those are the two main things I did each day. - That's great. So Debbie, has there been one book or an author or a framework or philosophy or something that you've leaned on throughout your career that has stuck with you that you've kind of practiced? - I don't know that it's been throughout my career. So much is more recently, I came across Simon Sinek and I'm sure you've heard of him. - Yes, start with why, yeah. - Start with why. I think so much of human nature is really, that his concept of starting with why and really understanding and having the reasons what will hide behind why we do what we do is really powerful and so I enjoy listening to his little snippets on YouTube by watching his podcast. I'm reading the book right now, "Leaders Feed Last" and I think he just has a lot of really good insight into just basic human nature that can be applied to any business, not just engineering but any kind of business and working with people, working with teams. - That's awesome, yeah, he's great, his talks are great. If you go online and you want to watch a couple of his talks, they can really provide some great leadership advice for sure. All right, Debbie, last question for you, we call it the Civil Engineering Career Elevator Advice question. So if you got into an elevator with, let's say, up and coming Civil Engineer, you had about 30 to 40 seconds with him or her, what career advice would you share with them? - I would say make connections. You are not going to be successful if you think you're gonna do it all on your own. Reach out to those in your organization, get out and go to those industry events, meet people, be curious, ask questions, say yes, even if you think you're not up for the task, get out of your comfort zone. You'll figure it out when you make those connections, rely on those connections, ask for help, get a coach, get a mentor. - That's the biggest advice I can get. - That's great. No, I love that. I mean, this industry is about relationships, right? And building relationships is gonna help you whether it's because it's gonna help you grow personally, whether it's because for networking purposes, whether it's because you're gonna work on a project with a sub consultant and you're gonna have a pool of people to reach out to, there's a million different reasons that it makes sense, but it is so important for you as your growth as a civil engineer for short. All right, well, once again, Debbie Reese, licensed professional engineers, Senior VP of California Water Business at WSP in the US. Thank you so much for spending some time with us here on the Civil Engineering podcast. - Thank you so much for having me. - I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Debbie. She is a great engineer and project manager and she gave a lot of good tips. If you did enjoy the episode, please subscribe to our channel here. We put out videos like this on a weekly basis to help engineers become better project managers and leaders. I'll see you next week. 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