Why Valuability Matters in Today's Civil Engineering Projects

Key Concepts

• Valuability: A holistic approach to assessing value creation across clients, employees, and communities, extending beyond traditional short-term metrics.
• Three Pillars of Valuability: The core framework for valuability, encompassing value for clients, employees, and the communities served.
• Traditional KPIs: Standard performance indicators often focused on short-term project metrics like revenue, schedule, and budget.
• Long-term Value Creation: Emphasizing sustainable benefits, reliability, resiliency, and cost minimization over an extended period.
• Resilient Infrastructure: Designing systems that can withstand and recover from challenges, ensuring long-term functionality.
• Innovation: The process of introducing new ideas, methods, or solutions, often driven by employee empowerment and a safe environment for experimentation.
• Weighted Criteria: A decision-making tool used to prioritize different factors based on their importance to a project or client.
• Employee Engagement: Fostering a positive work culture where employees are motivated, connected to their work's impact, and empowered to contribute.
• Talent Retention: Strategies to keep skilled employees within an organization, often linked to a sense of purpose and impact.
• Strategic Leadership: Moving beyond technical execution to ask broader questions about long-term value, requiring empathy, authenticity, and trust-building.
• Adaptability: The capacity to adjust to new conditions and changes, crucial in a rapidly evolving industry.
• "Think Again" (Adam Grant): A recommended book that encourages questioning assumptions and embracing diverse perspectives.

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The Concept of Valuability

Sarah Beckman, Chief Strategy Officer at Alteg, introduces "valuability" as a distinct approach to assessing value creation, differing significantly from traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Valuability evaluates how an organization creates value across three critical pillars:

1. For Clients: This involves developing solutions that not only address immediate project needs but also align with the client's long-term goals and strategy. The focus is on creating reliability, resiliency, and minimizing costs over the long term, rather than just achieving short-term savings.
2. For Employees: Valuability emphasizes fostering a positive employee culture where individuals are energized and excited to work. Engaged employees are believed to create better solutions, interact more effectively with clients, and understand the broader impact of their work on communities.
3. For Communities: This pillar connects the civil engineering work directly to the benefit of the communities served, aiming to improve their quality of life.

Distinction from Traditional KPIs: Unlike traditional KPIs that often focus on immediate revenue, schedule adherence, or budget targets, valuability encourages a broader perspective. It acknowledges that investing more upfront in a project, or approaching it differently, can lead to significant long-term savings and value creation, shifting the focus from short-term wins to lasting impact.

Tracking Valuability: Alteg tracks valuability through specific metrics:

• Client Value: Measured by long-term dollar savings and value-added engineering initiatives.
• Employee Value: Assessed through employee engagement metrics and their connection to value creation.
• Community Value: Evaluated by the overall impact on the community and community service hours contributed. This demonstrates a broader, more holistic measurement approach.

Sarah Beckman's Background and Path to Strategy

Sarah Beckman's early interest in building, stemming from playing with Legos and blocks as a child, led her to pursue civil engineering at the University of Missouri, where she was one of only four women in her class. Her early career involved designing diverse infrastructure, including bridges, water and wastewater treatment facilities, and power infrastructure (substations, transmission lines). This hands-on experience evolved into a passion for infrastructure strategy, where she enjoyed connecting current projects with future needs and thinking holistically about long-term development (e.g., 20-year plans). She continues to engage with Legos as a hobby, finding "flow time" in creative building.

Valuability in Strategic Decision-Making Amidst Industry Challenges

In an environment characterized by workforce challenges, shifting policies, and rapid technological disruption, valuability serves as a guiding framework for strategic decisions. Alteg's approach is to:

• Focus on the Long Term: Instead of reacting to immediate changes, the emphasis is on anticipating future needs (e.g., 20 years out) for communities and clients.
• Navigate Uncertainty: Valuability helps leverage value creation to address unknown future challenges. For instance, even without knowing all technological impacts, designing for resilient infrastructure systems in the long term remains a priority.
• Leverage Innovation: This involves creatively using technology, such as automating designs, to achieve long-term goals, encouraging "outside-the-box" thinking.
• Advocate for Clients: Alteg proactively stays abreast of policy changes to advise clients on long-term considerations and potential adaptations.

Case Study: Balancing Pillars in a Capital Infrastructure Investment Plan

Sarah shared an example of a project for a utility in the Western United States, tasked with creating a 10-year capital infrastructure investment plan. This project required balancing all three pillars of valuability amidst competing priorities:

• Client Needs: The utility sought a long-term strategy to mitigate wildfire risks and integrate more renewable and distributed energy resources. The plan needed to be technically sound, financially responsible, and focused on long-haul risk mitigation.
• Team Approach: The Alteg team worked under pressure, employing a holistic approach. They utilized weighted criteria to prioritize factors crucial to the client, such as safety being the number one priority, ensuring all solutions addressed this.
• Community Benefit: The plan aimed to provide safe, resilient systems and keep customer bills low and affordable for residents.
• Employee Empowerment: The project empowered employees to contribute innovatively and witness the tangible outcomes of their work, fostering a sense of impact on the community.
• Success: The final plan successfully strengthened grid reliability, advanced the client's long-term vision, and empowered employees, demonstrating valuability in practice. This project highlighted how innovation, often stifled by pressure, can be driven by creating a safe environment for employees to test ideas, even if it means failing and learning.

Balancing Future Focus with Immediate Results

Alteg balances long-term vision with current project delivery by integrating innovation directly into ongoing work, rather than isolating it as separate R&D. Client projects become real-time, controlled environments for testing new approaches.

Example: Automating Interconnect Applications

• Problem: An electric utility struggled with delays (15%) in assessing, vetting, and approving interconnect applications for renewable and distributed generation.
• Solution: Alteg's team developed an automation process.
• Result: Application delays were reduced to less than 3%.
• Benefits: This satisfied the client, facilitated more renewable energy integration, improved reliability and affordability for communities, and empowered employees to use scripting and technology to solve a direct client challenge. This demonstrates how setting clear goals and giving employees the freedom to innovate on how to achieve them can yield significant results.

Enhancing Employee and Talent Retention

For strengthening talent retention and engagement in engineering, Sarah emphasizes intentionality and consistent communication.

• Connecting "Why" to "What": It's crucial to highlight how employees' work creates value beyond just delivering a specific solution. Examples include connecting infrastructure projects to clean drinking water, accelerated distributed energy resources, or directly solving a client's complex problem.
• Fostering Pride and Ownership: This communication provides a greater sense of pride and ownership, which is vital for engagement and retention.
• Storytelling: Engineers are often humble, focusing on the "job to be done." Leaders must champion and celebrate the critical impact engineers have on everyday life, telling the story of why their work matters.
• Continuous Communication: The "why" should be communicated consistently: at project kickoff, reiterated throughout the project lifecycle, and celebrated at the end, incorporating lessons learned for continuous improvement. Involving employees in solving client challenges from the outset is also key.

Steps for Aspiring Strategic Leaders in Infrastructure

Engineers aiming to become strategic leaders should:

1. Think Beyond Technical Execution: Move past traditional project KPIs (schedule, budget) to ask broader questions about how a project creates long-term value for clients, communities, and employees.
2. Lead with Empathy and Authenticity: Build trust and relationships through vulnerability, authenticity, and active listening. Create an environment where teams feel empowered to innovate and contribute ideas. While challenging for some engineers, this shift in mindset is achievable by "pulling up" and viewing the bigger picture.

Final Advice for Resilience and Adaptability

Sarah's final advice for civil engineers and infrastructure leaders is to build relationships.

• Connections and Trust: Relationships foster connections and build trust. She recommends surrounding oneself with diverse thinkers, mentors, and allies, forming a "personal board of directors."
• Navigating Change: In a rapidly changing world (talent shortages, technological advancements, severe weather events), adaptability is paramount. Relationships provide a crucial support system for expressing ideas, challenging perspectives, and leading with empathy, especially when one doesn't have all the answers.

Civil Engineering Hot Seat: Insights and Habits

In a rapid-fire segment, Sarah shared personal and professional insights:

• Daily Rituals:
  • Morning: Works out most mornings to start the day fresh.
  • Evening: Has a bedtime routine of no screens one hour before bed, making hot tea, and reading a physical book to wind down and decompress.
• Book Recommendation: "Think Again" by Adam Grant. This book challenged her engineering mindset (seeing things as black and white, data-driven) to embrace diverse perspectives, question assumptions, and learn from being wrong.
• Qualities of Favorite Managers: They partnered with her to frame goals and career development but allowed her autonomy in how to achieve them. They consistently challenged her to push beyond perceived capabilities, take risks, and never settle for "good enough," while always providing unwavering support.
• Elevator Career Advice (30-40 seconds):
  1. Master Technical Skills: Get exceptionally good at the technical aspects of engineering; don't rush the learning process.
  2. Seek Stretch Assignments/Lateral Moves: Actively pursue opportunities to add diverse skills and tools to your repertoire. This combination of deep technical mastery and broad expertise enhances client engagement, provides external insights, improves strategic thinking, and makes an engineer significantly more valuable.

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Synthesis and Conclusion

The conversation with Sarah Beckman profoundly redefines success in civil engineering through the lens of "valuability." It moves beyond traditional, short-term project metrics to advocate for a holistic approach that prioritizes long-term value creation for clients, employees, and communities. The core takeaway is that sustainable impact in today's complex environment requires strategic leadership that embraces innovation, fosters employee engagement, and builds resilient infrastructure by consistently connecting the "what" of engineering work to its "why" – its ultimate benefit to society. By intentionally communicating this value, empowering teams, and cultivating strong relationships, engineers can navigate uncertainty, drive meaningful change, and shape a more sustainable future.