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strategic planning

How to Succeed with Your Strategic Plans and Initiatives

December 9, 2021 By EMI

 

This is a guest post by Peter C. Atherton, P.E.

There’s no question that strategic planning is essential for individual, team, and organizational success. Yet despite this, the vast majority of strategic plans and major strategic initiatives fail or fail to be fully or successfully implemented. 

Why is this the case and, more importantly, what can we do to ensure that we, our teams, and our organizations are on the winning side? 

strategic planning
From my perspective as both a strategic planning participant at manager, principal, and firm owner levels and now as a strategic planning facilitator and execution consultant, here are the top 10 reasons most strategic plans and major strategic initiatives either languish or fail: 
 

[Read more…] about How to Succeed with Your Strategic Plans and Initiatives

Filed Under: Blog, Leadership/Management Tagged With: active steps toward a better future, communications, Desire for Change, organizational structure, P.E, people are our greatest assets, Peter C. Atherton, strategic initiatives, strategic planning, Strategic Plans, Strategic Plans and Initiatives, strategic success, truly succeed

Providing Stellar Client Service: Engage Holistically

September 21, 2020 By EMI

This is a guest blog by Mike Burns, PE, PgMP, DBIA

customer service

As we commence a discussion about client service, I find myself reflecting on my first Engineering Management Institute (EMI) blog, “Think Big, Be Mindful.” Serving our clients and growing market share should create synergies with our individual goals and personal lives. Again, allowing us to evolve our vision as intentions, setting direction — not prescribing a destination. In this instance, we are going to set intentions by broadening our client perspective. This broader perspective allows us to avoid boundaries that might erode our individual and collective paths to success.

I thoroughly enjoy considering and discussing the complex programs and projects that AEC professionals serve. Like many of you, this enjoyment has allowed me to grow from technical roles into leadership positions with increasing business development (BD) responsibilities, realizing along the way that I am not a natural salesperson. Yet, I benefit from and continue to enjoy working with exceptional marketing, BD, and operations colleagues, who help me to refine my approach to winning work and providing stellar client services. Along the way, one of these wonderful colleagues introduced me to Heidi Gardner’s book.

Mrs. Gardner’s extended title necessitates a deeper read: “Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.” I would not suggest taking on silos as a path toward exceptional client services. However, I wholeheartedly support her guidance, which promotes zippered relationships, allowing us to avoid cross-selling gaps as we orchestrate collaborative selling objectives. Silos emerge for reasons that we need to understand, especially where Wall Street-driven performance metrics and commercialization of our products create onerous metrics for hit rates, profit, loss, and utilization. We must explore ways to incrementally feed these metrics, concurrently exposing colleagues whose breadth of knowledge and desire to grow create mutually beneficial opportunities — opportunities where our collective experiences provide a premium experience for our clients.

Like any dynamic problem, the complexities associated with artfully incentivizing internal and external clients necessitate an elegant approach. I believe that sustained stellar client services starts with a people-centric program management approach, marrying a comprehensive stakeholder assessment with dynamic communication loops throughout the project delivery lifecycle.

Step 1: Understanding and supporting your internal and external clients

[Read more…] about Providing Stellar Client Service: Engage Holistically

Filed Under: Blog, Networking/Client Relations Tagged With: avoid boundaries, client perspective, community stakeholders, Engage Holistically, facilitating, growing market share, individual goals, internal and external clients, paths to success, project delivery, project lifecycle, Serving our clients, Stellar Client Service, strategic planning

TSEC 33: Leading With Outcomes: Keys to Advancing Your Engineering Career

September 3, 2020 By EMI

https://media.blubrry.com/engineeringcareercoach/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/thestructuralengineeringpodcast/TSEC033.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

In this episode of The Structural Engineering Channel Podcast, we talk to Rens Hayes, Principal at H+O Structural Engineering, about strategic planning, organizational structure, leadership, management, and advancing your engineering career. Regardless of your current position and aspirations in your engineering career, if advancement is something you’d like to continue to pursue, this episode is full of big-picture insights that will help you see where opportunity for growth lies.

Engineering Quotes:

Advancing Your Engineering Career

Advancing Your Engineering Career

Here Are Some of the Questions We Ask Rens in This Episode:

[Read more…] about TSEC 33: Leading With Outcomes: Keys to Advancing Your Engineering Career

Filed Under: TSEC-The Structural Engineering Channel Tagged With: big-picture insight, Engineering Career, H+O Structural Engineering, Keys to Advancing, Leadership, Leading With Outcomes, management, mission, opportunity for growth, organizational balance, organizational structure, Rens Hayes, strategic planning, values, vision

Better Marketing for Engineering Firms Through Better Public Speaking

October 1, 2018 By EMI

Better Marketing for Engineering Firms Through Better Public Speaking is a guest post by Shoots Veis, P.E.

Marketing

Colter has been enjoying working at his job as an engineer at a regional engineering firm.  He is good at his job, liked by his co-workers and management, and has moved up a couple of rungs at the company.  At his last performance evaluation, he visited with his manager about starting to take on client relations and they agreed Colter should look for an opportunity to begin creating a relationship with a client.  He was motivated by the prestige of being a client manager, saw it as the chance to make another move up in the company, and begin planning how to cultivate the new client relationship.

A couple of months after his evaluation, Colter was invited to sit in on a strategic planning session for the company.  One of the discussions was about how the firm could grow through the acquisition of new clients and specifically, how they could find new municipal clients.  They listed about a dozen cities they would be interested in pursuing and it turns out that Colter knew the assistant public works director, Tim Harrison, in one of the cities.  They had met through the local section of ASCE, served together on a couple of outreach projects, and usually sat with each other at the monthly luncheon.

[Read more…] about Better Marketing for Engineering Firms Through Better Public Speaking

Filed Under: Blog, Networking/Client Relations Tagged With: client manager, clients, delivered, designed, engineer, marketing, marketing director, opportunity, planned, practiced, presentation template, presenter, proposal, relationship, Shoots Veis, slides, strategic planning

7 Attributes of an Effective Strategic Plan

April 7, 2015 By EMI

(TEL4-7)Strategic PlanWhen you think “effective leader” what comes to mind immediately?

I attended a leadership seminar at local university recently. Within the first fifteen minutes we were given a task to go out and ask three strangers this exact question. What do you think the result was? 

To be an effective leader you have to be effective at giving vision and setting a direction.

[Read more…] about 7 Attributes of an Effective Strategic Plan

Filed Under: Leadership/Management Tagged With: goal achievement, Leadership, strategic planning, strategy, Success

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