Just because it looks easy. . .
Managers didn’t need to understand everything about our project. If the team did a good job, the outcomes would look effortless and easy.
I hoped that managers understood this, that they realized cost-effective solutions come from mature, sophisticated thinking. In other words, you have to be really good to make it look this easy.
One of my greatest frustrations was that managers fretted endlessly that we’d develop a process or solution that wouldn’t work for another silo, or for a nebulous, obscure project that may happen sometime, maybe, or possibly, in the future, somewhere in the municipality.
All I could say was that everyone on the team did this work every day, that members were working closely to make sure that didn’t happen, and that it was incredibly unlikely they would develop a process that represents an alternate universe.
Managers were protective of the people creating the record drawings, even though these people were the first to say that red-lines were an inadequate information source for creating complete and accurate drawings. Logic never seemed to address these concerns because they were emotionally, not factually, based.
Next month: Pilot project results and 11 key lessons learned.
Karen Zollman is senior project surveyor for Seattle Public Utilities. E-mail kar en.zollman@seattle.gov. Read part one of this three-part series.
