What Is a Graduate Emphasis in Civil Engineering Business Practice, Leadership and Project Management?

The Civil and Environmental graduate emphasis in business practices, project management and leadership consists of two graduate courses that provide a rich experience in management, leadership, and professional practice outcomes. The emphasis includes a coupling of these two courses with our undergraduate capstone design class wherein graduate students can gain an effective leadership experience by mentoring undergraduate teams in their culminating design projects. While the majority of these culminating design projects are domestic in nature, there are few projects with international emphasis, which stem from students taking either the International Mega Structures or the Mexico Engineering Study Abroad classes for their senior design class.

A brief description of the two graduate courses is given below followed by a simplified explanation of the purpose of the coupling between these two classes and the undergraduate culminating design class.

Fall Semester - Civil Engineering Business Operations

This course is taught during the fall semester and provides the students an understanding of a range of considerations required in developing a business plan for a civil engineering firm. Students are taught that a business exists to make a profit and the elements necessary to make a plan so that the business achieves its goal of becoming profitable. Such a point of view is not altruistic but realistic in a business context. The class is divided into groups and each group develops a business plan for a civil engineering firm. As the program evolves, some group may look at what is necessary for a civil engineering firm to compete globally.

The topics discussed in the class include different legal forms of business ownership, time value of money, business performance metrics (ROI, IRR, DCF, WACC, EBITDA, and P/E Ratio), balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statement, business development, managing a business for profitability, budgets and cost management, marketing and branding, networking, operations management, supply and demand, market forces, managing a business for growth, competition and game theory, business strategy, managing outside consulting, customer value propositions in business markets, and staffing. In addition, students are taught the relationship between business and culture: a business model developed for the US market may not be successful in another part of the world simply because of cultural differences.

Request for project proposals and a statement of qualifications are introduced near the middle of the semester to help integration between the graduate class and the undergraduate design groups. Experience in managing a project will be gained by the students by leading an undergraduate student team through the required culminating design project. Undergraduate students respond to RFPs developed by the graduate student.

Winter Semester - Civil Engineering Project Management and Leadership

This course is taught during the winter semester and topics covered are divided into four groups: 1) management of self, 2) management of others, 3) management of projects, and 4) principles of leadership. The topics covered are diversity at work, building effective teams, effective performance coaching, evaluation, delegation, utilization, producers and managers, establishing a vision and alignment of purpose, communication skills, managing conflict, developing a contract fee, developing project scopes, engineering projects-from beginning to end, project management approaches, engineering liability, risk management, Microsoft project, critical path, scheduling, partnering, goal setting, professional licensure, public speaking, information sharing, being persuasive, negotiations, family leadership, situational leadership, and the four disciplines of execution (a Franklin Covey program lecture). Students also learn cultural differences that can affect team work.

Students in this course use the project for which they have previously developed an RFP as the design project for an undergraduate team enrolled in the department’s culminating design class. Graduate Students help their respective undergraduate teams develop appropriate scope, deliverables, tasks, timeline, and milestones for the project. The students serve as mentors of the multi-disciplinary undergraduate project design team. They help the team manage the project to completion on time, on budget, and to the client’s satisfaction; and supervise the preparation and delivery of a design project report. Each undergraduate team has three students and a scheduled weekly project meeting. Graduate students are strongly encouraged to attend their teams’ weekly project meetings and to coordinate the activities of the team. Graduate students are encouraged to help but not do the actual work; they are to function as a resource rather than a working hand. They “exist” to facilitate the working of the team and build a cohesive team. Graduate students are encouraged to check the progress of the work and provide encouragement and direction when such are needed. This setup provides hands on experience for the graduate students and an opportunity for the undergraduate students to participate in an actual rather than a contrived design project.

Integration with Undergraduate Capstone Design Project

A key component to what might set this minor program apart and make it distinctive is the opportunity of graduate students to lead and mentor an undergraduate team of students through their senior design project. The coupling will allow the graduate students to practice the skills and theory taught in the CEPML class through an “on campus internship” like experience that mimics professional practice. We envision that the senior design students as the preliminary part of their culminating design class would take a preparatory class where they are exposed to important professional practice issues such as economics, sustainability, global markets, etc. This preparatory class would have as an important objective the development of a proposal that responds to an RFP developed by one of the mentoring graduate students. During the second semester of the senior design class the students would be doing the work of the project in an internship-like experience where they report to the graduate student. Further, we intend to tie all of the design projects to actual work supplied by supporting external companies and organizations. The graduate students will do the initial groundwork in developing the project scope and deliverables and then prepare RFP’s for the undergraduate teams to “bid” on with a proposal.