Leadership and Management in Engineering

The civil engineering profession, in an adaptive reaction to emerging roles for civil engineers, is recognizing the need for new engineers to possess a more robust skill set than just the typical design background. This paper describes the efforts of Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries (CEDC) to fulfill the more nontraditional and often unaddressed learning outcomes noted by ASCE’s Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century as important prerequisites for licensure. The learning outcomes are addressed through ongoing international service learning projects in the Central Plateau of Haiti. The paper focuses on the following four outcomes and their fulfillment methods: leadership, teamwork, communication, and globalization. CEDC’s unique organizational structure is critical to the fulfillment of these outcomes and facilitates a student-led learning environment. The student-led organization has allowed students to set up their own fundraising mechanisms, recruit interdisciplinary members and industry mentors, and develop their own project objectives. This level of student autonomy is noted as key to ensuring that students achieve competency in these four program outcomes.

The aim of the research described in this paper was to ascertain the obstacles engineering managers face in executing organizational objectives, to identify differences between engineering managers and managers in general in the obstacles they face, and to map clusters of obstacles. The author conducted a survey of 26 engineering managers in a Canadian engineering company employing about 250 engineers and compared the results with a database of 322 managers in general. The study examined obstacles corresponding to five drivers of performance: rules, emotions, initiative, immediate action, and integrity. In contrast with managers in general, engineering managers faced a greater need to clarify rules, a greater lack of initiative among their employees, and less difficulty in taking immediate action. For the drivers of emotions and integrity, there were no significant differences between the engineering managers and managers in general. The obstacles the engineering managers faced when executing their management strategy could be clustered in five groups.

This paper presents the results of a study that sought to identify constructs that engineers in academia and industry use to describe attributes they consider important for undergraduate engineering students to possess. We explicitly targeted the attributes of leadership, recognizing and managing change, and synthesizing engineering, business, and social perspectives. Our findings indicate ways that engineering students can engage in technical and nontechnical activities that enhance their undergraduate engineering experiences. The final goal of this ongoing effort is to develop, validate, and implement a tool that examines undergraduate students’ embodiment of the three targeted attributes.

Exploratory research and development projects bring inherent risk due to the unfamiliar nature of the technologies investigated. No consensus exists as to a project management methodology that will consistently add value and increase the rate of success in the exploratory research process. In response to this problem, the authors present observations from their vantage point in the overall project management effort of the design, construction, and engineering of new solar thermal energy storage technologies. The project integrated the efforts of academic institutions, industry representatives, federal energy organizations, and energy utility companies. Based on observations from this case study, the authors propose a project management model to increase performance and more consistently add value in innovative settings such as exploratory technology development projects, specifically with respect to the engineering design and prototyping effort to develop commercially viable technologies. The proposed model aims to reduce schedule slippage, increase accountability, and maximize innovation through performance measurement, preplanning, and team alignment strategies in exploratory design and construction projects.