After 13 years of working within the Ivory Tower of Bentley, it was time to get back into the real world. It's like the difference between teaching at a War College and going to war.
Parsons engineers Mega Projects using all the new tools and techniques. Live multi-discipline collaboration.
My Job Title was Supervising Drainage Engineer, but my primary responsibility was supporting projects using Bentley Civil software support.
The complexity of the OpenRoads Designer platform - in particular, OpenRoads Drainage and Utilities - represents a large risk to project budget and schedules. My job and the job of my team, the xD Engineering Automation Group, was to proactively mitigate these complexity risks throughout Parsons Corporation.
I worked primarily with Drainage and Utilities because my Roadway skills are duplicated by the other team members while my drainage experience is not.
Projects include US183 in Austin, TX, the Valley Line West LRT in Edmonton, Alberta, and leading a Drainage Segment of a successful large highway Design-Build bid.
My big takeway from my thirteen months at Parsons was experiencing how the industry changed in the thirteen years I had been out of it. The live simultaneous collaboration between multiple disciplines all up there on the screen. That extreme integration provides new opportunities, but the extreme complexities, both of the platform itself (particularly OpenRoads Drainage) and the scale of the projects, opens up operational and business risks. Mitigating these risks by proactively engaging all stakeholders demands a new lefel of urgency:
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together" is out. Replace it with "If you want to go fast and far, get together". Get with people who know, get with people who have been there.
My last six months with Parsons was on the JFK International Airport Redevelopment. This multi-disciplinary design build project was AutoDesk Construction Cloud-based. I worked in Civil 3D, Storm & Sanitary Analysis (SSA) and ancillary programs on existing drainage modeling and proposed drainage design.