ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● HEIDI FOGELL

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our conversation about what matters most to you, whether you are a seasoned professional or just trying to get started with your project management certifications.  It’s our goal to help you improve, challenge you, motivate you, and, if possible, encourage you with stories from others in the profession.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at all this, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, today we get a chance to draw on the experience of someone who has really an incredible diverse background.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, that’s the beauty of project management, Nick.  You pull from so many different disciplines.  It applies in so many different ways.  And it’s kind of fascinating when you get people from different disciplines together to look at how they can manage projects more effectively.

NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s introduce our guest.  Heidi Fogell is a Project Manager and Natural Resources Practice Leader for Amec Foster Wheeler in Kennesaw, Georgia.  She’s a biologist and has been an adviser on ecological issues and habitat assessments and has negotiated with regulatory agencies.  She performs wetland delineations, biological assessments, as well as hazardous waste investigations and remediation projects.  Heidi, welcome to Manage This.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Good morning.  Thank you for having me.

NICK WALKER:  Now you have a fascinating background.  You’ve dealt with fish population studies, surface water issues, sediment and soil projects, and other environmental tasks.  Since our audience can’t see you, I should probably tell them, no, she is not wearing a lab coat.  But how does a scientist get into project management?

HEIDI FOGELL:  Well, at the risk of sounding trite, it was about a boy.  I actually, when I was in grad school for marine biology at Florida Tech – the route that most people go is to work for a state or federal agency.  And I actually had the opportunity to work for an environmental consulting firm.  And that opportunity allowed me to stay where my boyfriend at the time was.  And so I took that opportunity and actually, through that, got lots of experience working in remediation projects in addition to the biological projects, and eventually moved up through the ranks and became a project manager.

NICK WALKER: You know, I always tell young people, life takes you places that you never expected, so sometimes it’s just good to go with the flow.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Yes.

NICK WALKER:  But that’s really taken you into a lot of places that maybe you hadn’t planned on, but allows you to bring kind of a unique set of skills to it.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Right, right.  You know, nobody expected a marine biologist to wind up in Kennesaw, Georgia.  It’s not as far away from the ocean as you can get, but not as close as you probably should be.

BILL YATES:  You could be in Oklahoma or Nebraska.

HEIDI FOGELL:  I could be.  I could be, but I’m not.

BILL YATES:  Heidi, give us a sense for what are some of the typical projects that you’re working on.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Typically right now I manage environmental remediation projects under the Superfund process, which is a federal regulation that cleans up old hazardous waste sites, usually where there is a known responsible party involved.  So that’s the bulk of my work right now.  But I also manage several smaller projects that support municipal and industrial clients for getting wetland impacts permitted or addressing impacts to protected species, basically addressing their environmental issues so that they can develop their projects responsibly, yet comply with regulations.

BILL YATES:  Got you.  There’s something unique that you bring to the table that I want to get into because when I was reading over your bio, just getting a sense for the type of work that you do, I’m getting this image of you with two hats.  One hat is one that I can totally relate to.  It’s the project manager, and the PM has to get things done.  The project manager commits the team to milestones and deadlines and due dates and deliveries and all these things, budgets.  And then there’s another hat that you wear which is this environmental consultant that kind of goes back to your roots of, whoa, slow down, you know, don’t hurry up, but slow down.  We need to assess and test and survey and run all the right – get all the right approvals and go through the right agencies.  So how do you wear those two hats?  How do you juggle that?

HEIDI FOGELL:  I dance a lot.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

HEIDI FOGELL:  But it’s actually part of – that’s the biggest part of being in the environmental consulting business.  It’s a very competitive business.  The companies that are in it range from small to large, but it’s a small community.  And, you know, we compete against the same people over and over again in different arenas.  So it’s important to stay on the top of your game.  So you have to be able to jump from one thing to the next.  And that was the hardest thing for me to learn when I came into environmental consulting because I was very much a start a project, work it through to the end, finish it, move on to the next thing.

BILL YATES:  Right.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Yeah.  I can’t do that anymore.  I have to touch 10 to 20 different things every day.  And that’s difficult to feel like you’re making progress.  But by taking small chunks, you actually make probably more progress than you would just sitting and focusing on something for a long time.

ANDY CROWE:  So, Heidi, I’m interested in this part, something you just said.  My wife is very much the same way that you are kind of wired, that she wants to start a project, just really grind on that particular project, and then put it in a binder, finish it, put it away, go to the next.  I am somebody, I enjoy the variety of skipping around.

BILL YATES:  Oh, yes, you do.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, no, I do.  And I have a lot of irons in the fire.  But I’m able, I guess I’m able to stop something and pick it back up the next day pretty well.  So that’s something I do well.  So how do you manage that, having to do that, but not being wired that way?  Do you have systems in place?  Is your world full of Post-it notes?  What does Heidi’s life look like?

HEIDI FOGELL:  I have a list.  I have a list, but that list has to be flexible, too.  I make my list at the end of the day before, what I think that I need to accomplish the next day.  And I do check my email pretty regularly to add and subtract from that list, and then adjust it in the morning.  And then at the end of the day I look back, and I say, oh well, I got two things done on the list, but I also accomplished eight other things.  So I think, to me, being organized is the best way to manage that; and then also making myself be flexible and realize that it doesn’t have to get done right away.

ANDY CROWE:  Out of all the technology and all the apps that have come out, I still have not beaten a paper list in terms of its effectiveness and just getting things done.

BILL YATES:  Right.

HEIDI FOGELL:  I can’t.  I need a paper list and a paper calendar.  I need to be able to see the month in front of me still.  Yeah.

BILL YATES:  There’s a pleasure that I get in taking that little item on a paper list and scratching it off and saying it’s done.

HEIDI FOGELL:  It’s absolutely thrilling to do that.

ANDY CROWE:  So let me find something out about you two because I’m to the point now where, if I do something that is not on my list, I write it down on the list for the sheer joy of getting to strike it off.

BILL YATES:  Oh yes.  That’s me.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Yeah.  I just raised my hand to that one, too.

ANDY CROWE:  I think they make medications that’ll treat the three of us.  But you know what?  We get things done, so good.

BILL YATES:  Let’s buy it in bulk.

HEIDI FOGELL:  That’s right.

NICK WALKER:  My problem is that I lose my list, and I have to make a brand new one, and it’s usually different from the original.

ANDY CROWE:  Heidi, tell me, as you approach a project, and this is something I’m always interested in, how do you sort of organize and approach it?  When you get assigned a new project, where do you begin?  How do you start?  How do you even begin to think about the overall deliverables and how you’re going to do it?

HEIDI FOGELL:  Oh.  Well, it really depends on the size of the project.  The larger projects we work really as big cohesive teams on.  So there’s a group of people planning these things.  And generally what happens, if it’s something that’s completely new, we get a Request For Proposal from a client.  And usually we’re competing against people.

So we actually – a bunch of people get in a room and sit down and plan it out.  And we go through the scope of work.  We itemize the lists that they’re asking for.  We plan out the amount of time we think those things will cost, the personnel that get loaded into that.  And then from that we build up the budgets.  So it’s basically, it’s looking at what the deliverables are going to be and then building up the tasks underneath those deliverables.  And it’s a similar effort for a smaller project, but obviously the number of people involved is much smaller.

BILL YATES:  That’s good.  I can think back to RFPs where our team did a great job of estimating, and we won the business, and we actually made money off of it.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Wow.  Impressive.

BILL YATES:  And then others that were not so good.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Right, right.

BILL YATES:  You know, there were some rocks that we didn’t turn over and look under.  And those are tough.  Are there some things that you can think back in that RFP process where you guys have found, okay,