The podcast for project managers by project managers. The NTSB: hear about managing projects for the National Transportation Safety Board. Our guest Michele Beckjord is the Supervisory Investigator in Charge and Project Manager for the NTSB Office of Highway Safety. Michele explains the investigative process and describes some positive changes from NTSB projects.

Table of

Contents

00:52…The NTSB02:48…Meet Michele05:16…The Supervisory Investigator in Charge05:16…NTSB Project Manager Role08:02…Disaster Response Teams09:50…Incident Response Criteria12:14…NTSB Most Wanted List13:46…Sharing Lessons Learned16:00…Following Up NTSB Recommendations 17:34…Some NTSB Projects19:09…Avoiding Emotional Burnout22:58…Stages of the NTSB Investigation Process28:17…Growing into the Job32:01…Getting Accurate Information33:18…Positive Changes from NTSB Investigations36:40…Find Out More about NTSB Projects37:47…Closing

MICHELE BECKJORD: You’re never an expert in a project you’re

handed.  You’re the project manager.  It’s not your job to be the expert in that

particular area.  It’s your job to get

that project managed to its completion point. 

NICK WALKER:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we meet to try to get

to the heart of what you face every day as a professional project manager.  And we do that by talking with people who are

right there with you, facing their own challenges and finding their own

solutions.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me is Bill Yates, who

thankfully is the one who keeps us on track around here.  And Bill, we often hear in the news stories

of accidents involving aircraft, railways, ships at sea, vehicles on

highways.  Our guest is someone right

there in the thick of all those stories.

The National

Transportation Safety Board.

BILL YATES:  She

is.  And we’re going to talk about the

National Transportation Safety Board and have a conversation with Michele.  And just I’m fascinated in seeing how does a

project manager manage the situations that she deals with, with the high impact

that it has, the high visibility, and just the high stakes of these types of

projects.

NICK WALKER: 

Yeah.  Let’s get into this just by

talking a little bit about the National

Transportation Safety Board.  The

NTSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating every civil

aviation accident in the U.S., and other significant accidents on land and

sea.  It also issues safety

recommendations aimed at preventing future accidents.  Listen to this number:  14,900. 

That’s how many safety recommendations the NTSB has made in its 52 years

of existence.  And more than 80 percent

of them are implemented.

Meet Michele

We’re looking at kind of a different approach to project

management today with our guest, Michele Beckjord.  Michele is the Supervisory Investigator in Charge

for the NTSB

Office of Highway Safety.  She has a

B.A. in Criminal Justice from American University and a Master of Forensic

Science from George Washington University. 

She has worked for the National Transportation Safety Board since 1995

and has served as a senior survival factors investigator and senior project

manager.  Ms. Beckjord has led

investigations of major highway crashes involving school buses, motor coach

fires, and bridge collapses.  As a

project manager, she’s also taken the lead role in managing major investigative

hearings, safety forums, and workshops.

Michele, thank you so much for joining us on Manage

This.  And we want to start by just

hearing more about your position as the Supervisory Investigator in Charge and

Project Manager for the NTSB Office of Highway Safety.  What does that entail?

The Supervisory

Investigator in Charge.

 MICHELE

BECKJORD:  Well, I’ll start with the

Supervisory Investigator in Charge.  We

call it an IIC for short.  What the ICC

does is lead a team of investigators. 

And each of our investigators have a different background or specialty

area they focus on for every investigation that we send a team out.  We have three teams in the Office of Highway

Safety that covers the entire nation. 

And so I am one of three IICs.  My

team, and all the teams, are composed of a human performance investigator, survival

factors investigator, a vehicle factors investigator, highway investigator, and

then a motor carrier.  And so each of

those guys has their niche in the investigation.  And of course there’s a lot of crossover.

So, for example, our motor carrier investigator is going to

go to – let’s just pick Greyhound.  If we

have an investigation involving Greyhound, he will actually go to the motor

carrier’s location and look through their files and look at their driver

qualifications.  And so but you’re also

going to have a human performance investigator that wants to know exactly what

the driver was doing.  They’ll work in

tandem.  Also our vehicle investigator is

going to be putting that vehicle up on a lift, getting in there and looking at

all the mechanical systems, make sure everything was functioning as it should

have.  Our survival factors investigator

will do the interior of the vehicle.  So if

it’s a motor coach, looking at how did somebody get injured or killed inside

the motor coach, and then working with the vehicle investigator to see what

type of seats were in there, what type of belts.  When was this built?  What was any retrofit that might have been

done?  So everybody works very closely

together, but they each have their own area.

BILL YATES:  And Michele,

do these three – is it often that these three teams are working at the same

time, working investigations at the same time?

MICHELE BECKJORD:  We

have multiple investigations ongoing all the time.  So we spend two weeks on call, two weeks in

backup, and two weeks off call.  So each

team does that rotation to cover a six-week period.  However, if one of our teams gets sent out on

a major crash investigation, the next team in backup may need to go out if

there’s another large one that happens so that we don’t miss out on an

opportunity to make a difference.  And so

you need to be right near your phone, and you have a “go bag” with you, and you

launch out to wherever that accident will be. 

We say “launch.”  But, you know,

if you were talking about deployment, we would go to wherever that accident

happens anywhere in the U.S.

NTSB Project Manager Role

Right now, as a project manager – which I’m sort of

transitioning out of that role, but I’ve been doing that for about 18

years.  The project manager takes the reports

that those investigators write, and they turn it into the product that the

board votes on.

Our five politically appointed board members will vote on

what we present to them in a report fashion. 

That’s what you end up seeing published on the web, that we can then

make recommendations, and everyone can go and read the entire report, factual

and the analysis, of what happened, why we think it happened, and what we think

the probable actual cause of that, either accident, whether it’s a bridge

collapse, a motor coach rollover, a school bus fire, what caused that to

happen.  So that final product is what I

manage as a project manager.  So an

investigator in charge will do the investigative part and then work

hand-in-hand with the project manager once that investigation’s over to turn it

into a report and get it before the board members.

BILL YATES:  That

makes sense.  So the deliverable is that

final report.  That’s what the project

manager is ultimately responsible for.

MICHELE BECKJORD: 

Absolutely.  You’re responsible

for the final product of a report.  But

encompassed in that report are all of our safety recommendations.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MICHELE BECKJORD:  So

even as a project manager – so let’s say, for example, I just finished a report

on Oakland, Iowa’s school bus fire.  All

the recommendations in that product will then also tie back to me until they

all get closed out by the recipients. 

They will contact us, and I will work with them on that.  So the product never really fully ends.  But as a general rule, your product is that

project.  That project is the

report.  And the report is telling the

story of the investigation.

Mission and Core

Values of the NTSB.

BILL YATES:  Michele,

give us a sense for the mission and the core values of the NTSB.

MICHELE BECKJORD:  Well, the core values, there’s four, so you have transparency, you have integrity, you have independence, you have excellence.  And so those are relatively new terms that we’ve put out there recently.  It used to just be that our mission was investigating accidents that happened in transportation, determining the probable cause, and issuing safety recommendations so that we can try to prevent that type of accident from happening again.  Over the last several years, we wanted to develop more of a core value that we could put out there so people really understood it wasn’t just a mission for us, it was how we went about doing that mission that we take a lot of pride in.

And so that’s where that transparency comes about, that we let the entire public know everything we’re doing from start to finish, and how we got to where we are at the end with that project that I put forth to the board members.

Disaster Response

Teams

NICK WALKER:  Now, do you ever work with disaster response teams and those sort of resources to help meet the needs of the victims themselves, so the families of the victims, that sort of thing?

MICHELE BECKJORD:  Absolutely, so as soon as we hear about an investigation or an accident that’s happened, we have folks in what we call our Response Operations Center. And so they monitor all the television stations, and they monitor all incoming calls from across the nation reporting accidents to us, whether that’s aviation, rail, marine, any of those.