Membership chair's message

By George P. Gardner, state partnering coordinator, Virginia Department of Transportation

Feature article

Construction notes from Matt Horvat, president-elect

Matt Horvat

An owner needs to decide early on that they are not buying a product. Rather they are engaging a team of professionals to help them solve a problem that nobody understands yet and keeps changing. This is a paraphrased quote of Jim Carroll by Greg Howell and Glenn Ballard during the 11th Lean Design Forum on June 14-15, 2012, in St. Louis, Mo. 

There is so much industrial engineering going on in construction. With every project a new organization is designed and with that another new opportunity presents itself. We, as industrial engineers, can short circuit the learning curve that architects and builders are going through. Our IE role in construction remains the same; teach others about new ways to do their work. 

The above quote was first partly stated in the early 1990s. We're still hard at work revising the structure of our project teams. During the last IGLC conference (July 17, 2012 in San Diego, CA) all of the papers presented were about leadership or organizational design. Some focused on production system and safety, but it all comes down to the project-based organization and how we work together.

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Notes from Newsletter Editor Bobby Smyth

Friends,

"Leadership is winning ... describing wins always comes before achieving wins." - Leadership Freak

The first step toward winning is defining it.

This newsletter seems to mark a transitional time for us with the goal of building upon the incredible foundation which has been laid out by Dr. Forbes and many others. High attendance at the town hall meeting in Orlando, new contributors to the newsletter and the website, and an influx of construction-related content are indicators of recent success within the division.

More from Bobby

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Wanted: Construction articles for Industrial Engineer magazine 

The Construction Division invites members to submit articles on construction topics through our publications committee for publication in the monthly Industrial Engineer magazine. We would like to see IE-related articles about construction included in the Industrial Engineer magazine on a regular basis, and we are starting by determining which members are interested, and the topics that they would like to write about. At this point, we would just like to see a brief outline of the topic(s) that you wish to write about. Following that we plan to provide you with the detailed publication requirements, such as the format and length to be observed for each article. By working together, we can organize our articles in a sequence that will be most interesting and informative for our readers. Please contact Lincoln Forbes.

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