Infrastructure: Tackling the Needs of Today and Tomorrow

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Every project leader has to account for a range of stakeholders. But when you’re talking about infrastructure projects, matters get even more intense. There’s often a real sense that society, writ large, now and into the future, is your primary stakeholder. No pressure, right?

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

As project leaders, we are advisers. We’re entrusted by society to make certain decisions that will make society a better place. If project leaders take ownership of the impact that they have in the world, they can convince the next person or other organizations or governments to do a better job in implementing infrastructure projects.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

The infrastructure projects happening around the world right now will lay the groundwork—quite literally, in many cases—for the next generation. Whether it’s roads and bridges, the power grid, broadband, or clean water, these are the projects that form the foundation for the civilizations that emerge on their shoulders. They’re a big deal: An analysis by PwC estimates the total global requirement for infrastructure investment at 3.9 trillion U.S. dollars annually, with the greatest demand coming from emerging markets. The Asian Development Bank estimates 1.7 trillion dollars is needed annually in Asia alone this decade.

Of course, it’s one thing to spend lots of money, and another to spend it well—on the sort of infrastructure that actually does what it’s supposed to do. The best of these projects not only meet their specs but are also resilient enough to accommodate the sorts of changes in technology and usage that can be tough to anticipate as a project is first launching.

Today, we’re speaking to two project leaders about infrastructure projects and the strategies they use to get these massive initiatives up and running and how they think about future-proofing. First up is PMI Future 50 leader Innocentia Mahlangu, a senior civil engineer and project manager at global engineering giant Hatch in Johannesburg.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

What makes infrastructure projects so unique, so challenging and so important?

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

I believe infrastructure projects are quite unique due to their proximity to human development and advancing civilization. There are various studies that have shown the close linkages between infrastructure development, economic growth, improvement in health, education, and poverty reduction, for instance. Coming from a developing nation such as South Africa, I really get to see the immediate impact of infrastructure development on society and the economy, and I’m sure that is the case across the globe as well.

To give an example, if you build a road or railway between a remote community and an urban area, there’s a developmental catalytic effect, both during construction and throughout the life cycle of that asset. During construction, you can create much needed employment opportunities. You can support local businesses. You can create new local industry and really revitalize local economies in that community. But during the life cycle as well of that asset, you enable access, and you improve mobility of people and goods between places. And that really results in productivity in the economy, and it improves their livelihoods. So, I believe through infrastructure projects you really have the opportunity to create something where there was nothing, and you leave a legacy by doing so. I really find that aspect of being part of something bigger than myself truly, truly inspiring.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Some infrastructure projects, including some of the railway projects you’ve worked on, can span great distances. How does that affect how you plan and manage these projects?

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

I believe that the linear nature of some infrastructure projects presents unique challenges and, really, they relate to the geographical spread of the project. If a railway line traverses different areas, you trigger different land use challenges. It can affect multiple stakeholders or multiple communities with varying needs, which is also a bit difficult or challenging to balance.

The environmental footprint of railway projects as well may be large due to its geographic extent, and it makes your compliance processes even more intricate as well. But from a technical perspective, your technical conditions may vary. This affects your design process, and logistics and material management may also make construction as well a bit more challenging, especially if you’re building a long stretch of railway line or a road.

From a project team perspective, you may not have the benefit of having a colocated team. So, it does affect team dynamics to some extent, especially if you have to position your teams on different areas or different sites along the linear infrastructure. So, these challenges and impacts really emphasize the heightened need to make sure that your planning is done well, but also ensuring that it’s also done in a sustainable manner as well, given the large impact that such projects can have.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

So, these projects can have many stakeholders. If you’re building a road, for example, you have people and local governments in the communities at both endpoints and all along the way, everyone who will use the road for different commercial and noncommercial purposes, and on and on. As a project leader, how do you juggle all these groups and their different interests and priorities?

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

In every project, there needs to be meaningful stakeholder engagement, and this is not a zero-sum game. I emphasize meaningful because it should extend beyond being just a checklist. It needs to be meaningful, and it needs to be intentional. Meaningful stakeholder engagement needs to be done through detailed planning at different stages of the project. It cannot be left until the last stage. There needs to be proper stakeholder mapping, thorough communication with all interested parties—but the other element of it is, there needs to be mutual respect and trust. The latter are basic human virtues.

Project leaders need to be committed to establishing a shared vision with stakeholders in the project environment. Because when stakeholders feel a level of ownership or involvement in the project, and feel confident that it will provide long-term benefits, they will be more willing to contribute to its success, in more ways than one. And project leaders therefore need to create the conditions of shared benefit. Sometimes project leaders go into a community and tell them, “This is what we are going to do,” and they dictate the terms of that engagement. They don’t go in with the intent of listening to the views of the community, and I think that’s quite a mistake. How you communicate with different communities or the different stakeholders, it makes all the difference. And you have to adopt a listening attitude rather than, “We have decided this is how we’re going to do this, and these are your needs.”

STEVE HENDERSHOT

These projects can be years in the making, and their intended lifespans can be generations. That makes it very difficult to anticipate advances in technology, not to mention shifts in usage. How do you think about future-proofing as you’re approaching a project? 

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

A lot of the work we do in infrastructure development is largely driven by demographic shifts, which makes future-proofing challenging and more difficult to predict, even more so in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—or VUCA—world that we live in today.

I have several success factors, which I believe are relevant for future-proofing infrastructure development. The first one is start with the end in mind to create a sustainable future. We must really think of infrastructure development beyond fulfilling the immediate need, but rather encourage ourselves to craft a vision beyond just the opportunity of the moment. Because in so doing, this will also allow us to cater for scalability in our project specification.

The second point is seeing the bigger picture. Understand the macro environmental context within which the development fits. This will also help you predict trends better. Thirdly, make good analytics a priority. Identify and understand the full value—social, environmental and economic—that any investment infrastructure will have, but also factor in the lifecycle cost of that asset. Also issues around climate change and contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals in delivery of infrastructure is quite important.

And just the last point is if we are diverse and inclusive in our project delivery, in our project teams, in our thinking, we have better project outcomes, we have positive stakeholder value, and we can craft a better, inclusive vision for the future.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

You’re clearly focused on trying to make sure your projects deliver value now and in the future, and it seems like others including politicians and companies are catching up with this idea. How’re you seeing this shift play out on projects?

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

I believe in the infrastructure project economy, there’s a bit of a tipping point, which is long overdue. And these are some of the trends that I’m certainly picking up. I’m seeing more and more people and organizations becoming more aware of their impact on the world, and companies are recognizing that long-term sustainability and industries are intrinsically related to the people they serve, communities which they operate, as well as the environment. So there’s a bit of a wave of change, which is happening now, and I emphasize that it’s long overdue. But project leaders as well are seeing the results of—and organizations or governments are seeing the results of—failed projects and what happens when they get it wrong. It’s almost becoming more critical for them to ensure that they make the right decisions in consideration of economic, social and environmental impacts as well. So, project leaders have to hold those around them accountable.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Any tips for other project leaders on how to build long-term value into their projects?

INNOCENTIA MAHLANGU

The nature of problems that we’re faced with now is even more complex. Project leaders require different types of skill sets to actually be good project leaders in the environment that we live in today. Those key factors that set a good project leader apart from a bad one is really wanting to do the right thing—understanding that environmental impacts, it’s not something that you postpone and get to understand at the end of the project. It’s part of your decision-making process. Your social impact is part of your process. It’s part of your business case. It’s no longer, “We’ll go into the community and then we’ll do it, or we’ll consider it as we get there.” It’s intrinsic to our project life cycle or project planning process as well. Those factors are equally as important as your economic evaluation as well.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

Not so long ago, infrastructure meant something you could see and touch—a railroad, a highway, a skyscraper. Today, though, many infrastructure projects are aimed at expanding the reach of the digital world, like providing high-speed internet to underserved communities. Projectified^®’s Hannah Schmidt spoke with Casey Canfield, an assistant professor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, about a pilot project she’s leading that aims to expand broadband in U.S. rural areas.

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HANNAH SCHMIDT

Let’s start with the idea of digital infrastructure. Why is it so important, and how has the discussion around it changed in recent years?

CASEY CANFIELD

The biggest thing that I feel like has changed everyone’s perspective is obviously COVID. Before COVID, I was starting to look at rural broadband, and people were like, “Yeah, this is an issue, but I don’t know how we’re going to solve it.” But COVID just brought everything to the forefront. There’s huge implications for health, education, economic development.

There’s access to telemedicine. A lot of people, especially in rural communities, live really far away from the hospital and from a doctor. So being able to do a telehealth visit, especially for older folks, is super, super important. Access to education. A lot of folks in rural areas might not go on to get a college degree or a certificate or graduate school because they don’t want to move that far away. But with the internet, you don’t have to. So, it really just opens up a huge amount of opportunity.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

So, your team is working to expand broadband access in a town in rural Missouri. Tell me about the project and the tech you’re using.

CASEY CANFIELD

So we’re testing a new approach to building a wireless network, and then we’re also evaluating the social impact of that new wireless network.

In terms of the technical innovation, we are just using off the shelf hardware, but we are developing an open access intelligent router. So, the idea is to be able to dynamically allocate the resources so that instead of just statically serving bandwidth to all of the households, if one household needs a lot of bandwidth and another household doesn’t need as much, to be able to kind of dynamically react to that. The idea is to try and improve everyone’s quality of service.

So, we’re really trying to think through what does it mean to actually design a wireless network for a rural area? Because normally, wireless networks are optimized for urban areas, where congestion is the big problem. And so if that’s not the main problem, how should we think about this differently?

Part of why we’re looking at a wireless network instead of installing fiber is basically just the economics of it. It’s expensive to install fiber everywhere. One way of getting people the internet faster is to look at wireless networks. We’re operating in the unlicensed spectrum, so that provides us a little bit more flexibility. So, the real innovation that we’re focused on is this development of the intelligent router.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

You’re executing the project in Turney, Missouri. Why this location?

CASEY CANFIELD

We’re basically focusing on Turney because one, it’s close to the fiber network that already exists. And then two, it’s really representative of many small, rural communities where it’s just not economical to build out to them right away. This is a big challenge that a lot of communities have where the fiber network is so close, but there’s so many communities that need fiber build out. It’s just hard for these really small communities to rise to the top. The population of Turney is about 150, 160 people, so it’s really, really small.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

You’re working with a lot of stakeholder groups. What’s the collaboration process been like?

CASEY CANFIELD

Just logistically, we have weekly meetings, and we alternate the focus of those meetings. So one week we’ll focus on the technology aspects, and then the following week we’ll focus on the community engagement aspects.

There has been some conflict on the team. We’ve really had to negotiate between the operational perspective and the research perspective because when you’re designing a network, each of those different perspectives has different goals and different motivations for how everything should be done. And so, we’ve had to negotiate a lot of that. And so, that’s actually part of why—as part of this grand experiment that we’re doing—we’re actually going to be experimenting with the architecture of the network. Because from a research perspective, it’s really helpful to have this intelligent router in the midstream of the network. But from an operational perspective, you don’t really want this key piece of technology to be in the middle of a wireless network because you might lose connection with it, because it’s wireless. And so, from an operational perspective, it makes more sense to have this intelligent router actually connected to the fiber. And so, we’re actually going to test it both ways to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of each of those architectures.

HANNAH SCHMIDT

You mentioned the team is going to measure the project’s social impact. How will you measure that as well as the value the project will deliver?

CASEY CANFIELD

There’s two different parts of the project. So there’s the technical part, and then there’s the social impact part. So for the social impact part, we are running a study. So we’re basically doing pre and post surveys, both in Turney as well as in surrounding similar communities to act as a control for comparison purposes. And so, that’s part of what we’re going to be looking at in order to evaluate the impact in terms of health, education and economic development. Because of the short timeline of this study, we don’t anticipate that people will actually have improved health outcomes or something like that over the course of six months. But we are hoping to be able to measure things like interest in starting a new business, being an entrepreneur, that maybe having increased access to the internet will help with things like that.

And then from the technical perspective, we’ll be looking at technical network metrics like speed, latency, all that stuff. And then we’re also going to be looking at satisfaction. I think that the ultimate measure is right now people are very clearly unsatisfied with their ability to connect to the internet. If after we install our network people are satisfied, I think that would be the biggest measure of project success.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

So much of modern life stands on the shoulders of ambitious infrastructure projects undertaken generations ago—airports, expressways, subways, railways, power and communications networks, you name it. Today’s project leaders have a similar opportunity to make transformative contributions—the kind that make a better world now—and in the future.

NARRATOR

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