This book has been written with the hope that it will serve as an inspiration to students and young professionals in the water and wastewater field to take on the challenges and responsibilities of utility management. The rewards are great. You will have the opportunity to work with wonderful people, have stable employment generally unaffected by business cycles, and become an important member of your community with a responsibility for maintaining its health and prosperity.
We live in an age of dynamic revolution in business, the environment, and society. A never-ending stream of new regulations, new technologies, and heightened expectations are changing the business climate for all service providers.
Demographers are telling us that the early 21st century will find us with a shortage of human resources, especially those individuals trained in science and engineering. We face impending surges in energy costs that will result in large rate increases, even for utilities that have undertaken energy-conservation initiatives. The need for competitive business practices has become a driving force for change. Public and private operators who are not driven by a passion for change are going to be left behind in this increasingly cost and quality-conscious world.
It is these challenges that make the field so attractive for the right women and men. Society will not, and indeed cannot, fail to support utilities. The challenge for you is not to be perfect; it is just to be better than the rest. The key to rising to this challenge is to adopt a pattern of life-long learning and continuous improvement. It is my earnest hope that this book will provide a foundation of knowledge and an array of experience-based opinions that will help prepare the reader for a successful career as a utility manager.
This book is founded on the understanding that the scaffold on which successful
water and wastewater utilities thrive has three legs
Enveloped in regulations, union contracts, and past practices, many managers find themselves almost completely locked into a response mode. Without breaking out of this mode, none of the necessary change is possible. The three abilities that are required to lead are communication skill, an understanding of human responses, and the drive to insist on the right outcome. The portion of Chapter 3 that addresses leadership will show you how you can strengthen your leadership performance in each of these areas.
Getting to where you want to be with your management skills is a challenge, too. The leader may have everyone following, but where are they all going? The manager, alone and through others, plans, organizes and staffs, and controls the work processes needed to perform the utility's function. You are managing when you ask the probing questions after analyzing the accounting reports or call about a late engineering report. But, management takes more than diligence. You cannot consistently produce the right results unless you have a solid grasp of the core knowledge and skills of the utility business.
The authors of this book all have had line responsibility for managing utilities. The book is the result of creative brainstorming on the subject of what they never told us when they made the job offer. The best managers are generalists. Yet we all achieved some level of accomplishment as specialists before we became managers. And few utility managers began as specialists at managing a business, particularly a business going through the kind of cultural transformation needed in today's utility.
Most of us who end up in utility management positions came up via either the engineering or the operations ladder. Part of the challenge of writing this book was to provide information to help in the transformation from specialist/expert to leader/manager. To accomplish this as efficiently as possible, the authors have used their experience to sort through the necessary information and save the reader from wading through pages of extraneous information to get to what they can really use.
One area that is typically deficient in the preparation of utility managers is accounting, fiscal control, budgeting, and rate setting. Part 2 is intended to fill that void. Part 3 addresses the issue of how to manage operations and maintenance, not how to do it. Part 4 provides hands-on experience on managing the process, not the content, of planning, design, and construction of capital improvements. And, the last chapter presents an overview of a technical field that the authors feel is still seriously underutilized in our business, namely, information technology.
The early years of my career were spent as a consulting engineer working with very small water utilities in the Pacific Northwest. Later, I worked in and managed large wastewater utilities in California. While writing and editing this book, the experience of my early years helped to ensure that the information presented served a wide range of utility sizes.
The total range of knowledge and skills required by the utility leader/manager is almost independent of the utility's size. In the larger agencies we had more highly trained people and more resources to deal with problems. My hat goes off to the leaders of the medium to smaller utilities. They have the highest demands on their knowledge and management skills. I hope that the book provides methods and approaches derived from the larger agency experience that may be applied to the smaller agencies.
It is important to understand what this book is not. It is not a how to do it book on pipe design, treatment processes, laboratory procedures, or any of the endless list of technologies covered so well by technical societies. We also have not provided any more than a cursory overview of the large and complex field of laws, regulations, and governmental grant/loan procedures. We have tried to present just enough information so that students new to the field can see the role and complexity of the laws and regulations. The book is focused on sound, competitive business practices and is based on the expectation that the manager will obtain technical information through the traditional sources.