Fort Wayne’s Strategy to Creating a Highly Effective Engineering Team

Fort Wayne Utilities has worked to build an in-house, highly effective and specialized utility engineering team by focusing on output, collaboration, and individual development as it experienced approximately a 50% increase in its average annual Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) over the past 15 years.Fort Wayne is a midsized water, sewer, and storm water Utility with over $135M in total annual revenues and approximately 100,000 direct customers and multiple wholesale customers. Fort Wayne provides distribution, collection, drainage and treatment services for the region in and around Fort Wayne. Over the past 10 years Fort Wayne Utilities has increased its engineering department FTE’s by 20% and developed its intern program significantly to help handle the increase in CIP. In addition to its increase in size the technical specialization of the team has increase significantly, including a 400% increase in the number of engineers with Professional Engineering licenses. Now in addition to general project and program managers, Fort Wayne has in-house designers in multiple disciplines, construction contract managers, hydraulic modelers, I&C/SCADA programmers, CADD technicians and GIS analysts.Fort Wayne’s results show that it delivers design and engineering services at a lower cost in comparison to its former primarily consultant use model and now designs approximately 75% of its CIP in-house. They have a highly specialized technical team that collaborates across disciplines and departments with the institutional knowledge to effectively aid in areas from master planning to customer problem solving and dealing with O&M issues. The engineering team has worked to create individual development opportunities to retain staff and has key staff that are recognized across the region as part of the industry leaders in their specialties.