Episode 92 – Reporting Projects and the NTSB

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.