Beyond Backlog: What Your Busiest Year Might Be Hiding

Most engineering firm leaders I talk with are busy, really busy. Backlogs are healthy, and the biggest headache is finding enough people to do the work.

So here's an uncomfortable question — if your most senior principal retired next spring, which clients would notice first?

I don't mean the ones who'd miss her technical work, because your firm can still do the work. I mean the clients who'd lose the one person who knows why they really hire you.

A backlog tells you how much work you have, but it doesn't tell you who's holding it together.

Two clocks are running

Right now, two clocks are running in most civil engineering firms, and they run at very different speeds.

The first one is loud and close. A generation of principals is heading for the exits. Everybody knows it, and most firms have some kind of succession plan, usually about ownership and who inherits which projects.

What retirement actually puts at risk is accumulated judgment.

Think about what a senior principal carries around in her head. She knows who really makes the decisions at the county, whatever the org chart says, and why a project went sideways years ago. She can tell when a “technical” objection is really about budget or politics. None of that lives in your CRM, and none of it shows up in the client's RFPs.

The second clock, AI, is quieter. It's starting to change technical work, unevenly. It's reshaping some tasks now and will reshape more later, though nobody can honestly tell you how fast. I'm skeptical of anyone who claims it has already freed up big chunks of your PMs' time. In most firms I see, whatever time it saves gets swallowed by higher output expectations.

The thing is, the first problem exists whether AI delivers modest gains or huge ones. AI just makes it more urgent.

The handoff that looks fine on paper

Picture a principal handing off a long-time client. She does everything right — introduces her successor, a sharp PM, at the kickoff meeting and copies him on every email for a year.

Then she retires, and within a year the relationship goes quiet.

Nobody did anything wrong, and the PM could run the projects just fine. What he never got was her reading of the client: who to call first and which “minor” concern was the one that actually mattered.

Someone inheriting the project is only the start of succession, and you're not finished until the firm can sustain and deepen the relationship.

You don't need a firm full of rainmakers

When I make this case to firm leaders, I usually hear some version of the same reply. “Jim, are you telling me I have to turn every engineer into a trusted advisor?”

No, not even close.

Most of your people should be doing technical work, and doing it well. The question is narrower and far more useful: who?

In most firms there's a relatively small group of people whose roles already put them near important clients. They're PMs, senior engineers, technical leads and practice builders. They have client exposure, technical credibility, and enough career runway for the investment to pay off.

Find those people and invest in them on purpose.

Judgment transfers through real work

This is where firms usually reach for a training course, and structured practice does help. It gives people language and a safe place to try things; however, judgment really takes hold when that practice is tied to real client work, in the run-up to a meeting and on the drive back to the office. Each one makes the other stronger.

Before the meeting, ask the emerging leader how she reads the situation. Then let the principal explain what the history changes about that reading. In the meeting, give her a real part in the conversation. Afterward, compare notes on what the client really meant and what happens next.

That's apprenticeship, and it's how most of us learned, back when years of routine work gave us exposure long before anyone expected us to lead. AI may be shortening that runway, which makes it more important, not less, to do this deliberately.

Your next generation still needs technical depth, and firms are good at building it. What most firms leave to chance is client leadership, the empathy and judgment that show up when someone hears the concern behind a request or frames a hard tradeoff and owns it.

Technical excellence gets you to the table. Human capability determines what happens once you're there.

Join the conversation in Phoenix

I'll be digging into all of this on October 26 at the ACEC Fall Conference in Phoenix, in a session called Beyond Backlog. I'll lay out the argument, and I want to hear how it holds up against what you're seeing in your own firm.

Bring your skepticism. And before you come, think of your three most important clients and ask yourself whose head each relationship lives in.

If you write down the same name three times . . . you'll want to be in the room.

To learn more about building human capability in your firm, talk to Impellor Group. Ask us about our Client Leadership Lab.

Ready to install more business development capability in your firm?

This book will help you understand what a seller-doer does and you will gain a firm grasp of the knowledge, skills, and attributes required to succeed in this role.