Episode 30 — Science Meets Project Management with Heidi Fogell

Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● HEIDI FOGELL NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. This is our conversation about what matters most to you, whether you are a seasoned professional or just trying to get started with your project management certifications. It’s our goal to help you improve, challenge you, motivate you, and, if possible, encourage you with stories from others in the profession. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at all this, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. And Andy, today we get a chance to draw on the experience of someone who has really an incredible diverse background. ANDY CROWE: You know, that’s the beauty of project management, Nick. You pull from so many different disciplines. It applies in so many different ways. And it’s kind of fascinating when you get people from different disciplines together to look at how they can manage projects more effectively. NICK WALKER: Well, let’s introduce our guest. Heidi Fogell is a Project Manager and Natural Resources Practice Leader for Amec Foster Wheeler in Kennesaw, Georgia. She’s a biologist and has been an adviser on ecological issues and habitat assessments and has negotiated with regulatory agencies. She performs wetland delineations, biological assessments, as well as hazardous waste investigations and remediation projects. Heidi, welcome to Manage This. HEIDI FOGELL: Good morning. Thank you for having me. NICK WALKER: Now you have a fascinating background. You’ve dealt with fish population studies, surface water issues, sediment and soil projects, and other environmental tasks. Since our audience can’t see you, I should probably tell them, no, she is not wearing a lab coat. But how does a scientist get into project management? HEIDI FOGELL: Well, at the risk of sounding trite, it was about a boy. I actually, when I was in grad school for marine biology at Florida Tech – the route that most people go is to work for a state or federal agency. And I actually had the opportunity to work for an environmental consulting firm. And that opportunity allowed me to stay where my boyfriend at the time was. And so I took that opportunity and actually, through that, got lots of experience working in remediation projects in addition to the biological projects, and eventually moved up through the ranks and became a project manager. NICK WALKER: You know, I always tell young people, life takes you places that you never expected, so sometimes it’s just good to go with the flow. HEIDI FOGELL: Yes. NICK WALKER: But that’s really taken you into a lot of places that maybe you hadn’t planned on, but allows you to bring kind of a unique set of skills to it. HEIDI FOGELL: Right, right. You know, nobody expected a marine biologist to wind up in Kennesaw, Georgia. It’s not as far away from the ocean as you can get, but not as close as you probably should be. BILL YATES: You could be in Oklahoma or Nebraska. HEIDI FOGELL: I could be. I could be, but I’m not. BILL YATES: Heidi, give us a sense for what are some of the typical projects that you’re working on. HEIDI FOGELL: Typically right now I manage environmental remediation projects under the Superfund process, which is a federal regulation that cleans up old hazardous waste sites, usually where there is a known responsible party involved. So that’s the bulk of my work right now. But I also manage several smaller projects that support municipal and industrial clients for getting wetland impacts permitted or addressing impacts to protected species, basically addressing their environmental issues so that they can develop their projects responsibly, yet comply with regulations. BILL YATES: Got you. There’s something unique that you bring to the table that I want to get into because when I was reading over your bio, just getting a sense for the type of work that you do,