In its inaugural year, the CEO Excellence Awards acknowledge CH2M HILL employees who go above and beyond their day-to-day responsibilities and who demonstrate exemplary alignment with CH2M HILL’s governing values of Respect, Delivery Excellence, and Employee Control. Well over one hundred individual employees and project teams were nominated for these awards, reflecting the extraordinary level of achievement we have reached as a firm. It is well worth the time to review these inspiring accomplishments, not only those that won a CEO Excellence Award, but all of these exemplary endeavors.

The Water Business Group Global Technology Leader for Structural Engineering, Sue is an accomplished and active employee who makes CH2M HILL a successful and fun place to work. Numerous engineers, design managers, and QC managers have Sue to thank for her mentoring that helped them to advance in their careers.

In addition to promoting technical excellence in structural engineering and design team efficiencies, mentoring staff, and overseeing projects during her day job, Sue sits on several U.S. code and standards committees, teaches a graduate-level structural engineering class at Oregon State University, and is involved at both the national and state level in structural engineering professional organizations.

Sue provides high-quality work that is innovative but technically sound. She educates clients as well as our staff in structural engineering, project delivery, quality reviews, seismic requirements, and construction phase activities. Always striving for technical excellence on projects, she manages firm-wide risk and quality control on some of CH2M HILL’s largest projects. With her focus on quality, Sue has developed project quality management tools, developed and presented quality training, and mentored other project quality managers, improving CH2M HILL’s processes for producing quality designs. Sue continues to provide quality control following completion of the design phase, including meeting with clients and the contractor on construction quality and special inspection requirements in advance of construction startup, leading to positive chartering during the construction phase. As the project quality manager on several projects in 2009, Sue worked on the Oxnard AWPF, designed as a LEED-certified water reuse facility. This project is located in a high seismic area and had unique characteristics both from a structural design and treatment perspective. The contractor provided the project manager with extremely positive feedback for Sue on the construction chartering meeting she led, ultimately enhancing the teaming relationship and leading to a higher-quality constructed project.

Sue developed an innovative approach to deliver efficient, high-quality reservoir projects. The “Reservoir Design Team” leads the firm in this niche market and is recognized nationally for reservoir project expertise, leading to wins last year that included the East Park Reservoir, Portland (Oregon) Water Bureau Powell Butte Reservoir, and the Westcott Reservoir. Serving on these projects as design manager, QC manager, and structural reviewer, she has used these projects to train junior design managers in managing multi-discipline projects and keeping the firm’s goals for health and safety as a top priority, both in the office working environment and during the project construction phase.

Highlights:

• Committed to mentoring and enabling junior structural engineers to quickly learn both structural design and project interface needs
• Provides design management mentoring, including mentoring assistant design managers
• Involved at both the national and state level in structural engineering professional organizations, provides leadership to the Structural Engineers Association of Oregon (SEAO)
• Sits on the NCSEA structural engineering licensing committee and on their continuing education committee, which provide guidelines to all of the United States and its territories
• Volunteers to grade west coast seismic structural engineering licensing exams, and writes and instructs regional and national training sessions in masonry building design and construction