Ideas of Carmine Militano

Carmine Militano from Stantec had a lot of things to say about a lot of different subjects. Although he spoke way to fast to collect all of the information that he was throwing out at us I did catch a number of interesting and hopefully valuable ideas. I still need to figure out if I am able to implement them into my work or not.
One of the ideas that I thought could be extremely valuable in the near future is the idea of the “6 Step Decision Process” which Carmine believes should be used in all of your projects. According to him you need to go through the 6 steps to make sure that your project will work and be exactly what your client wants.

The 6 steps are as follows:

1. Leadership and Commitment
2. Frame the Problem (Be on the same page as the client, decide what EXACTLY the client wants and be sure to ask what they do not want)
3. Development Goals, Models and Alternatives
4. Collect Valued Information (focused material; ie: pick out 3 books that have information on the exact info you are looking for rather than 30 books on anything with the word you are looking for in the title)
5. Manage risk and Decide
6. Develop implementation plan.

Carmine also informed us of what he believes to be the 10 reasons why decisions fail. They are as follows:

1. Lack of process
2. Lack of leadership
3. Lack of commitment
4. Wrong stakeholders
5. Inadequate information
6. Wrong problem
7. Politics
8. Insufficient time
9. Company culture
10. Insufficient interest

I believe that these two ideas were the most helpful in the sense that I feel I can implement them into my personal endeavors immediately. The rest of the information I believe will have to wait until I have some weight and pull into how communities and the city are being designed and operated. This may take until I am actually working in the field.

~Trevor G