Communicating in Civil Engineering

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Neil Grigg, Civil Engineering Professor

I worked with a group to write software for state government supply. At a meeting, we were setting up protocols, that is, who would own the software, who would modify it, control it, distribute it. I told everyone that we needed to stop discussing these issues and look at the future to see how the software would be managed. To do this, I used a narrative story:

The year is 1999 and Judy is the software manager in Fort Collins. Jack works on the Western slope and needs to stay in contact with Judy. The two communicate via e-mail. They exchange files over e-mail, etc. This technology plays a major role in getting the job done.

From this story, everyone could visualize how this situation would work because the e-mail trend was apparent to everyone. A narrative story helped in that situation.