Beyond the Pipe: One-Hour Project Business Workshop
Workshop Purpose

A wastewater project can look like an engineering decision pretty quickly. Build locally or connect to a regional system. Compare the estimates, capacity, rates, and technical requirements.

Then people have to live with the choice for the next forty or fifty years.

Beyond the Pipe uses a municipal wastewater case to explore that longer Project Business story. Participants work through a make-or-buy decision involving assets, contracts, capability, dependency, risk, and public value. Both options can work technically, which makes the case more useful. The interesting part is figuring out what each choice sets in motion among the organizations involved.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the hour, participants should be able to recognize make-or-buy choices as decisions about organizational boundaries and relationships, separate production costs from the costs of managing those relationships, and identify how asset specificity changes bargaining power once infrastructure is in the ground.

Participants will also practice looking at uncertainty, lifecycle costs, failure, adaptability, and public value. The goal is to leave with better questions for decisions where several organizations will share the consequences long after the project closes.

The Case

A community of about 3,500 people needs to replace aging wastewater infrastructure and prepare for future capacity.

One option keeps treatment local. The community owns the assets, develops the capability, operates the system, and carries those responsibilities forward.

The other connects to a larger regional utility. The community gains access to existing treatment capability while taking on a different set of dependencies, agreements, conveyance assets, and future uncertainties.

Neither answer gets to be the easy one.

The case asks participants to figure out what the community should make, what it might buy, what could be shared, and which capabilities may be worth keeping close.

The Tools

We start with Transaction Cost Economics because the treatment price is only part of what the relationship costs. Agreements have to be negotiated, monitored, adjusted, and sometimes repaired.

Asset specificity takes us further. A force main pointed toward one regional system does not have many alternative uses. Once it is buried, the bargaining situation changes.

SWOT helps organize what each option brings with it, then we push past filling boxes and ask what requires action.

Evidence-Based Management turns words like flexibility, reliability, and value into things we could actually observe later.

FMEA asks how each option can fail and what happens when it does. Poka-Yoke asks whether some of those failures can be made harder to create in the first place.

Then lifecycle costing follows the money beyond construction, while public value widens the view to affordability, resilience, environmental performance, development capacity, and what the community actually receives from the investment.

Where We Finish

After an hour, I want participants looking at the pipe differently.

The engineering tells us whether it can work. Project Business asks what happens among the organizations once we decide who owns it, who operates it, who depends on whom, who carries which risks, and what happens when circumstances change.

Those decisions may outlive everyone sitting at the original project table.