152 Are modellers just drainage planners in training?
Martin Osborne
Water industry strategic advisor, asset planner and drainage expert. Winner of the 2023 WaPUG Prize for contributions to the development of urban drainage practice
This week’s episode was sparked by an excellent blog post by Rafed Ali on the role of “modellers” in drainage planning. This sparked an online discussion of contradictory views and reference to the CIWEM Urban Drainage Group - Competency Framework, which I discussed way back in Episode 40.
The common terminology is to describe those who use models of drainage systems to carry out investment planning as “modellers”. There are job titles of “modeller”, “senior modeller”, “principal modeller”, “Technical Director of modelling” etc.
However, the definition in the UDG competency framework is for “Wastewater Network Planners”. I always try to use the term planner rather than modeller, but cannot be bothered to go back over previous blog posts to see how many times I failed to do this. Feel free to do so if you have the spare time.
So how are the roles of modellers and planners similar or different, or are they just different flavours of one skill set.
The competency framework states that:
“Modelling is a key component in these activities but a wider experience is necessary to carry out this work successfully and to a level of competence to meet professional development objectives.”
A planning team will need to have the broad range of skills needed to deliver all aspects of a drainage and wastewater management plan including; hydrology, hydraulics, data management, feasibility, stakeholder engagement, water quality, environment, project management; as well as the ability knowledge of which buttons to press to make the software do what we want it to do. Obviously, no one person can be fully proficient in all of these; but they need to be aware of them all and have some competency in them. They need to know when it is better to hand over a part of the work to someone else who is more capable in that aspect.
An individual’s proficiency will change over time as they get experience of new topics and are left behind by developments in others. For example, I would no longer have the faintest idea of how to actually run an InfoWorks model; despite having written the code for some of it; but shown the input data I should still be able to identify the errors and limitations.
Although everyone would agree with the statement that proficiency is not equally distributed across a team of people; many teams tend to allocate a “model” to an individual “modeller” to take responsibility for the whole planning process. Are we tending to operate as groups of individuals rather than as a collaborative team? I think that this is particularly the case for some topics that are regarded as peripheral to “sewer modelling” but that are important for drainage and wastewater planning. These include stakeholder engagement and wastewater treatment.
I wonder how many DWMP teams actually map the capabilities and expertise of individual members of staff (using something like the UDG framework) and have this pinned to the office wall; or perhaps more usefully, in a spreadsheet on the team SharePoint site. I think the members of many teams do know who has what skills but this is informal and may not be recognised by the team managers.
I think that this would also reveal the skills that were lacking in the team at the core of delivering the plan. How many “modellers” have attended stakeholder engagement events or been involved in the design of engagement material? How many have presented a cost benefit justification to a finance director’s team?
I think that we need to be more aware of the spread of competencies in our teams; not just as a tool for staff development, but as a tool for managing the delivery of successful DWMPs.
A useful first step would be to compare the existing UDG competency framework with the Cycle 2 DWMP guidance and see what needed to be added. Then widen this out to the needs for Cycle 3 and for the new role of the regional water system planners. For example, agricultural pollutant runoff and highway drainage (but I hope not bioresource management).
Then make use of this framework to assess, record and manage the capability of the teams that we use for each part of a DWMP.
UK Director of Operations at Stormwater Shepherds
3wHmmm 🤔 Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater though Martin. The water quality modelling and groundwater risk modelling are both essential parts of some drainage design and we need to build those skills & make sure that everyone knows how to find & use those skilled people. If I get my way, and highway outfalls are assessed using site-specific source data for pollutant load, then water-quality modellers will assess the risk of pollution, the extent of EQS failures in the watercourse, and the extent of treatment needed to protect the water environment. For discharges to ground, they will need to run a comprehensive hydrogeological risk assessment. The results of these modelling exercises will dictate how the drainage design goes forward, and how much treatment must be included. But to do that properly, the drainage designer needs to model the water quality treatment element of the drainage features to make sure that they are big enough. This is often absent or inadequate in current highway drainage treatment scheme design, so we need to 'big-up' the water quality modellers and make sure that the drainage designers know where to find them. So I think that the modellers are an essential part of a drainage design team.
Exploring & supporting community engagement with water
3wWriting as a social scientist, I hazard that the past practice of presuming / ignoring stakeholder engagement competence is common. This said, great that it IS increasingly recognised as a competence that is important to planning and designing rainwater management. (NB 'Drainage' is itself a problematic word, as frequency the goal today is detain or infiltrate rather than to 'drain', and for public communications at least, I think this is an important change of language that needs to be made).
A market leading highly experienced designer and developer of drain and sewer maintenance and flood prevention solutions. Sector changing sustainable solutions to many of the most significant challenges.
4wYet another excellent article Martin Osborne. This absolutely makes a fantastic case for the wide array of reliable information necessary to obtain meaningful results from any hydraulic model. The amount of uncertainty or erroneous data, challenges the most experienced modeller or planner. Perhaps the difference between the two, could be explained as a Modeller being someone who collates data, without the experience to question its validity, and ultimately compromises results based on the closest fit between the data available and the failures and conditions observed. And a Planner being someone who questions the validity of data from the onset and looks for ways to prove the quality of information or provide secondary evidence to provide verification. We at Flusher Limited urge Modellers and Planners alike to use digital twins such as Flusher2 to accelerate the understanding of modelling data and software development. AI offers so many solutions, however only humans have the ability to question and demand understanding. Whatever title you choose or are labelled with, let's not ever lose this ability.
Making communities more resilient with smarter water asset management
4wIn my view professionals who use models can be problem solvers, analysts, planners, designers, system thinkers and communicators. ‘Modeller’ as a title does them a disservice.
30+ Years Helping Utilities Make Better Decisions with Models & Data.
4wGreat discussion, as always, Martin. A hydraulic model is only as valuable as the decisions it supports. Without context—planning, design, or operations—model results are just numbers. Similarly, a modeler without understanding how the model will be used is just as useless.