Brad Freeze recalls his experience in the Operations Academy Senior Management Program as a major stepping stone in his career. When he attended in 2012, he was managing ITS projects for the Tennessee DOT (TDOT). Within a year after completing the Operations Academy, he was promoted to Director of Traffic Operations within TDOT. It was a major step up for Brad. His agency had just reorganized the division, and upon completing that process, appointed him as its first new director.
“I attribute a lot of the success of that experience to the knowledge I gained in the Operations Academy,” Brad said. “I put into practice what we learned in the program. Going through the process of changing your organization and restructuring it to support transportation systems management and operations (TSMO) is what we discussed, and that’s exactly what I got to do when I was promoted. I took my experience at the Operations Academy, put it into practice and formed a new division.”
It started as a division of one, and Brad was responsible for moving others over into the newly restructured division. Soon, he had 70 people reporting to him, and that’s how he organized the new Traffic Operations Division.
Brad was able to connect all the dots and implement all he’d learned at the Operations Academy. Along the way, he made great friends with whom he’s stayed in touch and expanded his network of peers that he has leveraged constantly throughout his career.
“When I need to learn more about something, or if I have questions, or if I’m starting something new, having that connection to peers is invaluable,” he said. “I wouldn’t have any of that without the Operations Academy.”
He remembered doing a peer exchange visit with a colleague from the Washington DOT (WSDOT) whom he’d met while attending the Academy. After making a good connection with someone in the incident management program at WSDOT, Brad visited him and gained a wealth of useful information. They had formed a traffic operations division like the one he’d just stepped up to lead, but the WSDOT’s division was much more mature than his.
“I would never have made that connection, nor had that great experience visiting had it not been for the Operations Academy,” Brad said. “Seeing him in his own role, working at the same things I was doing was so helpful to me.”
Among his most useful takeaways from his experience was the lesson that it’s not possible for an agency to build its way out of its most common, most annoying problem—traffic congestion. Using the principles of TSMO, he sharpened the skills that allowed him to find a more efficient use of his existing resources. The opportunity to learn more about ways in which it’s possible to maximize existing capacity and be more efficient at moving people at a lower cost has gone a long way toward his upward career trajectory.
“I can attribute at least some of my career advancement to my time in the Operations Academy. Now I am Deputy Director of the Nashville DOT (NDOT) and Multi-Modal Infrastructure,” he said. “It built my experience and put me more solidly in a direction I was already going,” he said. “I was in the process of the theoretical side of putting a new org chart together, and then I was given the chance to put that into actual practice. My time in the Operations Academy translated directly into my career’s advancement.”
