The 11 years that Zack Neihof has been with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet confirmed to him that he found his passion in the transportation industry. Completing the Operations Academy Senior Management Program at the University of Maryland in 2022 has helped reaffirm his “why” as he continues to advance in his career.
Zack holds his experience in the Operations Academy in a special place. He entered the academy thinking it would broaden his horizons and build his depth of knowledge, because there had never been a Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO) program in Kentucky until just prior to his enrollment in the Operations Academy.
He thought it would be about gaining more in-depth knowledge about the subject matter, but after his two-week immersive experience, he learned to speak a whole new language about TSMO and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) with other people in the transportation space. He was “dropped right into the deep end” with practitioners who are nationally known.
Learning in a classroom setting with those practitioners, and then having those same people as resources to call on afterwards was a phenomenal advantage.
Although he took pride in his achievement in completing the Operations Academy he was not prepared for the surprise that came soon after his return to his agency.
“I didn’t know that completing the Operations Academy would catapult my career,” he explained. “I know not everyone has the same story I have. I completed it, and then was selected for a role to lead my organization into the next generation into the TSMO and ITS space. I am a test case for sure, and it gave me foundational knowledge for TSMO and the practice.”
Last year, Zack became TSMO Program Lead for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. His new role gave him the opportunity to take a deeper dive beyond transportation challenges related just to engineering.
ITS is about the products that the agency uses, and TSMO is about the strategies used, but those two concepts are joined together in their support of the people for whom these solutions are sought.
“It’s my job to incorporate these products and strategies, not just quickly, but also safely,” he said. “It’s about our stakeholders and customers. It’s why we’re engineers. TSMO is crucial, we have limited resources, funding, and time, so we must use what we must to implement our strategies at a lower cost.”
The Operations Academy did an excellent job of framing why we need to be there and think about these things—it’s all about the end user. Of all the continuing education courses and conferences he’d attended over his career, the message about the critical importance of the end users was often missed, and the Operations Academy reaffirmed to everyone the impact of their work as transportation professionals.
Operations solutions or strategies in the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet had never been framed as “TSMO.” While taking the courses, he learned how to bundle those strategies into the TSMO umbrella and communicate them uniformly as TSMO to his leadership. The Operations Academy taught him how to develop that communication plan, how to capitalize on what their agency was already doing, but also add in the elements of a strong TSMO program.
Learning to “sell” the mission of TSMO, wrap it in the why and how, and explain the engineering practices and the business case is crucial for executive leadership to understand, and Zack brought those communication skills back with him through his Operations Academy experience.
Just before Zack began the courses, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet prioritized a shift toward a TSMO culture in the organization, resulting in the creation of the TSMO Program Lead role he now occupies. TSMO is now a line item in their agency’s budget, and it is his job to continue to demonstrate the need to continue funding it, why it matters, and to help his executive leadership envision the bigger picture.
“TSMO is what most engineers don’t want to do, which is communicate a sales pitch to their leadership focusing not just on the importance of TSMO, but why it’s right, by bringing talking points into the conversation,” he said. “Connecting with people’s ‘why’ has been a new thought process for me. We need to talk about why we should invest in technology, and which audience am I interacting with about these conversations? How do I frame what I need to address each audience’s ‘why.’”
Now, one of Zack’s tasks as TSMO Program Lead is to conduct statewide TSMO training. With the help of a consultant, he teaches transportation professionals in Kentucky TSMO principles and how they interact with the agency’s goals and vision, as well as the ITS strategies needed to meet these goals. He underscores the need for districts’ buy-in and support, so they have clarity as to why TSMO is needed to complete their individual projects.
Using the communication skills he learned in the Academy, Zack has learned how to align TSMO principles to the needs of all those different audiences, and even in the agency’s own internal culture.
“Being in the Operations Academy definitely gave us time to work through some of these different positions we could be in, down the road in our careers,” Zack said. “I feel prepared, and I know how to navigate. It’s definitely worth it, and I knew it would be uncomfortable, but the biggest accomplishments are when I’m not comfortable and working through the process. This made me rise to the occasion. I loved every second of it.”
