One Eighty: Engineering Special Forces

To explain why we call ourselves this, one first needs to understand the concept and application of special forces: A special forces team is essentially a multi-disciplinary team comprised of different members of different skills and abilities. This team gets deployed into a “hot spot”, or an area that has had a failure of law and order – and the special forces team at that stage is usually the best shot at sorting out the problem and bringing a resolution.

In this process, there is of course a level of risk, and therefore risk mitigation management is required to eliminate or manage the tasks at hand.

When I draw the comparison of Special Forces in the traditional sense, as described above, with One Eighty, it is so clear to me that we are the Special Forces of engineering: We have a multi-disciplinary team of engineers and scientists and the relevant support staff, and what we essentially do is address real issues in the engineering space.

This is especially true of our work in the capital projects space – there are so many windows that we need to plug into – planning, selection, implementation, etc. – and for this, a multi-disciplinary team is essential to address the engineering and or scientific challenges across the board.

A trend that has emerged regarding capital projects is an interesting one: most of our customers have a consulting engineer, but that engineer can’t address the risk carried by the owner of the project – and that is where we, One Eighty, a multi-disciplinary team, come in as the Special Forces of Engineering, – to identify any potential risk as well as the likelihood and frequency of potential occurrence, then to quantify the risk and formulate the solutions.  We work alongside the consulting engineer as technology and integrity partners on these projects with our customers across the globe.

As the Special Forces of Engineering, we must select our multi-disciplinary team very carefully, choosing specific people for specific tasks and reasons. Selecting the right qualifications, experience and character traits is important, and it is critical to have the right team of people for the client in question.

The approach that our Special Forces Team follow will be a typical project management methodology, which consists of: scoping, engaging, detailing, evaluating, costing and carrying out the work. With regards to a capital project, we must ensure that all bases are covered thoroughly and that we provide a solid support structure or platform from which the project can run.

We develop lasting relationships with asset owners through this process, and become technology and integrity partners to our customers.

Click here for more about our Special Forces team.