Jennifer Overbury

Smart project management in a technical domain

There’s more to ITEA than technology: as the leader of the ITEA project SMART, Jennifer Overbury recently demonstrated the balance that an experienced manager can provide between the overarching objectives and technical nitty gritty. “You know, technical minds can sometimes get down rabbit holes when there’s cool technology. But we need to delicately steer that energy towards the project goals. Bringing that experience to the project can be a beneficial contribution – it doesn’t have to be 100% technical.”

Intelligent questions

That’s not to say that Jennifer is nontechnical. Having been interested in the physical world since childhood, she majored in Geography at the University of Calgary and joined geographic information systems (GIS) company Esri Canada in the 1980s. “GIS was a really new technology and, when I turned up at Esri Canada to be interviewed, it was a little bit embarrassing because the owner had to explain to me what GIS was and how it was going to change the technology world,” Jennifer recalls. “I think I got hired on the basis of asking some intelligent questions and showing my sincere enthusiasm for anything geographic; there weren’t a lot of GIS professionals floating around at the time.”

Long overdue

Over time, Jennifer’s role within the company shifted to managing professional services engagements and, after 13 years, she opted to experience the client side of work at a large Canadian bank. There, she received formal project management training and attained her project management professional designation. The roots of her international project leadership ultimately go back to an assignment received during that first 13 years at Esri Canada.

“Back in 1993, Esri Canada participated in a GIS implementation project for a regional water agency in Cairo. I was very fortunate to be sent to Egypt and work for two weeks with local water engineers to help them deploy GIS on a mainframe with command line software that wasn’t easy to teach or learn. I guess I was due to work on another project outside my home country – and then this ITEA one came along.”

The Science of Where

The ITEA project in question was SMART, which brought together partners in Canada and the Netherlands to investigate dynamic traffic control and geospatial visualisation in cities. This appealed to Jennifer not only for its focus on GIS but for the demonstrable societal value. “I’ve lived in the large city of Toronto my whole life, so I was very interested in moving the dial towards solutions for congestion,” she says. “And we geographers see everything through ‘The Science of Where’, which is actually an Esri slogan. Where is the traffic congestion? Where are the emergency vehicles being routed? Where is the transportation infrastructure? The problem set of the project made a lot of sense to me. I came to it not with technical wizardry but with years of project management experience. At the high level, that role is to orchestrate all the technical geniuses in their work. So, you clear the roadblocks, you help with the decisions, and you provide guidance to ensure all our efforts are aimed at the objectives and the goals of the project.”