Speakers
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Alence Poudel PESenior Engineering Manager | City of SugarlandAlence Poudel is a municipal engineer on a mission to transform how local governments approach infrastructure management and capital decision-making. As the Senior Engineering Manager leading the City of Sugar Land’s Modeling and Analysis Division (MAD), he directs multidisciplinary teams in deploying data analytics and machine learning to build an efficient, resilient, long-term CIP. A 2021 graduate of Texas A&M University, Alence is passionate about bridging daily engineering practice with applied research to advance data-driven governance. For fellow practitioners interested in real-world infrastructure strategies and collaboration opportunities, he publishes a monthly LinkedIn newsletter titled Data Driven Infrastructure Planning, where he shares practitioner-tested insights for municipal engineers. If interested, please follow:
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/data-driven-infrastructure-7360769117802450944/ -
Jonathan Braun PE, CFM, MBAAssistant City Engineer | City of Sugar LandJonathan Braun, P.E., MBA, CFM, serves as the Assistant City Engineer for the City of Sugar Land. A Houston native with experience in both the private and public sectors, Jonathan focuses on the unique challenges of managing and modernizing infrastructure in an established, maturing city. By combining his engineering background from Texas A&M with an MBA from the University of Houston, he brings a strategic, business-minded approach to municipal projects. Jonathan is a strong advocate for regional collaboration and is committed to building long-term resilience for the Texas Gulf Coast. He focuses heavily on driving operational efficiencies, improving project delivery, and fostering organizational transparency. Through this collaborative approach, Jonathan works to build stronger internal processes that ultimately advance reliable, transparent, and resilient public infrastructure for the community.
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: Sep 16 2026
- Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Seeing Trouble Early: Sugar Land’s Earned Value-Based Early Warning System for Municipal Project Risk Management
Municipal governments are expected to deliver capital projects predictably, yet they rarely have access to the cost systems, resource‑loaded schedules, or enterprise tools that make traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) effective. While contractors and consultants operate with sophisticated controls, cities are confined by taxpayer constraints and limited visibility. This creates a structural blind spot: municipal owners need early warning signals, but the data required for standard EVM is not available. To bridge this gap, the City of Sugar Land developed a “lightweight” early warning framework that adapts core earned value concepts using only information municipalities already possess: contract value, invoicing, certified percent complete, and milestone‑based progress. Rather than replicating contractor systems, the approach translates these municipal data proxies into performance indicators. These indicators reveal how projects behave as uncertainty accumulates, supporting a simple risk‑categorization structure that helps staff prioritize intervention. The practical impact of this system is best illustrated by its application to two active infrastructure design projects, the framework surfaced emerging risks months before traditional reporting. In Project A, a counterintuitive Cost Performance Index (CPI) of 1.21 signaled underbilling and financial stress well before a 20.5 percent change order materialized. In Project B, a Schedule Performance Index (SPI) declined to 0.60, quantifying severe delays driven by external regulatory coordination, even as narrative updates remained optimistic. These signals helped staff distinguish between epistemic uncertainty related to incomplete knowledge and aleatory uncertainty driven by external actors and variability. Ultimately, the value for attendees is practical and replicable. This session shows how cities, and even private firms, can use earned value concepts as an early warning tool to ask better questions, communicate risk clearly to leadership, and intervene earlier, all without new software, proprietary cost data, or added taxpayer burden.
