Designing outside the box.
Yousef's personal mission is breaking down barriers between work groups.
Yousef learned a lot about efficiency while working in private industry, but he didn’t feel that his firm allowed him to explore new skills or experiences. In his three years at EBMUD, Yousef has professionally flourished by taking advantage of training, practicing project management, and doing a rotation with a pipeline crew. It is his personal mission to break down barriers between work groups and “poke his nose” into their parts of the process.
With a system as complicated as EBMUD’s, Yousef says you can’t just design a facility without considering what it’s connected to. He says that designers and engineers traditionally think “I’m designing, say, a box.” But using everything he’s learned from colleagues across the District, Yousef is able to think – literally – outside the box.
“It’s like my own house. When I design a project I think – what if I had to come back in 30 or 40 years to deal with it?”