Sensing that there is strength in unity and tired of duplicating efforts, leaders of the three national organizations representing professional structural engineers are cautiously putting aside their differences in an effort to better tackle the issues facing the profession.

SHAH

Through cooperation and consensus building, the groups can provide a unified voice for structural engineers in an effort to develop uniform standards of practice across the U.S., say the leaders of the three groups–the 16-year-old Council of American Structural Engineers, Washington, D.C.; the 10-year-old National Council of Structural Engineers Associations, Chicago; and the six-year-old Structural Engineering Institute, Reston, Va.

MESSER

At a Feb. 2 meeting of the Leaders Forum, composed of the groups' elected officials and staff directors, a decision was made to rev up cooperation efforts. The four-hour session, which preceded NCSEA's winter institute in Clearwater Beach, Fla., "was the first time we really started to talk in detail about the alignment of the three organizations," says Raymond F. Messer, chairman of CASE and chairman of Walter P. Moore Engineers and Consultants, Houston.

Though functions and memberships overlap, the groups represent different constituencies. "We are all volunteering for the betterment of the profession," says John G. Tawresey, SEI's president and vice president of KPFF, Seattle. But "it's frustrating when volunteer efforts don't amount to anything due to lack of coordination," says Sanjeev N. Shah, NCSEA's president and associate principal of Lea+Elliott Inc., Miami. People are too busy to allow that to happen, he adds.

TAWRESEY

The Leaders Forum has not been formalized. It has no charter, no dues, no membership. Meeting costs are rotated and each group is not a member of the others' organization. But the groups' past presidents, presidents and presidents-elect, along with directors, have been meeting "informally" behind closed doors twice a year since July 2000 to discuss cooperation on initiatives.

One of the first steps toward more concerted and big-picture alignment is to make sure the members of the forum agree on the definition of terms like "unified" or "partnering," says Shah. Then, the group can identify areas of alignment and determine a lead group for each. It is likely that NCSEA might lead in certification of structural engineers. CASE might lead issues relating to business practice, such as quality assurance and inspections. SEI might lead the standards development effort.

NCSEA, which considers itself a consensus builder, has a membership of 35 local and regional structural engineering associations representing 12,000 individual engineers. Each engineer is a member of NCSEA through the local group. The umbrella organization was formed by a group of engineers who felt that the American Society of Civil Engineers was not adequately representing structural engineers, who make up less than 18% of civil engineers.

SEI, with a U.S. membership of 21,000 and an operating budget of about $800,000, is a "full-service, discipline-oriented, semi-autonomous institute" of ASCE. SEI, formed later and some say in response to NCSEA, has divisions for technical activities, codes and standards development, business and professional activities and local activities. SEI recently produced the building performance studies of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

CASE, which is a subgroup of the American Council of Engineering Cos., has some 300 firm members and an annual operating budget of about $180,000. The group, which publishes model contract documents and practice guidelines, looks at issues relating to business practice as its singular mission.

Playing down continuing discord on certain sensitive subjects, the leaders line up behind the value of cooperation. "We've been working hard to pull the industry together," says Tawresey.