Executive succession at an engineering firm may appear distant from the daily work of a water utility. Contracts remain in force, project managers remain assigned and design schedules continue. Yet a leadership change is a useful prompt to examine whether critical projects depend too heavily on informal relationships or knowledge held by a small number of people.
Water Finance and Management reports that Carollo Engineers has selected Anne Prudhel as its next president and CEO, effective Jan. 1, 2027. According to the outlet, Prudhel will succeed B. Narayanan, who is retiring at the end of 2027. The announcement provides a current example of a planned change at a firm serving the water sector. It does not, by itself, indicate any disruption to client work.
For utilities, the practical question is broader: If leadership, account management or technical personnel change, can the project continue without losing decisions, deadlines or accountability?
Separate corporate succession from project succession
A chief executive transition and a project staffing transition are not the same event. Senior leadership can change while a utility’s project team remains stable. Conversely, a project can lose a key process engineer or construction manager even when corporate leadership is unchanged.
The utility should therefore avoid treating a corporate announcement as evidence of a project problem. It should use the announcement as a governance checkpoint. Contract administrators can confirm who holds executive authority, who can approve changes and where unresolved issues should be escalated. Project managers can separately verify the continuity of named personnel, discipline leads and subconsultants.
This distinction matters on long programs. A treatment plant upgrade may span planning, piloting, permitting, design, procurement, construction and startup. The people who developed the basis of design may not be present when an operator questions a control sequence several years later. Continuity depends less on retaining every individual than on preserving the reasoning behind consequential decisions.
Audit the project record, not just the organization chart
A continuity review should begin with documents that explain why the project took its current form. The contract and amendments establish formal responsibilities, but they rarely contain the complete technical history. Utilities should identify where design criteria, alternatives evaluations, pilot findings, modeling assumptions, regulatory correspondence and owner decisions are stored.
The review should test whether another qualified person could reconstruct the project’s logic. A drawing set shows what was selected. It may not explain why an alternative was rejected, which source-water condition controlled sizing or which operational constraint shaped redundancy. Those gaps become expensive when a new team reopens settled questions or carries an obsolete assumption into detailed design.
Meeting minutes also deserve scrutiny. They should distinguish a discussion item from an approved owner decision and identify the person authorized to make that decision. A list of attendees and topics is not an adequate decision record.
Confirm authority at four levels
Utilities should be able to identify four contacts: the day-to-day project manager, the technical authority for disputed design questions, the commercial authority for scope and fee matters, and the executive escalation contact. One person may fill more than one role, but the authority attached to each role should be explicit.
This check is especially useful when a project encounters a change in scope. Technical staff may recognize that additional investigation is necessary without having authority to commit the firm. Commercial staff may negotiate an amendment without being equipped to resolve the underlying engineering question. A clear escalation map keeps those two conversations connected.
Look for concentration risk
The most important continuity risk may sit below the executive level. A specialized treatment process, hydraulic model or controls architecture can become dependent on one practitioner. Utilities can ask whether another person has reviewed the work, whether calculation files are accessible and whether model inputs are documented in a usable form.
That does not require duplicating every task. It requires enough independent familiarity to prevent a departure, reassignment or extended absence from stopping the project. The appropriate depth depends on project complexity, schedule sensitivity and the availability of specialized expertise.
Make continuity a routine control
A leadership announcement is one occasion for this review, but it should not be the only one. Utilities can add continuity checks at phase gates, major amendments and changes in key personnel. The result should be a short, maintained record of responsibilities, decisions, assumptions and escalation routes.
Executive succession is ultimately the firm’s responsibility. Project resilience is shared. A utility cannot choose every staffing change at a consultant, but it can require a record strong enough for the work to survive one.