Reporter Volume 25, No.25 April 21, 1994

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
News Bureau Staff
Employee training is getting more than just lip service through a new
partnership formed by UB and Niagara Mohawk Power Corp., the largest
utility serving upstate New York.
Aimed at fostering a stronger orientation toward customer support and
providing employees with technical skills in a structured academic
setting, a Master's of Engineering program has been designed by
professors in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and
company managers exclusively for Niagara Mohawk 
The program was kicked off this semester, with 30 Niagara Mohawk
employees enrolled in "Project Management," offered Monday evenings at
Niagara Mohawk's offices here.
"This is nothing short of 'cultural reengineering,'" said Dennis
Elsenbeck, Niagara Mohawk's manager of energy utilization and one of
the program's developers. "We needed to put into place a structure
designed for competition. It required a change in the way we did
training."
Citing increased competition, particularly from independent,
unregulated power generators, Elsenbeck said that employees needed to
start thinking about new ways to help customers. 
"We need to understand the customers' practices and needs," he said.
"Traditional training doesn't provide that." 
Elsenbeck became interested in a program after hearing about the
"University on Wheels" program, where UB professors deliver
engineering courses on site at area corporations.
While standard engineering masters' programs tend to be
research-oriented and fairly general in nature, Niagara Mohawk needed
employees to concentrate on a combination of knowledge and skills that
could be applied to their jobs.
"UB recognized that need and asked how it could accommodate us, while
preserving an academically sound program," said Elsenbeck.
Andres Soom noted that UB and its engineering school have been
bringing courses to companies as part of an effort to reach out to
industry." "Companies have typically selected from among our standard
program offerings, but in this case we needed to come up with a
different approach," said Soom, professor and chair of the UB
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. "Partly because it
is so interdisciplinary, this is a program that none of our individual
departments offer."
Organized around the theme of energy consulting, the MESA (Matching
Education with Strategic Advantage) Program consists of regular
technical courses, several nontechnical offerings on engineering
management, and a few specially designed courses on energy conversion
and utilization, and legal and environmental issues.
UB faculty who teach their standard courses to Niagara Mohawk
employees adjust them to emphasize topics of interest. Project work
for the courses stresses company applications.
Every Monday evening this semester, UB civil engineering professor
Satish Mohan has traveled to the utility's Buffalo offices to teach
"Project Management" to 30 Niagara Mohawk employees. A similar course
taught on-campus stresses the construction company point of view, Soom
explained, but it takes a project-planning perspective when taught at
Niagara Mohawk.
"Many customers have specific power requirements," he added. "To serve
them well, the company needs to understand those requirements from the
customer's point of view."
Each course is 12 weeks long. The complete master's program requires
the standard 30 credit hours. Employees in the current class are
expected to complete their degrees by August 1996.
Funded by Niagara Mohawk's Human Resource Department, the program has
already demonstrated advantages to the company. Career development
officials say it is helping to establish a foundation of knowledge
about electric power necessary for certain positions and has
identified employees who can serve as mentors. Employees not currently
enrolled, but who are in positions that would benefit from the
program, are also being identified.
"We'll be altering the emphases of the courses as we go along," said
Elsenbeck. "The challenge is to adjust the program to match our
corporate strategy even as that strategy changes."
So far, employee reaction to the course has been extremely positive.
"It's an awakening," said Elsenbeck. "People in the course are
beginning to talk across their disciplines. When they learn something
new, they're saying to each other, 'This is a good idea, let's
incorporate it into our normal routine.'"
If the master's program, which is now under way only in the company's
Western New York division, is successful, Niagara Mohawk will expand
it to the utility's other divisions.