Alicia L. Lanier

I am a project management and water resources professional with over two decades of experience leading complex, interdisciplinary initiatives across the public and private sectors. I currently serve as Principal Project Manager at Arcadis, a role I stepped into in March 2026, where I support clients and projects in the water sector, primarily across the southeast region and the Pacific Northwest. In this capacity, I bring my deep expertise in strategic and complex project management to help communities and organizations navigate their most pressing water challenges.

Prior to joining Arcadis, I spent over five years as Stormwater Project Manager for Special Projects at the City of Fayetteville, North Carolina, where I served as the Internal Program Manager for the city's Watershed Master Plan program. In that role, I worked to build a flood-resilient city, collaborating across departments and with external partners to advance long-term stormwater infrastructure and planning initiatives that protect lives and property.

Before my time with the City of Fayetteville, I ran my own management consulting practice, Lanier Consulting, for nearly eighteen years. As an independent consultant, I provided program and project management, training, coaching, facilitation, and business process consultation to a wide range of clients. I developed a particular passion for new ways of managing projects and facilitating collaboration in an increasingly complex world, and I have shared these approaches through professional conversations and LinkedIn groups focused on agile project management for non-software contexts.

One of the most significant and rewarding projects of my consulting career was my work as Lead Facilitator for the South Florida Water, Sustainability, and Climate project, a large, complex five-year interdisciplinary National Science Foundation-funded research project involving geographically dispersed universities and agencies. I designed and facilitated both technical and multi-day all-team meetings and introduced a variety of energizing group process activities based on consensus-building, self-organization, and dialogue, including Consensus Brainstorm, Knowledge Café, Role Play, Mind Map, Lightning Talks, Open Market, and Story Board. I also introduced progressive collaborative management techniques based on Agile principles and adaptive action, including iterative development, retrospectives, Agile with Scrum, kanban, agile chartering, and adaptive action. This combination of lightweight management concepts enabled researchers to pursue their scientific inquiry independently while ensuring collaboration across the sciences and consistent communication across the geographically dispersed team. I later co-authored a journal article describing the management and collaboration aspects of this project, titled Facilitating Integration in Interdisciplinary Research: Lessons from South Florida Water, Sustainability, and Climate Project.

I also served as Lead Facilitator for the Urban Water Innovation Network, a project of Colorado State University, where I worked for over three years. In that capacity, I served as Project Management Instructor, developing and delivering training on interdisciplinary research project management to over forty research scientists in both 2016 and 2017, covering topics including adaptive project management, leadership styles, communication, and tools to facilitate collaboration and knowledge co-production. I also served as the Lead Stakeholder Engagement Facilitator, where I worked closely with a geographically dispersed engagement team to plan, organize, and facilitate five full-day stakeholder workshops across the country in both 2016 and 2017. I co-authored a journal article describing the results of those meetings, titled A Stakeholder-Science Based Approach Using the National Urban Water Innovation Network as a Test Bed for Understanding Urban Water Sustainability Challenges in the US.

Across my career in project management, water resources, and interdisciplinary collaboration, my work has been driven by a belief that the most complex challenges require not just technical expertise but also skilled facilitation, adaptive leadership, and a commitment to bringing diverse voices together. Whether I am managing stormwater projects for a city, facilitating research collaboration across universities, or supporting water sector clients at a global firm, I am focused on building resilience, fostering collaboration, and delivering results that make communities stronger and more sustainable.