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Atchafalaya Master Plan Development

Project Overview
The Atchafalaya River System is a unique and economically important river swamp that provides an array of resources; however, its management is often confounded by competing priorities, interests, and uses. For decades, the need to preserve this system and address growing issues related to hydrologic changes, sedimentation, habitat loss, access, and recreational opportunities has been expressed. The Atchafalaya Master Plan is not only an avenue to identify priority issues and stakeholder concerns, but also a vehicle to deliver meaningful solutions to advance holistic management of the system and yield practical benefits across multiple interests. Using the best available science, cost-effective solutions will be identified, evaluated, and prioritized to ensure they can address key issues and that their outcomes are aligned with the goals and objectives set forth for the plan.

Project Work and Royal Solutions
Over six months, the Royal team worked closely with CPRA to translate their vision for the plan into a comprehensive, integrated suite of actions with enough detail to define the scopes, schedules, and budgets needed to develop it. During this “planning for plan development” phase, our team created a Plan Development Process and Program Management Plan. Our contributions are unique in that although this effort is focused exclusively on the Atchafalaya River System and the specific challenges, opportunities, and stakeholder interests therein, both the planning and management frameworks were developed with forethought for potential future needs. By applying a structured yet flexible approach, Royal’s work can facilitate similar basin-scale planning across coastal Louisiana.

The Plan Development Process clearly articulates the scope of the Atchafalaya Master Plan and lays out a framework for developing it. Our team detailed the importance of each step in the planning process, beginning with determining the appropriate spatial boundary and inventorying existing data and models to support plan development. Owing to Royal’s understanding of common challenges with managing large amounts of data, we developed a clear plan to guide data management. Given our team’s unique experience with similar planning efforts, we designed a practical, yet rigorous decision framework that is both aligned with the Coastal Master Plan and customized for the Atchafalaya River System. The framework sets the stage for connecting priority problems, goals, and objectives with decision drivers, metrics, and funding scenarios. With consideration to both the spatial and temporal scale of interest, we defined a strategy to identify existing projects and detailed key considerations for developing new and innovative projects. We underscored the importance of meaningful stakeholder engagement throughout the planning process and created a thoughtful strategy, including tools and platforms, to guide communications before, during, and after plan development. Last, we built a detailed workflow to bring these components together and clearly chart a four-year path forward to establish the plan.

After decades of leading, managing, and successfully completing large-scale, multi-year efforts, the Royal team knows the importance of having a thorough, well-articulated, easily implementable plan to facilitate seamless coordination and integration of tasks and track progress to ensure the tasks remain in accordance with scope, schedule, and budget and to ultimately ensure successful project completion. Leaning on prior experience and lessons learned, we developed a preliminary Program Management Plan intended to serve as a living, one-stop resource for general information, processes, logistics, etc. and day-to-day guidance for team members. We clearly laid out the overall workflow, task descriptions and associated deliverables; success and risk factors; team organization, roles and responsibilities, and contracting strategies; communication and meeting protocols; and quality assurance/quality control procedures that are aligned with both the scale of this effort and CPRA’s requirements.

Seeing value in our approach and owing to our team’s unique history and familiarity with large-scale water, sediment, and coastal planning efforts, CPRA asked the Royal team to launch the second phase of plan development. In this second phase, our team is expanding upon the planning and management frameworks to include a greater level of detail where needed, and steps laid out in the Plan Development Process are underway. For example, we are contracting with experts to expand upon existing models and develop new components where needed. Project solicitations will begin to identify existing project ideas and develop new project concepts to fill areas of need. We are supporting CPRA in developing and sharing information regarding plan development as well as building relationships with key stakeholders. Project metrics and targets are being refined to a higher level of detail as is the list of key stakeholders representing various interests in the system. We are building out the Program Management Plan by including full-task scopes and schedules, points of contact, and more granular workflow processes. It will continue to evolve, especially during early stages of plan development. For example, standard forms, templates, and web-based applications for use by all team members are being added as they are developed.

Although part of plan development focuses on analytical topics and communications with the technical community—including resource managers, other state agencies, federal agencies, and restoration practitioners—our team knows that the plan must be developed with participation of the many diverse interests that live, work, play, and own property in the system, along with national interests that have a stake in this area; therefore, we are working diligently to ensure relevant content is summarized and presented in various ways for various audiences. As previously mentioned, although the plan will focus exclusively on the Atchafalaya River System, by providing foundational information to support robust and evolving planning and management processes, the Royal team strives go above and beyond to ensure the work we do on this plan is both structured and flexible enough so that the overall framework can be used for similar basin-scale planning in coastal Louisiana.