
OUR Team Leaders
We are proud of our teams and the work they do to make every project successful. Our goal is to provide timely quality services using our years of experience and our trust network of team members.

Jody Fail, P.E.
Owner, Chairman of the Board
Jody began his engineering career with the Bay Springs Telephone Company in 1961 after graduating from Louisiana State University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Electrical Engineering.
Jody has been very active in the Independent Telephone Industry as well as in the Electrical Engineering profession. He has been a former Director and President of the Alabama-Mississippi Independent Telephone Association and member of the National Society of Professional Engineers, Mississippi Engineering Society, Association of Communication Engineers, and the Independent Telephone Pioneer Association. He is also a board member of various companies, colleges and other associations.
Jimmy Gray
Manager Outside Plant Contracts
Jimmy started with Joseph D. Fail Engineering Company, Inc. in February of 1977. Beginning as a draftsman, he has since held the positions of Assistant Design Engineer, Design Engineer, and now is currently a Senior Consultant with the position of Manager of Outside Plant (OSP) Contracts.
The Outside Plant department is responsible for preparing schematics, circuit assignments, permits, cut sheets, project status reports, OSP contracts, and closeout documents for any outside plant construction project. In addition to these standard duties, the OSP group provides specialized cost estimates and digitizing records utilizing AutoCAD.
Terry Haynes
Director MRO/Regulatory Consulting
Terry comes to our firm with more than 25 years of field operations and corporate management telephony experience. His field operations background includes supervision of installation, repair, facilities assignment, and dispatch. In his corporate management role, he served as a technology planner, operations planner, process re-engineer, field support manager, major programs manager and regulatory consultant. As a regulatory consultant, he testified on behalf of GTE and Verizon in 18 states. He worked with a number of state commissioners and their staffs to provide education on key regulatory issues.
Terry's program management experience includes managing the selection and deployment of 11,000+ laptops to field technicians, directing the deployment of local number portability capability in 28 states, deployment of 711 dialing capability in 23 states and participation with other industry leaders on the planning and deployment of 511 dialing. He has also served on several national industry forums addressing the issues of telephone number conservation and implementation of wireless and wireline local number portability.
Scott Mackinaw
President
Scott joined Joseph D. Fail Engineering Company, Inc. in June of 2004 and brought over 15 years of experience in all aspects of facilities and non-facilities based central office switching and transmission both analog and digital. His strong project management, personnel management, and technical team building skills combined with a detailed understanding of public and private networks provide an extremely well rounded background in the telecommunications industry.
After obtaining a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering, Scott developed an in-depth understanding of the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) through the implementation of a nationwide, switched-based private network for long distance carrier MidCom Communications. This experience was immediately supplemented by working as Director of Technical Services for Digital Telecommunications, Inc. (DTI) and later for CopperCom. At DTI and CopperCom, where he was responsible for all technical training, installation, customer service and post-sales TAC support as required by their Voice over Broadband, Class 4 TDM, Class 5 TDM and Soft Switch customers. Numerous ISP, RMTS, CLEC, IOC and IXC voice and data networks were successfully installed, turned-up and put into service, allowing Scott to develop a wide range of technical, operational and strategic planning skills.
At Fail Engineering, he assumed the position of President after serving as Vice President of all inside plant (ISP) engineering and project management. He also directs all aspects of the IT group and heads up the team to prepare, coordinate, and submit all broadband designs for both grant and loan applications to the USDA/RUS.
Bruce Stringer
Manager Network Planning & Design
Bruce began his telecommunication-engineering career in 1973 with Joseph D. Fail Engineering Company, Inc. Since that time he has worked doing “in house” design of outside plant facilities. Bruce has over twenty years of experience in all phases of Outside Plant Design, staking and construction. He manages long range planning and design including loan applications to RUS for telephone operating companies.
Randall Bowman
P.E. - Engineer
Randall came to work at Joseph D. Fail Engineering Company, Inc. in 1986 as President. Prior to this, he was President and CEO of Cottrell & House, Inc., of Nashville, Tennessee. While at Cottrell & House he was responsible for all phases of project development. Randall brings over forty-nine years of engineering experience and holds a Bachelors of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee and also has completed a four year program in Mechanical Engineering at Tennessee Polytechnic Institute. He is a registered licensed Professional Engineer in many states.
Randall is a member of the National Society of Professional Engineers, the Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers, the Professional Engineers in Private Practice, and the Independent Telephone Pioneer Association, as well as, an active member of the Association of Communication Engineers, and many other trade associations. Randall retired from the President's position at the end of December 2003; and is still very active in working with Fail Engineering Company.