Project Management
Project Management, as you can see from our collage of words, is a word that we believe encompasses many parameters and project related variables. It’s also a term used in America today to describe positions ranging from an EPC Manager overseeing a $10B project all the way down to the person managing a team installing $2K worth of landscaping in your yard.
What’s the difference between those two positions? One could argue that there is no difference. If we remove the monetary value from the projects, both Project Managers will still have the same jobs duties. Both Managers will need to be part of the design and initial approval phase. Both will oversee the planning of the project before moving on to the implementation phase where they need to provide oversight to ensure the project goes as planned in relation to budget and planned duration. And finally, both will need to finalize the project with a proper closeout.
So in theory, both of these PM’s have relatable responsibilities where the success, or failure of the projects, directly correlate with their abilities to execute the project.
To execute a project, regardless of whether it’s a $10B LNG grassroots facility or $2K project replacing the grass in your yard, it takes dedication and attention to detail.
How does the Project Manager guide her/his Team with the confidence it takes to accomplish great things?
The Project Manager has to immerse themselves into every facet of the project during the earliest stages so that they may have an intimate knowledge of the scope of the project. Many costly issues projects are experiencing at later stages should have, and could have, been resolved early on in the project if they had only been recognized by leadership, and at the end of the day the responsibility for that failure will fall at the feet of the Project Manager.
No matter how experienced a good Project Manager may be, they simply won’t have enough time to be involved in every facet of the project as the project implementation phase starts, so it is vital to the success of the project that the Project Manager mentor and empower the Leadership Team Members from day one!
A Project Manager does not always get to pick their Team, so being well versed on the entire scope of the project allows the Project Manager to ensure the Team as a whole, and as individuals, are both capable and well prepared for their respective roles. This is where a Project Manager’s knowledge and experience with scope, procurement, planning, scheduling, risk analysis, costs, quality, efficiency, progress reporting, etc. come into play, as the Project Manager can now assess Team Member’s and their performance confidently. In turn, a little coaching and mentoring of a team can quickly build confidence in both leadership and themselves.
When it comes to Project Management, having the right leadership in place to ensure a successful outcome with your project is vital. This is one reason RTF Project Services believes so strongly in the leader-leader model versus the leader-follower model. It’s true, one person can make a difference, but imagine the difference an entire team of goal-oriented, self-motivated individuals can make on a project. Imagine a Team that can rely on, and trust each other, to work towards a common goal. Fortunately, we don’t have to try to imagine that, as we have that team.
A great Project Management Team doesn’t just fall in your lap from the HR gods. It starts with identifying individuals who, regardless of education or experience, have the drive to continue to learn and excel with each new assignment. It continues with individuals who ask for more responsibility with each passing day and who can envision success even under the most challenging of circumstances. As these individuals learn and grow together, they feed off of each other, wanting each other to reach new goals, believing in each other, trusting in each other, teaching each other, and encouraging each other. And before you know it, you have the true definition of a Team, and more than that, you will have developed personal relationships with people you can trust that will last a lifetime.
A great Project Management Team, is a team where every individual is expected to come to the table with new ideas and solutions with the expectation that their peers will help them to develop those ideas into new, efficient work practices. A great Project Management Team knows how to work together, is never afraid to ask for an opinion or for help, and knows that the success of the Team is more important that the success of any one individual.
When you think about the best Project Management Teams you have worked with in the past, you will recall those who exhibited leadership skills you admire where Management empowered Team Members to think outside the box and were allowed to make critical decisions. You’ll probably also recall the Team’s ability to fully utilize all resources available, the effort to collaborate across all disciplines and companies for both transparency and efficiency, the way Team Members spoke positively of other team members, and the way more knowledgeable and experienced Team Members took the time to elevate both the skills and knowledge of lesser experienced Team Members.
If you haven’t seen that before, then maybe you haven’t seen a true Project Management Team.
When it comes to the implementation of a large scale project, RTF Project Services goes right back to the same leader-leader model we have been successful with on previous projects. Instead of assigning one task out of many to a Team Member, we prefer to assign system(s) to a Team Member along with every task associated with that system.
This concept does three things. First it creates ownership and gives the Team Member a greater sense of responsibility while allowing the Team Member to get the satisfaction of having total responsibility for the different phases of a project from beginning to end. Second, it creates a more knowledgeable and skilled work force by allowing each Team Member to not just see how the entire implementation process works, but to actually be an integral part of each stage of the implementation process and it’s successful completion. The third thing is does is creates a system expert nearly doing away with any rework as this person becomes solely responsible for the review of documentation, the building of construction and commissioning packages, the oversight and guiding hand of construction, the person interfacing with other crafts and scheduling, the tracking of and reporting of progress, and eventually solely responsible for the commissioning of this system they have nurtured and watched grow.
Think about that for a minute. From a cost standpoint you have created a position that no longer has down time and almost eliminates all rework. It’s now a truly productive position as a you will never hear a Team Member say again, “I am waiting on construction”, or “I’m waiting on commissioning”, or any number of other excuses we have all heard at some point in our Project Management careers.
Along with the resulting creation of a system expert comes efficiency through the information that is relayed or presented in every direction. Information no longer travels up, then back down, and vice versa, leading to the almost guaranteed result of misinformation, but accurate information now travels laterally. Information now travels from the sole source to the scheduler, to management, to interfacing crafts, to construction, etc. Danger words like “I think so”, “that sounds right”, “it should be done”, “I’m not 100% sure”, etc. becomes a thing of the past and detailed, accurate information becomes king, allowing for better decision making by the Project Management Team, better KPI’s, and an overall confidence in knowing that someone is intimately involved at every level of the project.
We don’t just believe our work processes work from a theoretical point of view, we know they work because our Team Members have repeatedly been successful on projects both large and small. The one thing you quickly learn is that Clients only care about KPI’s when a job is over budget and has fallen off the rails, but no one ever seems to ask about KPI’s when the project is on time and on-budget.
Don’t worry though, we build custom tracking databases for every project we manage so we never miss scope, always have a handle on progress, and so we always have live data for the Client to review. It’s from those databases that we can derive that we have a successful method for managing projects.
