What are the leadership philosophies and strategies that produce effective project management? ZweigWhite—a business information consulting firm that focuses on the A/E industry and the publisher of Structural Engineer—presented the A/E Project Management Summit at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak, Phoenix, on March 23-24, to explore the answer to that question.

To focus the dialogue into the realm of the structural engineering profession, I hosted a roundtable discussion around the same topic, which included several practicing structural engineers as well as other project management experts. (View "The Panel" to the right for a list of participants.) The participants shared their philosophies of project management and project managers, and then we discussed some strategies used to develop both effectively.

> PHILOSOPHIES

GOUPIL: I invited you all here to talk about project management and what it means to your organizations.

And specifically, I want to discuss what you think makes a good project manager and what are the challenges to produce that ideal person.

MAXMAN: In our business, project management is so very fundamental.We are project-based or project-focused organizations, and my mantra is that there are only two things we do that count: we sell projects and we execute projects.

If we do those two things well, we’ll be successful, and if we don’t, there’s no way to be successful. So the strategy has to be to focus on doing those things well and having an organization that supports that.

COOK: One of the things that I see quite a lot of is not project management, but project reporting. Often because of the contractual requirements for providing reports, lip service is paid to project management just purely by producing those reports. Then project management gets a bad reputation as being extremely onerous and a waste of time just to satisfy some sort of reporting requirements.

But the reality of it is that project management is an essential part of running a project-based business. It has to come from the very top, and everybody must understand why they are doing what they are doing.

In my experience, there is a lot of push back from the rank and file when they are asked questions such as, ‘How long is it going to take?’, ‘How much have you done?’, or ‘When are you going to finish?’ But if you educate those folks as to why they are being asked those questions, they will come forward.

BELL: I agree. Project management needs to fall into the overall context of the firm’s strategy. It relates to relationships with clients. It relates to the development of staff and the success of staff.

So the broad context is very important.

CYGAN: As we all know, most of the engineers that come into the business come out of school without any understanding of the importance of project management. They’ve just finished learning how to do the calculations.They are in their engineering training phase.

They are just learning the application of the calculations and the first thing they want to do is solve some problems.

They are not educated as to why the company does project management or how they do it. They are not provided the tools and shown how to use them. I have seldom, if ever, seen that.

GOUPIL: How do you educate recent graduates or other staff that are new to the firm about your company’s project management practices?

LANE: We are a service organization. We deal every day with the architects, and one of the key things that we look at when we hire an individual is does this person have the personality to work with the client? It’s very important. Granted, not every engineer is going to be a project manager. There are some that are just number crunchers. But we definitely see that they do need to have the ability to satisfy that client and communicate about the project.

Not every project is going to be 100 percent successful, and when it really comes down to that, we have to shine when the chips are down. That’s when the problem-solving has to take place rather than just trying to wash your hands of it. That’s when you really have to communicate.

MAXMAN: The skills required for project management are different than technical skills and include communication and the ability to plan, manage, and delegate. Effective delegation has a technical aspect to it. Y ou certainly do need to understand the technical requirements of what people are doing. But, there’s a difference between being responsible that QA/QC has been done and actually doing it. Yet as an industry, we’re still using technical benchmarks to make people a project manager.

In a lot of firms, you can’t be a project manager unless you’re a P.E. I think we give mixed messages about the difference between what is required to be a really good designer or an engineer and the necessary project management skills.

BELL: I agree and think that in a lot of organizations advancement to project management is the necessary next step, or the only step, through the ranks. I think that’s a mistake.We need to have dual paths so that people with very strong technical skills, but who perhaps aren’t cut out—either by skill or ambition—to go the project manager route, can be recognized and feel good about the contribution that they are making to the firm.

The other thing to keep in mind is that there are a myriad of skills required to be a good project manager that are in addition to technical skills—innate creativity, organizational skills, people skills, and leadership skills are all very important.

Nobody has the perfect combination, and even individual project manager’s skills vary from person-to-person.

That puts a burden on us—as firm leaders—to make the correct project management matching between projects and people. Y ou need to recognize that people are different.

CYGAN: Yes, and project management is learned and it has to be applied to meet the requirements of the clients that you’re serving. Project management for the General Services Administration, for instance, is a whole different kettle of fish than it is for the city of Phoenix.

The job of the senior management of the firm is to have those people in the organization trained to know the difference.

> STRATEGIES

GOUPIL: Do any of you have a formal or informal training program for project managers?

BELL: We have both formal and informal processes. On a formal basis, we hire an outside expert to help us run every staff member with a certain level of experience through a formal project management boot camp that gives them the basics.We run that camp every year.We supplement that with onthe- job training, with mentoring, with teaming, with individual experts, such as people who are strong in project management. And we have one person within our organization that is responsible for developing our PM programs, standards, and our training programs.

MAXMAN: We have a formal certification program that begins with a project management boot camp and then the person goes into a minimum of a one-year apprenticeship mentoring with a project manager. After the boot camp and the apprenticeship, the person can be certified as a project manager within the firm.

The boot camp includes the soft skills and management and organizational skills. Plus, we’ve just instituted Wade- Trim University, which is going to be a whole set of additional seminars, courses, programs.

LANE: Whether or not we have a formal system for training, it does occur every day.When an EIT first starts, he’s given ownership of a small project. As his education and experience grows, he grows into the P.E. role and he is learning project management as he is gaining experience.

If an employee wants to be a project manager, it is up to that individual. The person needs to come out and shine.We don’t try to mold them into a project manager, but rather that individual, as he gains experience, grows right into that role.That way we have people that fit into their slots, where they feel comfortable.

BELL: Jim, your point about importance of training on the job is an extremely important one. When we talk about the role of the project manager, we often miss that dimension, but we can create all of the formal training programs that we want and send people out for training and do our in-house classes and so forth. But the best way of training a project manager or developing an engineer or an architect is the on-the-job training.

And our project managers need to understand that the development of staff, that the opportunity that they have for on-the-job learning experience, is an extremely important one. And part of the success of a project should be the measure of did it develop staff? Did we take advantage of that developing opportunity? So executing work is important.

Selling work is important. But, developing staff is also important. When we pick, train, evaluate, and incent our project managers, that component for training the staff needs to be there as well.

MAXMAN: I think that it really is our responsibility to have in place something that is definable as a viable project management process with the expectations outlined on what a project manager is responsible for.

The way that we do that is to have a really strong project management culture. The way that people learn how to manage projects well is to observe other people doing it right. Training just barely scratches the surface, but if an employee gets to work for a project manager that’s got the project organized, the task breakdown structure done right, delegates things clearly, monitors folks but gives them the wherewithal to go on out and do what they need to do, and builds the boundaries for the team, then he or she will learn how to be a successful project manager.

BELL: Technology has done some wonderful things for us, but it’s also insulated us often. We use e-mail for communication. CAD has kept us away from the old paradigm of the project engineer leaning over the drafting board and working with the young engineer.

We all are stuck behind our electronic media and don’t interface. There’s a lot to be learned about the pros and the cons of information technology in terms of what it does with our human interactions.

COOK: As a purveyor of technology, I absolutely agree, and the fact is that the technology does remove some of the personal contact; but the great advantages of technology in project management are that it does automate a lot of the processes that you otherwise would be doing manually, and probably more importantly, you can get data in real-time.

BELL: Technology is a great advantage to us if we use it right; but I think as we learn to rely on it more and more, we learn that there are right ways to use it and wrong ways to use it. Overall, it can enhance our collaboration tremendously, but we have to learn along the way.

CYGAN: Some of the greatest project management disasters that I’ve seen occurred because nobody picked up the project management reins and said, ‘Hey boss, this is a problem and here’s what we have to do.’

MAXMAN: That’s the point. It’s so very useful when used correctly. A short message to inform a number of people is a smart use of e-mail. But then of course we all have engineers who use it to give bad news to the client. They’ll bury the bad news about two paragraphs down in the e-mail and hope that nobody will ever notice.

BELL: We don’t often talk about the importance of courage in project management, but it’s a very important trait, to be able to confront the difficult issues, pick up the phone and talk to that client to deliver the bad news, if necessary.

MAXMAN: I like that, courage. To be able to communicate regardless of whether it’s comfortable or not takes courage. That’s a good way to put it.

> CONCLUSIONS

COOK: I think effective project management is a three-legged stool of people, processes, and tools.

People are essential. They have to understand why they are doing what they are doing. They need to be educated. Project managers need to be empowered to do what they do best.

Processes are the things that we see most often being neglected. It’s important to document the processes by which you project manage. Otherwise, everybody will project manage different ways.

The idea behind tools is efficiency and to allow managers to spend more time doing project management.

CYGAN: It’s been said many times today, but it takes a certain personality to be the head of a technical department in a company and it takes a rather different personality to be a good project manager.

MAXMAN: I think it is senior management’s responsibility to establish a culture within the company that both recognizes good project management and supports it and values it.

While I think project management needs to be recognized as necessary, it can’t be put up on a singular pedestal as the only way to make it in a firm. You’ve got to have other career tracks for folks.

We still need good technical people.

BELL: I think my answer to the question of what makes good project managers is that we do—the firm leaders.

It’s up to us to select people with the right characteristics, and then encourage those people to do it. Also important is to allow people who aren’t suited for project management to have a different career path that is appropriate.We have to provide the right training, but we have to provide the right organization and context within our organization as well.

Teamwork and support from top management are very important.

GOUPIL: What I have realized is that in addition to maintaining the budget and the schedule and getting the drawings out the door on time, that mentoring staff is a critical responsibility of the project manager. And it seems that, unfortunately, making the project relevant and interesting for the staff can get overlooked to meet budget and schedule requirements.

BELL: I think the best project managers I ever worked for were inspirational.

They made the project a learning experience for me. They made the project very relevant. They gave meaning to the work that I was doing.