PSMJ's A/E/C Project Management Boot Camp Reviewed on Industry Speaks

"This boot camp will not make you a project manager, however it does provide the foundation and tools to become successful," says Jason Jaworski, MSEM, project manager for the jdi group, Inc. (Maumee, Ohio).

Jaworski attended the Chicago boot camp August 8-9, 2013; PSMJ holds them at various locations throughout the year. Check out his full course review on Industry Speaks.

Mistake: We Opened an Office on the East Coast!

“Really?” I said. Hmm. “Did you do any market research—competition, market capacity, pricing?” “No, but I’ve got a relationship with someone who knows someone there.” “Is it a client?” (That’s different.) No. I’m thinking: just shoot me now.

Two years later and more than $200K invested, the client closed their office in the region. Reluctantly, I asked why. The truth was, I already knew. No work, no demand for work, too many competitors, preferences for union workers, and the list went on and on. This wasn’t the first time I had heard this and it wasn’t going to be the last.

Too often, firms rationalize pursuits of project types and regions that common sense would suggest are ridiculous! The answer is always, “But we can do it!” My question is, “Are you the best at it?” In this economy, recovery has taken hold in some regions but not others. Even in those areas on the road to recovery, opportunities might be tighter, and business has radically changed.

It is no longer acceptable to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in regional or market sector expansions without prudent exploration first. How do you do that?

1. Set a budget. If your annual revenue is $2.5M/year then a $200K investment might be substantial. Set a budget that defines travel and subsistence for a fixed number of secondary research meetinga. The sky is not the limit here.
2. Do some recon before you leave the building. There are some wonderful research tours and sources available. FMI Resources, PSMJ and even local Economic Development Corporations have very inexpensive and useful tools that can be used to assess regional or market sector viability.
3. Use your resources. Local chapters of CMAA, ACEC or even agencies and municipalities have public information available that give you a sense of the competition from both majority and minority firms.

Here’s the funny part of this tragic story: The office manager—the lowest person on the firm totem pole—said this was a bad idea. For the cost of her annual salary, they should have listened before wasting all that time and money.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

Today's Project Manager: Marketing, Relationships, Communication

Publisher's Statement: The Ultimate Project Management Manual is a very large collection of checklists, procedures, and guidelines for A/E/C Project Managers. Industry Speaks solicited peer reviews of selected sections and topics, and is posting excerpts from all of them to give readers an overall sense of the manual. The feedback from some reviewers indicates that some of the general information does not apply in pursuit of public sector projects.

Editor's Note: This is the next to last installment review of PSMJ's 2012 Ultimate Project Management Manual. Series coordinator Lisa Sachs will wrap up the series next week.

While I cannot think of anything I would want a project manager to do that does not seem to be covered in this Manual; much of what I want a project manager to do is missing from this Manual or understated in the extreme relative to marketing, relationships and communication...
Click here to read the full review

The full series of reviews, as well as other course and book reviews, will be available at IndustrySpeaks.com

Project Controls: Schedule, Budget, Software & Apps

Editor's Note: This is the fourth of six Industry Speaks™ installments reviewing sections of PSMJ's updated Ultimate Project Management Manual.

Chapter 5 of the Ultimate Project Management Manual sets the Project Schedule as the key to the successful execution of the Project Management Plan. With the scope of services well understood, tasks need to be planned, sequenced and prioritized in the most efficient order for completion by the project team. The schedule serves as a project control tool at three levels of increasing detail: milestones—to tasks/activities—to deliverables.
To read the full review, click here.

Is Growth for Everyone?

Editor's Note: For more perspective on this question, check out the AIA Practice Management home page and scroll down to view the October 2012 webinar Best Practices in Business Development, presented by Karen Compton.

"Can a small firm with no plans to grow expect to survive?"

This is a wonderful question. Firm success begins with an understanding of the end game. If you are clear that your culture is to remain a small family-like firm, then embrace it and success will still be yours!

Growth is not a strategy for everyone. The monikers of your success will be in the ability to identify, cultivate, and deliver to clients who want, appreciate and respect YOUR value. So, what does this mean for staff?

1. They must be clear on the clients you service and the niche you provide. For the market sector you’re in, staff must be clear on what a client wants, needs and expects from your firm's culture.

2. They must be clear that “the buck stops with them” and more importantly, they must be empowered to take responsibility.

3. You must mentor them, not just on design, but on business. In a small firm, mentorship is key. Adopt a Shadows Program, where others can shadow not only your design decisions, but your business decisions. It is important in a small firm that everyone understands where and how you make and lose money.

4. Finally, embrace failure. Yep! I said it. Staff will make mistakes, and in a large firm you can hide. But, not in a small firm. So, create a safety net for failure—not by chastising, but by seeking what could/should have been done differently. Success is yours regardless of size.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the September 2012 issue of Professional Services Management Journal. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

Project Management: From Design Through Closeout

Editor's Note: This is the third of six Industry Speaks™ installments reviewing sections of PSMJ's updated Ultimate Project Management Manual.

The Ultimate Project Management Manual (UPMM) is an excellent reference and “how to manual” for design professionals, project managers, business management consultants, and owners. The templates, checklists, and diagrams are exceptional in their applicability, simplicity, and usefulness, and they correspond well with individual chapter and overall manual content.
To read the full review, click here.

Running a Project Management Business: Contracts, Invoicing, and Financial Benchmarking

Editor's Note: This is the second of six Industry Speaks™ installments reviewing sections of PSMJ's updated Ultimate Project Management Manual.

The Ultimate Project Management Manual provides a range of instructions for these business related topics for Project Managers (PMs).

The target audience for Chapter 3, The Contract Agreement, is specifically PMs who have primary contract writing and negotiation responsibilities. Some firms don’t delegate this authority to project managers. However, all PMs should be thoroughly informed about their firms’ contractual procedures and obligations in order to properly execute the work and manage risks.

This topic would benefit from a step-by-step approach to creating and negotiating contracts. “Some Basics About Contracts” didn’t provide these basics:
To read the full review, click here.

The Ultimate Project Management Manual onProject Initiation: The Plan and Startup

Editor's Note: This is the first of six Industry Speaks™ installments reviewing sections of PSMJ's updated Ultimate Project Management Manual.

The Project Management Plan (PMP) and its counterpart, the Statement of Work (SOW) are essential tools for identifying and controlling parameters such as project cost, schedule, and client performance needs. Chapter 4 of the Ultimate Project Management Manual stresses that a breakout/detailed structure of the PMP is needed to carry out and implement a SOW.

Included is a “how to” guide for sorting and organizing data into a valuable assessment tool that supports the PMP. Two samples, a Short Form and a Long PMP Table of Contents, outline what to include. While it is virtually impossible to factor every potential uncertainty into a project plan, the author convincingly presents the PMP as an essential tool for project managers.
To read the full review, click here.

Industry Speaks Panel Reviews The Ultimate Project Management Manual

UPDATE: The Ultimate Project Management Manual (UPMM), presented by PSMJ Resources Inc., is comprised of best practice resource materials to be utilized as a comprehensive resource guide by PM/CM professionals. A first edition was published in 1993 and this updated version published in 2012 reflects how the PM’s role has evolved and expanded over the past two decades, considering the impact of new technologies and integrated project delivery systems.

Industry Speaks™ has recruited a panel of experts to review the manual in a six-part series organized around key topics – Today’s PM, Running a PM Business, Project Initiation, Project Controls, Project Management, and The PM of the Future. The reviews will be posted in sequence and available to IndustrySpeaks.com subscribers and consultants with the first set to appear on January 10, 2013. Happy New Year!

Series Coordinator:
Lisa Sachs is managing principal of Cumming, a leading owner advocacy firm offering construction management services world-wide, responsible for successful delivery of large public and private sector building programs. Ms. Sachs is a licensed architect and an AIA fellow as well as a certified construction manager. She recently authored an authoritative new book on construction management entitled, What is Your Construction Management IQ? available for purchase through the Construction Management Association of America. You can reach Ms. Sachs at lsachs@ccorpusa.com.

The Road Well-Traveled (Is One With a Map)

My husband likes to take car trips. I hate them. I get sick. During our 20 years of marriage, I’ve had to learn how to take a road trip and not get sick. I’ve figured out that I need to know how long we’ll drive, when we will stop, when we’ll eat, and when I’ll get to sleep. If I don’t get to stretch, eat, or sleep, my husband can look forward to me being sick the entire time.

My reaction to a car trip without a schedule is a great analogy of what it’s like to run a practice without a Strategic Plan. The employees are the ones who end up sick (and tired), the partners are the ones who want to stop, and the owner is the one who gets no sleep. Why should your firm have a Strategic Plan? You wouldn’t get in a car and take a road trip without a map, so why run a practice without a plan?

A Strategic Plan is a valuable tool that maps your practice’s journey from present to future. It defines new opportunities and new markets, and it honestly addresses challenges and opportunities in management, operations, service delivery, sales and leadership. Without a Strategic Plan, you end up wherever the wind may take you.

Here are three important rules for developing an effective Strategic Plan:

• Be honest. Strategic Planning, done well, examines all of your practice’s functional areas and develops plans, tactics, and strategies to achieve long and short-term business goals. It will fail if the participants are less than honest with themselves and others about the firm’s opportunities and challenges. Ask for honest comments and observations, and receive them without judgment or criticism. While all points of view can’t be reflected in a focused strategic plan, all must be heard in order to have buy-in to the final plan.

• Focus on the journey, not the destination. The value in Strategic Planning is not in the document that you produce. It is in the dialogue, discourse, and consensus that builds toward the direction you are headed. Don’t spend nine months trying to write the perfect document. Instead, spend two days mapping out the best journey based upon a clear destination (i.e., buy, sell, develop leadership, add markets, add services, eliminate services, etc.).

• Define accountability. The best plan means nothing unless there is accountability. Don’t leave the table without defining accountability and actions for various components of the plan. This is often difficult, but without it, passengers along for the trip are likely to get sick—sick of promises not kept and goals not achieved.

Today’s competitive firms are strategic, thoughtful, and deliberate. Gone are the days where “winging it” could get you on the right road to your destination. Today, winging it is likely to send you coasting down an uneven side road, while others who have planned their trip enjoy a road well-traveled.

Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the November 2012 issue of Professional Services Management Journal. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

The Equation for Failure

While there is much disagreement about what the equation for success looks like, I am of the opinion that the equation for failure looks much like this:

Failure = (U + D) - (C1 + C2)

where
U = Understanding the client’s most important problems
D = Determining the best solution to those problems
C1 = Communicating the solution
C2 = Compelling and convincing the client that the proposed solution will really solve their problem

An equation for success can be extrapolated from our September 18 post - Business Development: Black Art or True Science?

Do you have an equation for failure or success? Please share it with us!

Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the September 2012 issue of Project Management. Karen Compton is principal of A3K Consulting (Glendale, CA), a business development and strategic planning firm specializing in the architecture, engineering and construction industries. Ms. Compton is also the founder of Industry Speaks™, a web-based business-to-business portal that connects AEC firms with experienced consultants, provides peer reviews of consultants, reports on key industry trends, and publishes expert reviews of professional courses and books. Contact her at kcompton@a3kconsulting.com.

The Slippery Slope of Staff Augmentation

Peter Block is a bestselling author, and on the subjects of empowerment, stewardship and chosen accountability. In his book, Flawless Consulting, Peter writes that, “The task of the consultant is increasingly to build the capacity of clients to make their own assessments and answer their own questions.” Nowhere is this issue more difficult that in the world of staff augmentation.

For decades, clients have solicited the design and construction industry seeking “consultants to provide on-call or as needed professional services.” While such solicitations are often true consulting assignments, many are often calls for staff augmentation. Staff augmentation may be defined as the ability of a company to provide prescreened professionals that meet the client’s criteria for a project and duration. While there may be a specific assignment, the staff member's employment agreement is with his or her own company; however, they are assigned to work on-site usually under the direct supervision of the contracting company. By all outward indicators, the staff person would appear to be an employee. This model works well for the contracting company as issues relating to poor or underperformance can simply be met with a call to the staff person's own company and the individual may be replaced.

This is vastly different than true consulting. Like staff augmentation, consultants may be hired per project or for duration. However, unlike staff augmentation, consultants do not work under the direction or instruction of a client in a supervisory role. Rather, they provide similar or complementary services to more than one company thereby offering the hiring entity the benefit of many perspectives and points of view on a subject or project. So, why is this so important to understand?

True consulting is thoughtful and advisory in nature. It is intended to foster an innate ability to assess and resolve problems in the absence of on-going advice or counsel. However, those in the role of providing augmentative assistance under the guise of a consulting agreement may often find themselves in the difficult situation of just taking orders. How then do we, as design and construction professionals, bridge this gap in the face of augmentation?

Recall that on the face of it, the staff you select to assume an augmentative role is arguably the best qualified and most talented for the position(s) required. But, looking deeper, they are a representation of you and your company’s management. To that end, when faced with a situation that is contradictory to your company’s philosophy (not the hiring agent) or best business practice, your employee must have an “open door” to your firm to resolve complex and conflicting issues. Without such a “loop,” your firm may be found diluting the real and valuable role that your consultancy provides, and at worst, be culpable for actions taken by your employee, but at the direction of another.

 

by Karen Compton, CPSM. Published in the August 2012 issue of PSMJ Resources Inc.

Stop Wasting Your Time (and Money!)

Have you ever felt like you were throwing good money down the drain on books and courses that you felt were really going to answer some fundamental questions; only to be disappointed that the abstract didn’t deliver?

Well, now you have a better way to determine what is worth your time and money.  Industry Speaks will begin providing course and book reviews to our subscribers. Our first course review, Leadership Effectiveness, is being offered by aecKnowelge® as a six part, web-based series for CEUs.   This review, which will be posted in September, will be authored by Valicia Dantzer, a 13+ year human resources professional whose focus is in the development and implementation human resources strategies in the areas of recruitment and retention, performance management, diversity, employee relations, policies and procedures, leadership development, training and organizational

development, and Human Resource Information System (HRIS) applications. Additionally, she is a member and holds certificated from the Society in Human ResourceManagement (SHRM) and Professionals in Human Resources (PIHRA).

In early fall, we will be reviewing PSMJ Publications, “Strategic Planning - Preparing Your Firm for Success” and the “Ultimate PM Manual.”  Are there publications or courses that you’d like our independent counsel to review? Let us know.  Our industry professionals are more than happy to take requests.

Karen Compton, Founder & President

Industry Speaks

Sage Advice

When I started my consulting practice, six years ago, I wanted “sage advice” from experienced professionals.   I wanted counsel from other business owners and executives about what had worked along their path and what had failed.  I wanted someone to share “lessons learned” and provide me with a “wide-eye” view of the AEC business, so that I could be successful.

That same desire for advice and success is now an integral part of Industry Speaks. Our Advisory Board begins their inaugural tenure July 30^th and we are pleased and honored to have such broad industry experience, disciplines and geographies represented and include:

Elena Andrews, Steinberg Architects, Los Angeles, CA

Lynn Capouya, Lynn Capouya Landscapes Architects, Irvine, CA

Tess da Silva, Lend Lease, Los Angeles, CA

Deborah Hodges, Golden Square, Chicago, Illinois

Nancy Leven, Veneklasen & Associates, Santa Monica, CA

Gary Krakower, ARC Graphics, Santa Monica, CA

Jason Palmer, Web America, Irvine, CA

Lisa Sachs, FAIA, Cumming, Los Angeles, CA

David Salazar, California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

Bernie Siben, Siben Consult, LLC, Austin, TX

Paula Stamp, PCL Construction, Glendale, CA

Ken Tichacek, Think Like Your Clients, Salisbury, VT

As members of the Advisory Board, their goal will be to provide counsel and direction into the development of reviews and recommendations that will purport our industry’s knowledge and create a sustainable path for business success in a global environment. 

Karen Compton, Founder & PresidentIndustry Speaks