PM-in-Training Guide

business strategies

So you want to be a project manager? Taking care of the client — not design —must be the project manager’s role. By Bernie Siben, CPSM

The president of a full-service A/E firm made a presentation to the engineers in a branch office. In mid- presentation, a slide showed the job description of a project engineer, but no job title. The president asked, “How many of you want to do this?” Everyone raised a hand. The next slide showed the job descrip- tion of a project manager (PM), also with no job title. The president asked, “How many of you want to do this?” One hand went up, very slowly, and its owner whispered, “I think I want to do that.” The president said, “That’s one of the biggest problems in our industry. You all want to be titled and paid as project managers, but nobody really wants to do project management.” I’ve worked with engineers for more than 30 years, and have found that a great many PMs really want to keep designing. Many admit to choosing engineering as a career, believing that they could bury themselves in the details and not have to interact with others. College taught them to want the title “project manager,” but their instructors never told them that, when they became PMs, design would no longer be their job. So what happens when an engineer wants the title, but not the responsibili- ties? When the PM insists on being just the senior designer, barely finding time for budget and schedule management, never finding time to take care of the client? Or when a firm lets its PMs persist in this behavior?

What happens is a project that gets completed on time, at budget, meeting all of the technical criteria of the scope of work and all the obligations of the contract, for a client who will go to some other firm for their next project. Why? Because the PM insisted on designing and didn’t do basic client care — didn’t treat the client like a member of the project team, didn’t demonstrate the client’s value to the firm by “putting his ‘butt-print’ in the client’s guest chair,” didn’t learn the client’s preferred com- munication means or schedule, didn’t make personal contact for anything beyond the technical scope, didn’t spend

workbooks, sent them to the marketing department as if to teach us our jobs, and continued to hold fast to the above- mentioned belief. We thought, “Maybe the PMs will understand the real nature and impor- tance of the PM role and client care if they hear it directly from some of our biggest clients.” So we brought the entire staff — from all our offices — to the headquarters, put them in a hotel ballroom with a panel of major clients from each of the firm’s five market sec- tors, and began the discussion.

“Project managers must be good with people … other traits can be trained/taught. It is difficult to find great project managers because they must have technical knowledge but also be a great communicator.”

— Lindsay Young, CPSM, marketing and customer relations manager, DEN Management Co. Inc.

the time to let the client be heard, and didn’t provide value-added assistance if the time couldn’t be invoiced. A few years ago, I was marketing direc- tor for a full-service A/E firm with 250- plus professional, technical, and support staff in multiple cities. Most of the firm’s PMs, particularly our engineering PMs, still acted as if the PM was just the team’s most senior designer. Nothing we said or did seemed to change this belief. The firm sent most of its PMs to project management training, which included sections on client care and market- ing. Many PMs returned to the office, removed these chapters from their

At one point, the firm’s largest commer- cial real estate development client said, in these exact words, “If you are design- ing my project, you are not managing it.” What an idea! A week later, we sent a company-wide e-mail asking people to identify the major message(s) they took from this session.We received about 75 responses, and not one of them mentioned this idea. The senior management team was perplexed. We couldn’t understand how so many PM brains with different tech- nical roles and educational backgrounds seemed able to totally block this one concept.

September 2011 CE NEWS

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