Tales From The Project Trade - Softcover

Snare, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1553691644 ISBN 13: 9781553691648

Publisher: Trafford Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

Lessons learned by a capital project manager during a 40 year career. These stories may help your project be successful.

About this title

About the Author

Paul F. Snare's career spans forty years, primarily managing capital projects with Procter & Gamble, International Playtex, Scott Paper Company and the Weyerhaeuser Company. He has a civil engineering degree and an MBA, both from Cornell University. He is a registered professional engineer in Washington and New York. Paul and his wife, Louise, reside in the state of Washington.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The president of a large, successful engineering and construction company once told me, "Having our people learn lessons from past projects is the most valuable thing we can do for our company." "But," he said, "we have not been able to do that effectively, nor am I familiar with any firm doing it even remotely well." My experience supports his view.

In the 1980s, the engineering group I was working with took a run at documenting and transferring lessons from past to future projects using a database. Trying to have new teams apply those lessons turned out to be a wasted effort. There were several reasons:

* Lessons reported were often symptoms of more basic underlying problems.

* Lessons stemming from behavioral issues were deemed too risky to report because in the next project, roles might be reversed and personal evaluations could suffer.

* Users of the data would respond with "I'm not that dumb!" or "My project's different."

A look at the research on the subject of capital projects reveals, not surprisingly, one interesting conclusion: what draws most people to project work is the enjoyment that comes from solving problems. I can testify that every project, when you live with it throughout its life, seems like one continuous problem, regardless of the outcome. There are project people who, if things are slow, will invent problems so they can display their problem-solving skills. Some would say that this argues against learning lessons to minimize problems. I would assert, however, that if a well-constructed program is introduced and answers positively the "What's in it for me?" question that all of us ask, then there should be positive results.

It is said that we learn best from our own mistakes. Yet, there are some useful lessons that we can learn from the experience of others that may help us prevent mistakes and missteps and thereby contribute to the success of a project. In this book, rather than provide an engineering approach to the principles, practices and procedures of project management, I describe my experiences and observations gathered during my career as a project manager. Instead of sorting everything into lists, categories and flow charts, I use real stories to illustrate the lessons.

Philip Crosby's book, Quality is Freei contains a wonderful phrase that encapsulates what project management is about: "It's not what you know, it's what you do about what you know." The stories in this book illustrate the "do" in that quotation.

By my definition, projects are temporary organizations established to achieve a specific set of objectives including cost, schedule, quality, performance and other measurements. There is an assigned team plus stakeholders, who may or may not influence the team but whose future is affected by the outcome of the project. The project is usually accomplished within a larger organization. Examples include running a political campaign, making a motion picture or building a chemical process installation.

Creating this book was also influenced by a question from our younger daughter. One evening while I was working on schedules, estimates and other papers covering our dining room table, she looked at me and asked, "How do you know what to do?" What a question! She used seven words to focus on the basics of project work: priority, allocation of time, skill, knowledge and the good judgment to do the right thing at the right time. I've never forgotten to periodically ask myself if I was doing the right thing and sometimes, more importantly, did I know what I was doing and how to do it?

According to a Persian proverb, One pound of learning requires ten pounds of common sense for its application. The successful project managers I know have a full toolbox of skills and the "perfect pitch" to be able to tune their efforts to accomplish what is required. I hope the material in this book adds practical and useful ideas to your toolbox.

Philip B. Crosby, Quality is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979.

Edition details

• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1553691644
• ISBN 13: 9781553691648
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 106