Trafford Publishing: Tales From The Project Trade

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Tales From The Project Trade

by Paul Snare

104 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #01-0566; ISBN 1-55369-164-4; US$14.50, C$19.95, EUR13.00, £9.00

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

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about the book about the author reviews sample excerpts catalogue info

About the Book

A collection of stories illustrating the lessons learned by a professional capital project manager over a 40 year carrer. The lessons are presented in a conversational style; non-techinical, and focuses upon behavior, inter-personal style and the softer side of project failures and successes.

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.

Reviews

"I want to thank Paul Snare, MBA '58 (3651 71st Avenue West, University Place, WA 98466) for sending me a copy of his new book, "Tales from the Project Trade." He managed capital projects for over forty years and put his memories down in this most interesting memoir. I can't screw in a light bulb, so his project descriptions were most enlightening. Hope you will get a copy if this sort of topic is of interest."
Jan-Feb issue of the "Cornell Alumni Magazine," pg. 91.

Sample Excerpts

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.

Issue and conflict resolution...

At the beginning of a project there is a "feel good" period, a kind of honeymoon, where success appears assured and all will be sweetness and light. At this stage, you are reluctant to develop a conflict resolution procedure because you don't want to deal with negative issues. However, develop your resolution process early and do not wait until you are in the middle of a fight.
Projects normally have issues and conflicts. If you don't resolve them promptly, they grow in megatonnage and become more toxic. I have heard project teams say they don't have enough time to resolve an issue when it comes up and that they will do it at the end of the project. That approach yields dissatisfaction, hard feelings and higher costs.
I have seen several good methods for resolving conflicts. One way is to agree on who the decision-maker will be and then have each party argue the other side's case. This doesn't change the facts but it assures that each side understands the other's point of view. This process allows resolution between the parties, usually without going before the decision-maker. History teaches that we don't listen. This assures listening. Also, if you take too many decisions to your supervisor, your ability to get things done will be questioned.
My favorite process divides all the project participants into several tiers of responsibility. At the lowest level, you have two days to resolve the issue. If it isn't resolved, it moves up the line for a five-day time limit. Next, it goes to the site managers for each of the parties for a seven-day maximum. Beyond that, it moves to the vice-presidents. This process keeps disagreements from lingering on and becoming more detrimental to relationships and to project outcomes. This works well since those with the most knowledge of the issue deal with it first. In order to be successful, this approach requires a level of trust among the participants.
Usually a project has an issue resolution process written into the contract. Scott Paper Company wanted every possibility covered in a contract and always in Scott's favor. On one project, the work was 50% complete and we still did not have a signed contract with the construction company. In frustration we finally agreed that the remedies available to each party were those determined by common law. I might add that Scott assigned newly hired in-house lawyers to write construction contracts. Draw your own conclusions.
On a major Weyerhaeuser project, the contractor and Weyerhaeuser's project management agreed to accumulate all changes and settle at the end. The contractor's number was $7 million and Weyerhaeuser's was $500,000. The contractor threatened legal action but later settled for $1 million. Who fared best? No one knows. The contractor was never on Weyerhaeuser's bidders list again.

A few words...

A few words said at a critical moment can reveal a person's character and often will establish that person's reputation among his co-workers.
The manager of a large company's engineering division and I were discussing some matters at his desk. His assistant interrupted saying the construction manager at one of the plants was on the phone with an urgent call. I only heard one side of the call and it went, "Hi, Cliff... Was anyone hurt?... Call when you know more."
The engineering manager explained to me that the plant production crews were starting to occupy an almost completed warehouse when a forklift truck ran into an interior column causing four bays of the roof to collapse. Cliff was giving him an early warning so he would not be surprised and could respond to any other calls. He also didn't want to take up Cliff's time, as he knew it was a crisis situation. (Fortunately, no one was hurt.) This speaks to a lot of trust.
As a postscript, the contractor who was repairing the warehouse roof had stored materials on the adjacent roof bays. It rained heavily before he could do his work and water pooled under the materials causing two more bays to collapse. (Again, no one was injured.) If there is a lesson from this subsequent failure, it is that the most recent event (a column knocked out) probably received serious attention but other potential hazards were skimmed over. I once had a boss, who said, "Paul, no matter how well you think things are going, there is a land mine just waiting to be stepped on."
In an entirely different situation, I was in a plant manager's office of one of the company's midwestern plants. His wife walked in the door looking disheveled and said, "We've just been in an accident." The plant manager responded with, "How bad is the car damaged?" His distraught wife replied, "Don't you care anything about your children?" The plant manager followed her out, turning red with embarrassment as he realized what he had said.
Those swift, reactive responses reveal our beliefs and attitudes. Once said, those few words can never be unsaid. They mark you for life.

Catalogue Information