Project Management

[lamojai]

I was involved in a large ~ year long design project and I have over 20 years civil engineering, last 10 PM experience. I was asked to be involved with the project and constantly was kept out of the decision process by the PM. I was not the PM on this job. The PM would have early morning calls with team members and I was cut out of the process. I asked the PM what my role was and I was continually told that I was to keep doing what I was doing, so I tried to help out as I could. The job went 40% over budget which is a huge loss. It was really frustrating!
Another senior team member was thrown off of the project because the was too vocal about the project.

Has anyone else had this experience it was painful to watch the carnage.

 

[FreddyNurk]

Not the same, but I've been in 'Project Management' meetings where the statement was made 'We're in the early stages at the moment, so we're just going to manage it week by week as it goes', which ended up that in the meeting every week, they talked about how they'd 'manage' it.

If I didn't know better I'd think that management was just talking about how you would do something without ever actually doing anything.

 

[KENAT]

I've seen some lousy project management, and when you've done some yourself, then yes it's frustrating.

Posting guidelines faq731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

(probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​

 

[IRstuff]

Most PMs learn on the job, and the diligent ones learn everything they can about how to do it right, and will get it right most of the time. Others are simply overwhelmed, or full of themselves, and will probably never learn what to do, or even what not to do.

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[gandersen]

lamojai:

I have also had first hand experiences with budgets getting away from you on large projects. There are many reasons why projects go bad and many ways to fix them. Personally, I think that the best way to prevent budget overruns is to restructure the way that we handle one of the most fundamental aspects of a project - the transfer of work between project managers and staff.

Some of the participants in this forum came up with some pretty good ideas on best practices for transfering work. They are summarized in prior threads

768-272259

768-272104

I presented a paper at the ASCE Texas Section Fall 2010 meeting that describes these best practices and an associated web-based work transfer tool called OREx.

You can get a copy of the paper at:

http://www.ore-engineering.com/Blog.html?entry=2010-asce-el-paso-conference

I hope that this helps.

Glen R. Andersen, Sc.D., P.E.
Optimum Resource Engineering, Inc.

http://www.ore-engineering.com