Premdale Consulting BLOG

The IT Crowd


What a breath of fresh air to have an IT department that believes their role is to support operational staff. In other words they exist because we need them and not vice versa. The lifeblood of a company is communication and my new company don’t mouth it they do it. There have been occasions in the past when I have had to literally threaten IT people to be held by their ankles from a window to get them to do what they need to do, so big tick for Amos and his staff.

IT departments when they are a support service do get a hard time and sometimes it is justified. However, when they understand their role and actually sit down with the person with the issue as opposed to hiding behind the dreaded email “help desk”, they then understand what we as project managers need – reliable communication.

Of course as the Project Manager you are responsible for the profitability of the project and IT support gets charged to the job. If you have a problem with a subcontractor for instance you hold the purse strings, but you do not with your company’s internal departments. My new best friend Amos understands that and I take my hat off to him.

Perhaps other IT people could learn from Amos. but if you try to poach him you may have to learn to appreciate hospital food.

New Employees

First impressions when joining a new company are so important. Have you ever shown up on day one only to be greeted with “we did not know you were starting today”. To me the simple steps I put in place to greet new staff are what I expect myself.

I arrived at my new company yesterday morning. On by desk were my new mobile, new laptop, access codes, company procedures manual, contact lists, a welcome email and text, and my team expecting me. My hotel accommodation had been booked, and my car waiting for me at the airport.

Simple stuff but so many companies get it wrong. If they cannot be organised for a new starter how on earth can they organise and deliver projects.

It is so refreshing to get back to new construction where everyone in the team knows what they are responsible for, who they report to and who reports to them. Also to have tried and tested project management software in place ie job costing, document management systems etc. Turn the computer on and familiar icons for Primavera an Aconex appear, no Sharepoint and no linked spreadsheets – Nirvana!

A We have a month in Perth head office and then start on site in Port Hedland. All we need to do is rev up our consultants (D and C), meet the subcontract letting schedule, hire the final project team members and just get into it.

Don’t you just love the smell of green concrete in the morning! Mr Wolf is back.

FIFO

Yes I have joined the legions of Fly In Fly Out (FIFO) construction people here in Australia. I live in Brisbane and now work in Port Hedland. To my Pommy friends that like living in London and working in Jerusalem.

But I am returning to site based construction – concrete and cranes, and I cannot wait. I reckon construction is in the blood, those of us who have spent many years trying to meet deadlines, budgets, etc must have a passion for it, otherwise why would we do it?. It does not matter if it is a high rise on the Gold Coast, resorts on the Mediterranean or coal mines in Kalimantan, there is a certain buzz about being based on site and seeing a job come out of the ground. I need a break from the “coorporate” world of Powerpoint, Politics and Platitude. I want to hear he sound of concrete pumps in the morning not the sound of some bloody management consultant. I also want to feel I have earned my salary not because of what it says on my business card but for what I and the team have achieved.

So farewell Mackay and thanks for all the fish and hello Port Hedland, 39C today and the best fishing in Australia.

Project Controls

The first time I heard this term was a few years ago whilst working in the Middle East in Qatar. In Australia the role is usually described as Contract Administrator, but project controls much better describes the position.

The skills and experience that I have looked for in potential contract administrators can be broadly divided in to three:

  • contract management
  • financial management
  • schedule/programme management (on larger projects this becomes the role of project planner)

Unfortunately on some lesser size projects the contract administrator ends up being the dogsbody who has to manage the subcontractors, submit progress claims to the client, order the stationery and do the filing. So a lot of their time is spent carrying out tasks which they are grossly over paid for.

The concept of project controls ensures that the right people are doing the right job. Unfortunately if you have ever tried to hire an experienced planner who can use say Primavera you will know how difficult it is.

So far I have been talking about the construction industry, mining and infrastructure has even bigger problems. Many companies in this sector simply do not have the systems and expertise to run and deliver projects. There is a reluctance from the mining sector to bring in construction people, yet, here in Australia that is where the boom is taking place and that is where there is a desperate shortage of planners, contracts people and project managers.

Mr Joyce

Good news for aficionados of Joyce, his opus magnus, Ulysses in now freely available in the public domain. Which means in can be downloaded at no got and with no fear of contravening copyright. So from Dedalus to the noble sons of Leda can be enjoyed on your iPad or your kindle.
So check it out on the Project Gutenberg site: http://www.gutenberg.org

A Hypocrite Released

If you push your views but not live by them, you are a true hypocrite.

This is probably the Achillese healof all bloggers. It is so easy to pontificate personal views, get a response and then it is game on for anyone to join in the chat. It is even easier to take yourself so seriously that you start believing your own bullshit.

My conclusion is if you espouse certain beliefs then you have no alternative but to live them. My beliefs are to make things happen and to be passionate in doing those things. My passion is construction: building structures and leading people who also want “to make it happen” I cannot do it today, but in five weeks, I will be back where I want to be. Concrete, tower cranes, design teams etc. I just can’t wait to be back and no longer be someone who talks about it but a Project Manager that really does make it happen.

I am joining an organization that has true job costing, robust cost reporting, a  “out of the box” document management system, and best of all – no Sharepoint and  no linked spreadsheets.

Who Wants Sharepoint

SharePoint folks enjoying some Huey Lewis action

I cannot understand why many organisations have or are going down the road of Sharepoint implementation. My experience is in construction project management and have gone through Sharepoint implementation in two companies in the last five years. On both occasions it was sold to us as a document management system – it is a document repository, as simple as that. If you want it to be a management tool you have to get bolt ons or pay through the nose for consultants to adapt it. Instead you can simply buy Acconex, project Centre etc etc and straight out of the box you are managing your document flow, drawing storage, capturing project correspondence and all the other data you need to run projects.

When will IT people understand what we do instead of forcing us to change best practice to suit what they think we need ie collaborative software tools. Managing projects does have some collaboration between the various participants but that is outweighed by the need to have accurate real-time records and systems that are easy to learn, use and manage.I came across a great blog and I have reproduced part of it.

What’s wrong with Sharepoint?

“I tend to agree that Sharepoint sucks. Using it is like closing your eyes, holding your breath and spinning around for thirty seconds. When your done you don’t know where you are, you are very dizzy, and feel like you might throw up… I might create something in one place, but can’t delete it or rename it there. After 15 minutes of searching, I can’t find the same tool I used yesterday to do one thing or another. It’s like that house in 13 Ghosts, everything SEEMS to move around on you… What really bothers me is this is not version one. It is a great idea gone horribly implemented.

STAY AWAY… Sharepoint can be an incredibly useful tool, but in any office where I’ve seen it deployed, it’s acting merely as a web-based front-end to the file-system. If that’s all you’re going to be using it for, you might as well just use the file-system, via Explorer and mapped drives, and do away with the glorified front end.

I absolutely hate sharepoint even though it seems to be serving purpose here of a company with over 9,000 employees. i have to do the support and administrative stuff for it and have several users I can’t get connected to our Portal for some reason we can’t figure out.

Sharepoint…I hate Sharepoint with the passion of 10,000 burning Lotus Notes users…Sharepoint is a decent enough idea but it lacks a logical flow for navigation. Also, sometimes it just seems more cumbersome than it’s worth but eh, it works too.

Honestly, I found Sharepoint so inadequate and typical of a first generation MS product that I could only shake my head at it.  If it was made by anyone else than MS and had to compete on its merits I suspect most of us would have never even heard of it”

So any business that has an IT department as a support service is exposed to having software imposed on it by people who often do not even understand what that business does.

If you find yourself in that position, you can push back and if that fails simply move on

Best Christmas Present

English: 1964 Aston Martin DB5, produced by Co...
Image via Wikipedia

What is the best Christmas present you have ever received?

I suppose there are presents givin to you as a child and those when you are an adult. On that basis I have two “bests”

The first was when I was young and I received a James Bond Corgi toy replica of the car from Goldfinger. The Aston Martin with ejector seat, machine guns etc. It was the bees knees and I treasured it.

The second and I suppose the real “best” was the news my darling daughter is coming to our place on Christmas day for lunch. Why so special? because this has not happened for sixteen years. Of course there is a story within a story but not to be published here.

 

Stone Wallers

Well it had to happen, the first blog from my iPad, an early Christmas present from my beloved. But down to business:

I believe in passion, I have written about it, brought it to the forefront of people’s minds and always tried to ‘maintain the rage’. But how do you keep the passion when you hit a stone wall, have cold water thrown over ideas, have your passion misinterpreted as a threat to the status quo.

What you do is simple. The stone wall may seem immovable and intransigent but really it is just a temporary block which can be surmountable. The stone wallers are predictable and stand out in organizations. Ultimately they get left behind an they are further away from the business as Narnia.

So maintain the passion and when you want to quite – don’t. Ramp up your efforts and stay until you have laid the stone waller to waste.

My father’smotto was simple “per ardua ad astram” it worked seventy years ago and it is apposite right now.

Profit – percentage or dollars

If you were discussing a pay rise with the boss would you ask for a percentage increase or a dollar amount. When you organize your household budget do you ever use percentages?

Of course you don’t, dollars mean cash income, percentages are for government spin doctors and bean counters. If you apply for a car loan or a mortgage the prime question is about how much do you earn ie cash.

So how to change this way of financial reporting? and get away from margins to the real world of cash – dead easy – stop trying to make us all accountants.

Readers have seen my views previously regarding killing off spreadsheets which is aka accountancy current practices. But that is a completely separate discussion. However, it was the bean counter who first started using Lotus 123 and now the expectation of employers is that is how the project manager will report on the project’s financial performance.

When a tender is accepted we know what the client is going to pay and if the estimate is accurate we know our costs. At the financial wrap up we know what we have been paid and what it has cost. The skill in forecasting between these two points in time is aided by using good project management systems such as Jobpac or Cheops.

The margin percentage is just a result of a simple calculation. The cash profit is what shareholders want.