Herding Lions? The Project Manager

I sat up quickly as the ringing of the telephone echoed off the walls of my small trailer. The clock glowed 12:30 am so I knew it was either a family emergency or something had gone wrong with the overnight deck pour. When I answered, Dan, my structure engineer, said "Hey boss, we turned over a mixer truck near the bridge!" My heart leapt to my throat as I went through the checklist, "Is anyone hurt?" I asked, when Dan said "no", then I pivoted to the job, "Can we finish the pour?". When Dan indicated that the truck was in the water and not in the way, I simply said "ok, see you around 6." and I went back to sleep.

In another post, I mentioned how managing estimators was like herding cats because diligence can catch mistakes before they become problems, but when you move into the Project Manager Role, your duties become more proactive and mistakes can kill someone or at the very least, erode your job margin. While you have a team in place, a project manager is ultimately responsible for jobsite safety; public safety; public relations; job schedule; procurements; environmental protections; billings; payables; owner relations; quality control; legal compliance; and bringing home the chest of gold at the end. For these reasons, project management becomes more like herding Lions. When properly managed, they can perform flawlessly, but one simple mistake can make for a very bad day.

We used off duty deputies for night time patrol on the five mile long jobsite. They would show up in their personal vehicle and we'd give them a company pickup to use for their patrol. Everything went well for a few months, a few reports of attempted vandalism and some trespassing, but otherwise normal for a remote site. Then one day a sheriff's car was parked in the lot when I arrived for work. Nobody knew why it was there until the County Sheriff showed up and asked to speak with me privately.

With my office door closed and the air conditioner howling on my end of the trailer, the sheriff quietly explained how our company pickup had been involved in a couple of domestic violence calls, and at least one high speed pursuit down the highway. These events, which would have been frowned upon by our insurance carrier, happened because the off duty deputy had received the call from dispatch and since he was the closest, he had to respond. The sheriff said he thought it to be prudent to park a county vehicle at the jobsite, so a responding deputy could avoid using our vehicle. I thanked him for the honesty and preventative action as my mind swirled with all the possible outcomes that I could have been dealing with, had lady luck been on vacation.

Project management is a 24 x 7 job during the peak of construction. If you are fortunate to have highly qualified help, then the flow is better but the stress remains. Worrying about hundreds of people doing the right thing and not endangering themselves or others is something that really doesn't get enough recognition in many companies. I had my own project to manage at the age of 20 and I sucked at it. Fortunately, I had experienced professionals around me, to keep the job moving safely and efficiently. I was smart enough not to disrupt their energy as long as schedule and production were within our budget.

Educate-Empower-Support is the management model that has served me well for many decades. The important part is to educate yourself before you pass along the responsibility to your team. A realistic job schedule with realistic milestones is critical to ensuring that a job is going well. Many companies focus on daily unit costs when in reality meeting production goals is usually a good metric for the budget. If the unit cost is not in line after a few days, then adjustments can be made, but productivity is the key to controlling collateral costs such as overhead, indirects, etc. It's a delicate balancing act that the lion taming project manager must embrace with honest, open communication and without fear.