No, No, No, Ed. You’ve got it wrong. YOU are supposed to be the idiot and drive everyone else to distraction, road-rage and general levels of subservience to your own whimsical style of driving whilst talking on the mobile, reading a map and scoffing your lunch!! Vengeance will be YOURS.

James.

Ed - the answer is........Become a Van Driver.

James.

Ed,

I’m not sure we’re off topic at all actually, I think you’ve hit the nub of the issue, or at least one of the major points. Trust and the team.

The industry usually forms a new team for each project. By team, I mean everyone, from the client’s rep to the contractors. Even within each camp (client, engineer, contractor, etc) the teams are often constantly shifting. Thus we all start a new job not knowing each other. If we don’t know each other, there’s little chance we can trust each other and planning (or the acceptance of planning) requires trust. So, how do we build trust? First answer is go find a philosopher, they’ve been pondering it for centuries :P

wrt to rolling your sleeves up, This is certainly a good way, particularly to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about and that you’re don’t consider yourself "above" the task. Sometimes this isn’t very practical (for example, I would need extensive additional safety training to work alongside some of the guys on my current projects, even if the task is a relatively simple one, the working conditions are not) One coporate answer is "team building" events, which I suppose are better than nothing, but tend to be treated as a hokey excuse for a free lunch. I would think one good way is to quietly foster out of office team building using the existing interests within the team. Team building weekends based around "lets all co canoeing, that’ll be great" are illconceived imo, especially when no-one asked forst "who here can swim?"

Our last project the contractors were all Italians, so there were 3 or 4 ad-hok football teams sprung up. I was invited to join them and really should have gone, but I bloody hate the game. My Bad. Here in Belgium everyone rides a bike so there’s an opportunity. It’s all pretty standard motivational stuff and much of it very hokey, but it can be useful I guess.

I’ve rambled off again, in essence I think that when you start a project with a new team of people who do not know each other, you cannot expect any level of trust to spring into existence. As the planner takes data from all areas of teh job and juggles it together using his experience and imagination to produce a feasible plan, he needs the trust of those that he gets the data from, or he must generate it himself. If he generates it himself, those who need to follow the plan will not feel responsible for it and will find 3 things wrong (and tehre will always be at least 3 things wrong with any complex plan) and use this as an excuse to abandon it.

As a PM, I’d say support the work of your planner (of course) but make it clear to all that the plan being generated is a collage of everyones ideas, needs and responsibilities, not one man’s idea of how a project should be run (The PM or planner’s)

Then go play football and/or get drunk with them.

Fair enough, you obviously don’t need me (or anyone else) to tell you how to run your staff.

The silver bullet though, is a toughie.

I moved over to petrochem a couple of years ago and they really do out a lot of effort into planning here compared to commercial development or even civils. I don’t say they’re perfect, but they certainly recognise that jobs don’t plan themselves and that planning properly is a complex exercise. Our company guidelines for planning a complex stop (>15M Euro or 200k MH) start 3 years before the stop itself, with full team involvement 18-24 months prior to execution. It’s easy for the managers here to appreciate why they shuold commit the resources for this up front; the unit we shut down in March makes 500,000 Euro profit per day when it’s operating or more to the point, fails to make 500,000 a day while it’s down.

A realistic estimate of the actual costs+lost opportunity per day or week created by a late project should be enough to convince the money men that planning is worthwhile. I’ll leave you’re own people to you, use your spanner on them!

6p’s? please enlighten me and excuse my ignorance.

Sure something is better than nothing. But I don´t think that´s the point. A crude bar chart won´t let you but check milestones, once they are due and late. There´s no way to generate a realistic percent complete that way; much less make estimates to completion.

A simple bar chart summing up information generated from a real program is a different thing. A real, comprehensive program does not necesarilly mean tons of paper.

How do you control or update a contruction project planned by means of a few bars drawn in powerpoint?

Ernesto,
if top management is convinced that PM is worth implementing then it is necessary to develop corporate project management standards that are mandatory to use in any project. If this is not achieved then you will start from the very beginning every time and besides will not be able to manage project portfolio. Top management should be supplied with reports not only on projects but also on project management implementation process and at least once in a month a special meeting with the top management participation should be devoted to the project management implementation. Try to involve top management in the PM implementation. Personnel resistance to changes will be lower if everybody will know that the process of PM implementation is monitored and supported from the top and all problems will be reported.
PM makes projects highly visible and many people are not interested in this visibility.
Vladimir

Ernesto,
implementing project management (not only scheduling) we always begin from the top. Top managers (and preferably owners of the business) are the real interested parties. If they are not involved, if they don’t require proper planning and regular reports then you will meet opposition that is hard to overcome.
So start with the highest possible level. If they become your allies then PM implementation has good chances for success. Without management support you will have many problems and your chances to be successful are low.

I think you should inform them of the advantages of a Planning.

1) Time is Money

2) A "plan" main objective is to ensure that you will complete the work on time. (See point 1)

3) It will identify if it is possible to save time. (See point 1)

4) If you plan propper you would notice that their will not be stoppages due to poor planning. (See point 1)

5) It will also assist you with extension of time / Delay claims. (See point 1)

6) etc. See point 1

In short propper planning will save you money.

How do you think Bill Gates did it. I am convinced he had a good plan and even a better planner.

Ultimately it is the project managers call, but here we have a project manager who is pro planning and is trying to get the other project stakeholders to plan also

I think Marc Borburgh was on the right track when he suggested that you need to lead the charge. Perhaps you should hold a regular (fortnightly or monthly) project coordination meeting where each of the stakeholders discusses what they have achieved since the last meeting and outlines what they plan to achieve during the next period, as well as forecasting dates for project milestones.

Document these discussions and issue them after the meetings either in a bar chart or simply as dot points with dates against them.

Group psychology dictates that people will prefer to live up to written commitments rather than face the embarrassment of not achieving them


out of interest, what is the project you are managing. no need to be specific, but it would help to understand the context

Stuart is right, CONTRACTS is the key word. At first, if they don’t want to plan, MAKE them plan and hit them with a contract that tells them to plan.

Besides that, if they don’t want to plan and they don’t have to contractualy (is that English ? ) then the keyword is COMMUNICATE. Make a schedule yourself (you can use the Prod-Rates on this site) and make a guestimate plan. Then tell your contractors that "this should be it" and have them coment on the plan. Trust me, 90% of them will comment and before you know it, you will have more information about the work to the done than you would have ever imagined.

As a final step, you can (maybe) trick them in to complying to your plan with there input for execution.

COMMUNICATION and INPUT is the key.

"Failing to plan is planning to fail" I use that all the time, one of my favourits :-D