INNOVATION May-June 2016

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Sweat the Small Stuff Are Small Projects Hurting Your Profitability? Marg Latham, P.Eng., CMC

outcomes rather than prescriptive procedures. Apply more detailed procedures only where the risk requires it. Don’t handcuff your project managers, but do make it clear what is expected of them. • Map out the project delivery process for small projects, from proposal to closeout. Keep it simple and generic enough to capture the variety and types of projects you carry out. Remember to include decision points where confirmations, checks, reviews, and approvals occur. • Create simple tools that project managers can use at each decision point to easily capture output from confirmations, reviews, checks, and approvals throughout the project. • Develop a simple small-project directory or file structure. For some companies, projects may be small enough to fit in one project folder. Others may require more structure. Six to eight folders, ten at the most, should be sufficient. Seek input from those who carry out small projects on the folders they use regularly. • Use the same naming conventions for electronic files across the organisation, whether for large or small projects. • Decide on the outcomes you want project managers to achieve. Keep them simple and easily tracked. Four to six outcomes should be sufficient. Consider including objectives for client satisfaction, profitability and schedules, as well as other objectives for behaviours you wish to reinforce. Set measurable targets for each objective and monitor the results. • When small projects go well, reward the team and learn from

‘Don’t sweat the small stuff ’ is a common expression—and one that many consulting engineering firms seem to practice. Large projects get attention, detailed planning, resources and continual monitoring. The thinking is that the big projects involve big risks and big bucks. And they do. Yet small projects are the bread and butter of most firms. What happens to them? Well, they are small. Doesn’t that mean less risk and less potential loss when things go wrong? Individually, that may be true. However, when small projects collectively amount to 50 percent or more of your business, as is the case with most engineering companies, they deserve attention. Small projects also serve as the training ground for project managers. Allowing employees to be casual about managing small projects can lead to bad habits and will not embed those best practices that you want your managers to graduate with and then apply to larger projects. Small projects need to be planned, resourced and monitored. This doesn’t mean managing them with the same tools as large projects. Doing so can add bureaucracy and costs that may price you out of the market. If your project management tools are designed for large projects and you impose them on the small projects, your frontline will gripe about how much complying is costing their projects. Eventually, they may stop using the tools and fill the vacuum with other ways of managing the projects or—worse yet—not fill the vacuum at all. So what is the solution? Consider taking some of the following steps. • Set up systems to provide parameters within which project managers on small projects must operate. Think performance

the successes. When small projects go off the rails, investigate the root causes, take corrective action, and communicate the lessons learned. The bottom line is ‘sweat the small stuff’ for the sake of your bottom line. v

APEGBC 2016 ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND AGM CONNECT DISCOVER +

Marg Latham, P.Eng., CMC, is President of Aqua Libra Consulting Ltd., where she assists clients in improving quality management, professional practice and project delivery.

Connect with your colleagues, industry leaders, government representatives, and consultants. Discover new ideas at this year’s conference.

Registration to open in June.

She is passionate about leading people and change. Latham has served as vice president with consulting engineering firms, UMA and AECOM Canada Ltd. from 2000 to 2009. She has managed institutional, residential and infrastructure projects in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver.

For more information, visit apeg.bc.ca/ac16 .

Victoria Conference Centre | Victoria, BC | October 20 – 22, 2016

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