Project Managers Who Don’t Get Jobs Done

Good morning everybody, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.

Over the past year or two, and certainly this is not a consistent thing, but more and more we find project managers who
just aren't getting the job done. And more often than not, they're not getting their tasks done. They can't get everything
done that's on their plate. And this can be bewildering too for the management folks because the trend in construction
has been for them to probably carry fewer jobs, to carry less responsibility than they used to. Some of you that are in
charge of companies probably remember the good old days where you carried four or five jobs. You carried a $40 million
job and two other jobs at the same time. And now you look down and you say, "Well, gosh, they got one $6 million job
and one $500,000 job and they can't get it done." What's going on there? Well, certainly project management has gotten
more paper-intensive and probably more difficult than it was in the past, drawings aren't quite as good, all of those same
old tired excuses.

But really what I see is, we have a number of project managers out there who really aren't very good at the basics of
organizing themselves, organizing their tasks, prioritizing their tasks, eliminating distractions. And when I say eliminating
distractions, the distractions in life just seemed to be more and more and we'd probably have social media and email and
all of those things to blame and the internet and all of that. It's just so easy to be going through your emails and all of a
sudden get sidetracked and all of a sudden, you're spending 45 minutes on minutia and your priorities have gotten pushed
back and might not get done for the day.

And I also see decisions not being made oftentimes by project managers. Instead of driving for conclusion, they're beating
around the bushes, and not holding folks accountable for their pieces of the pie and getting decisions made and things
like that. Not driving for decisions and driving for conclusion. So if you see that going on with your people or you have that
going on, it's not necessarily an easy fix, but as a leader or a manager of people, you certainly have the ability to help your
people organize, prioritize, eliminate distractions, and get things to a decision point. But you have to do that.

So, I was listening to a leader the other day talk about having their weekly one-on-ones. And in those one-on-ones each
project manager was tasked with coming in to talk about what his priorities were for the day and for the week, how things
were going in terms of their overall workload, their overall workflow. And they were talking through those priorities,
distractions, things like that, to make sure that their people were staying online on task and getting everything done that's
on their plate and not have things that are flowing over into the next week or the following weeks that eventually can
affect the jobs and the jobs not getting done.

So, think about that as a leader and a manager. You are part of that responsibility of your project manager's being
organized, prioritized, and not having too many distractions. And I think you'll find that you really can move your team
forward, but you do need to take on that responsibility in that task.

Again, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.