Conversations with Architecture Firm Leaders Project Management Challenges: Competings Priorities

In Conversations with Architecture Firm Leaders, these conversations will have three premises.

1. You want your business to thrive

2. A thriving architecture firm not only creates architecture that successfully meets or exceeds client goals, it does so profitably

3. Employing competent, engaged people increases the likelihood of completing successful and profitable projects

I'm David Clarke. I'm an architect for 35 years. I've been in architecture for over 40 years. I'm not a business coach. I'm not going to discuss KPIs or help you get more clients or higher fees.

I help architecture firmly add more value to their most valuable asset: they're people who execute the projects. More qualified staff create more effective and profitable projects, making the firm more effective and profitable.

Deltek publishes an annual report every year, the most recent as of the date of this post, the 45th Annual Report, had 2023 data cited three areas of the greatest challenge.

Now these three areas actually have shown up ever since COVID as the top three concerns for architecture firm leaders, and they've sometimes switched positions, but they've all been right up there at the top, sharing the biggest concerns for architecture firm leaders in project management challenges. There are a lot of different areas of challenges, but Project Management Challenges have three top concerns.

I'm going to discuss the top concern today, and that's Competing Priorities.

Your staff is doing too much. You're doing too much. You're trying to do billable and non-billable work. Your staff is trying to pick up the slack of some of this non-billable work. You're just trying to do too much with too few people.

So you get,

• Declining utilization rate

• Increased burnout

• Impacted profitability

• Increased turnover

These problems take attention away from delivering projects on time. In a related data point in the Deltek report, is delivering projects on or ahead of schedule has been declining for seven years. In fact, in the 2023 data firms only delivered projects on or ahead of schedule 58% of the time, meaning,

42% of projects were late

Over 30% of projects were over budget

And this really all has to do with the fact that you don't have enough people. You are hiring, you're trying to get people, but they're just not responding. What do you do about it? This is the key to these conversations, I want to help you thrive.

So what can you do? You do need to hire people, but here's my suggestion:

Hire for production and then train up the people who are ready to move up.

You don't want your best people doing rote activities. Save that for the entry level staff who can be cost effective at doing the repetitive work.

Put your really effective staff where they're going to do the most good. You want to put them in areas where you're lacking knowledge and skill, but you want them to be aligned with their interest areas. Use them for more productive activities where they can use their creativity and their ingenuity, and their leadership.

So, those are strategies for dealing with your Competing Priorities.