Conversations with Architecture Firm Leaders: Project Management Challenges - Inexperienced Project Managers
These are conversations with architecture firm leaders. You've got challenges, and it's affecting your business.
These conversations have three premises.
You want your business to thrive.
A thriving architecture firm not only creates architecture that meets and exceeds client goals, it also does profitably.
Employing competent, engaged people increases the likelihood of completing successful and profitable projects.
I mentioned there are three main project management challenges Deltek cited in their 45th Annual Report. The first two were Competing Priorities and Staffing Shortages.
The third one is Inexperienced Project Managers.
Now, all of these are still pretty close. Inexperienced Project Managers were about 39% whereas the other two were close to 60% of firms saying that was their biggest issue. So for many firms Inexperienced Project Managers is actually their biggest issue.
The challenge is that you're tasking new project managers, or people who've been with you for a while, but taking on the new project management role before they have sufficient confidence in what they're doing in their role as a project manager. What results is,
poor time management
poor client and consultant communications
lower document quality
poor fee and budget management
missed deliverable deadlines
You and your senior staff don't have time to give adequate oversight, much less to train these project managers.
What results with the young project managers who are new in their role,
they're stressed
they get a burnout situation very quickly, and that results in
lower productivity
What's really going on here?
It's a mismatch in the assignment and the strength.
Obviously, they need more experience, but they have to do the project managing in order to get that experience.
There's also a mismatch in their internal strength. What do they feel that they can do?
A project manager who really sees himself or herself as a designer might lack the motivation for the operative project management tasks.
A shy introvert might feel trepidation, fear, about communicating, and end up procrastinating and wasting time.
An outgoing person might not have the discipline to do all the meeting, documentation and quality control.
There's different qualities each person has. There are more effective ways of utilizing your staff and tapping into their strengths.
This is what I recommend, and this is take action. You can start right now.
First of all, consider giving your team a personality assessment. This reveals their strengths, what areas of strengths that they have, that they really feel connected with, Gallup’s StrengthFinders is one that I recommend. No compensation here for this. I've done it. I found it really effective.
Another way is to tap into their strengths for having them do other things. Free up other people to do the project management while they can do something else that those experienced project managers are doing. So you're matching the innate ability that those people have to firm roles.
Finally, there's training to build their confidence and strategies in project management. There are lots of project management trainings out there. I offer project leadership, which is not about the nuts and bolts of project management, but it's about the big picture, about how to lead people--how to pull everybody together, and that's Architects’ FAST TRACK To LEADERSHIP System™. https://architectsaccelerator.com/fasttrack
I'm David Clarke. I've been in architecture for 40 years. I've managed hundreds of projects, led hundreds of project teams.
I'm going to continue these conversations with tapping into more of these areas that are really challenging you and help you find some ways of dealing with them.
