Interview with Chris Carson, A Project Controls Thought Leader

Chris Carson has over 40 years of experience in Program/Construction Management, specializing in Program/Project Controls disciplines of Planning & Scheduling, Cost Estimating & Management, Risk Management, Document Control, and Forensic Analysis. He is a recognized thought leader in industry associations including CMAA, AACE International, RICS, PMI, and the Guild of Project Controls. He is the co-author of CPM Scheduling for Construction: Best Practices and Guidelines. To learn more about this book and order a copy, please click here.

I encourage you to watch this video interview with Chris and learn from the great stories and insights that he shared.

Early on in his career, Chris understood the importance of planning and scheduling in his own projects: “One day, I realized that I had moved into this crisis management role where I wasn’t planning properly. I was doing some level of planning, but I realized that I wasn’t doing the things I should have been doing. So, I sat down and put all my projects on schedule and brought them up to date, got them detailed, planned them out, got all the answers, and really within three four months my life went into a much more manageable role.”

Chris also realized the importance of communication and leadership in projects. According to Chris, “When you’re running a project at a foreman level, you’re working with all the workers, and it’s really easy to motivate people, get them excited, and set a pace. Then you move into being a project manager or even a superintendent and now you’re not actually doing the work. So, you’ve got to motivate people a little bit more remotely. Then you move into an office role where you’re not even on the job and you’ve got to motivate people even more remotely. I really started looking into why those things are so much more difficult the further you got away from the workers.”

Here is what Chris mentioned about his first paper and how he started teaching scheduling: “The first paper I wrote was about the fact that a project manager just doesn’t really have time to do all the scheduling because as a PM you have all the communications and letters and emails and shop drawings and submittals and problems and time and job costs. You have so many responsibilities that you can’t really do the scheduling as well. I found that nobody was scheduling right. Contractors always have an estimating department, but they almost never have a scheduling department. So, I started teaching the foreman and superintendents and PMs how to schedule and that’s how I started my training career if you will.”

When asked about the top 3 lessons that he’d teach someone who is new in project controls, he shared the following three lessons:

Please click here to continue reading....