Workload planning sessions occurred every Monday morning at the building design firm and were typically an opportunity to vent about the impossibility of workforce planning.?Department managers were either fretting over not having enough manpower to meet upcoming delivery milestones, or trying to determine how to creatively keep idle staff busy with productive work until the next anticipated big project finally arrived.?Recently promoted to Architectural Department Manager, Arturo chose to say very little at these meetings until he better understood the process.?He noted that John, the head of the Civil Engineering Department for the past twelve years, also did not partake in this weekly drama.
After one such planning meeting broke up, Arturo followed John back to his office to ask, “So, why doesn’t your department seem to have workload issues.”
“I manage my clients,” was the short answer accompanied by his signature cynical smirk.?Asked to elaborate, John then detailed six tactics he employed to either slow or speed up the work flow from clients of his department’s projects:
- Understand Client Expectations First:?When developing a list of interim and final project development milestones, John would start by soliciting his client’s target dates.?Too often he saw project managers be the first one to ?suggest a submittal date for each deliverable.?If the date was too far out, the client would usually ask if the date could be improved.?If the date was much quicker than the client needed, the client often just smiled rather than reply, “We’ll, we don’t really need it quite that fast.”?Except for those clients who claimed to “need it yesterday,” most clients were satisfied to silently watch their expectations exceeded.?By having the client offer a date first, the design project manager would usually have the opportunity to exceed his client’s expectations for delivery, either by suggesting an earlier date, or surprising the client with a sooner-than-promised arrival.
- Make Missed Milestones the Client’s Fault:?When the client identified a due date that John could not reasonably meet with current staff and committed workload, John would almost always agree to the client’s proposal anyway.?However, he would carefully identify (and document) what information his project team would need to have from the client, and by when, to meet that proposed date.?John was confident that the client would then choose a more achievable date, or when he failed to meet the expectation, John could point to the periodic reminders to the client about missing information that negated the design deliverable commitment.
- Establish Little or No Interim Milestones:?When John anticipated minimal project progress oversight by the client, John would only commit to a final delivery date.?Over a design period of a few months, he would typically have the opportunity to slow or speed up the pace of the work based on staff availability, ultimately completing on time.?If that didn’t happen and the completion deadline was about to be missed, John would revert to tactic #2 (above).
- Create a Self-Serving Sense of Urgency:?John would diligently alert his clients of imminent or recent changes to the building codes to which their facilities may not conform.?While he might not be so disingenuous to omit the fact that these existing conditions are “grandfathered,” John would often suggest a moral imperative to bringing facilities up to the latest codes, particularly for emergency egress and handicapped accessibility apart from there being no requirement to do so.?As a business planning alert, he may identify cost savings to have a building permit in hand for a planned project before the code changes, particularly relative to costly upgrades to meet more demanding energy use reduction requirements.?The intention of these alerts would be to initiate unplanned projects with immediate starts, or to accelerate the start and/or completion dates of planned projects.?The typical results were the client’s gratitude for the cost savings heads up, and immediate work starts without the competitive proposal process for “emergency” projects.
- Proceed on Risk:?If the workload was insufficient to keep his department staff busy, John would proceed with work that was most likely to be authorized soon.?If the work eventually came through, he had the chance to exceed has client’s schedule expectations.?If the project never materialized, his department was profitable enough to write off the wasted hours.
- Offer Client Incentives:?John was not above calling a client on a prospective project and announce, “I have an opportunity that could be mutually beneficial.”?He would then offer to reduce the project fees if the client would authorize the project immediately in order to help John’s department cover a dip in workload.?This approach would not be viewed as a discount that suggested John could be typically pressured into lowering his fees.
“Won’t you the be losing profit on that discounted fee project?” Arturo wanted to know.
John paused, signaling he was about to reveal another secret of his client management prowess, and then softly explained, “Not necessarily.?There are ways to manipulate the project execution to generate fee change orders in such a way that the client believes that delays, scope changes or unanticipated existing conditions are the client’s responsibility rather than the fault of the design firm.?The client often apologizes to me as he gladly signs the change order.”
These insights into project management did not dissuade Arturo from his preference for a more collaborative approach with his clients, to settle on a schedule that met the needs of his clients as well as his department’s manpower limitations, along with including schedule buffers to handle inevitable unexpected design process speed bumps.?However, he had to run to his next meeting so there was no time to debate project management approaches with his much more experienced peer.?Arturo did make a mental note to find out how John accomplished leading his clients to happily approve fee change orders.
