The past few weeks have been quite a roller-coaster, but what’s new, right? Life as an engineer is nothing short of exciting. Working in project management presents new and exciting challenges every day, which is both interesting and challenging. One thing though, is that you have to be ADAPTABLE.
Adaptability – this single quality is way more important than I had ever imagined in the working world. For someone like me, a self-confessed control-freak, perfectionist, it’s actually sometimes quite difficult to adjust quickly when plans change. I am also not talking about a small schedule overrun or scope tweak, I am talking about major, paradigm-shifting changes that have the potential to alter the very course of the project. At first, I fought against these large changes, my well-schooled, university-bred brain still pushing for best practices, procedure to hold above major digressions. This is a common characteristic of graduate engineers. We want things to be textbook, by the book, compliant and planned. In the real world, this is seldom, if ever the case.
We are building a plant for one of our operations, in a crazy timeline and with a very tight budget. Following the book won’t get the plant to run in the time we need to get it running by, so what do you do? The crazy thing is that the company has another, similar plant nearby that was built about ten years ago, at extremely low-cost and in record time. You could argue that the plant is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to design and maintenance, and things frequently go wrong, but the bottom line is that the plant still runs! It produces what it needs to. To you as an engineer, a technical mind, this may not seem quite enough. What does production matter when the plant is obviously of low quality? But think of it from another perspective – the CEO of the company doesn’t care about how many times the plant breaks down, if it produces and doesn’t hurt anyone, he is happy.
So back to my project – so we want to build a plant that works better than the one I described above, but we have little money and no time to site about planning down to the nuts and bolts…what do we do? Well, we do our best. We make decisions, sometimes not the most academically correct, to make things happen.We pull rabbits out of hats, we work together cohesively, we have faith in each other and we cover our every move to make sure we’re not overstepping important legislative, safety, or company procedures. This industry is a rat race, but a rewarding and extremely fun one.
Project Management is about making a clear plan, and doing your best to stick to it. Or at least that’s what I thought it was about. That view of project management is highly idealist. It works on the assumption that everything will go well. Real life however, means that nothing will ever go well. Unforeseen obstacles, new challenges, disastrous occurences will happen. Project management is about managing these challenges, not seeing them as problems, being fluid, knowing enough about the diverse bits of information concerning the project to make quick decisions and implement them across all the project management areas, keeping a lot of information in your head at one time, knowing people and what motivates them, and intuition.
I believe you will find the CEO does care about how many times the plant breaks down, or at least should care. If the existing plant was meeting demand for product then wouldn’t need the second plant. Each time the plant breaks down then effectively loosing income. So reducing the mean time between failures (MTBF) is important to productivity.
Once you have the two plants, then instead of simply repairing the existing plant, have opportunity to upgrade it so that reduce its MTBF, thus increasing production capacity. Something which is difficult to do with one plant, since if shut down to upgrade, not producing anything: so repairs tend to be quick fix, to get back in production.
Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will. So being able to adapt and improvise is important. Not really about following the plan, more having foresight to all that can go wrong, and being prepared so as to be able to respond appropriately.
Those quick decisions you mentioned, make it appear that everything is running smoothly even though the plan has gone to the wind. The quick decisions are easier to make with prior preparation.
Basically that is what planning, design and engineering are about: getting better and better at predicting what is likely to happen, rather than specifying what would prefer to happen. Rules are made to be broken.
Should care, and yes – you’re right about that, but if the plant is doing the bare minimum, thats generally sufficient. And my plant is an expansion in production, not for production redundency, so unfortunately the poor old plant is going to have to struggle along for a while yet 🙂
I definitely agree with you on the planning side – lsome companies take years to plan a major project, this unfortunately wasn’t the case with this project though – so you have to work with what you get, right? I just hope we can do our best and make it work! Hope you’re doing well.