You just can’t find the staff these days!
When an engineering project needs managing, contacting a recruitment agency and finding a project manager to do it for you would seem like an obvious course of action. For larger projects, a commercial manager and an engineering manager might also be required.
And so it begins…The project manager begins the project with high hopes of success (which project manager begins an engineering project with an expectation of failure?!!) However, when all is said and done, it’s not unknown for projects to fail or fail to deliver what was required within the agreed-upon budget and time frame. Many fail to meet the financial forecast or the ROI target.
If the project is failing from a commercial standpoint, firing the project manager and contacting the agency to find someone else who can do a better job seems like a fair call. As a business owner, you might not necessarily know exactly which issue has caused the breakdown, you just know that the project manager isn’t doing the job effectively.
At Coron Projects, we have come across the same scenario on several occasions where there has been some sort of breakdown. Sometimes even more than one project manager has come and gone. Unfortunately, the engineering project then stumbles on, but still without meeting the desired results. Each PM has been given the same brief, with the same objective, but somehow the project has not been connected to the business and the commercial objectives are still not being met.
Could it be that a weakness common to engineering projects is that they tend to be managed by engineers given the title of project manager and even business owners who are ex-engineers don’t have the same insights into the commercial side of things? This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the project manager or the business owner, they know their stuff when it comes to engineering, it’s just that the business itself needs to have more confidence in the commercial aspect of the project as it will dictate their ultimate objectives. At the end of the day, it’s the cost performance of the project that will determine whether the project manager is deemed to be successful or not.
It is often not the project manager’s fault if the project has been wrongly initiated and the commercial objectives have not been adequately clarified or planned for. If the PM is from an engineering background they are naturally going to read the project from an engineering perspective and may not perceive shortcomings in the financial planning. However, if a project is not meeting its commercial objectives, re-assessment is required, not necessarily an overhaul of the whole project or a sacrifice of the project manager. It’s more about identifying and thrashing out the project’s core commercial objectives and when there are underlying issues that are preventing them from being met, resolving them before any attempt is made to return to the engineering brief or think about a new project manager.
At Coron Projects we decided to face this problem head-on, albeit from a different angle! It’s a fact that often projects have not been started in the right way, within parameters which will ensure their viability and success. This is why we went about devising a way of taking engineering projects back to the drawing board to pick up specific issues and make a plan to fix them, facilitating effective project management and taking projects closer to commercial success.
Our delivery model offers a different approach:
Step 1
Our first job is to make a full assessment of the project. We don’t just walk around the car and sit in the driver’s seat, we want to get under the bonnet and find out what’s really going on. We know, thanks to the experience we have built up over the years, that discovering the pain points or pinch points of faltering engineering projects is about knowing what to expect. We know what we are looking for and how to identify the actual problems, along with diagnosing a plan of action to meet the commercial objectives.
Step 2
Once we have provided you, the business owner, with an assessment of what the project actually needs, we then take you on a journey of implementation. With our assessment in place, we can offer a proposal on the back of our findings. Our overarching objective is to get rid of the disconnect between what the project manager is saying and what the financial manager needs to hear.
We request full transparency from the business owners because without it we can’t work our magic! We’re not just ’another project manager’, we provide a very specific service to enable project management success. Whether we need to revisit the initial requirements of the project, resource or budgetary constraints, we will distil everything down until we have a plan that enables key players to “get stuff done”. Let’s be honest, there is a lot of stuff out there “simply not getting done” and Coron Projects is here to find out why.
Step 3
You may or may not require us to action the plan we have made. Our role may be purely consultative. Usually, our help is required, however, to see the project through to success and “get the stuff done” so our team are primed and ready for you.
We are aware that this approach does fly in the face of conventional project management for engineering projects. You would normally expect to go to a recruitment agency to find an appropriately qualified and available project manager to free you of the commercial issues you are facing. You can rest easy though, as Coron Projects already have the expertise and experience to bring projects and businesses into the alignment you want.
Maybe you are a busy managing director who needs to deliver a complex project (or maybe you know someone who does) and you (or they) have been an unhappy recipient of a project manager’s progress report. You have received the unwelcome news that the team aren’t on plan, on time or even on budget. Your attempts to work with internal leadership have left you frustrated and the project manager has been dismissed. Overspend, staff departure and loads of mistakes are all giving you grey hair.
This kind of scenario is a Coron Projects speciality. Regardless of the challenge, we’ll step in and we always aspire to be Decisive, Resilient, Innovative, Visionary and Excellent (these are the values that DRIVE our services). Our whole reason for existing is to get faltering projects back on track. With a new plan, we’ll make you look like a hero as you hit your commercial objectives.
So why not join us and approach your project the Coron Way?
