Teachable Moments: The Link Between Project Schedule and Staff Member Paychecks

James (Jim) P. Branden, MBA, PMP, is an accomplished project manager with over 35 years of managing projects in several industries and countries utilizing various methodologies while working with diverse disciplines. He has successfully completed projects in Information Technology, Architecture, Urban and Land Planning, Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Research and Development, Facilities Management, and Organizational/Cultural Change. He was the recipient of the Presidential Award of Excellence” from the National Endowment for the Arts for a project with the Department of Defense. His projects range across 35 of the USA, England, Germany, Japan and Norway.

  Estimating   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

Teachable moments are formed when you have done something--regardless of the outcome--and learned from the experience. Learning makes us better at what we do and provides a great opportunity to develop others and sharpen skills. We’ve compiled our best Teachable Moments from our community members for you to learn from and share with other project managers.

Several years ago (back when we used a dedicated word processor to produce invoices that we mailed to our clients), one of the programs assigned to me included several projects with enough similarities that we developed algorithms to estimate the time and costs for each of our disciplines on the team. Our experience gave us a high level of confidence in our project team’s ability to produce acceptable deliverables “within the schedule and budget”.

However, a part of the tension was the pressure on PMs to sell and make a profit--two of their annual performance metrics. The opposing pressure encouraged the staff to be utilized “as much as possible”. So, while all our PMs wanted the staff to report the fewest billable hours, the staff wanted to report the maximum billable hours.

One technique for trying to balance these conflicting pressures across the team included obtaining the discipline leaders’ agreement that the fee was reasonable before the final negotiations with …

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