PM and Construction

This idea I had has grown so fast even on here I am surprised. I posted a poll question before starting this thread, and generically speaking, I am seeing it is 50-50 right now on the tempature of the field and "PM"

I posted a response on it to a question I wanted to share with all of you, because I think it was relevant. My initial intent was to just see if I was alone, I am not, but I do see what started all this in the first place... Misunderstanding.

I believe I run into it in my work because they don't understand the "PMI" aspect, or implementation of adapted practices and styles I have learned.

Here I believe I was probably the cause, not expressing or describing well enough... so I wanted to apologize for that.

any way here is my response from a question proposed off that poll I made

"I can answer this pretty easily, and I am glad you went this road because it wasn't just this poll where the conversation went this direction.

So a little back story...

I stumbled across PMI. I was doing "project management" before I ever even knew it really was a thing. When I found out it was a thing however I dove in deep. I was reading everything I could, webinars, studies, taking classes, it appealed to me as a person and incorporating that into work was a great idea to me.

I was so far down the rabbit hole when I came back educated, I had these blinders on believing words like Agile, Scrum, Sprint, Stakeholder, Work Breakdown Structures, and Risk Assessment were in everyone's vocabulary.

I was astounded to find the exact opposite. Working for 2 different contractors over the last few years I have yet to find another in my industry.

I found that odd.

I loved the processes, and as I tried finding more tactics tailord/adopted for construction I was finding not only was I not seeing this in real world instances, the project management field as a whole drops off very quickly. aggressive pursuit of knowledge lead me to "construction management", and that's when I pulled back, because I had an idea.

I have had some real success tweaking the things I have learned to what I do. The thing is I can't really explain my personalized "sprint" being my own "Scrum Master", and how tweaking the Agile process I gathered very informative insights especially along the lines of productivity and efficiency.

Ultimately I would love to see something along the lines of a PMP-C(onstruction) certification offered, something to help establish a standard in the field, but on a micro scale I want to incorporate how I have been doing things on my projects into even the company level.

I have a lot of ideas, and when I have demonstrated what I am doing and what it produced as far as useful data to make more informed decisions around, and actual deliverables to others, mainly my management, they like the concepts, ideas and theories of what I am doing, I just feel as though there is too far of a gap between this style I am building in it's infancy, and the industry norms.

Having more people on board would help me tweak the style I am building, gathering input from others, and adding in or deleting steps/procedures/tactics/ideas I am/am not using.

Before I began all that....I thought why not engage a community of "PMI focused" if you will project mangers, to gauge where things are at on a more macro scale to help me determine my approach.

What I found interesting is these "PM's" have wanted to give me more of their opinion on things like the "Agile Manifesto" and official definitions of terminology, then the input I was looking for like approaches they have used or their company uses or stories of going from an old way to a new, or even if it is a good/bad idea.

I blame myself, maybe I didn't frame it right. Regardless... My want to help my industry evolve will continue, this is now just a "project" I have to continue working on."

Hi Steve, It does feel like a bit of a wilderness out there when it comes to adopting or adapting PMI practice standards and frameworks to the field of construction. I appreciate your efforts.

There is a steep learning curve to acquire these skills and values in the beginning. However, there is great potential to realize the benefits over time, in the form of satisfactory project outcomes, increased safety, and improved profitability especially for small to medium sized construction companies.

I think you are on an interesting path, the see about PMI certification for construction. That would contribute to resolving at least some part of the problem.

I also agree that in constructions world Agile is really hard to implement as I found difficult to identify the "incremental" deliverable. For Instance, If the project scope is "Deliver a highway" ,you cannot deliver the asphalt first and lines, signs and lights then. In my opinion, the best approach in this case is waterfall. By the way, Agile may be used in the concept phase to quickly build a robust project scope. In the end, for me , hybrid approach is the way to recommend.

You could say they built highway 50 in Québec using an Agile approach.

They built two-lane portions at each end, with hookups back to secondary highways. These highway portions were in use for years while they worked on the middle pieces.

Now, they are working on expanding certain areas to four-lanes. (The overpasses were built sufficiently large at the beginning to allow for future expansion.)

Each "sprint" produced something that could be used immediately by the driving community.