Day 215 - Project Management Lessons

Image of blueprint by Mirandala, via Flickr.com

I had six months of training before heading to Doha. During that time, I contacted a number of offices to get familiar with issues I would have to deal with once I got there. One of those issues was a planned Public Access Control or PAC project. The project would be completed by a construction company, contracted by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS). The primary project manager, therefore, was someone in that bureau, a security professional, not a construction professional.

During the six months I was getting familiar with the project, I met with three separate DS staff members assigned to the project as responsibility was shifted often. The project had already been delayed beyond the original completion date. The security equipment which included a vehicle barrier and gate to improve the ability of the guards to keep vehicles out of the compound had been delivered more than a year before. The rest of the project involved hardening the wall between the space where the consular staff worked and the waiting room.

The first lesson I learned from this project is that I never wanted to work in an office responsible for building projects because no one ever saw the projects through from beginning to end. Instead, one person saw the beginning, another or more saw the middle, and yet another saw the end. And that seemed to mean that none of them really took responsibility for the whole project.

Those at the beginning of the project only worked on the plans through about the 35% level. This was too early to be sure that all the details were included. Then as the project moved forward into the middle stage, more details were added, but occasionally requests for changes would be rejected because it as already too late to include them. But since the project was still far from completion, most of those involved wouldn't press the issue since they wouldn't have to live with the result. Instead of insisting that the plans be reviewed and changed, the involved gave in. And that meant that when the project reached the final stages, it really was too late to make changes. In our case, the equipment was already on site. We were stuck with what was in the plans.

By the time I arrived in Doha, the DS project manager had changed yet again. Within a couple of months, that project manager scheduled a visit to inventory and inspect the equipment that was on site. He was the first of many visitors who seemed not to understand that our work week was Saturday through Wednesday, not Monday through Friday. He scheduled his arrival, along with representatives of the construction company that would complete the project, for Wednesday evening, Gulf Friday, and his departure for Saturday morning. I reminded him that would mean he would only be in Doha for the weekend. He thought that would be fine since he wouldn't then be disrupting us during our work week. It didn't matter to him that I would have no weekend. More than once I asked him if he would need anything special available during his visit. Each time he said he didn't need anything special. He would be able to do everything once he arrived.

Image of forklift by galeria_stefbu, via Flickr.com

On the Thursday morning when I picked up the project manager and the three people he traveled with, brought them to the embassy, and showed them where the equipment was stored just outside the back door of the building - we did not have a warehouse - the project manager's first question was "Where is the forklift?" I invited him to join me in my office so that we could discuss it without the others. When we reached my office and I closed the door, I reminded him, perhaps a little louder than needed, that I had asked him repeatedly if he would need anything to be on site for his visit and that he would be here on a weekend, yet he had never mentioned the need for a forklift. His response - he just assumed we would have a forklift. He hadn't thought it was necessary.

I called Mahmoud, one of the local employees, to ask him to come in to see if there was any way we could get a forklift and driver for the day. Mahmoud succeeded.

By the time the project was ready to start, the first project manager I had met in Washington had again inherited the project. And there were delays. Instead of beginning in the winter when the weather was pleasant, the start slipped into the middle of summer, the hottest time of the year. This was the source for my second lesson - project schedules should be set to begin at the worst possible time because if the schedule slipped, it would slip into a better time. And if the schedule didn't slip for other reasons, the project manager could then make a last minute change for the better time. Of course, this lesson would never be followed. Anyone who proposed such a schedule would be ridiculed. But time and time again I saw projects scheduled for the best of possible times slip into the worst of times.

When the contractor staff arrived, they told us the contract spelled out we would provide escorts so they could work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. But we did not have Marine Guards to be present during the work. That meant that we members of the staff had to be on site all those hours. Only a small number of the staff were entitled to get paid overtime, so the extra hours were divided up among them - Arnold, Gloria, and Jeff. Within a month, however, only Arnold was still in Doha. And that meant he worked 84 hours a week. The lesson I learned from this is that I should never have accepted those conditions. I should have insisted the Department send additional staff as escorts. Over time, the Department also learned that lesson. At my next small embassy, Chișinau, Moldova, the Department provided Cleared American Guards or CAGs when that embassy building had to be refurbished.

Image of fanby db0yd13, via Flickr.com

When I was becoming acquainted with the PAC project before arriving in Doha, I was annoyed by the constant rotation of project managers who all seemed to be learning about the project at the same time I was. But when the project was completed, we discovered the real pitfalls of rotating project managers. The consular waiting room, for example, was outside the reach of the building's air conditioning. That's what happened when the wall separating it from the office was hardened - there was no ventilation shaft through the hardened wall. The waiting room was like a sauna. And when we decided we would have to provide fans in the room to move the air around, we discovered there were also no outlets within the waiting room. Those were the little details no one noticed on the early blueprints. The best we could do was to open the windows, leave the door open, and then run an extension cord through the gap at the bottom of the ballistic teller window to plug in one fan in the waiting room. The same extension cord was used to plug in the vacuum cleaner at the end of the day when the waiting room was cleaned.

But we were so much safer than before the project.