Interview 1

Respondent 1 is Adjunct Professor Infrastructure and project managment at a well-known Australian university and consultant of project management CV : http://www.alan-patching.com/alan-patching-cv.html

Interviewer: Can you hear me now? yeah, now I can hear you.
Respondent 1: yeah, just all of a sudden, it unmuted. Ok. How are you going?
Interviewer: I’m good, thank you. How are you?
Respondent 1: yeah, good, mate, good.
Interviewer: yeah, thank you for accepting my invitation and, as you know, my research concerns understanding what success on a project means and how to measure success in a quantifiable way so the projects can be compared and benchmarked.
Respondent 1: ok. Before we go any further…
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: can you see my screen there?
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: there’s a thing that says “webcam”. See where it says “webcam”?
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: hit that button where it says “share my webcam” and I should be able to see you.
Interviewer: i hope so, because, um, yeah, i hit it, webcam.
Respondent 1: can you see me now?
Interviewer: yeah, I can see you, but I guess you won’t be able to see me because… stop sharing. can you see me?
Respondent 1: no. hang on. now, I can. Yeah, you got it. right. Well, I can’t yet – it’s all black. but have you got a camera on your computer?
Interviewer: I think so. There is a cam here, but i’m not sure if it’s working or not because i’m using the computer at the library.
Respondent 1: oh, you’re in the library?
Interviewer: yeah! Sorry about that.
Respondent 1: the camera’s working, but nothing’s coming through. it’s all black. it’s probably too dark. not to worry. ah, i’ll just go with your voice. so, sorry. just go ahead whenever you’re ready, mate.
Interviewer: yeah, i’m ready. so, i’m going to start with this question. what does success mean to you?
Respondent 1: what does project management mean?
Interviewer: no, what…what does success mean in general and in project management? Mean to you, i mean.
Respondent 1: um, interesting question. um…hang on a second. i just want to think of something here for a minute. ah…just give me two seconds, mate.
Interviewer: no worries.
yeah, yeah, now it’s working. can you see me now?
Respondent 1: now i’ve got you. i’ve got you.
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: ok. so, the question is, “what does success mean?”
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: um, in personal, i guess it’s achieving your goals and that sort of stuff. When I was young, I used to think it was about having a lot of money and all that. and the reason for that, really, was I was brought up in a very poor family. my dad died when I was five and my mum had five kids – she had six, but one died and so we never had any money when we were kids, and I always – in fact, it was post war, so in my whole street, there was only two people who had cars, you know. So we didn’t feel that we were hard done by, but I always… I was always telling myself I was going to have cars, I was going to have a nice house, sort of thing.
Interviewer: yeah, yeah.
Respondent 1: so, when I was younger, it was about money and achieving things, and then when I got a bit older, I changed my attitude – I went broke and I had to start again, so I changed my idea of success. so, to me, success is about having enough to live on, financially, but doing stuff you like and feeling you’re contributing, having time to have a balanced life, good family, all that. On projects, I really still have the same view that i’ve always had, but it’s tempered a little bit. on projects, it’s all about getting it done on time, on budget, to a standard of quality, and beyond what you learn in PMI type courses these days, it’s also about creating the benefit or revenue stream that the project was set up for. I know PMI is focused on that a lot. But, i’ve come from the commercial side, government and commercial. But, if you’re doing a project that finishes on time, on budget, good quality, but you don’t achieve the benefit of the project wanted, or you don’t achieve the project revenue that you wanted, what’s the point of doing it? You know, you’ve got something wonderful that could send you broke. so, that’s always been a big thing to me. But the people side has always been the biggest thing to me. If you have a successful project, you’re always going to have conflict during the middle of it and you need that, because different – conflict gives you different ideas and better ideas.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: but conflict, i think, tends to go too far. Certainly, i’ve been involved with projects where conflict went too far and probably i was part of it going too far when i was younger. but i do think getting people to perform – the difference between people performing as a team and pushing and fighting with each other is amazing. the Olympics, to be honest, 70 per cent of it was one huge fight. but the 30 per cent where everybody was pulling together to make the Olympics work and to make the trial games work, that’s probably been some of my most magical experiences in project management. Just…just everybody working for each other instead of against each other.
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: so success isn’t a single definition. it’s different from every project. if i’m working on a crisis project, you don’t have time to focus on the people things. i’ve just got to get people out of the crisis. But if I’m focusing on most projects, you need to build that team, you need to get the communication going and you need to spend time planning. I just won’t – in the last 20 years of my career; i would not work for clients who wouldn’t let us plan projects. Because if you don’t plan it, you’re going to screw up, simple as that.
Interviewer: yes. so, my project basically concerned with project delivery success, not with the project success as outcome. So are these constraints – the time, quality and the cost are the most important – the most important criteria for the project delivery success. Not the project outcome as a whole.
Respondent 1: yeah. um, interesting question again. yeah, you’re right. I mean, if we go back to a, um, um…an academic definition…

Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: it used… when I started project management, there were only three things – time, cost and scope. And they called it the triple constraint. You get the scope right, right budget, right, then fine. and then, as you took more and more projects on in the organisation, now you had the problem of fighting for resources and that introduced risk. What eventually happened is people would be doing projects with people who weren’t trained to do it. so now, you had a quality issue. so, project management institute said as well as the triple constraint, we’ve now got what they call the project constraint. so, they’ve got the triangle in the middle for the triple constraint and around the outside, they put quality, risk and resources, because those three things go together.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: so, I guess what that’s saying is as long as projects exist, the deliverables will be number one in the eyes of the client. They want it done on budget, they want it done on time, and they want the scope they defined. However, they also want quality. What they sometimes don’t understand – in order to get a project to the right quality, you’ve got to have the right resources to deliver that. If you don’t have the right resources, you’re increasing the probability of lower quality and you’re increasing the risk, in other words, of lower quality. So, this whole concept of the triple thing, the big thing we want – scope, cost and time – you can’t look at it in isolation. they’re the deliverables that we want. but in order to get those deliverables, we’ve got to balance the right people to deliver the right quality with the lowest amount of risk. That’s my – that’s my – i agree with that. i think that… look, i don’t agree with everything PMI says, but I think they got that pretty right.
Interviewer: yeah. so, do you think sometimes, do you need to prioritise one criteria over another? like, sometimes making trade-off between time over cost or over quality? do you know what I mean?
Respondent 1: I absolutely do. And that gets back to the point – everything’s iterative. So, for example, if you – let’s take the broader perspective. If you’ve got a client who says, “I want you to do this project in this time for this amount of money,” and anyone who says yes to that without analysing it is an idiot, because, you know, where did the money come from? Where did the time come from? So, let’s say we analyse that and it turns out ok. but once we start going with the project, it gets back to that same old thing – there’ll be variations, there’ll be delays, there’ll be weather, there’ll be – all sorts of problems can come and they are going to have an effect on every area involved in project management. And, you know, I don’t care whether it’s contracts, um, quality, cost, time, scope, people, communication – there’s going to be an effect, a ripple effect of variations and weather and disasters and all this sort of stuff. So, you inevitably – project management is about doing those trade-offs, one to the other. But the real focus of the good project manager is you don’t make those trade-offs in isolation. You do it in an integrated way. You sort of say, “well, we can’t increase the money because the client’s told us that’s all the budget there is. So, therefore, what do we do?” if the money doesn’t move and you’ve got a problem in scope, you’ve only got one thing you can do and that’s change the quality. Now, if you change the quality, you are also increasing the risk profile and the performance. you might need, you know, on a life cycle costing basis, you might need more maintenance. So, the whole idea is to say to the client, “well, if you don’t give me more money, I get that.” we had that on the Olympics. That was it. No more money. The bank wouldn’t give us any more money. So, you’ve got two options. You can either say, “well, if you don’t give me any more money, there’s only two things I can do. one is I can change the quality, or two, I can have a life cycle costing exercise” – not life cycle costing – “value management exercise.”
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: do you know what value management is? Saying, “Can we deliver a solution that does that function for less cost?
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: so you don’t just say, “let’s just drop the cost and buy crap stuff.” you say, “let’s do a value management and find out where we could lower the quality of a thing without changing the overall functional capability.”
Interviewer: yeah..
Respondent 1so my answer is, yes, you will always have to compromise on one thing or the other, but you should do it in an integrated, intelligent way, not just hip shooting and, “oh, my god, let’s leave that out.”

Interviewer: yeah. yeah. So do you think these constraints – constraints are relevant to any type of projects?
Respondent 1: the constraints?
Interviewer: yeah, the same constraints that we have talked about iron triangle, and all these traditional constraints.
Respondent 1: I personally believe not all projects have the constraints we think we have. I’ve had a couple of projects for clients in my day where they just said, “we want the best we can get. We don’t care what it costs. We don’t care how long it takes.” um, i mean, they’re dream projects. they’re just amazing, and you don’t get them very often. And none of them have been in construction. They’ve been other sorts of projects. We had a bank wanting a trading floor once, and, you know, a big share trading floor. They said, “We don’t really care how much it costs us. We just want the best trading floor you can get.” you know? It was amazing.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: but it’s not really hard project management. you know? so if you’re doing a bridge or you’re doing a tunnel or you’re doing roadworks and this sort of stuff, there’s always going to be one priority over the others and quite often, in those, it’s not so much, particularly if it’s a toll road or something like that, um, it’s quite often about time because there’s a whole stack of constraints that we don’t know about on infrastructure projects and they’re largely political. so, where you have alliance projects and ppps and – private public partnership, the government’s coming in to get something done, but in our political system, they’re doing it and they want to make sure that they don’t piss the public off by making it go too long and the politicians want to stand up before the election and say, “hey, look how we spend your money. Didn’t we do a good job?”
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: so time is quite often the big priority factor ahead of money even, on some projects. So, yes, the priorities do change depending on the project, but you can’t say that on all infrastructure projects, time’s more important than money. And you can’t say on all government projects, money’s more important than time. The criteria have to be set by the client on a project-by-project basis.

Interviewer: yeah. so, um, is there any process to assist the performance of a project team against these objectives to determine whether the project team were success in delivering this project or not? Any quantifiable way?
Respondent 1: you’ve actually got some darn good questions here, Interviewer. I don’t think the assessment of the project team – let me answer your question two ways.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: first of all, I don’t think the project team should be selected – should be tested at the end of the project. The project team should be tested at the start of the project. And there are a lot of projects that go on where people get the job based on the fact they did a good job on the last project, or people get the job because they know someone who knows someone. um, people get the job because they’re connected with a particular consultancy or whatever. that’s not the way to appoint people. You know, you have to appoint the best firm, the best company to the best role and you have to insist that they have the right people when they get that job. so, the right time to be assessing peoples’ performance and whether or not they can do a good job is at the start. Having said that, at the end of the job, should you assess performance? Yes, i agree, you should, but you can’t assess performance at the end of the job unless you’ve got performance indicators for the people at the start of the job, and most projects don’t have that.
Interviewer: interesting.
Respondent 1: whenever we did a project, we used to break it into subprojects. it’s very difficult to assess performance in project management of individual project manager or project people because of the overlap of all the roles. you know, let’s say, for example, on the Olympics, we broke it into three different sections where we had four project managers under me. One of them wrote all the systems and procedures for the operations, one of them was in charge of construction, one of them was in charge of fit-out and one of them was in charge of what we call olympic overlay, all the stuff for the olympics, right? now, how could you judge the fit-out person if they didn’t get it done on time if the construction guy didn’t get his stuff finished so that they could do the fit-out? and then you go and talk to the construction guy and you say, “but the olympic people didn’t give us the information.” it’s really, really hard, in project management, to say, “it’s your fault and it’s only your fault.” you can judge a team far better than you can judge individuals in project management.

Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: i do agree – there are certain things you need to say. “This is your job and you need to be able to do these things, and if you can’t, you need to tell me along the way.” And you can measure them on that basis. but it’s very difficult, at the end of the job, to measure individuals. One, if you measure individuals, you’re sort of telling people that the individual’s more important than the team and it’s far better to keep them as a team. Secondly, if you measure them as a team, it’s harder to do. So, what you ask is a good idea, but you run the risk in focusing on individuals, of breaking that team identity. Particularly in a company. if you work in a company and you’ve got stacks of people on teams and you say, “we really want good teamwork, we want you guys to build together and work really well on the projects,” and then at the end of the project, you evaluate them individually and not as a team, and you reward them individually and not as a team, it contradicts. So on the next project when you say, “we want you to be a team,” they’re going to say, “oh, bullshit,” you know, the guy who works the best gets the job. And then you get all this infighting on the project. So you have to be careful. It’s a good idea, but it’s not easy to do.
Interviewer: so, in the business, usually they use the key performance indicators to measure the organisation’s performance. Do you think it’s good to see key performance indicators in the projects to evaluate the project delivery success, as general, not talking about the team members or the team, but the whole project, if it’s delivered successfully or not?
Respondent 1: every project has… I had to laugh when key performance indicators came in to the world. Every project has key performance indicators. Finishing on budget is a key performance indicator.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: you finished over budget, it’s a disaster. If you finish on budget, it’s good. You finish ahead of budget, they love you. If you finish late, they want to kill you. You finish on time, not bad. Finish ahead of time, fantastic, gives him the next job. They’ve always had key performance indicators. We just never called them key performance indicators.
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: so that’s point one. But should we have key performance indicators? Yes. Every project should have a team key performance indicator and even some individual key performance indicators. But the key performance indicators of the individual should be about their contribution to the team. And the key performance indication of the team should be the contribution towards delivery of the deliverables. So, we don’t have a key performance indicator that says the architect was better than the engineer.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: but we do have a key performance indicator that says the architect got to every meeting on time, responded to all the things they had to do after the meeting on time, got their reports in on time. That’s where you have the key performance indicator – on the contribute – the contribution to team. And then the team key performance indicator is on budget, cost, quality and all that sort of stuff.
Interviewer: yes.
Respondent 1: that’s how I run my projects.
Interviewer: yes, that’s great. So how do you like to see thes KPIs? Like, in percentage, or like, 1 out of 10, or how to quantify this kips? How do you prefer to see it, like, stars ..?
Respondent 1: that’s… these are really good questions. You’ve got great questions.
Interviewer: thank you.
Respondent 1: um, the – one of the key performance indicators I run of individuals that have contributed a team is something that gets assessed by the client. Keep in mind that I worked for the government for a while, but for most of my work, I had my own company and we were hired to work for the people. so, one of the key performance indicators I used to have, or a series of them, was communication, because I found out long before the project management institute nominated it, that if you don’t communicate with clients, they get pissed off. Even if you finish on time and do a good job, they get pissed off if you don’t let them know what’s happening. so, when we’d sign a contract with a client, after we’d sign it, so we’ve got the job already, i would sit down with the client and do a partnering agreement and we’d say, “okay, if you phone us and we’re busy, we won’t be able to call you back, but how long do you think is a reasonable time to call you back?” and they’d say, “oh, you know, as long as you get us back that day, that’s alright.” we didn’t have email in those days. “what about returning faxes? and returning messaging and letters?” they’d say, “oh, you know, within 24 hours.” so, we’d set guidelines like that and then i’d ring up the client and say, “this is what we agreed for communication in terms of reporting, answering to letters, answering phone calls, answering faxes. has anybody on our team failed to meet those standards?” and they’d say, “no, everybody’s good. maybe nicole misses out a little bit.” you know. so, then i’d go back to her. so we always set key performance indicators on individuals that had an effect on our client relationship. because when you… look, i don’t want to sound like a wanker here, mate, but i don’t remember a project where we didn’t get it finished on time and on budget and on quality. that’s just what we did. And I was – had a very strong record on that. but we were very, very focused on making sure we got the next job, and the way to get the next job was to be outstanding on this job. And it doesn’t cost a lot of money to communicate and to keep the client happy along the way. you know, there’s a lot of people who finish the project on time, on budget, quality and the client doesn’t use them again because they did a great job, but they just – they never talked to me, i didn’t know what was going on.
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: so a lot of – a lot of our things are about the client.
Interviewer: yeah. so maybe it’s important to – to put these key performance indicators in a way that the customer can see them in ….so to keep him informed all the way along, during that project.
Respondent 1: I’ll show you something that i use a lot, if i can find the bloody thing.
you are dead right. you are absolutely right. But i’m trying to find… I’ve got a slide on it somewhere. (pause) I can’t find it, I don’t think. No, that’s not it. I’ve got a…
um, no, i can’t find it, mate. I had a slide of exactly what you said, a graphic, and, yes, i do agree, visual, but i had one we used to use at work and i was going to show it to you, but i can’t find it. But, yeah, you’re right. it has to be visual. In fact, every procedure we ever had in project management is visual. I’ve never had one where you had bullet points. it’s all got to be flow charts or visual.
Interviewer: yeah.
Respondent 1: people don’t read – they don’t read bullet points, but they’ll read a flow chart.
Interviewer: yeah, of course. um, so maybe talking of these measurements, do you think that using these quantifiable measurements can help us in benchmarking with other projects or to the best practices?
Respondent 1: on one condition – on one condition. And that’s if they’re benchmarking as well. If they don’t benchmark, it’s too hard. But, yes, it can. but, I guess, implied in what you’re saying is another question. It’s really easy to benchmark against people who finish on time and finish on budget and all that sort of stuff. What’s difficult to benchmark is what we call the intangibles. The intangibles are things that you can’t write into a contract. You don’t write into a contract, “your staff will be respectful of the client.” what the hell did that mean? You don’t write, “Your staff will make the client’s day better every day.” that means to people. It’s not – it’s not – you can’t measure it, so therefore, you can’t manage it. so, you’ve got to – when I said before to people, you know, we used to say to people, “how soon should we return a phone call? how soon should we return an email?” all this sort of stuff. that, in fact, was benchmarking. we’re changing that intangible, abstract concept that the client has, that, “they should be in touch with me. they should communicate with me.” we’re changing that from an intangible thing, and we don’t know what’s in their mind, to something, that if he says, “you guys don’t communicate.” I can go back to that piece of paper where i said, “We said we’ll call you every day, we call you every day. So, either you’re wrong or you want a different schedule than we’ve got.” so you can – you can control their expectations. so, in that stance, you can control the client. As for benchmarking one project against another, it’s pretty difficult to benchmark anything other than the deliverables.
Interviewer: mm-hmm.
Respondent 1: you can do subjective benchmarking. You could do subjective benchmarking, where you could go to a client – go to a client, or 10 clients of different projects, and give them a survey that says, “Were you happy with the outcome on a scale of 1 to 10? What did you think of the project manager?” you know, you could do that – subjective benchmarking.
Interviewer: yeah. so, this is maybe the final question. ah, usually there’s cost involved in performing – performance measurement. Do you think performing – the measurements worth this cost involved and this process?
Respondent 1: (laughs) if you look at it as a cost of this project, you’ll be – you’ll go, “it costs too much, i don’t want to do it.” but when I was in business, we grew from myself and a secretary to over 50 people in less than two years, the company I had. um, and then it – it buried out. It was in peak times and it came down again. it’s wrong to say that the benchmarking i’m doing for this client is a cost to this project alone. because if you do, you’re going to say, “i’m just chewing up too much profit, it’s not worth it.” however, if you’re a private consultant and you’re in the business of project management, the benchmarking you do on this project is your marketing for the next project. hang on, mate. i’ve just got to let – there’s someone at the door. just give me two seconds.
Interviewer: yeah, that’s fine.
Respondent 1: thank you. yeah, your benchmarking on this project, you have to see, not just as a cost against this project, but as an investment in winning the next project. because all that benchmarking, if you do it right and communicate it to the client, the client goes, “I love these guys. I know what’s going on all the time, I get a chance to feedback and change things,” and all of a sudden, they just give you the next job. Or even if they call tenders, they say to you… now, if you’re in government or you’re working for a company, that’s less likely to be the case. And it’s just a lot of effort for apparently no return. But if you work as a consultancy, benchmarking is marketing.
Interviewer: yeah, sounds great. um, I would like to thank you for this opportunity and if you have any other thing to add, you’re welcome to add. Otherwise, thank you so much.
Respondent 1: no, if I can help you any other way, I tell you what, I really want to read the thing when you’re finished, actually.
Interviewer: of course.
Respondent 1: they’re some of the best questions i’ve heard in a long time. They were really good questions.
Interviewer: thank you so much. Thank you. Actually, this is my first interview in this thesis, so i was really terrified about the questions! but now, I’m a bit relieved…
Respondent 1: you did extremely well, mate, and the questions were bang on.
Interviewer: oh, great. Thank you so much. Thank you. And i wish you a great night.
Respondent 1: see you later, mate. Take it easy.
Interviewer: see you. bye-bye. Thank you so much. Bye.

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