Conversation #2 of my 100 Conversations had a structural engineer state that a focus of his ponderings related to “Engineers are good with numbers until you put a dollar sign in front of them.” This certainly doesn’t only apply to engineers. The reality is that most people who are closer to the beginning of their careers are focusing on learning their professions, rather than project management and profitability. If the proper company safety nets are in place (good fees and good project management), then the negative impacts of their ‘task delivery only focus’ is minimized. This blog post will be short, because a few years ago I had put together a mini-manual that tried to put profitability into context for staff. The main realization I had was that we miss our budget targets when unknowns are not managed properly.

It is important to state that profitability discussions need to be positive. No one WANTS to lose money. It’s just that a fully intentional approach to achieving profitability is often not in place. These posts relate to being fully intentional with how we engage our staff resources for a project.

So… conversation #2 inspired me to take that mini-manual and post it on this blog in three different parts:

Know what NOT to do – Part 1

Know what NOT to do – Part 2

Know what NOT to do – Part 3

Conversation #2 – Interviews

Another excellent part of our conversation dealt with how we subconsultants are sometimes on multiple teams. This means that sometimes we are on multiple interviews. Our lessons learned through seeing how different teams deal with the same interview lends some great lessons learned for interviewing. That will be an upcoming post. [ED: the post is here – Getting the Project: The Interview]