Engineering Management
The management of civilian engineers is really quite different from that of managing Royal Engineers. In twelve months as a project engineer, I have managed teams not only on diverse engineering projects but the people who make up the teams are potentially even more diverse. As a result, I have had to hone my soft skills to get the job done.
Military Culture. When I was a brand new troop commander I heard the term FIDO. I’d be surprised if anyone reading this blog hasn’t heard the term but for clarity I will explain the acronym. It means f**k it, drive on. It succinctly encapsulates the military ethos where the mission always takes precedence and the will to succeed despite shortfalls of manpower, time or resources means the job usually gets done. And credit to the Royal Engineers, in my experience the final job is usually more than fit for purpose. However, this inculcated culture could lead to a potentially one dimensional leadership philosophy where the commanders just shout louder and get angrier until they drive their subordinates to complete the job. I’d like to think I wasn’t one dimensional but I have certainly had to adapt and develop whilst on attachment. A single leadership approach can work in the Army because of the hierarchical structure, the discipline instilled in basic training and the excellent NCOs that enforce it. It also works because the people in the Army are generally different and more robust than their civilian counterparts.
The Army attracts a certain kind of individual, one who is comfortable with straight talking and potentially being told off if they’ve messed up. Also, the average age of a British Army soldier is 20 years old. There is a natural tendency for these younger soldiers to follow the instructions of older and therefore more knowledgeable soldiers. This discipline, understanding of straight talking and hierarchical structure means that when an order is given, even if not completely agreed with, it is usually followed. This means that things tend to move on a bit quicker.
Oil and Gas Culture Differences. I imagine that some of this will resonate with those in design offices in different industries but I have kept it to my own experience. The oil and gas industry has a very risk aware culture and in particular BP PLC’s top priority is safety first. Their mantra is “No accidents, no harm to people, no harm to the environment”. The average age of the oil and gas sector is between 46 and 49 years old. In the design office, they are nearly all qualified engineers, most will be at graduate level as a minimum. And, at age 46 to 49 there is a tendency to think they know best. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. These engineers are often members of engineering institutions with clear codes of conduct regarding making decisions within the realms of one’s ability, they tend to seek a higher degree of assurance and as such they take their time.
Also, there is a functional structure to the organisation which means that the balance of power is held in different places. For example, and in military speak, the discipline engineers are OPCOM to their principal discipline leads but they are TACOM to the project engineers. (For those of you who don’t know OPCOM and TACOM you should be ashamed of yourselves. OPCOM means they get given the mission statement and can be broken down or asked to do anything – essentially the highest level of command. TACOM is what RE CS squadrons are to the BG. They are given tasks and priorities and can’t be broken down further). This confused split of power exacerbates the situation because with two bosses if an engineer doesn’t like a decision they can trade one boss off against the other.
Consequences
Consequently, if you ask someone to do something in the Army they will generally get it done. This is providing you don’t ask the bottom third LCpl or Sapper who’s been in for 20 years and passed over quite some time ago. It doesn’t even matter how you ask, it can be the politest “I’d like groundworks for the LSB complete by COP Friday, please” because this actually translates as “the groundworks will be complete by Friday unless you know of a good reason why they won’t be then let me know right now”.
In BP it seems that unless you get something it writing it is a bit hit and miss whether it will happen or not. The amount of people in the design office who are happy to agree with something to your face and then not do what was asked of them caught me out at first. For example, I might ask a vendor “I’d like all long lead materials ordered by Friday, please”. And what they seemed to hear is “if you can find the time and as long as it’s not too much trouble try and order the materials by Friday. However, this is very much a target and not a deadline”. This actually happened to me and the materials had a 20 week lead time and if they weren’t ordered soon then the job was unlikely to go ahead. Everyone was aware but the materials hadn’t been ordered because it was not the next step in their process. Don’t assume common sense will prevail, even with bright people, they like to follow a process. In my early days, I would naively believe that people would do as they say; nowadays I follow everything up with a desk visit and then an email. Just sending emails is too easy to ignore.
Continue to be polite and friendly (even if you don’t feel like it). It is important to be polite for two reasons. The first is that the people in the office tend to be nice individuals and they respond better to being spoken to nicely. The second is that as a project engineer I am not directly empowered to get them to do everything I am asking. Being polite and friendly gives the impression that you’re friends and it’s harder for them to refuse a ‘friend’.
Finally, be ready for the confrontation. Officers tend to be quite good at confrontation and you should be ready to use this line of action if required. Be prepared to stand your ground but have the technical, financial or project detail handy to back you up. You can usually tell when a conflict is coming, try and work round it with a smile but make movements early to have all you ducks in a row. A confrontation without evidence is at best unhelpful and at worst undermining. I successfully, and publically, argued with a process engineer about the sizing of a shell and tube heat exchanger. He was trying to throw a spanner in the works and was being particularly obstructive. So in a meeting I produced evidence from the design report from a process engineer stating that the STHE was fit for purpose. He was promptly told to get on with his job. Without the evidence to hand, he’d have tied my in knots and would have shouted me down.
It goes without saying that you need to be firm and as a leader you need to be strong willed. As any kind of successful leader clear and concise communication is important as well. These are skills that come more naturally to us. However, working in BP has definitely honed my soft skills when it comes to leadership and management. Some top tips are:
- When you say deadline they hear target.
- Use explicit language and ask for exactly what it is you want and don’t think you’re being patronising.
- Follow up any agreement with desk visits and emails.
- Be polite and give them no excuse to put your request to the bottom of their to-do list. Also, get round and ask people’s names, know their interests and ask about their weekend. It is hard to refuse a friend.
- Continue to use common sense. Understand the project lie cycle and when the engineers would normally complete steps. If required, intervene and make sure the overarching aims are borne in mind. As military leaders, we tend to be quite good at this anyway.
- Be ready for a confrontation with evidence. Do not think you can argue your way out of something with platitudes. Only use as a last resort.
On your last day at work you can tell people what you really think of them if you so desire but I would’t advise it.
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Nick,
I like much of what I read but… There is a significant difference between the levels of command you’re describing. One is objective driven at the lower level whilst the other has a longer term strategic view. From our position on the edge of the game here I see a very different culture in the military ability to show continuity from making a decision to actually delivering. In many instances several versions of FIDO conflict to ignore inconveniences of truth in the hope that something new can be shown to be a sterling attempt to recover someone else’s errors and demonstrate personal worth. Frequenlty an expressed intent is delivered with tunnel vision and blunt instruments such that the declaration of success is trumpeted loud prior to a departure not that far from your cartoons. The collateral damage then has to be made good; taking more resource and effort than being a little more thoughtful in the first place would have done. This ability to make decisions appears to have left the FV432 in service for 55 years and counting having been introduced at the same time that British rail took delivery of BR standard class 9F number 92220 Evening Star… Convesely wanting clear decisions, thought through and documented, can in some instances be a little more sensible and lead to sustainable planning and delivery. In both camps, however, there will always be someone speaking from ignorance or trying to b*llsh&t and your use of evidence based decision making is exactly what the academic process strives to promote. So in summary, I think you have a slightly romantic and misguided view of military culture but a very reasonable grasp of the need to be clear, firm and diplomatic in civlian industry albeit that you might have missed something of the concept of longterm sustainability.
Regards,
Richard.
I accept that the technical differences in what the military exeute compared to oil and gas mean that a more measured approach with rigourous longer term plannign is required. I also know that in the Army the need to act quickly and get inside the enemy’s OODA loop is means a quick decision on limited information is often better than a 100% solution that takes too long to come too. Of course there needs to be a balance. The culture in the oil and gas industry means they take a long time over every decision andseldom act on intuition. Conversely, the Army may be guilty of acting only on intuition sometimes.
My blog is probably more about communication differences. I thought most of it was stating the obvious but if it may help people bear this in mind and embrace their soft skills more. Longer term sustainability is a different topic I think.
Nick
I get the communication message, its an interesting point and one that I struggle with regularly given my background, I’m less interested about the communication within organisations however but more fascinated with cultural approaches and I think you’re right when you say the BP culture is different.
My observation would be that communication has to be different between the military and many organisation such as BP becuase leaders need to instill a different culture; quite simply the military strategic horizon on operations is much shorter because the world is less predictable, the “product” life cycle is also much shorter and the transition through maturity into decline measured in years at the most, sometimes months (the 20 week lead time for long lead items being more time than some people spend in theatre). If the culture isn’t one of FIDO then operations don’t normally succeed, the communication has to follow the way things are expected to work.
However………. back on terra firma the strategic horizon should be extended greatly, the culture should reflect the change in tempo and communictaion should follow suit which is where you draw your observations of BP. I think this is where Richard’s observation comes in, quite often FIDO ignores the fact that the organisation is not necessarily going in the right direction and carries on regardless to bask in the afterglow of success, there isn’t necessarily enough communication and time to allow for reflection on actions and decisions because the organisation is intent on moving quickly and decisively in quite compressed time frames, personally I think the most interesting aspect is the civil service working alongside (or embedded, believe what you want) military staff – you always see frustration between both parties because one side wants to change things and the other side are always finding reasons why things are fine as they are!!
The last time we had this discussion on the blog I said that the new broom may sweep clean but if its not going in the same direction then all it will do is move dirt for someone else to pick up………..
Mark,
Thank you for your comments. It’s a good point about the different military tempos. Although my blog was not exclusively referring to an operational military tempo it is where the starkest contrast in culture will occur. Perhaps on key shortfall is when the Army fails to adapt to a suitable tempo when not on operations. However, being in barracks and on the FORM cycle is not low tempo. Any kind of training that involved MACC or construction tasks would still leave a very limited window to achieve an aim.
The military strategic horizon is probably similar to the tempo in BP’s projects department, as it should be. I do still feel that there is probably some benefit to be gained on both sides by looking at what works and what doesn’t from each culture. I think a hierarchical structure with clear command relationships would help speed decision making. I’m not suggesting a reduced level of checking, more clear responsibilities and accountabilities. That would help BP. And the Army would benefit from better long term planning and a way of analysing cost (probably of time, resources and life) vs benefit and for how long will the benefit last. This is very tricky given a potentially rapidly changing environment.
However, this is off topic from my blog. The aim was really to highlight how one may adapt to the change in culture to achieve a similar goal of project success.
Thanks again for the comments, good food for thought.
Nick,
I realise I am quite late to this party, but I thought I would throw in my experience over in Oz.
I have found it similar here in that people hear ‘target’ rather than ‘deadline’, although there is little to no appreciation of the one third / two third rule. This means that there are a lot of unrealistic deadlines in here which are the sole fault of the PM in not passing the info out quick enough.
The really interesting thing I have found is why that happens. I’m not sure how it works in your place but we sell ‘hours’, and as such everyone books each hour they work to a job code. If people cannot book time to a job code then their costs go to overheads. Too much of this and they are not justifying their existence as far as the business is concerned and are likely be moved on.
At the moment, we are in a period of decline here in Queensland due to a change in state government, and work is very sparse in some departments. The pressure is noticeably on!
There are really interesting dynamics around this way of accounting for hours, and I am still watching and learning so by no means have I nailed those dynamics yet. I have noticed that some PM’s will sit on tasks until the last safe moment, booking their time to the project, before passing it to the technical deliverers such as engineers & draftsmen. This causes unnecessary time pressure and unrealistic deadlines.
Those engineers & draftsmen not in the position of having a client to manage and an ability to win their own work (the junior blokes and those who only work internally such as draftsmen) are at the mercy of those who do, as they too need to justify their existence through the time sheets.
The upshot is that in the current climate, I have had no issues getting people to do work. There are a lot of people desperate to be able to book time to a job. The bigger issue is controlling the time being booked but that is a different subject.
I have been lucky as I am billed at an overhead rate of $1 per hour as opposed to $60 for a grad engineer, so I have no problem getting on jobs. I have also PM’d my own job which is being used as a bit of a team reserve. I delivered the bulk of the project through booking time to a proposal code (goes straight to overheads), so I have been left with a $15k fee to farm out to those team members struggling to justify their existence.
I guess what I am saying is that the shoe is on the other foot here and it is the PMs that can be more of a hindrance than the project team, but this way of doing it can be quite divisive among the team. I have not had to do this but ultimately if someone wasn’t delivering, I would just pass the job to one of their colleagues. Without the need to cajole people into work, I can just be nice simply because i’m a nice kind of guy! Ha
Ben,
The time sheet and hours booked system is universal in consulting albeit with various subtle nuances but if you follow it through the system to budgets and monthly billing it makes sense for clients they have a QM arrangement. What you are describing by way of passing hours to individuals to book without doing work for the client is, of course, malpractice whereby they are being fraudulently invoiced and you would be in breach of your professional ethics to condone the activity.
Richard,
I was given a run down the other day on a different way of managing project billable hours, and that was to throw all the client hours from all projects in one big pot from which everyone draws time to complete the work. I am told this system was in place a little over a year ago and worked effectively. This may not comply with modern accountability requirements (this is Australia) but it would certainly free up ‘hours’ currently spent tracking ‘hours’. Is this not a system that a smaller consultancy could use?
On your second point, in the project I described, the client received all the ‘hours’ he was billed for (and more). My comment was about the subtleties of internal accounting procedures and the difference between booking time to company overheads versus a project. This practice bears no impact upon the client but is used on occasion to satisfy quotas and margins imposed by Jacobs HQ in the US.
Further to that though, I would have thought on a fixed fee contract (in which there are no specified hours, just a fixed lump sum), we would be entitled to try and reduce the hours spent on a project to increase profit as long as we deliver the required product. Am I missing something?