Brain drain

To counter such problems, a shake-up in management structures in desperately required.

“If you look across the region, many downstream companies are much more sophisticated in terms of their project management structures and personnel recruitment and retention when compared to those in the telecom industry for one.

When you look on an international level, however, you see that companies in the Middle East still have a significant number of improvements to make if they are to reach the same standard,” says Mounir Ajman, chief executive of Sukad, a project management consultancy.

In order to address the project management crisis, a closer examination is needed of who and what makes a good project manager. Through doing so, downstream companies may adapt their corporate structures and practices to enable them to train more project managers, support them and then retain them.

Task force

“The scale of the projects that the downstream sector undertakes is tremendous which means that you cannot just assign a recent graduate to manage a project, you need a project manager that has at least 10-15 years of relevant working experience,” explains Ajman.

Bassam Samman, chief executive and founder of Collaboration, Management and Control Solutions (CMCS) is also quick to stress the importance of on the job experience, regardless of whether they have a degree in management.

“Countless times in organisations, I see what we call the ‘accidental project manager’, which is where people are brought in as project managers, but they are not educated as project managers. They may have worked on small-scale projects in the past, so they have gained some experience, but they have not gained the formal training and education in project management that is desperately needed for such huge projects. These people try their best, but you can only expect so much from them,” says Samman.

“Certain skills are inherently necessary to being a good project manager, but ultimately possessing an abundance of people skills is more important than anything else,” admits Samman. “A good project manager must be a good leader, a team builder, communicator and someone who can work under great pressure. The person needs to know how to manage issues and gain support from people both inside and outside of the team.”

Creation

Despite the need for natural people skills, nurture can play a critical role in creating an effective project manager and companies in the downstream sector have a guiding-hand in supplying this.

Project management has developed considerably over the last 30 years and may now be seen as a science given the vast amount of knowledge and expertise that have been compiled. In the past it may well have been a rarity to find a university that taught project management, but today universities everywhere are actively hawking both undergraduate and graduate courses dedicated to management.

Given the vast number of courses on offer, it is essential for all companies to consider the nature of the training and education that they require of their employees. One course does not fit all, warranting consultation with both employees and experts.

“In recent times we have seen a trend of downstream companies sending employees off to gain accreditations for a variety of different things. What they need to consider though is that certification takes a significant amount of time investment and it may be very valuable, but for the same amount of time people may be better to achieve a Masters degree of some kind in engineering or project management,” explains Ajman.

Support

Whilst training and experience can help to create a skilled and effective project manager, if a company’s structure and practices are poorly organised and ill-defined the manager will constantly be fighting an uphill battle to complete a project successfully.

“Most companies employ a functional corporate setup, not a working setup. That is, they have individual departments like finance, safety and quality that do not coordinate their activities and work together.

Project management is about team work so all of the departments need to blend together and collaborate to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings,” says Samman. “To succeed, companies must restructure in order to deal with those bad practices and procedures.”

Regardless of the nature of a downstream company’s work, there will always be cases of failures and triumphs. To best utilise such experience, Samman advocates the creation of a ‘best practice’ database. For every project that a company undertakes, a case-study should be compiled that includes recommendations and advice for those who take-on similar projects in the future.

At the onset of any new project, whether it be the construction of a refinery or a polymer production plant, the management team should be able to go to the database and seek guidance. With experienced personnel retiring en-masse such reference methods will prove increasingly worthwhile.

Train and retain

For all the efforts that can be made to train and develop project managers, if they leave the company to seek pastures new, as so many are doing, efforts will prove fruitless. Staff retention is therefore critical.

“We are witnessing an increased demand from companies in the industry coming to us and asking us to develop detailed career plans for their employees from an entry level onwards,” explains Samman.

Through creating such plans, employees see where their future may lie in the company and are aware of their prospects for career advancement. For each job-level in the company there should be a detailed description of exactly what is required of the person, both in terms of training and experience.

“I am hopeful that with the creation of more transparent career plans and check-lists for career advancement, we will see more people choosing to stay within the same company and an increased number of people becoming managers who have all of the relevant experience,” says Samman.

Change

Allowing employees the chance to advance in their career and work their way up the ladder of the company is laden with positives. Precisely which positions they are promoted to and the nature of the work, however, warrants much contemplation.

The conundrum is clear – you train and retain experienced project managers, but understandably many of them then seek promotion. They are then promoted to strategic or functional positions near the top of the company that no longer require a hands-on role. In doing so, essential project skills and experience are being lost and shortages of skilled managers reoccur.

To overcome this problem, company structures need to be changed and built around project management. Even if you promote a project manager, they should be kept within the larger project management structure.

“In larger organisations that are project driven, there should be positions such as chief project officer that are equivalent to a chief executive position. The person’s job is to oversee all of the projects that are underway and make sure that they are running to schedule and budget and delivered successfully,” says Ajman.

The chief project officer’s role would vary and range from managing the whole life-cycle of a particular project to providing support to the project managers. “Their role would basically be equivalent to being in the control tower of an airport – you are not responsible for flying the plane, but you are central to helping the pilots,” adds Ajman.

Final word

There is no shortage of advice as to how to overhaul corporate structures, train employees and maintain their services and skills, and there are numerous consultancy firms ready and willing to offer such advice. The number of companies in the petrochemicals industry doing so still needs to increase dramatically.

Certainly, many companies in the sector are ahead of other industries in terms of the sophistication of their structures. Companies in both the upstream and downstream sectors have, after all, been managing multi-billion dollar projects for a great number of years. This allows them a degree of familiarity with project management, but there is still much room for improvement,” concludes Samman.