The Dearth of Technical Project Managers

Project management is a critical part of modern infrastructure delivery. From timesheets to real-time dashboards, countless project management tools have become critical for cost-effective delivery of large scale and multi-disciplinary projects. These have been inevitably focused on cost and time, with increasing targeting on capturing service quality. However, within this setting, there has been a decline of the Technical Project Manager role, a technical specialist with intimate knowledge of infrastructure design or construction, who relates project delivery and business performance. It is not always a "hands off" role but typically involves higher-level integration of the many pieces which make up an infrastructure project.

We tend to think of project management as a modern part of engineering, although it has much older roots. It is likely that project management frameworks were applied to ancient megalithic infrastructure, including the Pyramids. Roman infrastructure was developed with time and cost well documented and construction standards widely applied. Although the intervening thousand years are a somewhat opaque, by the 15th Century, infrastructure was often built via contract, typically with legal conditions on time and cost. Accelerated post-industrial development saw increasingly challenging and complex projects undertaken. With the increased challenge came increased failure, and a desire for greater scrutiny by investors. By the mid 19th Century, Project Engineers were required to provide reports for rail, port construction and dredging projects that look remarkably similar to outputs from modern projects. Material quality was often managed through standardisation, with testing and classification of local materials being an intriguing sub-text of colonial practices, sometimes supporting protectionism.

Modern project management developed through collation and unification of previous practices in the early 20th Century. This formalisation supported further advance of mathematical methods and recognition of project control techniques, that coincided with rapid improvements to computing technology. Acknowledging both the knowledge underpinning project management tools and its potential value across different disciplines, project management was acknowledged as a distinct discipline by the 1950s. While some training was widely incorporated, at a basic level, in many engineering syllabi, staff with targeted training and responsibility for delivery became increasingly distinguished from Engineers and titled as Project Managers.

It is tempting to argue this split as an initial "grounds for professional divorce" with further rupture due to an increasingly large body of specialist knowledge required. However, equivalent to the barrister-solicitor or physician-surgeon divisions, the split is a gentler disagreement. While there is already a high proportion of engineers who obtain formal project management credentials, there is also significant on-the-job learning, with widespread integration of project management tools throughout most professional settings, requiring staff to constantly feed in information about project progress. Consequently, the "division of knowledge" between engineering and project management was at worst a brief dispute, substantially offset by the advance of technology. Intuitively, increasing availability and ease of project management tools should have provided more opportunity for Technical Project Managers.

So... why does it seem there are fewer Technical Project Managers in large infrastructure projects than there used to be?

One linked change has been the rise of the Administrative Project Manager, whose skill set is in implementation of project controls, rather than fundamental technical understanding. Their credentials often more clearly tick the "project management box" than an engineer, and with longer-term experience, the two can become hard to distinguish. Cost-wise, there can sometimes be a small saving, but it's rarely significant. However, viewed from the position of trying to find staff to fill roles, the rise of the Administrative Project Manager seems to be a symptom of declining Technical Project Managers, rather than a cause!

One of the substantive changes occurring over the era of the project manager which might help explain reducing presence of Technical Project Managers is how public works infrastructure is delivered. At its simplest, there has been transition from "Government Do" to "Government Say". Increasing use of external services can lead to reliance of technical advice from contractors, whose commercial interests lie in maximising profit, rather than project management to achieve best client outcomes. The result is often one of compromise, typically on quality or safety, to achieve best performance in more quantifiable measures of cost and time. In the rare occasions where an independent client engineer is engaged, the benefits of a different perspective must be weighed against the extra cost and potential for adversarial positions. These challenges are often be lessened when the client is supported by a Technical Project Manager.

An equivalent problem of divided interests can occur for a project comprised of multiple components. Under project pressure separate contractors will tend to compress their scope, leading to reduced connectivity to adjacent components. Interfacing can be partly addressed by targeted scoping, but a holistic viewpoint is usually required to provide project flexibility. Without the higher level of technical understanding that might be provided by a Technical Project Manager, the contractual alternative is to seek a multi-disciplinary contractor who can capture the scope. While this may reduce interfacing risks, a single contractor will price accordingly, with potential benefits accruing to the contractor rather than the client. Concurrently, this reduces demand on the client, who can generally be supported by an Administrative Project Manager.

Although changing knowledge, technology, credentials, client practices and project scoping are all likely to have influenced behaviour, perhaps the greatest reason for decline of Technical Project Managers is an inability to "see" the benefits provided. Each project only has one path, so it is virtually impossible to quantify how long a problem solved by experience would have taken an inexperienced team. Benefits are further obscured by high uncertainty in infrastructure projects, with corresponding use of P50-P90 ranges setting low expectations.

In the context of infrastructure provision, "If it can't be measured, it can't be managed!" is not good enough! The value of a Technical Project Manager is the value of knowledge...