New CIOB President Chris Chivers isn’t one to mince words. He’s seen the sharp end of the industry’s higher-level skills shortage, and it’s not pretty. In his role as a project troubleshooter, he’s encountered individuals promoted to project management roles who haven’t sat at the shoulder of experienced professionals for long enough. People who exhibit many of the right skills, while still making basic sequencing, contract management or negotiation errors that are the product of nous and experience, not the classroom.
And when those project managers are promoted to director level, that’s when the skills deficit really shows. Chivers describes working with directors who wait for the chief executive to take the lead, who don’t read the papers, who don’t investigate the answers from the ranks below, or who duck their responsibilities (supposing they knew what those were in the first place).
Within one company, it might just be seen as a little bit of harmless job title inflation. But scale that up across the industry, and the risk is that boards make decisions without knowing all the facts, or take unacknowledged risks because their collective experience just isn’t great enough, or start to believe their own over-optimistic profit forecasts. Oh, hang on a minute, didn’t that just happen?
So it’s an appropriate time for a straight-talking CIOB president to galvanise the industry with some home truths. Construction is an extremely challenging discipline, which has a huge impact on the people affected by its projects. To get the best possible outcomes on those projects, we need the best possible people in charge.
Of course, there can never be a guarantee that an MCIOB project manager or an FCIOB boardroom director will make all the right calls. But trusting to decision-makers who have thought deeply about what professionalism means, demonstrated depth of knowledge to their peers and made a commitment to keeping themselves abreast of developments in their field is surely the closest thing to a guarantee available to clients and employers. That’s the message that needs to take hold.
Or should the Institute be going further, making a case for an industry-backed recommendation that construction managers on, say, public sector projects over a certain value should be members of the CIOB, or another chartered institute? It’s an interesting thought, although one that’s hard to square with the sheer size of the industry and volume of projects. So that’s one for the future, while just now it’s clearly in everyone’s benefit if there was a scaling up both of the Institute’s membership, and the recognition across the industry that chartership can raise the industry’s skills capital where it counts.
As projects become more technically challenging, and the management and boardroom skills needed to deliver them increase too, let’s have more power to a straight-talking president’s elbow.
Elaine Knutt, editor
