A letter to Project Manager

Dear Edwin,

Is it lonely being the PM sometimes? Being the only one pushing for progress of the project even though this should be the collective effort of everyone in the team.

I've seen how your engineers communicate the importance of progress to the contractor during meeting. Sometimes, I get the feeling that the engineers are doing the PM a favour by pushing for progress. Should this be the case? If taking ownership of machineries, equipments and personal safety and everything under your purview is what we always preach to the contractors and the workers, shouldn't we, as engineers of the developer, take ownership of progress monitoring and push for it like we would push ourselves to study hard when we were students?

Comparatively, I've seen your inspectors onsite. Even though they're not as directly responsible for pushing progress as the main contractors themselves should, but they show higher responsibility and ownership over the progress. In the absence of the main contractors onsite to push for progress onsite, they are the ones who talk to the sub-contractors, find out the reasons for delays, give suggestions to reduce delays and increase productivity. What they coordinate onsite might not effect a change as impactful as the decisions concluded during meetings among the managers and engineers, but the fact remains - they make things happen.

Is the difference in the amount of ownership shown attributed to the nature of the jobscope, or is it passion that dilutes over the years? I'm referring to the passion of watching a structure built up over the years. Somehow, it feels to me the inspectors are more connected to civil works and construction. My first conversations with them are memorable as they recollected the various civil projects they were involved in and the remarkable things about each projects. As for the engineers, the sharing remains shallowly at the number of years spent at previous companies and perhaps some reasons why they decided to move onto next companies.

I dare not say I'm extremely passionate about civil and construction works. But since I've followed my initial passion and chosen this path, I'm all ready to make sure I make a positive impact to the project that I'm going to handle.



Yours sincerely,
KA

(P.S. I must bear in mind that regardless of age or jobscope, I must have in myself that something which I believe in to keep me going.)