Part 2. LCHS Report: Project Management Failure

From The Seat Of His Pants Despite his constantly citing 30 years as a construction manager, Ray Martin could not provide any evidence of the most basic of project management techniques. His attitude was "I am so smart" that I don't need them. First he said the project never had a written scope. Perhaps that why the name went from "Safety/Security" from the original "Safety/Health." He finally admitted "I was just supposed to look around and see what was wrong." Having a clearly defined, written scope is project management 101. For example, while the report makes some recommendations it provides no cost or time estimates for the problems that it found. He could not produce a planned task list from which work was done other than to refer to memos sent back to him by members of the inspection team. He kept no record of hours worked by team members--some of which were public employees. As a result there is no way to determine, other than his $2000 a week salary, what the true cost of the project was to the tax payers. There were no common checklists, no standard ratings of how serious a particular problem might be by the person who identified it, or minutes of team meetings. While the various members of the team no doubt did what they thought were their responsibilities, these responsibilities were never documented. Martin's style was to try to bully his way past the answers by questioning the knowledge of the interviewer. Martin saw no value in providing the Board of Education with a draft of his report so that he would at least have an up-to-date status of what was planned or if certain work had been done. Both state and federal audits of the programs I have managed in state government have always wanted to have management comments before making a report public. Martin kept failing back to all his experience in the past and his supposedly superior knowledge, but it took less than 10 minutes to see that this project was run by the seat of his pants. In the report, he ends up recommending bringing in a professional to test for fungus and a civil engineer to deal with the water problems. In other words, when it comes down to the bottom line, he was not qualified to perform these functions and the most critical issues were not resolved. Most of the recommendations were made by members of the team with little evidence of independent contribution by Martin. Worst of all, there were no proposed time schedule for or cost estimates on the recommendations made in the report. As he said "I was just supposed to look around and see what was wrong." In Part 3, tomorrow, a look at the recommendations.