208 - TZL - Justin Smith

208 - TZL - Justin Smith

TZL - Justin Smith

Randy Wilburn [0:00] Hey folks, and welcome to another episode of The Zweig Letter Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Wilburn. I'm excited to be with you today. I'm sitting here with my good friend, Justin Smith from Start to Rise LLC and Justin is part of the Zweig Advisory team like I am. And so, I wanted to bring him on because he's actually teaching a class that I used to teach from time to time for Zweig back in the day. I'm so glad that Justin came on the scene to take it over and has really just molded it into something really special and I'm specifically talking about project management. And for those of you that listen to this podcast on a regular basis, if you work anywhere in the design industry space, you know that one of the biggest challenges that design firms have is project management. How do we make sure that everybody on the team understands how to operate within the confines or construct a project? How to interact with both the client as well as their team members? How to communicate effectively? There are so many moving parts to a project management team. And there are so many qualities of a good project manager, a good assistant project manager, or APM, as we call them, and even a good Senior Project Manager, but we also know what a bad project manager looks like as well. And typically, it's individuals that struggle with communicating effectively and doing so much to move the team along throughout the process. So I said, who better to bring on the podcast than Justin Smith, to have him share what project management really is and also share some of the worst stories that he's gone through throughout his career as both an engineer and a consultant to this space. So without further ado, Justin Smith, I know that was long-winded, but I wanted to set you up for success here. Welcome to The Zweig Letter Podcast for the first time.

Justin Smith [2:07] Well, after that introduction, I feel like I need to lower expectations a little bit before we get into it but thanks very much for having me. A pleasure to be with you. Always a good time talking to you, Randy.

Randy Wilburn [2:18] Absolutely. Well. Listen, man, I'd love for you just to give the audience your superhero origin story and just tell them a little bit about yourself.

Justin Smith [2:27] So originally born and raised in Midwest, Michigan, specifically. I went to school at SMU in Dallas, Texas, go ponies. I majored in Civil Engineering, primarily because I was

drawn to math and found myself to be a pretty concrete thinker, but struggled a little bit with some of the abstract nature of more advanced math. So engineering seems to blend the best qualities of science, math, concrete thinking, and the ability to produce tangible results. And I found myself really drawn to that combination. So I graduated with a BS and an MS from SMU and went to work for a local civil structural firm in Dallas, Texas. In 2008, what better time to enter the industry, but it definitely taught me a lot of lessons about learning quickly and getting a peek into how leadership teams made decisions on projects. So from there, my career took me across the country. I worked for a time in New York, worked for a time in Florida, and now I'm presently located back in New England in Connecticut. But throughout that time, I worked in small teams, large teams, small organizations, and large organizations, and really found myself drawn to project management and the ability of a team to successfully execute a project as a strategic initiative within firms. Not just something that we do passively to deliver engineering services, but really a strategic opportunity for firms. So over the past few years, I've been focused on working with project management teams and leadership teams to pursue project management as a strategic objective. When you boil it down, the ability to successfully deliver a project is the thing that enables all the other things that firms want to focus on.

Randy Wilburn [4:30] That essentially lines up with the mission of Start to Rise, which is to help AEC firms codify their project management playbook giving them more time to focus on their people and their business.

Justin Smith [4:47] That's exactly right. I mean, having a great project management system that is all consuming is better than not having anything but really what we want to do is we want to help firms lean out the process, and focus on the non-negotiables so that they can deliver more successful projects and spend their time running the business instead of fighting fires.

Randy Wilburn [5:09] So, you started working with Zweig during the pandemic and you said it was a unique set up because you did a lot of virtual training, and then you finally did some in-person training. As we all know, Zweig Group offers a number of online education programs, as well as personal training. A lot of companies can call Zweig Group to have them come in and do a bespoke training for that particular company's needs, whether it's leadership, it could be a number of different factors. Typically, the main focuses happen to be leadership, sometimes financial management, but probably the most requested is project management. Most firms want help in that area because every firm has shortcomings as far as that's concerned. There

are a few firms. There are some outliers, as we like to say that really do project management well, and they tend to be the beacons of hope that we all look to when we're focusing on the North Star of project management. But you've had a chance to really go in and even before coming to Zweig, to go into a number of different firms and identify some of the major pain points about project management. I'm wondering if maybe you could tease that out so that some people in the audience listening to this might even identify some of the challenges that they're facing before we get into how you structure your project management training and what it actually looks like. So let's talk specifically first about the challenges that firms struggle with when it comes to project management. Justin Smith [6:49] So it's interesting because whether your firm is a sole proprietor, 10 people, 500 people, what we found is that there are a lot of common elements among firms of varying size that they tend to struggle with and pop up time and time again on projects. The opportunity really lies in smaller firms recognizing those and codifying their solutions to those problems early so that as they grow, they're solving a smaller problem on the front end versus a very large problem. But it does seem that communication is a common challenge, being able to structure the way that you communicate about projects and assign work. Looking internally, and then when it's looking outwardly, it's really the ability of project managers to tease expectations out of their clients and help walk their clients through the thought process to arrive at good decisions on projects. Leadership is a huge element. We'll talk about this in just a minute but when we looked at the body of research out there on project management, leadership is a huge topic. And leadership ability of the project manager has been identified as the strongest link to project success. And then we look at more portfolio challenges. Resource planning is a challenge that has been thorny for a long time. There are a lot of solutions out there, but the firms that can capture their resource needs now and capture their resource needs in the future, and then make good plans to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to go are really the ones that find themselves relaxed during the last two weeks of a deliverable versus under the gun. And then the last piece that we see really commonly is the ability to solve problems. And we're not talking about engineering problems. We're not talking about architectural problems. We're talking about when groups of people get together with competing interests. How can the project manager be the one that really leads the team to a solution that is a true win-win? So regardless of whether the firm is one person that is working with some consultants or a small founder-led company, all the way up to hundreds of employees, these tend to be those common >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12

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