ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● KEITH WILLIAMS

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our informal discourse about what matters most to you as a professional project manager, or if you’re working toward that position.  We want to keep you motivated, keep you improving, and encourage you with some real-life stories from others who are doing the stuff of project management.

I’m your host Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at all this, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And one of the subjects we like to keep coming back to, it seems, in this podcast, Andy, is what we call “best practices.”  And our guest today can definitely speak to that.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, I’m looking forward to that.  We have Keith Williams in the studio with us today.  And, you know, the whole idea with best practices, we get to learn from other people.  We get to figure out what they’ve learned by trial and error and through some pain so that maybe we don’t have to go through that ourselves each time.

NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about Keith before we introduce him.  He’s a project control supervisor at Georgia Power Company.  He’s been serving in various areas of project management there since 2005, and as the operational performance supervisor for Southern Company.  Before that he held several project management/project controls positions at Parsons Company, Georgia Transmission, Enron Energy Services, Chemical & Industrial Engineering, the City of Louisville, and Earth Science Technologies.  Keith, it is a privilege to have you here on Manage This.  Welcome.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Thank you, and I look forward to it.  It’s a great opportunity.

NICK WALKER:  Let’s start of by – just tell us a little bit about your current role in project controls at Georgia Power.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  The project controls group at Georgia Power, first of all, I’m segmented in the transmission organization.  Those are your large power lines and substations.  The biggest thing we always like to describe, we’re the extension cord between the plant and the customer, so we’re the big orange cord.

BILL YATES:  That’s a good picture.  Got it.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so my group is mainly responsible for scheduling and budget controls.  It’s segmented into several different fields within project controls, which also includes cost engineering.  And also we’re responsible for the tools that manage all of that.  In that role, as far as my leadership within my group, our goal is I always like to say we’re the mortar between the bricks.  We’re the ones that are trying to make the connection between the organization and give them information so that, first of all, our project managers can make good decisions, offer real information; and then also to see how we can improve processes as far as that constant improvement that you see in Six Sigma.

NICK WALKER:  You’re a project management nerd.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Yes, I would agree.

NICK WALKER:  That’s what Bill and Andy are calling you.  And we love project management nerds.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Oh, most definitely.  I get told that a lot.  But then I look at the other guy and say, “Hey, you all are engineers.  It’s not like you all are cool.”

ANDY CROWE:  Keith, you mentioned Six Sigma.  Now, do you guys actually practice Six Sigma in your group, or is that something that you look at from your own standpoint?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  It’s something more I look at from my own standpoint, really got exposed to it as the operational performance supervisor.  And especially with looking at DMAIC and looking at those aspects there.

BILL YATES:  Sure.  Now, Nick, you called me out, so I need to go ahead and explain.

NICK WALKER:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  So here’s how I came to that conclusion.  There are many data points here.  But as Keith and I were talking, he is a card-carrying member of the AACE, which is the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering.  And now, for those who have studied earned value management, you know what this is.

ANDY CROWE:  Earned value management is your entry card to get into this group.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, it’s like your password to get into that speakeasy.

BILL YATES:  So when he talks about scheduling and budgeting, yeah, this is exactly – this is part of our wheel...

ANDY CROWE:  This is the deep end of the pool, isn’t it.

BILL YATES:  Yup, yup.

NICK WALKER:  But when I look back at your résumé, you started out in biology.  That seems like a long way from where we are now.  Or is it, really?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  From a project management standpoint it’s really not.  Project management is sort of a model you can apply to any industry.  Now, when I got into biology, I did not know I would fall into environmental.  But there I was a projects person.  And we did a lot of, back during the early ‘90s, underground storage tank removals due to federal regulations.  And then just doing those jobs at retail sites as far as the law was you had to change all those out.  And then if there were any long-term issues there, as far as what type of remediation work we would need to do.  But that was sort of my informal introduction to it.

NICK WALKER:  So tell us a little bit about how that has transformed into what you’re doing now, and where are you headed with all this?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  I would say the biggest thing you learn as far as when you start doing project management or get introduced to it is you want a systematic way of approaching your work.  You want a methodology that is going to help you be more proactive and not just reactive to the things that you need to do.  And so what I found is that, even though it was informal, I didn’t know what it was called at the time, but that was really the approach that I could apply this and consistently use this over and over again.

And when I say “proactive” is how do I understand the risks that we have because there’s always environmental things.  And when I say “environmental,” not just from the field, but there are some external impacts that you’re going to have to try to anticipate and then mediate.  And so to me that’s just an awesome part of it.  And when I say you can apply it to anything, look at my résumé.  I’ve been in environmental.  I’ve been in chem, petrochem.  I’ve been in energy, utility, water, wastewater, but still using that same concept to do those jobs.

BILL YATES:  One of the things that I think Keith has a unique voice in is within your industry, because I was a part of this industry for 18 years myself, in the utility industry, one thing that’s unique with utilities is they share data across the industry.  Because of the regulatory bodies, they’re encouraged to do so.  But you’ve been a part of committees and are serving on some subcommittees now where you have the opportunity to look at, not just the project’s performance within your own organization, but looking across many different utilities, as well.  Tell us a little bit about some of those committees, and then let’s get into some of the takeaways that you have from those.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Okay.  With the committees that I’ve served on, one that I’m doing right now is AEIC.

BILL YATES:  And, yeah, what does that stand for?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  I’ll butcher this real quick.

BILL YATES:  I think – I jotted it down just in case.  It’s the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Yes.  And they have different working committees.  And one of them is a subcommittee on project management.  We try to get like for like.  So in our area that I’m a part of, most of these utilities are part of it.  They’re in the transmission or distribution organization.  Other committees involved with, Southern Company used to do a Southern Company transmission benchmarking effort where we would share technical data as far as cost to maintain, whether it would be substation lines in other areas.

But I’m going to back up a little bit to tell you a unique story when we first started doing that.  My role as operations supervisor was I ran that consortium.  But when we were doing feedback and trying to retool that organization, a lot of people started saying we love the data, it’s great.  But I tell you, the best part of the conference is the conversations out in the hallway when we start talking best practices.

ANDY CROWE:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  Right.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so we started making that a focus.  And really what we’re saying, even though it’s a formal setting, a lot of those conversations are very informal because they’re trying to figure out what do their organizations value and how can they move the needle.  A lot of times moving the needle is cost and schedule.  When I say “cost and schedule,” how can we maximize the work we’re getting done for the minimal cost?  And so the example I always give, if you have a capital budget for your organization, let’s say $500 million, at the beginning of the year you say I’m going to do 300 projects for $500 million.  At the end of the year, you might have only done 175 projects, but you spent the $500 million.

BILL YATES:  Right.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so I always ask that question:  Were you successful?  And that’s usually the high point where we start in saying, okay, let’s talk about a little bit more what it means.  For organizations today are under tremendous cost constraints.  We’re seeing that, not just in our industry, but across the board.  So they want to maximize and get more done with less.  And so when we start looking at stuff at our companies and in our industries, we’re now paying attention.  You saw on my résumé I used to work with Enron.  The Enron days are over with, where you just throw money at a problem.  We just don’t have that luxury.