CCM vs. PMP - What do you want to be when you grow up?

 A castle in the clouds design concept by artist Raphael Lacoste.

Initiation

Recently in my network I have become point person for what I affectionately term: "PMP-iatry." At least once a week colleagues or acquaintances contact me wondering about requirements or the experience of certifying as a PMP.

This past week, a colleague invited me to coffee to asking what is necessary in order to start working on certification requirements. On the way to coffee, I asked him what I always ask at the outset of this conversation: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Requirements Management

Without much prompting, he mentioned his desire to continue the family construction business, and certification would be his key to success. I countered this assertion saying he could easily succeed in business by focusing on processes he already knew and hiring someone with a CCM. The idea that multiple styles of project management certifications exist was foreign to him. So, I began to explain what I learned from having spent the last few years inside a construction PMO, interacting with CCMs, reviewing materials from both exams and passing the PMP.

Both exams share essential parallels. Understandings of the critical project management functions: scope, resources, schedule, risk, contract and stakeholder management all match up. Safety management, for example, is not an implicit PMP requirement. However, these items a PM could - either with a mentorship component or subject matter expert utilization, - absorb quickly along with taking the OSHA training. During training, a crossover PM could easily begin responsibilities in the CM world, and once properly trained and assessed, venture out on their own.

The 'responsible-in-charge' requirement is a frequent point of contention, but profitable management of projects is common between both certifications. Pivoting towards profitability, discovering efficiencies, eliminating wasteful practices, and change management are defined areas of study under the PMP. 

It is also true that, of the nearly 650,000 PMPs compared to 3,400 CCMs, a good chunk are not in RIC roles. Many are though, and have direct responsibility with projects of a scope complexity, scale and budget comparable to construction projects.

Change Management

So what's the point David? 

Rendering of  Governor Cuomo's
proposed JFK renovation

It is the following: Capital dollars spent by all three sectors vary widely annually. If the $1.0 Trillion infrastructure program ever materializes, the project backlog will be outrageous. Just now in New York, Governor Cuomo announced $10 Billion for JFK Airport renovations before the $3.0 Billion LaGuardia renovation is finished. Neither of those amounts take into account the commercial and residential construction that should kick off this year.

When all of those projects go live, there won't just be a labor supply gap. There will be an inescapable vacuum that irrevocably stalls on time and budget project delivery. Surveying industry openings just inside of LinkedIn a deficit of sufficient CCM supply already exists, while a veritable plethora of PMPs is available, many of whom are actively looking for strong opportunities.

Closeout

This represents a chance for the construction industry to pivot towards profitability. Creating mentorship and talent attraction/retention programs will pay dividends off into the out years. PMI and CMAA should develop inter-agency cooperation, and practitioners from both certifications need to be involved in the cross walk. However, the end product should be a freshly minted Construction PM able to glide seamlessly from one environment to the next and back again. Enough CM firms of sufficient size and heft exist that such a thing ought to easily spontaneously generate, and be standardizable across organizations. Feel free to contact me for some ideas.

So, what do you want to be when you grow up?

The EkranoYacht. A design concept winner from Australia, powered by Hydrogen. What's in your future?

Millennial Management in a Baby Boomer world.

This is the second in a series on management styles as they pertain to Millennials.

“Change agent” and “work-life blend” have become nomenclature de rigeur regarding a generation of current employees percolating up through the bases of organizational structures in public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Their hallmarks: overabundant utilization of new technologies, a desire for purpose driven work, and breaking down the entrenched hierarchies of business culture.

If you read that opening statement and considered this not the first time you’ve heard a generation fantasize about reforming their work environment to find a higher purpose, improving office protocols and efficiency through space-aged technology, congratulations! These are modalities inherited from their parents. The flower children and Volkswagen van touring generation birthed a new generation just the same. There is even a movement of 20 - 30 somethings to travel in tricked out, wifi enabled late model vans living the digital nomad lifestyle. The new American Dream includes a life of liberty on the open road according to a new Vice article by David Jagneaux.

However, where the whole of writing on the topic has gone completely awry is in the estimation of Generation Y’s taste for hierarchical work structures. Millennials are quite comfortable and entirely amenable to working inside of these sorts of structures - as long as they were the ones who imputed the structure. Such is the idea behind so much of the post-classroom work in which TFA is involved, as well as NLC, StudentsFirstNY, and a variety of other parallel organizations whose prime objectives are fundraising, and pipe-lining their alumni into key positions in the current political and business structures.

This is the hidden curriculum of the next generation 'leadership training' forums presently in vogue. The ideals behind flattening existing organizational structures and eliminating traditional pathways to leadership positions is to leapfrog trained, experienced, well-rounded - and, admittedly, a bit more seasoned, - individuals already in the leadership pipeline, displacing them entirely. But we have seen this insidiousness in prior versions of both world history, and popular fiction: Joffrey Baratheon, Jiao Long; in myths and legends - Phaeton, Patroclus, and in current business arenas.

Augmented reality. Photo courtesy of Design Boom

With the advent of the all-seeing, all-knowing interweb, IoT, Augmented Reality, and literally the power of the universe in the palm of their hands, now more than ever the generation needs guidance on why it is that they are performing the mechanical operations they’ve learned for their junior roles via YouTube channels.

Upending hierarchies
Photo by @dorania_luo

Fast-tracking untrained, inexperienced individuals into leadership positions is not a successful, long term sustainability plan for any of the three sectors. Thoughtful, reflective, purposeful leadership requires experience, learning, training, certification and degrees. It requires having had mentors so that as a leader they can in turn mentor the next generation. It requires a philosophical basis upon which the leader's daily actions and interactions are founded, and not one that is regurgitated in sound bites that make excellent five second Vines or catchy t-shirts devoid of historical context. We have seen this movie before and it always has a bad ending, always requiring the appropriately trained, highly experienced, and usually, a previously selected leadership figure to arrive and rid the kingdom of its ills (Game of Thrones has not yet arrived at this juncture.)

To quote Ryan and Robert Quinn from Harvard Business Review: Change Management and Leadership Development have to Mesh. This is a crucial concept for, as the saying goes amongst Navy SEALS: "Under pressure...you don't rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training. That's why we train so hard." Millennials, in order to be effective, will have to get the very thing that they lack - experience. Here I should echo the sentiments of a recent Forbes article: “Trying To Manage Millennials? Give Up And Lead Them Instead.” They will need leadership in terms of purpose, leadership in terms of habits of mind, leadership in terms of succession planning, and leadership in terms of critical thought. America will have to come to terms with the idea that the mentoring, instruction, and planning will have to be done by a generation older and more trained than the Millenials. The alternative is that while inexperienced, untrained 'leaders' are busy sinking to their level of training, the whole of the organizations around them will sink as well.

Fight the power.

Today I am thankful.

Photo by Daniel Schaefer

Thankful that my brothers and sisters are still with me. Thankful that during the past years, we have engaged in - admittedly at times, - heated debate, but mostly thoughtful discussion, ardent advocacy, and lifelong learning. Thankful that we have found each other in this journey, and managed to stay connected.

Today I am thankful they were not taken from me by a rogue with government authority and a gun, a rookie, or a racist. When George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, the danger of a non-indictment is ‘...not more Trayvon Martins, but more George Zimmermans'. The day after the Ferguson Decision, the same sentence pattern emerged in social media; ‘the danger of a non-indictment is not more Mike Browns, but more Darren Wilsons.’

After the decision of Ferguson’s Grand Jury not to indict, analysis of the documents and the long reaching implications erupted across the internet. Statements and nationwide actions continue in direct conjunction with heartfelt pleas for non-violence.  However, shooting deaths, economic segregation, educational manipulation, brutality against the community, and prisoners of the state...is not war already happening?

There are a number of periods in human history when oppressors were able to act this way towards an entire race. The Crusades, Colonization, Slavery, the Westward Expansion, Genocide, killing of Civil Rights Leaders, killing of Black Community Leaders, killing of young Black men...this seems a repetitive pattern.

Tearing apart cities, however, will prove nothing. Flashes of anger are to be expected, but it is not a means to the necessary end. Only a very generalized reaction in an extremely directed and organized fashion will break the pattern. Black Out Black Friday is a great opening to the 'national dialogue' for which our great thinkers have begun to call. But oppression is systemic and systematic, overt and inter-generational. Descendants of the era of the Conquistadors have been having 'a national dialogue' for more than 500 years. Once the border crossed them it became an international dialogue.

Ask an immigrant from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that lies South of the political borders of the United States how that dialogue is going. Ask the Native Americans.

Ask Mike Brown's parents. Or Trayvon's, or Kimani's, or Akai's, or Sean's, or Amadou's, or Ramarley's.

Now is an actionable moment and we are, in fact, perfectly positioned as a collective of communities, Black, Latino, Asian, all of us. We manage large swaths of the business sector that are cornerstones of the (inter)national economy. We are professors, we are military, we are elected officials and the staff of elected officials, we are workers, we are men and women, and we matter. We are even in the police force - not in the necessary amounts, but there nonetheless. We need an African American parallel to Univision or Telemundo, with news shows that discuss themes with gravitas and objectivity by educated, well spoken individuals from the community. We have the power and resources to furnish, staff and fund our own candidates, and ensure that sufficient votes carry them into office. We have to take our anger with us through to 2016 and usher in that new wave. Politics is not a spectator sport.

We are no longer the minority. We are the majority, and it is high time we started acting like it. As long as there is unity between our communities, and we have a well codified plan for success we will reach that goal. Amongst the requirements: a newly formed national political party banner under which to march is crucial. Yes, more than a rallying cry to the side of an unresponsive party, but an entirely unique party, not subject to the hegemony of dynastic families and politics as usual traditions. A party that is inclusive, and that will stand primarily to stop the killing and imprisonment of our young people. We have had multiple watershed moments, we have had our Tianamen Square moment. Now we must throw off the colonized mentality, and move boldly forward.