A recurring challenge I hear from firm leaders in the AEC industry is a lack of project management skills within marketing and business development.
Don't get me wrong ... no one is saying "Julie, our team is struggling with project management!"
Because most companies don't associate project management with the marketing function at an AEC firm.
What I hear is:
- "Every project is unique which means our proposal process has to be unique for each project."
- "What do you mean "close out the project"? We haven't even won it yet."
- "No, Julie, we don't track our proposal process. Who EVEN does that?!"
But project management knowledge gives us a formula to follow even when every project pursuit is unique. The phases shared in this video are project management 101.
You are likely doing them. However, you may not realize it. And if you don't realize it, you aren't documenting them. Once you document them then you can improve on each phase going forward.
Let's talk about project management for project pursuit specialist. You may not have that title, but that is what the AEC industry calls marketing coordinators, senior marketing coordinators, marketing managers. It's wrapped up in a lot of titles. And what that means in the AEC industry is that you are leading the charge on proposals and going after some projects, especially once your company has received an RFP.
I'm going to go over some foundations of project management that you're probably already doing.
Those foundations sound like the process lifecycle. You have five phases:
- initiation
- planning
- execution
- monitoring and control
- closing
Those may sound like phrases you're not familiar with, but what that looks like in the AEC industry is that initiation is really your go/no-go decision making process. The planning includes scope, schedule, cost, people. You have to know all those things in order to pursue a project. The execution is you actually doing the proposal. And that's what a lot of project pursuit specialists are doing.
Monitoring and control is where you're doing red lines and reviews. I'm not just saying the reviews of the proposal. The review may also be how did your team perform in pursuing this project? It's going to include KPIs and metrics. There's a lot in that monitoring and controlling phase. And then the last phase is closing. This phase is not only just closing it out in your CRM or within a file system, it's also documenting lessons learned. So the next time you go after a project, you'll do it better and more efficiently.
We already do a lot of project management in the AEC world from a marketing and a business development perspective. And this is just a simple formulation of it. If you're not already creating a formula for your project pursuits, this is the foundation of what that looks like.
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