Engineering Project Management

13The Social Aspects of Engineering Project Management

It is a cute cliché that engineers lack social and interpersonal skills. In actual fact, being a good engineering project manager is a highly social activity, and you will find that exercising effective interpersonal skills is an important part of your success as an engineering project manager. In this chapter, I teach you what you need to know: aligning and building an effective team, motivating and inspiring people, managing conflict, and other topics. The good news is that we engineers can actually learn to do this aspect of the job just fine … despite the clichés.

I will then discuss how you can get ahead in your career. I conclude with a couple of special topics: how to deal with the special problems presented by those projects whose work is geographically distributed across more than one work site, and those projects that include teams located in multiple countries.

You will spend most of your time as the manager of an engineering project dealing with people: employees, subcontractors, vendors, buying customers, paying customers, supervisors, other stakeholders, your corporate law department, your corporate human relations department, and so forth.

Since you will be spending so much of your time dealing with people, the social aspects of engineering project management – motivating people, aligning your team, resolving conflict, managing expectations, and so forth – are hugely important to your success, and to the ...