Raising children and working a fulfilling career should not have to battle. Many choose to put one on hold to prioritise the other, many feel forced into that decision. There’s no instruction manual for the perfect ‘balance’, but here’s Sinead’s thoughts.

When there’s a problem on your project, you can either deal with it or you can avoid it. If you’re the type to avoid it, this article is for you.

As government tenders continue to shift to require more social benefits for their local communities, it’s important for consultancies to understand their role and what they can do to stand out.

Properly briefing Consultants is key to the success of your project and ensures that they can provide the services you require in the time and at the price needed.

A project manager should know how to mitigate conflict by being able to identify the resolution that has the least impact on the project timeline, budget, and quality.

Is Buying Local a great policy that delivers long-lasting community benefits or just a set of rules to be worked around?

As a business owner, engineer, project manager, wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, wannabe runner, lover of cooking and eater of too much takeaway, I certainly do not have all the answers to managing time. What I do have is a work ‘to-do list’ and a strategy of how to prioritise it.

There are so many aspects to communication that we are taught in project management, however as the world we are living in is becoming progressively more digital, that’s all changing. While email is a fantastic tool for transferring information, it is not a medium designed to completely replace conversation.

A good project team is versatile and full of potential but without the right leadership and resources, they won’t be engaged in your project.

When every organisation has their own templates and each person has their own style, tender documents skew the definition of ‘contract’. If tender documents are designed to clarify scope, prevent conflict and reduce risk, why are they often so poorly written?

Despite decades of experience behind any given project team with multitudes of skills, qualifications, licenses, and expertise, is it possible that the Client still carries the greatest influence over a project’s success?

Project Managers are consistently trying to reduce the time and cost of projects in order to achieve targets. Whether the pressure is coming from the sponsors or an impending event, the sands keep falling. When looking for time to cut, it is common to look at the design timeframe.

Often, that is a mistake.

The purpose of having ‘lessons learnt’ is to provide an insight into how projects can operate more smoothly in the future. However, the process itself isn’t perfect and could stand for some improvement.

As project managers, we want to be able to plan for everything. Unfortunately when it comes to soft skills, the most we can plan for it to be adaptive to change.

One of the most valuable assets you can have as a project manager is good common sense. Unfortunately, it is not exactly something that you can study. Our philosophy to common sense is simple: if you can define it, you can practice it.

Almost everyone hates document control in Defence projects. This hatred, or dismissal, can lead a project astray. Good document control enables accurate communication, project tracking and project recording, and minimises the chance of delays. While there is an efficient and effective way to document control, there is always room for improvement.

While networking may not be written directly into the job description, it can add immeasurable value to the development and career of an engineer.

When the world went online during 2020, we were lucky we had the technology ready to go. However, this adaption of technology isn’t temporary. It’s here to stay. It’s convenient, intelligent and fast. What the technology lacks is the ability to convey nonverbal communication. Intuition does not translate to zeros and ones.

In the workplace, and especially in construction projects, it’s easy to forget that there are healthy, alternative motivators. People want different things. Understanding what those things are can help to find similarities and unify visions. Different situations require different approaches to communication.

The “Guideline for Operations and Maintenance Manuals” was originally published in 2007, updated in 2010 and remained unchanged for the next 10 years. Despite every other Defence process and system relating to project management and the project lifecycle advancing over the last 10 years, OMMs had not. That is, until June 2020.