eased owner, is the concept of scoring or objectifying "success." Wearne lists 19 factors on which "project success" depends or may depend (Wearne, "1. Projects" 8-12). Among those not specifically mentioned, which appear to be universally scored across North America, are: Adherence to the promised schedule, completion of all project objectives within (below) the last-agreed-to budget, and--at every stage--visibility and means for sanctioning of the person (Project Manager) who is responsible.
The eighth of Smith's chapters--on project organization (Wearne, "8. Project" 125-133)--reveals two important aspects of contractor reality. One, a project manager is generally a member of a large firm, with stockholding owners, construction crews, estimators, buyers, equipment operators, etc. Two, the assigned PM is alone; he or she is the single person the project-owner's representative will hound until project (task) completion and to whom responsibility for each accident or failure will be assigned. These two realities are in absolute conflict.
Which one dominates? The firm exists. Project managers can be replaced; they know that. Smart PM's achieve corporate success by making money for their firms; they achieve personal success by building monuments (or functioning sewage treatment works) for their firm's clients; and they achieve perverse satisfaction from enduring both the firm's and the client's duress while gleaning as much help from the two organizations' staffs as possible and then taking all the credit at the end for themselves. All parties seem to understand this arrangement. While Wearne's greatest contribution is his subchapter on Communications (within the PM's own firm)(Wearne, "8. Project" 128-132), he seems to have overlooked the sometimes overwhelming circumstance that there are two organizations--the PM's and the owner's, plus any contractors and subcontractors and all their peculiar, pacific imperatives for ...