Peerasit Patanakul

It is the time of year when the performance evaluation will soon be carried out. Matt Garner, the director of the project management department, sits in his room contemplating all the initiatives he had implemented in the past year. Some of them were successful, but the majority of them were not. Before joining Clement, Matt had many years of experience in project management and also worked as a project management consultant. He joined Clement several years ago in the quality assurance department and was promoted to the director of project management department at the beginning of this year.

COMPANY AND ITS PRODUCTS

Clement Corp is a provider of integrated financial and operations software for small and mid - sized businesses in the construction and real estate industries. The company also provides a range of support services. It operates predominantly within the United States; and also licenses products in other countries, including Australia and Canada. Clement ’ s customers include commercial and industrial contractors, residential builders, specialty contractors, electrical and mechanical contractors, real estate managers, real estate developers, corporate owners, and the government.

Through its integrated family of construction and real estate management solutions, Clement Office construction software gives its customers highly developed cross - functional capabilities to pull everything together for streamlined, single - source control. The software suite includes:

•Accounting: accounts payable, accounts receivable, billing, cash management, contracts, equipment cost, financial statement designer, job cost, pay roll, remote time entry, etc.

•Estimating: tools, data base, etc. Procurement: buy - out, inventory, purchasing, etc.

•Reporting and productivity: document management, information assistant, inquiry design, report designer, etc.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AT CLEMENT

Before Matt assumed the capacity of the director, project management at Clement was in a state of disrepair. Because of the internal promotion, technical staff were promoted to project manager positions with limited experience. In fact, no one had formal project management background and little training was provided. However, project managers did the job as best as they could. Matt knew this problem and he was

convinced by the CEO of the company to take this challenging task. He recalled his conversation with the CEO at the beginning of this year:

CEO: I know this is a big issue that we have to address as soon as possible. I want you to develop a methodology, document it, train the company on it, implement it, maintain it, and get these project managers up to speed.

This sounded simple but Matt knew it would not be easy to do. He knew that a previous director could not develop and implement the standard methodology. He had to figure out a way to do it successfully. He thought, at least, he had the support from the CEO.