Business Management ABCs

Which Is A More Valuable Resource Time or Money

A project is an endeavor by a group of people who come together for the accomplishment of a common goal, that of completing the project within the allocated time and money.

Project management can also be described as the process of converting in reality the dream seen by the architects and consultants.

The practice of tracking the progress of this project at regular intervals is called as project monitoring. Project monitoring can be done by planning programs like MsProjects and Primavera.

But in India the problem with projects is that the planning stage is not treated very seriously. At times planning is carried out in parallel with execution, which is a wrong practice. Every project should have a master plan prepared before project execution. This master plan can later be modified at regular intervals using the above mentioned software tools. This modification is called as project tracking and monitoring. Project tracking can be done depending upon the availability of labor, finance, materials, equipments and most importantly time.

The last mentioned resource can’t be created and once wasted leads to loss of all the other resources. This is the sad story of all the projects whether it is infrastructure like roads, airports or utilities like hotels, residential projects and mixed use establishments, in India. As planning is not taken seriously a very valuable resource called as time is lost. A standing example of this is the infrastructure project of Bandra Worli Sea Link. But the moot question is why planning is not taken seriously.

My personal opinion about the cause of this malady is our fickle human nature. Today we are so obsessed with saving money that we lose time and quality. We lose time by taking on board the wrong people to execute our projects without looking at their technical and financial competencies. To elaborate, I would like to give an example. Government tenders are invariably decided in favor of the lowest bidder L1, which they call as favorable vendor as he is ready to do the job at the rate decided by the government, without looking at their technical competencies. By financial competency, I mean the solvency of the vendor undertaking the project.

The vendor should have adequate cash flow to match with the owners so that the project does not derail from its path. This mad obsession to save money also leads us to recruit labor who are not at all suitable for the trade for which they are selected. The practice today is that labor (even engineers) are recruited keeping the cost factor in mind rather than their technical competency. I have seen a civil engineer following up the consultants’ payments when that job has to be done by the finance and recoveries department or the project manager. This happens as there are very few people in the finance and recoveries and there are a lot of bills receivables..

The main reason for this is the same mad rush to save a resource that can be easily reproduced in the process neglecting one that cant be recreated. My only question to all project managers would be. WHY IS A RESOURCE WHICH CAN BE REPRODUCED GIVEN MORE IMPORTANCE THAN A RESOURCE WHICH CANT BE SUBSTITUTED..