Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I believe in employing specialists – people who really know what they are doing.

I had an experience with experts this past month. Several of my friends have been working on another friend’s home for several weekends. I am not a carpenter, a plumber, nor an electrician. Regardless, I showed up and did as much as I could, and the other friends did the same.

Now and then, a friend had specialist come to the house – someone who actually had skills and experience. These specialists would accomplish more in a few minutes than a handful of volunteers would in a day. Last Saturday two general contractors finished a tricky toilet install in half an hour. The rest of us had been contemplating the problem for three weekends. The weekend before another specialist completed some dry-wall patching that  had frustrated me for a month.

So much for volunteers and home repair. I had a similar experience several years agao when I was monitoring a $100million project. There were ten different team leaders trying to coordinate their teams into one large team. Each team leader had his and her team’s schedules in Microsoft Project. The project manager linked the different team schedules into one master project schedule. Well, he tried to link them. Nothing ever quite worked.

Enter a specialist – a women who was expert in the use of Microsoft Project. She sat with each team leader for one hour. She changed all their Project preferences so they would be the same. I didn’t know their were such things. Once finished with that, she linked all the team schedules, found major holes in the project, and went to work fixing them. One and a half days on the job and she fixed a project that had been struggling for three years.

Specialists know the solution to a problem in the blink of an eye. They can start implementing the solution in minutes.

I am trying to be a specialist now – otherwise known as a consultant. I have tried in vain for years to have my managers employ specialists. I suppose what I need is a specialist in convincing managers of the benefits of specialists.

Any nominations out there?