Episode 29 — Best Practices with Keith Williams

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● KEITH WILLIAMS NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our informal discourse about what matters most to you as a professional project manager, or if you’re working toward that position.  We want to keep you motivated, keep you improving, and encourage you with some real-life stories from others who are doing the stuff of project management. I’m your host Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at all this, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And one of the subjects we like to keep coming back to, it seems, in this podcast, Andy, is what we call “best practices.”  And our guest today can definitely speak to that. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, I’m looking forward to that.  We have Keith Williams in the studio with us today.  And, you know, the whole idea with best practices, we get to learn from other people.  We get to figure out what they’ve learned by trial and error and through some pain so that maybe we don’t have to go through that ourselves each time. NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about Keith before we introduce him.  He’s a project control supervisor at Georgia Power Company.  He’s been serving in various areas of project management there since 2005, and as the operational performance supervisor for Southern Company.  Before that he held several project management/project controls positions at Parsons Company, Georgia Transmission, Enron Energy Services, Chemical & Industrial Engineering, the City of Louisville, and Earth Science Technologies.  Keith, it is a privilege to have you here on Manage This.  Welcome. KEITH WILLIAMS:  Thank you, and I look forward to it.  It’s a great opportunity. NICK WALKER:  Let’s start of by – just tell us a little bit about your current role in project controls at Georgia Power. KEITH WILLIAMS:  The project controls group at Georgia Power, first of all, I’m segmented in the transmission organization.  Those are your large power lines and substations.  The biggest thing we always like to describe, we’re the extension cord between the plant and the customer, so we’re the big orange cord. BILL YATES:  That’s a good picture.  Got it. KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so my group is mainly responsible for scheduling and budget controls.  It’s segmented into several different fields within project controls, which also includes cost engineering.  And also we’re responsible for the tools that manage all of that.  In that role, as far as my leadership within my group, our goal is I always like to say we’re the mortar between the bricks.  We’re the ones that are trying to make the connection between the organization and give them information so that, first of all, our project managers can make good decisions, offer real information; and then also to see how we can improve processes as far as that constant improvement that you see in Six Sigma. NICK WALKER:  You’re a project management nerd. KEITH WILLIAMS:  Yes, I would agree. NICK WALKER:  That’s what Bill and Andy are calling you.  And we love project management nerds. KEITH WILLIAMS:  Oh, most definitely.  I get told that a lot.  But then I look at the other guy and say, “Hey, you all are engineers.  It’s not like you all are cool.” ANDY CROWE:  Keith, you mentioned Six Sigma.  Now, do you guys actually practice Six Sigma in your group, or is that something that you look at from your own standpoint? KEITH WILLIAMS:  It’s something more I look at from my own standpoint, really got exposed to it as the operational performance supervisor.  And especially with looking at DMAIC and looking at those aspects there. BILL YATES:  Sure.  Now, Nick, you called me out, so I need to go ahead and explain. NICK WALKER:  Sure. BILL YATES:  So here’s how I came to that conclusion.  There are many data points here.  But as Keith and I were talking, he is a card-carrying member of the AACE,