are a few firms. There are some outliers, as we like to say that really do project management well, and they tend to be the beacons of hope that we all look to when we're focusing on the North Star of project management. But you've had a chance to really go in and even before coming to Zweig, to go into a number of different firms and identify some of the major pain points about project management. I'm wondering if maybe you could tease that out so that some people in the audience listening to this might even identify some of the challenges that they're facing before we get into how you structure your project management training and what it actually looks like. So let's talk specifically first about the challenges that firms struggle with when it comes to project management. Justin Smith [6:49] So it's interesting because whether your firm is a sole proprietor, 10 people, 500 people, what we found is that there are a lot of common elements among firms of varying size that they tend to struggle with and pop up time and time again on projects. The opportunity really lies in smaller firms recognizing those and codifying their solutions to those problems early so that as they grow, they're solving a smaller problem on the front end versus a very large problem. But it does seem that communication is a common challenge, being able to structure the way that you communicate about projects and assign work. Looking internally, and then when it's looking outwardly, it's really the ability of project managers to tease expectations out of their clients and help walk their clients through the thought process to arrive at good decisions on projects. Leadership is a huge element. We'll talk about this in just a minute but when we looked at the body of research out there on project management, leadership is a huge topic. And leadership ability of the project manager has been identified as the strongest link to project success. And then we look at more portfolio challenges. Resource planning is a challenge that has been thorny for a long time. There are a lot of solutions out there, but the firms that can capture their resource needs now and capture their resource needs in the future, and then make good plans to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to go are really the ones that find themselves relaxed during the last two weeks of a deliverable versus under the gun. And then the last piece that we see really commonly is the ability to solve problems. And we're not talking about engineering problems. We're not talking about architectural problems. We're talking about when groups of people get together with competing interests. How can the project manager be the one that really leads the team to a solution that is a true win-win? So regardless of whether the firm is one person that is working with some consultants or a small founder-led company, all the way up to hundreds of employees, these tend to be those common data elements or those common issues that seem to be coming up time and time again. And the firms that are well positioned in these areas are the ones that struggle a lot less with project management than the ones that aren't.
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