Keith Pickavance certainly knows how to alienate a big section of the CIOB’s membership (‘Is Your Planner a Monkey?’, CM, October 2007).

Naturally projects that have gone wrong will exhibit some of the worse examples of project management, but he should be wary of extending this minority of cases to the industry as a whole.

As a ‘monkey’ who started as a planner over 30 years ago I can assure him there was no ‘golden age’ as he seems to suggest. Okay, so we had to plough our way through tedious CPM calculations, but that also meant we tended not to produce very detailed networks and certainly did not have the energy to perform regular ‘what if’ analyses or programme updates.

Inflammatory language isn’t going to aid recruitment or enhance the reputation of the planning membership of the CIOB. The problem for contractors is not just a shortage of good planners; as CM regularly tell us, our industry is suffering from a shortage of talented and qualified staff in all disciplines.

David Bordoli FCIOB

Source

Construction Manager