INDUSTRIAL: Rethinking Project Management

• People: project managers, coordinators, detailers, foremen, fabricators and their experience, judgment and willingness to communicate bad news early.

• Processes: how change orders are captured, how RFIs are logged and answered, how drawings are issued and superseded, how labor is tracked and compared against budget.

• Tools: the actual platforms that hold drawings, budgets, time sheets, RFIs, submittals and photos.

“A new platform that just recreates the same bad habits in the cloud will not save a single dollar of margin,” he insists.

When Manual Tracking Becomes a Liability
The contractors who most urgently need a structured project management system often have the most reason to believe they can get by without one. The crews are seasoned, the estimator knows the market and the shop has its own rhythm. But Corsar asks them to look for three warning signs that show they can no longer operate without a better system:

• Too many surprises. Costs, quality problems, schedule slips or scope gaps keep blindsiding the project team. This equates to project managers being surprised more than once a week, executives more than once a month and ownership more than once a quarter, Corsar says, signaling that the system isn’t surfacing risk early enough.

• Progress reports that require a meeting. In many sheet metal shops, job status still comes together in a monthly ritual: someone gathers timecards, pulls the latest PO log, requests updated fabrication status, hunts through email for change approvals and then walks it all into a conference room. If there are no automated reports or dashboards, you are using meetings “to find out about problems, not to solve them,” Corsar says. 

• Claims and change orders that leak value. If the value of missed or incomplete claims is more than 25% of your margin or if no one can say how much is missing, the contractor is effectively donating profit to the general contractor or owner. In industrial HVAC work, where scope creep often hides in “small” extra runs or rework tied to other trades, that leakage can define an entire year’s results.

When all three indicators show up on the same jobs, Corsar says the problem is not “bad luck;” it is the project management system itself, and spreadsheets are part of the problem.

Who Actually Needs Project Management Software?
Corsar doesn’t pretend every contractor needs a heavyweight project management platform tomorrow. Instead, he challenges firms to ask what they are really trying to fix and to focus first on process. 

An integrated project management system can force changes through one documented path: an RFI or change request is logged, the model or drawing is updated, the shop status is changed, new assemblies are tagged and the cost and schedule impact are attached to that specific event. That is how a contractor turns what used to be unbilled chaos into a billable, defensible change.

For very small shops — fewer than 10 people — the question is stability. If jobs are small, scopes simple and changes rare, a modest digital backbone paired with disciplined processes may be enough. But if even one or two industrial scale jobs a year can push the company to the edge with complex coordination, multiple vendors and long lead times, that is a sign that more structured project management is no longer optional; it is insurance.

For mid-sized contractors — those with multiple foremen, a dedicated project manager or two and a real backlog — the tipping points are usually:

• Repeated disputes over extra work, especially when documentation lives in texts and unsaved photos.
• Chronic re entry of data from field to office — time sheets, quantities, change logs — that burns out staff and still produces inconsistent numbers.
• Difficulty answering basic questions in real time: Where is this job versus budget? Which change orders are approved? How much labor have we really spent on this level?

How to Decide on Project Management System Software
When a contractor decides that “something has to change,” Corsar’s advice is to focus on four areas to keep the project management software decision grounded.  

1. Budget. This means understanding not just license fees, but what you already spend on people who are doing manual project management: tracking hours, copying data, chasing signatures, reentering quantities and fixing billing errors. That cost often dwarfs the software line item.

2. Authority. Who really decides what project management tool can work best for the company? For a sheet metal contractor, that may mean bringing in the shop superintendent and the most skeptical field foreman before any contract is signed.

3. Need. Are you shopping for cost control, productivity, decision speed or risk management? If the “need cannot be explained in a single sentence that makes sense to the ultimate decision maker,” he warns, “you probably aren’t clear on what you’re buying.”

4. Timing. “System change takes 12 to 24 months,” Corsar says, and contractors should not let anyone convince them it can be done faster. For industrial HVAC and sheet metal shops juggling live jobs, that means planning a rollout that respects bid seasons, shutdown windows and critical project milestones.

Processes First, Tools Second
Corsar’s most practical advice to industrial contractors is also the least glamorous: fix your processes before you pick your platform. He stresses that “good process can make up for shortcomings in tools & people,” and warns, “if you don’t have good processes, stop” before you sign any software contract.