The Need for Travel

When planning a project, it's important to budget for travel.

Even in today's modern world, with high-speed internet connectivity, video conferencing, applications like join.me and go-to-meeting, Skype, email, IM, texts, smart phones, 4G hotspots, etc… there still is no substitute for face-to-face, in-person meetings. This is especially true for critical WBS items for which you're responsible. And even more so when you're remotely interacting with colleagues and contractors working in foreign countries, where nuances in language are literally lost in translation.

Presence matters.

Face-to-face matters.

Presence lends an air of conviction and importance that a telephone call or email normally can't carry with it.

If you can, meet face-to-face, and this in turn means you need to have sufficient budget to allow for travel. On our big, 50-person, international multi-year project, we have allocated just under $8M for staff travel over the 10-year life of the project. This works out to be about 2.2% of the entire $350M project, or roughly $16K per person per year. This might seem high to new project managers in the planning stages of a project, but on our project we have dozens of contractors located around the globe, including significant work that is performed in Europe. We also have four headquarters sites (three on continental US, and one in Hawaii).

When we started, we knew that we would be in planes, trains, and automobiles for significant periods of time. Our engineers performed bottom-up travel estimates on a work package by work package basis, focusing on the expected number of support trips needed, including the number of people we had to have at those meetings. Travel costs were then calculated and rolled up into a set of high-level management travel accounts; the estimates were performed bottom-up, but we manage the money top down.

Budgeting at these levels allows our engineers, managers, and scientists to be where they need to be to perform their job duties-- without management discouraging said travel because it's squeezing the overall budget. In other words, we planned for this expense from the start, so expectations in this area were managed from the beginning.

Allowing engineers, managers, and scientists to be where they need to be has paid significant dividends in the form of reduced errors, mistakes, schedule slips, and of course change orders. There is a marked difference is contract performance at those contractors that we support heavily with travel vs. those that we don't visit as often. Travel not only keeps the engineers well informed of progress and issues in near-real time, but it lets the contractor see firsthand that a) we care about what they're doing; b) we expect to see regular progress; and c) we're helping them solve problems as they arise, not afterward when it's often too late. Our contractors have told us they feel more a sense of being part of a team then just as a supplier. Presence lends conviction.

Bottom Line: Budget correctly for travel at the beginning of a project-- it is vitally important to success.

© Copyright 2014 Mark H.Warner. All rights reserved.