Nate Habermeyer, APR: 0:00

Hello listeners. This is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I went to the gala. Just as an aside, I went to the Canada era of Business Council gala last night. Oh, yeah, yeah. And then before they're expecting you, yes, yes. Do kanesh are members of the Canada Arab Business Council, which is a great organization, sort of representing and helping to facilitate a lot of the sort of, you know, MENA Canada business relationships. And then earlier in the day, I went to the business forum. So we sat down with, like the Jetta airports company, Jed co met with some other companies, and I'm sitting in the Ritz Carlton. And like in the morning the like 830 ish, 845 just doing some work. Down the lobby, like you do. There's all this breakfast bars, you know, I'm like, this is interesting. And in

Unknown: 1:10

walks shotani

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:14

Yamamoto, the whole Dodgers team walks in, what? Yeah, and they're they just arrived. Their their flight had just arrived yesterday morning in Toronto, because tonight is the, is the World Series. I mean, this is the, the series final for Toronto. If we win, we win the World Series. And, you know, placed in immortality. So you

Albert Brier: 1:41

got to see the but I saw them, yeah? The Dodgers, like a Lister, is some of the best baseball players of all time. Yeah?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 1:47

Shatani is. He is super tall, because you remember, he's like, 6665, or something. But he was almost unrecognized because they had a big hoodie on, like he could barely see his face, yeah. Moto, yeah. Anyways, and then all the guys come through, it's, it was cool. The people were taking pictures, and the hotel was like, hey, stop doing that. It was, it was

Albert Brier: 2:08

pretty, man, you know, on the one hand, like, they're, they're adequately compensated for their inconvenience, but on the other hand, like, what a pain in the ass to, like, not be able to go anywhere without having a picture taken. Yeah? Man, seriously, like, I barely remember to take my own picture in places that I care about, with people that I love. So having random strangers taking pictures of me all the time would be gratifying for about one day. I think,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 2:32

yeah, I it would be annoying. I agree. It would be really annoying. Well, what

Albert Brier: 2:38

are we gonna do when our podcast gets us so famous that we can't go outside without being

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 2:42

mobbed by fans. I mean, that's what's gonna happen, right? Like, people are gonna want my autograph and I'm gonna just, you know, use my palm print.

Albert Brier: 2:54

People are gonna want your autograph, Huh? Interesting? Yeah, they are,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 2:57

yeah, and I'm and I'm gonna sign, Noah fex for my autograph. Boo, no, yes, oh god, yeah. So let's go back to AI. Okay. I You were saying you got this workflow. I was talking about business writing slop, yeah, yeah, I had, like, some prompts that I was using you responded to some good content that I'd produced through because

Albert Brier: 3:27

it didn't seem like it was written by AI, right? And like, we're finally getting to that point where enough people, because it used to be that you couldn't go online without absolutely being inundated. And I guess that's still true. Like, with AI created content, like it's absolutely everywhere. You know. Sorry, go ahead, LinkedIn.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 3:44

Yes, no, I was gonna say LinkedIn. It's just, it's not even I, as a marketer, I look at LinkedIn now as a B to B channel, and I just don't, I like, there's so much noise. Yeah, there is. It's not, it doesn't feel like a viable channel anymore. I think you have to get people this has always been true, especially in growth marketing, where you're, you know, you're constantly iterating on content and get people off of the channel and then, like, engaged on, like your website, or, you know, landing page, whatever. But now more than ever, it feels sly,

Albert Brier: 4:20

yeah, and fake it does. But the flip side of that coin is that we've had enough time on target now that I think some people are starting to figure it out, right, like how to use it to create natural sounding content that actually reflects what you would have done if you had written the whole thing from scratch without help, right? I think, like, yeah, that's, that's my goal. When I'm when I'm, especially when I'm building things for clients. Like, I use AI, yeah, to build work product for our clients. I mean, of course I do, because I would be foolish not to. Like, it's a massive value add, if you are not just using it to replace your job, but rather to supplement and augment it. So. Um, so my workflow that I've that I've gotten into is when I always provide it with some context, like I try to give it a document or a snippet of text or something as an upload into the chat, and the first thing I tell it to do is to identify what I just gave it, right? So I say, tell me what you think this is and why it might be important, and that works best in the context of, like, a project, you know, in Claude speak, where there's, like, a already, there's some context and, like a some some learning that the AI can draw from to answer the question. But then it'll say, you know, okay, well, I think this is this and, like, here's a quick summary of the contents, and it's important to you because, you know, it relates to this project. If it gets that right, then I move on to the next step, right? Yeah, the next step is telling it what I'm trying to do. Right? I am writing this kind of document. I am building this kind of thing. I need to better understand this situation. Ask me any clarifying questions. You need to understand better my goals and the underlying you know, that's kind of thing. I'll ask it. I always tell it, ask me clarifying questions, right? And lately, yesterday, I was writing a document, and I was up quite late writing it, and I was, you know, using Claude to help me write it. And so it's like 1130 at night, and I'm banging away at this document, working with Claude, and I get to one of these, ask me clarifying questions steps. And I say, ask me clarifying questions about the end, it churns out 40 questions. Wow, that was like, Claude, it is 1130 at night. I don't think I have the energy for 40. Yeah. But anyway, that step though like, because it will learn, not just like the context that you provided to answer the questions, but also your style, like as you're typing in, you're giving it like an idea of what your voice is like, and if you've given it a snippet of text, like I wrote half of that document with absolutely no help from the AI, it was the part that I cared about the most, that I wanted to make sure reflected 100% accurately what I wanted to say about it. I mean, that was true for the whole document, but this part especially because I'm a scheduler by trade, right? So this is, like the scheduling standards part. So I wrote that part without any help from AI, and gave that document to it. And I, you know, it picked up. I didn't have to tell it like, to mirror the writing style, to mirror the parallel structure. I did have to correct it a few times because it did what AI always does, and, you know, delivered a 15 out of 10 solution where, like, there was, you know, way more text than was required, you know. But that workflow really has been working for me, you know, identify what this is. Ask me clarifying questions. Let's go

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 7:36

so to build on that, or to add my piece is, the projects that I'm creating have always, like a clarifying question step or, you know, right, like when I'm inputting, you know, because I tend to like one shot it and I prompt, and then I, you know, if I'm I take one shot, and then here's the content that the brief that I came up, I'll share that, and then I'll one shot prompt, and then, you know, it'll kind of churn. I'll get a bunch of, like, Edge kind of use cases ideas, and then, you know, it asks me clarifying questions. So it's like, key for every project now that I have from designer, like UX landing page graphic designer to, like, business writing and other projects that I have for other use cases and now, like, with skills getting layered on to that, yeah, it's always clarifying, right? Like, keep quizzing me.

Albert Brier: 8:37

Why do you think we both landed there? Like, what I mean, I know why I did, but you know, we're using these things for such dramatically different purposes.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 8:45

Well, I think it's understanding the iterative nature of using AI. I think is, yeah, you know, we're both curious about new technology, and I think we both are domain experts in I mean me, but you are,

Albert Brier: 9:02

oh, no, yeah, definitely. But there are some things I could name that you're, okay,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 9:06

yeah, sure. I wouldn't necessarily call myself domain. But the like we are, you know, we are artisans, artisanal, you know, craftsmen. Okay, look, we're domain experts, we're curious, and I think from that comes a desire to get the best out of something. And so when we're using a new tool, like AI, that we're recognizing, sort of an iterative process, and part of that iterative process is like, how do you get from point A to point B? And that's like asking, clarifying quite Yeah, so I think it's like a natural, logical progression, like, you know, 1015, years ago. If I'm sitting with my agency team and we're like, brainstorming, you know, a concept for a campaign strategy, and then, like, the creative content this. Is how it works for that would go, you guys will be talking, we would kind of talk about that. And then people would be like, Well, wait, so what about, and what about, you know? So those are clarifying questions, right? Yeah, I think it's a natural it's a natural progression. It's a evolution of but it's based on sort of a logical, sort of foundation that we use.

Albert Brier: 10:21

So you're gonna, you're gonna find this interesting. But do you want to hear my answer to that question? Yeah. So I came to it from a very technocratic perspective of I kind of sort of get how the large language models work and how they generate answers, and what the feedback loop looks like. And one of the things that that feedback loop has done like the self training elements of the models, which is like, why they're so good, but it's also their main problem, because they have been trained to prioritize wrong answers that sound right and make people happy, as opposed to correct answers or admitting when they don't know something, right? So this is my attempt to control for that inherent bias in the way that the model is set up and built, right? So in order to control for that, that negative feedback loop, I'm saying like, not only do I want you to admit when you don't know something, you need to explicitly take a step where you close gaps in your knowledge. And if you do it enough, eventually the model will learn like, Oh, this guy wants me to ask questions. Why I don't get something so like yesterday, during that conversation, building that document at multiple times when I didn't ask it to ask clarifying questions. It asked me clarifying questions. So basically retraining. Now

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 11:39

do you prompt it to ask you clarifying questions that part of, sort of the general I do love top so I use, I'm using more and more skills to met, to do master prompts, and then I'm using projects to, you know, anyways, do you build that into, I

Albert Brier: 11:57

mean, into the prompts? Yes, like, but like, I'm talking about the individual like chat window prompts, like, I build it into those, but it makes sense to put it into the the instructions right at the project level, as opposed to the chat level. So I'm project

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 12:12

level. I have, I have an agency, like for strategy project. I have a copywriter project, right? I have a creative director project, so it's more of the sort of like high level design, then I have, like a designer project. These are these don't really like substitute for, like, having these full time employees, but they do a pretty, halfway decent job at, like, filling the gap for having them, because I know what good looks like, but it's interesting, like, you're so I think I'm right on the Curiosity front, because we're trying to know how to use something. But yeah, you, you and I definitely came at it from a different Yeah, means,

Albert Brier: 13:04

like, mine was from a close gap in tool perspective, yours was from a mirror good workflow perspective, and they wound up at basically the same place, which is interesting.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 13:15

We're going to talk about something that is, yeah, it's a bit it's a big question. It's a big topic for capital projects now, and it's outsourcing. So we're going to talk

Albert Brier: 13:27

about, yeah, I mean, you must have seen the news about Imperial and ExxonMobil. Yes, right. That's like, here's the thing, if you hear Exxon Mobil talk about it, they're not talking about outsourcing or offshoring or anything like that. They're talking about streamlining operations, they want two central hubs for their for their like office based workers. One is in Texas and the other is in India. So that's it. Those that's two and listeners with extremely sharp minds and keen memories may recall that I moved to Canada to build their headquarters office in Calgary, which is now empty as part of this change, or emptying, I should say. And it's a beautiful building. It's a lovely camp. It was a great project. I mean, you know, not to pat myself on the back, but let me just pat myself on the back for a little bit like I was, I was the master scheduler and planner for that project, and it came in on schedule and so dramatically under budget that we actually funded a whole other project from the overage, which did raise a lot of eyebrows about why it was estimated at that extremely high level in the first place. I personally was one of the people raising those eyebrows. But hey, cost was not cost was out of my hands, pal. Schedule guy. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, I can't resist someone else's job, right? So, you know, I did get my grubby little paws into cost from time to time. But that's not the point. The point is that is a Class A office building that's only around 10 years old, and it is fully unutilized. Just at this point, almost fully it had the one of the most beautiful conference centers I've ever seen in a private office. It had a full fledged food court, you know, with really solid food offerings. And, you know, an executive office suite, a bunch of meeting rooms. It was one of those places that had, like, you know, the ping pong room, right? And that was cool, man, like it was, it was a genuine community. Feel like I worked in that office for a few years after we built it, and it was a great place to work. And now it's, you know, all those people are either moving to Edmonton to consolidate into the Strathcona field office at the refinery up there, or

Unknown: 15:38

question mark, you're right, and I think the question mark is what we're going to talk about, that's

Albert Brier: 15:43

what we're going to talk about. Yeah, for sure. And I've had lots of conversations with lots of people who were former colleagues of mine at Imperial and ExxonMobil. I won't name any names, but I've got some juicy detail about this stuff. I know right? Drama. I'm not gonna I'm not going to spill too much tea, but I will say that Exxon Mobil's talking about consolidating, cutting costs, eliminating redundancies in the workforce. They're doing all of those things, but really and truly, what they're doing is their offshoring.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:14

THAT'S SO SO offshoring just quickly offshore, like, let's define offshoring, you know, capital projects like Project controls.

Albert Brier: 16:26

Don't even get me started on offshoring project controls. I mean,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 16:30

it's, I want to talk about the trade offs next. But yeah. I mean, oh, you know, we

Albert Brier: 16:34

definitely will, because there are, yeah. But like, Okay, so let's first off outsourcing. Right? Like, everybody outsources. Every company outsources. What they outsource depends on the kind of work that they do. But like, a classic example would be marketing or advertising, right? Like, if you are a big brand, you probably don't do all of your own marketing and advertising. You outsource that right now, the fact that it's outsourced just means that it's not your company doing it. So, you know, Duke and company, we're a consultancy. We're effectively an outsourcing tool for our clients, like they can bring us in to provide business process expertise and project controls expertise, system implementations, all that good stuff. They could theoretically do all those things themselves, and frequently they try and fail and then talk to us. So that's the reason why offshoring happens, right? It's like to plug holes in your own you know?

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 17:25

Or outsourcing happens. Outsourcing, yeah, but, but offshoring, offshoring, yes.

Albert Brier: 17:31

Offshoring is what has happened to customer service data centers, for example, over the course of the past, say, 30 years. Yep, right. Not data centers, call centers. So when, when you call a customer service line and you are talking to somebody, there is a 90 plus percent chance that that person is not in North America, and say what you will about the quality of those conversations, that's not the point from the perspective of the companies that you know are doing this offshoring. The point is cost, right? Yeah, it's cost savings. So to me, that's that's an important distinction between offshoring and outsourcing. Where, if you're outsourcing, it's often because you can gain expertise, right? It's a, it's a, it's additive. If you're offshoring, it's because you want to cut costs, right, right? Subtractive. So sometimes that comes with a quality hit, and sometimes it doesn't like one of those people I was talking to actually just yesterday is an engineer at Imperial, and he has had people from their engineering support center in Mumbai calling him semi regularly to be like, how can we make your job easier? Like, what parts of your job would be good for you to outsource to us? Like, what can we do? And he said, these are really capable, solid engineers, but, but he also said, like, why would I train somebody to take my job from me? Like, I'm, you know, I'm here doing my work, and they want to be like, What can I do? That is your job. And it's like, none of it. Thank you. Yeah.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 18:58

Now, let me interject. So did he say none of it because he's opposed to the help? No, that's just what I was about

Albert Brier: 19:07

to get into. Yeah, no, no, why? So a big part of it is the same reason why I'm opposed to offshoring project controls and project management, which is that this guy, a big chunk of his engineering role is field engineering and verification, right? He has to physically go places and look at stuff and, you know, verify that it matches the design intent and that it is safe to occupy, slash utilize, that, you know, he has to write inspection reports and that kind of thing. And, you know, if you try to offshore news, I mean, you know, the point he made was, what am I going to do? Tell you to come fly halfway across the world to to inspect something that I'm a two hour drive away from? Like, why would you do that? You know, it doesn't be he doesn't respect

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 19:57

there's a big difference between being on a video call. Versus being there on person, absolutely, especially from a project controls perspective, 100%

Albert Brier: 20:07

100% I mean, you know, this kind of, to me, ties to the the growth of AI agents now, where they're getting good enough that you could theoretically stand up a copy of yourself to go attend meetings for you. And I was talking with us about, you know, I mentioned, I'm neck deep in a project right now, my project team, I was talking to them about this, like, if one person does that, it's no big deal, right? Like, they get a transcript of the meeting. They get some some filtered notes. Like, it makes sense, what if everybody does that, and then it's just just a bunch of large language models talking to each other, and everybody gets a summary of the meaningless conversation that they

Unknown: 20:46

had, right? Like, that's not better, right? Yeah, it's just

Albert Brier: 20:51

noise that it's like, it's closing the loop in a way that that isn't productive, right? It looks productive on paper, because now you have people doing two things at once, but one of those things is utterly valueless and takes organizational resources to complete. So the reason why I brought that up as a comparison point is that closing the loop with technology isn't always a good thing, because in a closed loop system like that, no new information is even possible. So when you close the loop technologically on something like field inspections or progress updates or on site work coordination, like trade coordination, you know, making sure that you have the right resources and that sort of thing, you can do some of that remotely, but at some point somebody's got to actually go look at the work and say, This is what is needed,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 21:41

what is so I'm just imagining, like, what's the first thing someone notices when they step foot on a construction site for the first time? Yeah, right. Like to you're we're talking about closing the loop. Now, I'm talking about starting the loop. I guess. What's the first thing they

Albert Brier: 21:58

notice? Well, it's a good way to get at the you know, what are the risks of closing it? Because for me, the answer was scale, scale, meaning the size of everything, like when I first got onto a construction site, you know, it was a commercial construction site, so it wasn't an especially complicated site. It wasn't particularly dangerous, but it was very crowded, so the number of people involved to hang drywall, put plumbing behind walls, make sure, and to do it quickly, right? Because commercial properties generate revenue when they're complete, and they drain revenue right? They require there are costs while they're being built, and they are a profit center when they're operational. So the faster you can get them built. It's like, it's like anything, you know, that's revenue generating. You want to, you want to bring the project execution window right, right down. So that often means having a very, very crowded work face, like, full of, full of people and materials, and like, when I say about scale, you know, things like the the ring main duct work, okay? That services an office building with cold air, right? Is enormous, and it's sitting above the ceiling, and you'll never see it, but it's huge. It needs to be lifted into place and supported while it's being, you know, like tacked in. And if you take that scale thing and take it out of commercial space and put it into almost any other industry where I've worked, like, you know, one of the first major projects that I worked on was in a refinery in Southeast Texas, and that refinery, at the time I was working there, was over 100 years old, and there were operating pieces of equipment there that were over 70 years old, right? So you drive around, you see these things, like the towers are 30 stories tall, and there are whole road networks inside of these things to get from place to place. And like you talk about, you know, pipe, like, if you see that pipe on a drawing right, and you know where it goes from, like, which piece of equipment's on this end, which pieces on this end? Where are the relief valves? Like, you got an ISO, you can kind of see what the scale is. You can see like, Oh, it's this long in this segment, there's this many fittings on it. You can read a drawing and get all that information. You take that drawing to the field and match it up to the actual pipe itself. That thing is huge, right? It's a big, big thing, and it goes a really long distance. So if you're planning a project that is to cut that pipe in half and throw it away, right? You might say, oh, cut a pipe in half, you know? You get a you get a saw out that you do some energy isolation, you drain the pipe. You get the saw out there, you cut it in half, you take both halves out. Done. You're done two hours, right? Well, it's a kilometer long, right? It weighs something. There's a road going under it, like there are people working on the pipelines near it, there is dangerous chemical material flowing through some of the pipes, there is a massive spark risk from the work that you're doing. And I was talking about scale, this really brings me to the second thing that you notice, yeah, which is the complexity of it. Yeah, right. Especially in brownfield environments, no job site contains only your project. It contains, sorry, so many

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 24:58

Yeah. And the complexity is. Is all of the variables around the people moving like the like you can you there's math that represents the thing that you need to do, but it's all in isolation. It doesn't take into account variables in your environment, yeah,

Albert Brier: 25:15

and like, it's to some degree this is important to me, because I am a visual and experiential learner, right? I mean, I internalize information most rapidly through my

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:28

weird way to say that I was like, Where are you going with that? Because, yeah, that's

Albert Brier: 25:32

a really good question. Nate, where am I going? But the point is that I needed to see it really, to have it all make sense on paper. But even so, like, even if you're, you know, very abstract thinker, which you know good for you, but I would still bet that an isometric drawing of a pipe that enters and exits a pipe rack is going to be fairly abstract, even to you, until you've seen where it actually is in your facility.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 25:58

Yeah. So what, what is like, is there digital evidence, like, you're, you're referring to, that are is enough to replace people on the ground?

Albert Brier: 26:12

I mean, yes, I think this really depends on what you're building, what you're doing.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:20

Like, take your colleague, for example, the engineer, like he's, yeah, hesitant to, you know, off load stuff to his team.

Albert Brier: 26:28

So you know, if the reason for offshoring is to cut costs, there is irreducible complexity to the on site version of this work. That means that there's a, there's a minimum threshold for how much cost you can actually cut, or maximum threshold, I guess,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 26:43

yeah, it's not really. It's the expertise. Like, if you're going to offshore for expertise, and then you're willing to pay, that's not really cutting costs. That's a, I guess that's a completely different subject.

Albert Brier: 26:56

Totally. Yeah, like, might work. And this, again, going back to this particular engineer, and I heard the same thing from another engineer friend of mine, who said, like, these people are good, like, they're really good engineers. Like the schools there are good. They're experienced, they're smart, they know what they're doing, like the turnaround quality outputs, but they're over there, right? And if the projects are over here, then it does create that, that kind of separation. And there's, like, this digital translation layer between, you know, physical reality and digital reality, where that, that gap just absolutely has to close. Now it's, it's really, really difficult to do that and still save cost, right, right? Because, you know, we had a whole other episode about digital twins and like that. Kind of class of project, information is one of the ways to close this gap. Full blown reality capture and compare, or paired with virtual reality, for example, would be a really good way to get an 80% version of what it's like on site. A lot of the things I was talking about, like, the scale of it, the complexity, you know, that pipes in a rack next to a bunch of other stuff. Like, you can get that from a virtual reality model. You really can. But what is it going to cost you to build

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 28:11

the model? Yeah. And why do you think the well, so let me set this up. So India, we were doing, like, some research before this and prepping for this episode, and one of the research, the bits, the stats that you found was that India now hosts, you know, nearly 2000 sort of global centers that serve, you know,

Albert Brier: 28:33

different purposes. Yeah, global capability centers or GCC Yeah,

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 28:38

GCCs, and they generated nearly 660, $5 billion in export revenue. So, yeah, there's engineering, but people now are offshoring project management and controls. Why do you think that evolution happened? You

Albert Brier: 28:55

know, there's the the classic and slightly wrong, but still useful old saw in project management, the Golden Triangle of cost, schedule and quality, pick two, right? I was taught, you know, as, like, Baby scheduler, that, you know, the whole pick two thing. It's funny, but it's also kind of true. You and most of our clients would choose which two they wanted based on the project, right? And, like, the end product that they were trying to build. So in some cases, they would pick schedule and quality. They want a good thing really fast, and they'll pay out the nose to get it. That, by the way, is pretty common still in like, shut down and turn around work and like, outage work, if we're working with, you know, a client who runs a nuclear power station, and they do a lot of outage work, and they really, really, really, really care about quality, right? Because they need to stand up a nuclear reactor at the end of it. So, you know, schedule and quality means, you know, your outage is short, the reactor stands back up. Everybody's happy, like, if they have to throw money at it, they will okay. But it seems like a lot of projects that would have chosen, say, cost and quality. Quality or schedule and quality as their two main focuses, or foci, I guess, are now choosing cost and schedule, right? You know, like, you can have it fast and cheap, but not good, or good and cheap, but not fat, you know, all that stuff. Yeah, they're saying, like, okay, you know what? We're fine with fast and cheap, but not good. Yeah, that seems to be the shift that's happening, and no one would ever acknowledge that. Right? Like, if we, if we dragged every CEO into a room and forced them to explain to you why they offshored something, and asked them, Is it because you wanted it to be crappy and cheap? They would say, No, right? Like they wouldn't agree

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 30:39

to well, they would point to their their increase in revenue, they would point to their management of bottom line that you know, caught operating costs. They would point to like various metrics that you know, show that the company is productive and is doing well,

Albert Brier: 30:57

but like the modern Exxon Mobil has its roots in companies that are as old as that refinery, yeah, that I was working at in Southeast Texas. You know, these are, these are corporations that are, you know, the child organizations of something that you could consider to be ancient at this point, like, 100 plus years old. And they didn't get there by prioritizing TODAY'S BOTTOM LINE. Meanwhile, you know, there's a principle in economics that you have to incentivize the behavior that you desire, right, right, right? So we are incentivizing CEOs and upper management to prioritize next year's return on investment, not 15 years down the line, return on investment, right? CEOs are more more mobile between companies now than they have ever been before, and they are making more money compared to their average employee than ever before, right? So their incentive structure is upside down and backwards, right? They're incentivized to cut cost and make the numbers be better this year, so that they can, you know, pad their resume with a with a big fat win, and move on to the next company next year. And that means that long term growth isn't really in the picture. And that's what I fear about this trend towards offshoring, is that we're going to wind up with so many quality issues, right, that you know that long term growth prospect just isn't there, like they're going to stand up facilities that need enormously expensive maintenance to upkeep. It's, I don't know, maybe that's just me doomsaying, but it really does feel like a short term vision as opposed to a long term

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 32:37

one. Yeah, and we've talked a lot about sort of the negative side of offshoring, and then just to pivot the other side of the coin, like PMI did some research in 2024 and they found that project teams perform equally well across on site, hybrid and Remote arrangements, kind of throwing offshoring into the mix. Yeah, they found that agile teams might perform slightly better when fully remote, which is really interesting. It is so from what you've seen, what helps make remote project management successful?

Albert Brier: 33:17

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you know you're quoting PMI 's 2024, pulse of the profession report. And if you know anything about the PMI, and you've been kind of tracking its, you know its progress over the past, I'm gonna, I don't know what number to say, 15 years. 20 years, maybe 15 for sure. Yep, you've seen it drift away from field construction management, and, like, building big things and towards it, project management, yes, and a lot of people will claim that this is some kind of, oh, it's the death of the profession. We're all IT project managers. Now, grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble. Well, frankly, yeah, we are all IT project managers. Now, right? Like, what is that I used to manage? What is that it means? It means that as a little bit like, you know, agriculture Right? Like back in the day, the average American was a farmer who lived far from a city, and now the average American is a knowledge worker who lives in a city, yes, yes. And in fact, that average is skewing ever more towards the city dwellers and ever farther from people who like work the land for a living, like, there are precious few such people actually Right, right? And even those folks like a big chunk of the job of the average farmer is upkeep and maintenance of technology systems. Okay, yeah, so as things get more technologically complex and rely ever more on digital solutions to problems we all have to contend with our tech stack, right? I got my The reason why I have this job is because of working in refineries and on construction sites and flying to Africa and building office buildings. And you know that that's why I have this job, right? But the job I'm doing today. A is a digital process evolution, right? That's what it is. So, you know, I personally took off one hat and put on another one. I'd love to put the other head back on, but that's what happened. And also, even if I didn't do that, there are far, far fewer people building the average project now, physical construction project than ever before, because of increases in productivity, better tooling like, you know, I was talking earlier about slamming that construction window as close as it can get. There's good evidence that a shorter construction window means a better product, right? Because you've closed the door on a lot of risks that could impact the final quality. So the shorter those projects get, the more productive, though, the crews that are that are building them, the less need there is for a massive, you know, talent pool of construction project managers, right, right? So most project just like, you know, the average project manager maybe used to be building a refinery in Southeast Texas, the average project manager to now now is building software for the web. That's right. So of course, the PMI shifted in that direction because their average reader shifted in that direction. So that does mean, though, that those agile stands like Agile is a very you know, it's kind of a buzzwordy thing, but it basically just means iterative planning that doesn't necessarily made itself to a fixed scope, right? That's the short version. So if you are on an Agile team, there's about an 80 to 90% chance that you're doing an IT project. So a lot of the data that you just cited, like, it's true, but it, to me, speaks to the main way that you're going to get value out of this, which is matching the tool to its use case, right select the right tool for the job. So if you are managing an IT project with an Agile team, yeah, do it remotely, Sure, absolutely. Like, you know, why not? Like, there's good data to support that. This is positive for you. And, you know, I have a very close friend who is a, it. He's not a project manager. He is, he actually manages a team of coders, right? And he is himself, you know, a coder, and he's a really, really good one, because he, he was the, you know, swing and hammers hard hat on version of that for a lot of years, right before there was chat GPT to do half of his job for her. Yeah, he had to actually do it the hard way, and he's and the deadlines were still tight, and the resources were still constrained, and so he just had to figure it out, right? Well, that experience mated with new technology means he can do the job of, I'm going to guess, five or six people, right? And even on his team, which he leads and manages, and like, he gives them work to do, and he's checking he is the most productive member of his team by a factor

Unknown: 37:30

of three or four at least. And he's the manager, and he's their manager, right? Wow,

Albert Brier: 37:34

but that is his fully remote team. Like, you know, I go visit his house whenever I'm in Houston, and he has this lovely little office off to one side, mission control. It's Mission Control, right? And he is in there 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, just banging out code and managing his team remotely. And he's really, really good at it, and it's really productive to do it that way.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 38:00

So going back to the engineer, and maybe to, just to close this out, like, what's like, one piece of advice that you would give somebody in Project controls, you know, project management for capital projects that's faced with a sort of option of, you know, do I offload this to my now offshore team. Or, you know, do I keep it in house? What? What's the advice and, like, on how to sort of think about that?

Albert Brier: 38:29

So question I'm gonna, I love that question, because to me, this, this is one of this. This is a real workers of the world. Unite moment for me, and I will, I will echo some advice that I got from from Dr David Hewlett at the AAC E conference earlier this year. I asked him that very same question, like, what piece of advice would you give to people? One of the things he said was, push back against bad practice, like bad ideas by executive management, like, stand up for doing a good job, right? Quality Matters, and that's what I'm going to tell you. Know, your average junior project controls person or project manager who's looking at maybe being offshored. You need to stand up for the idea that perhaps it doesn't make sense to do that, right? Even this client, like the one that I'm neck deep in a project for, they mostly have their project team on site, meaning at their offices, which is right next to the power station, right? But even even then, most of those people don't go to the job site, right? Like, I met a project manager last week who was killer, like, absolutely awesome. Like, I could tell from talking to him that he really knew his stuff. He was super effective. He was using his schedule better than most of his peers. He was getting his projects done on time and on budget, like a really, really effective project manager. Right after the meeting, the next thing I saw him doing was putting on some wireless headphones and going to get a coffee, you know, and like, I'm not saying that's the wrong thing to. Do okay, but like my old man version of that was I would have the meeting, like the one I just had with myself, and then I wouldn't put on headphones and go get a coffee. I would put on a hard hat and go out to the job site, right, right? But the first instinct of your average project manager at that job site isn't to lace up their boots and go see what's going on at the work face. It isn't that, right? Maybe make it be that, like, increase your own productivity by creating an irreplaceable set of skills driven by real work face experience like I mentioned earlier. The reason why I have this job is because I had all those other ones like that could be true for you too, right? So lace up your boots, put on a hard hat, and go look at the work, right? And then you can tell your bosses, well, here's what I can offshore and here's what I can't, yeah, right, yeah, because it's not, like you can't do it, right? Like, even in construction, like we talked about the digital layer, right? Like, is it just a fig leaf? I don't think so. I think there's some real there there, okay, but it has to be paired with good practices, right? Like any technology solution has to be paired with, like, procedural and behavioral solutions, too. And there are good ones that, like you could do buddy systems, where you have, you know, an on site person who is paired up with somebody who's offshored, so that they have, like, a real working relationship that they can leverage to, like, do knowledge transfer and, like, have some of that field stuff, like, reflected in documentation. Like, you can have your schedule fully off site. I wouldn't do it, but you could do that as long as they had regular, consistent, high quality access to information from the site, right? Like making it clear who does what on a job site. Like setting up that every every project has a racy they're mostly a tick box. You do it at your gate and then you forget about it. But what if you actually used it as a tool for managing work on a daily or weekly basis? I mean, most companies that offshore already do this. They set up what are often called Golden hours where, like, the working schedules overlap, and like, if you're doing work in Canada, and your project manager is in India. Naturally, you guys would never talk right like because it's day over there and night over here, and so you just need to make sure that working hours are aligned such that you can get real face time with people. And even though it's expensive, I do think it's still valuable, maybe not every single time or every single week or every single month, but get some of those folks that are offshored on site, yeah, at least sometimes, at least get them there once. Like, give them the grand tour, let them take in that scale that I was talking about earlier, yeah. And like, really feel it, especially the ones that haven't been on construction sites before, because we're in real danger of raising a generation of project managers and project managers and project controls professionals that have never seen a construction site. That's quite existential. It is, man, it really is like it makes me feel like I'm from a different planet sometimes. So

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 42:52

you are from, you are from Texas. Nate for Texas, yeah, it's

Albert Brier: 42:58

I am, I am basically from a different Yeah, that's true.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 43:00

That's great. Well, yeah, this was a really interesting conversation. Thanks. Albert,

Albert Brier: 43:05

yeah. Thank you, Nate. And I hope you guys enjoyed the random, off topic meandering conversation. I certainly

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 43:14

I really like listening to me drone on then you probably enjoyed it. But there's very few people that like that so

Albert Brier: 43:20

well, I'm one of them. Nate. So excellent, my friend. Yeah, I was talking. We'll talk very soon. I'll see you in Toronto next week.

Nate Habermeyer, APR: 43:26

You bet. All right, thanks for listening, everybody.

Albert Brier: 43:31

Hey everybody. It's Albert here. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. We hope today's conversation was informative, and above all else, inspires you to excellence in what you do. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to rate, subscribe and leave a review. It helps us reach more listeners just like you. I'd also like to thank Thompson Igbo Igbo for letting us use his excellent music on our show. If you like what you hear, check him out@igbomusic.com that's E, G, B, O music.com talk to you

Unknown: 43:59

later. You you.