| Spotlight on Rita Wulke |
 Rita
Wulke brings more than 25 years experience in the chemical and oil
and gas industries,including 15 years in project controls. She has
broad experience in the design and implementation of cost control
systems, years of experience on large capital projects, and
continues to lead the development and application of best practices
for cost control at major corporations. Rita holds a BA from The
University of Texas (Austin), and currently consults for Advanced
Project Solutions.
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| Your Bachelor’s degree is in speech communications—
that’s interesting, given that you have never worked outside the project
community. How did that happen? |
Like a lot of women in the South in the sixties, I was
raised in an environment where the only reason a woman went to college was to
have a degree to fall back on in case something happened to her husband!
Teaching was a profession my parents approved of for women, so I went into
school at The University of Texas (Austin).
I was in Houston doing graduate work before I stopped to ask myself, “What am
I doing here?!” I then went to work for an oil field contractor, first as a
receptionist, then on an IT project they were doing, on the operations side. I
worked on two IT projects each taking about five years to complete. On the
second project, I worked in a project management position as a result of
personnel changes, so I got to see things from that perspective as well.
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| For you, the move into control of capital projects
wasn’t totally unfamiliar—even though you began on the IT side of things, you
were already in the “oil patch.” How did you handle the transition? |
I had some idea of what was going on, and there were
similarities between the projects. They were of long duration, with numerous
activities, and we had a need for tools—both processes and software tools—to
get our arms around the projects.
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| You left being a project manager to go into cost
control? I thought, for most people, project management was the light at the
end of the tunnel! Why did you elect to work in cost control instead? |
Project management isn’t for everyone—it depends on what
your goals are. There is a lot of responsibility and with that comes a lot of
accountability, a lot of stress. It’s a 7-day-a-week job. I went after an
opportunity at Dow Chemical that was supposed to be a cost management position
and I got it…only to have the supervisor tell me that I would really be
working in scheduling. I stayed in that position for awhile, using Open Plan
and, by the time Dow was switching over to P3, I was working in the cost area,
helping to specify and create a cost system for use on capital projects at
Dow.
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| Did anything strike you as noteworthy about the role of
the cost management team and that of the project manager, or the relationship
between them, having done both? |
There was, and is, a huge failure on the part of many
companies to properly educate people outside of project controls — including
the project managers—on the value and the intent of project controls.
Many people who execute projects have little or no understanding of why the
people on their projects are doing controls. I’ve found that any companies,
even those with very large projects and established processes, frequently have
no mechanism for growing people into those roles.
They haven’t put an emphasis on cost management because in many cases—as with
upstream oil and gas—they make so much money that overruns aren’t as
significant as they would be if it were, for instance, a chemical or
downstream project. And, with small projects with short durations, the money
is spent before you even know you have overruns, if you aren’t watching it
closely. Those people feel a bad project more viscerally than upstream oil
would. There’s not this huge contingency fund to dip into when that happens.
You have to be able to do more with less.
|
| That makes sense. I think of myself as a single working
mother in the same situation - you get better at juggling time and money when
you have to. You spread yourself thinner and stretch a dollar further… |
Exactly—it’s no different than your personal finances.
You don’t figure out your budget when you get your bank statement, you do that
up front, so you know what you have to spend, and you write checks down in the
checkbook as you go along, so you can see what you have left and you don’t
overspend.
As a project manager, I want to figure out how much we are going to spend in
the future. If I’m a business manager rolling up my cash flow to determine how
much money we need for this project—or what the return on investment is—the
impact is huge.
Cost control brings value by knowing how much money is going down the tubes,
and having a plan to waste less of the company’s money. Oil companies are now
getting wise to that. The really professional companies have rigorous
processes, high expectations, and they standardize and enforce the standards.
Otherwise, they are not bringing all the values to their shareholders that
they could bring.
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| Dow, being heavily process-driven, has one of the best
records today in project controls. You were fortunate to get your background
in a company like Dow where you could learn from —and even influence—those
processes. |
Yes. I learned that cost control isn’t a reactive
discipline. It’s proactive, when it’s done correctly. Your best ability to
impact cost
is early on, to kill projects that aren’t worth doing, to do portfolio
management so you can see which ones are the most likely to succeed,
and what you can afford to do.
My role as project controls leader is a focal point that marshals these
complementary services—estimating, cost and schedule—making sure that they
agree and that it all hangs together. I also participated in the development
of the scheduling work process and the creation of training materials for
those outside of the discipline.
Then Dow needed to do a capital project cost system that was to support and
further an emerging work process for cost management for those projects, so I
went from a team leader to helping to create that system, helping to specify
it, debugging it, writing the training course and user documentation, creating
and executing an implementation plan…we went live with that in 1995.
As a result, cost management positions were either established or furthered
around the globe and there was a need for a global network which I lead and
mentored. I also became the keeper of the global work process which included
maintaining it and developing a comprehensive training program that fit in
with the total project controls training curriculum.
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| It seems like your path in project controls has been on
an upward curve. What are you doing now, and how does it fit on that path? |
I’m a consultant in Houston, for Advanced Project
Solutions (APS). APS provides front-end project consulting, primarily in best
practice stage gate work process, value improving practices, cost and schedule
risk analysis and risk management, project execution planning and project
controls. And you’re right, the closer you get to the front end, the more
impact your work has on the project success and the company’s bottom line, and
shareholder value. What I do now helps teams execute key best practices early
in the project, because that’s where they can have the most impact and ensure
the long term success of the project.
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| If you could go back and do anything differently, what
would it be? |
I would have made sure that I had professional training
and a good mentor. I should have been more aggressive in that regard. If your
company doesn’t support your professional development, do it yourself. It will
not be wasted time or motion.
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| Do you have any advice for women in project controls or
who want to pursue that as a career? |
Don’t make gender an issue, and don’t let anyone else.
Most of the time when you walk into that meeting you will be the only woman.
That cannot be a factor.
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| What characteristics do you think are important for
success in this field? What about a degree in engineering? |
You don’t have to be an engineer, but (with the lack of
defined project control career paths at most companies) an engineering degree
is currently something than can put you head and shoulders above the rest.
Analytical abilities are invaluable, as well as the ability to know when to
stop analyzing and to know which things to analyze.
Having the right eye for detail, ability to manage and maintain a large amount
of input and data, and the ability to summarize depending upon project need or
audience. You need to get people to open up with you and trust you, especially
on projects that are in trouble.
Professionalism, teamwork, and excellent communication skills are an absolute
must, as well as a keen understanding of projects and project processes.
Construction exposure is also important. And the ability to deliver
potentially bad news and have people thank you for it doesn’t hurt!
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| Given all this, do you think project controls is
particularly hard on women? |
It can be. It’s stressful. Project controls isn’t a
9-to-5 job. But at some point in your career you get to the place where it’s
going to be stressful anyhow, if what you do really matters to you and is
critical to the client and to your company. So that’s a given, regardless of
whether you are a man or woman. But it adds tremendous value to your company,
and funds a lot of fun and worthwhile stuff as well.
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| What do you do when you aren’t consulting? |
My husband and I are avid art collectors and we travel to
support that habit. I’m a Master Gardener, and have both the NWF Backyard
Wildlife Habitat and Texas Wildscapes Backyard Habitat certificates on our
property here in Houston. We own land in the hill country, and I’m very
interested in reclaiming it to its original prairie habitat. We love to go
wine tasting up there as well, so we try to hit the ranch at least one weekend
a month with our retired racing greyhound, Hawk, in tow.
Article by
Valerie Behrendt
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