PROJECT EXECUTIVE
Job Description
Senior operational leader responsible for ensuring project management teams consistently operate within the company's established project-control systems. Provides oversight across preconstruction, active production, financial forecasting, change management, documentation, and closeout while serving as the primary management-control link between Project Managers, Operations Leadership, CFO, and President. Owns the integrity and effectiveness of the company's Compass management system, ensuring project risks are identified early, information is accurate, commitments are followed through, and leadership receives a clear and validated picture of project performance. Primary Responsibilities & Ownership Project Management Leadership • Directly oversees and develops a department of 5 Project Managers and Assistant Project Managers. • Sets clear expectations for planning, documentation, forecasting, communication, and follow-through. • Holds the team accountable for completing required routines accurately and on time. • Ensures department processes for tracking, planning, and performance are consistently followed. Project Controls Ownership • Ensures the department breaks monthly contract and schedule requirements into weekly work segments and staffing assignments. • Holds PMs accountable for executing weekly plans against budgeted labor, staffing, and production targets. • Reviews actual labor, production, and staffing against budget and schedule across all department projects. • Determines which variances flagged by PMs require investigation, escalation, or correction — and ensures none are left to recur unaddressed. • Tracks flagged issues and commitments across the department through to resolution rather than allowing indefinite carryover. • Verifies budget, schedule, and staffing data from the department before it is reported to executive leadership. Preconstruction & Project Startup • Ensures PMs complete scope and engineering coordination, including product data submittals, before field mobilization. • Reviews schedules to confirm sequencing is complete, timeframes are adequate, and trade-dependent work is properly divided (e.g., separating framing steps where MEP trades have intervening work). • Ensures procurement plans identify long-lead and selection-dependent items, with lead times and deposit requirements reviewed in advance. • Ensures each project has a staffing plan that converts budgeted man-weeks into weekly work packages and crew assignments, so field supervision has a ready-to-execute plan they can adjust. • Ensures change-management setup and project-specific risks are identified and addressed before mobilization. • Coordinates with Operations so field leadership receives a fully prepared project — supported by clear scope reference materials — rather than discovering unresolved issues after mobilization. • Ensures kickoff and team-to-team expectations are established before boots hit the ground. Financial & Forecasting Controls • Reviews actual results against budget using job cost and work-completed data to identify emerging financial exposure. • Requires PMs to reconcile field reality — actual labor, production, and cost — with financial reporting. • Works with the CFO to ensure project reporting is supported by accurate operational information. • Flags major overruns and unexplained cost movement early rather than allowing them to surface late. • Requires reforecasts to be built from remaining scope of work and budgeted rates, not optimistic or unsupported projections. Change Order / COR Management • Ensures no field work proceeds without proper written authorization, whether initiated by a company-issued change directive or a GC-issued estimate request. • Oversees the common documentation process for both paths: written scope basis, time-and-materials estimate, and contemporaneous verification of quantities, labor, and materials as work proceeds. • Ensures GC-issued RFIs and estimate requests are reviewed for scope impact and submitted within the contractually required timeframe, given their formal, time-sensitive nature. • Reviews aging change orders and identifies items bottlenecked on approval for escalation. • Oversees follow-up on approved change orders to drive collection. • Escalates material commercial exposure before it becomes an end-of-project problem. Operations Interface • Works with Operations leadership to connect the project plan with what's actually happening in the field. • Verifies that field staffing, sequencing, production, procurement, and schedule align with the approved project plan. • Investigates and corrects discrepancies between field conditions and PM reporting. • Holds both office planning and field execution jointly accountable rather than treating them as separate functions. Risk Management & Executive Reporting • Identifies which projects need elevated attention from leadership. • Keeps leadership informed of the company's highest-risk projects and confirms each has a defined corrective action and owner. • Distinguishes normal project issues from those that require executive involvement. • Reports verified, accurate project information to leadership to support their decisions. • Escalates issues based on financial, contractual, client, schedule, or execution risk. Closeout & Lessons Learned • Ensures each project closes out with clear plans to finish remaining staffing, schedule, deficiency-list, documentation, change-order, and financial items. • Drives timely resolution of open items rather than letting closeout costs drag on indefinitely. • Leads or prepares PM teams for a structured review of each closed project. • Ensures that review identifies what worked well, what didn't, and where inefficiencies cost time or money. • Requires those lessons to translate into specific improvements in future project planning and management. Leadership Accountability The Project Executive is ultimately accountable for answering: “Are our Project Managers actually controlling their projects, and can the information being presented to leadership be trusted?” • The PM owns the project. • Field leadership owns execution. • The COO owns operational performance. • The CFO validates the financial picture. • The Project Executive owns the management-control discipline connecting those pieces together. This distinction is important. The Project Executive role is not defined as “responsible for everything that happens on every project” — that would let PMs and Operations push accountability upward. The role is to make sure the people who own those things are managing them through the company system, that failures become visible, and that corrective action actually closes the loop. Executive Summary Project Executive responsible for PM leadership, project controls, Compass governance, preconstruction discipline, forecasting integrity, change management, risk visibility, and ensuring project-management commitments are verified and carried through from startup to closeout.
An asset to the construction industry
