4th June 2008, 12:06 AM
SClarkP,
Sorry, but the questions you have outlined are a part of every day project management when managing large scale archaeological projects. Most project managers for larger units here will tell you (not enthusiastically to be fair), of a stream of meetings they will have attended addressing these very issues.
And it is those questions which are so difficult to answer in an industry where you can find large variability in the level of work required to discharge a planning condition depending on the interpretations used. This means that profit targets must be very sympathetic to more than just market conditions, but to the whims of archaeological interpretation. And building in this flexibility is simply not possible without a serious understanding of the industry.
Also, there is a fundamental difference between the archaeological industry and most others with which we compare ourselves: commercial archaeology is, by its very nature, a high turnover business. Meaning that we don't sell stocks and shares or provide lots of building materials, and as such the 'tax loopholes' which can be explored are relatively limited (here mostly to do with expenses deductions and VAT, which is tricky, but doesn't require a finance degree to understand). The vast majority of the financial return for the business therefore comes from having lots of archaeologists on the ground doing work. Which means your finance director can fiddle with tax loopholes all they want, but if a large project overruns they won't be able to rustle up extra cash from the client without understanding the contractual basis of the work, and this is inevitably tied up in the aforementioned web of archaeological interpretion and value statements. And I am afraid the engineering CFO wouldn't have much to say on the matter, and so the company incurs a massive loss because you have all your archaeologists staring a bits of pottery and leaving the 'real management' to the finance and managment professionals who have been doing us all so many favours in the world ecomony recently.
This is what I mean when making the statement about the importance of operational management in determining the profitability of an archaeological unit. The finance director can have as un-archaeological a background as you would like, but the situation would still require an operational / contracts manager with a good understanding of business AND archaeological practice to resolve such a situation. Moreover, there are plenty of small businesses out there getting along just fine without a finance director at all....like small law firms, small architects and planning consultants, small building firms, plant companies....the list goes on really.
"don't panic!"
Sorry, but the questions you have outlined are a part of every day project management when managing large scale archaeological projects. Most project managers for larger units here will tell you (not enthusiastically to be fair), of a stream of meetings they will have attended addressing these very issues.
And it is those questions which are so difficult to answer in an industry where you can find large variability in the level of work required to discharge a planning condition depending on the interpretations used. This means that profit targets must be very sympathetic to more than just market conditions, but to the whims of archaeological interpretation. And building in this flexibility is simply not possible without a serious understanding of the industry.
Also, there is a fundamental difference between the archaeological industry and most others with which we compare ourselves: commercial archaeology is, by its very nature, a high turnover business. Meaning that we don't sell stocks and shares or provide lots of building materials, and as such the 'tax loopholes' which can be explored are relatively limited (here mostly to do with expenses deductions and VAT, which is tricky, but doesn't require a finance degree to understand). The vast majority of the financial return for the business therefore comes from having lots of archaeologists on the ground doing work. Which means your finance director can fiddle with tax loopholes all they want, but if a large project overruns they won't be able to rustle up extra cash from the client without understanding the contractual basis of the work, and this is inevitably tied up in the aforementioned web of archaeological interpretion and value statements. And I am afraid the engineering CFO wouldn't have much to say on the matter, and so the company incurs a massive loss because you have all your archaeologists staring a bits of pottery and leaving the 'real management' to the finance and managment professionals who have been doing us all so many favours in the world ecomony recently.
This is what I mean when making the statement about the importance of operational management in determining the profitability of an archaeological unit. The finance director can have as un-archaeological a background as you would like, but the situation would still require an operational / contracts manager with a good understanding of business AND archaeological practice to resolve such a situation. Moreover, there are plenty of small businesses out there getting along just fine without a finance director at all....like small law firms, small architects and planning consultants, small building firms, plant companies....the list goes on really.
"don't panic!"