WHAT DOES AN INDUSTRIAL PROJECT MANAGER DO?
Published: Sep 03, 2025 - The Industrial Project Manager ensures health and safety is the top priority by strictly adhering to company policies and regulatory requirements. This position oversees the operation and maintenance of company facilities, optimizing workforce efficiency, resource utilization, and controlling expenditures to align with budget goals. The manager also provides supervision, training, and cross-functional support to staff, ensures high-quality performance and timely equipment inspections, and contributes to operational improvements and bid preparation.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Industrial Project Manager
1. Industrial Project Manager Duties
- Program Interface: Act as the main interface on the program core team for DFM, A, T, P, etc.
- Supply Chain Management: Own the integrated supply chain milestone and ensure design maturity before handing off.
- Manufacturing Planning: Determine manufacturing locations for new and affected parts and assemblies, ensuring optimal flow of material, inventory locations, assembly, and testing.
- Process Development: Develop process flow diagram, commissioning and qualification, direct labor routing (standard hours), process controls, operator competency and skill training, PFMEA, and PCP.
- Line Design: Design manufacturing line layout, material flow, equipment selection, readiness, and qualification.
- Process Validation: Contribute to product validation, own process validation allowing for M3 ramp up and official handover to plant leader and team, establish and achieve process entitlement.
- Supplier Management: Work with the sourcing counterpart on supplier selection, maturity, and readiness.
- Quality Assurance: Work with the engineering and program team on setting product-level quality goals.
- System Testing: Work with the advanced manufacturing technology team, engineering, and program team to set enhanced system test criteria and provide feedback to engineering on required actions.
2. Industrial Project Manager Responsibilities
- Financial Oversight: Manage with financial oversight and demonstrate operational excellence.
- Project Delivery: Deliver projects according to client needs while exceeding expectations.
- Client Relations: Develop and preserve a positive business relationship with the client while ensuring contractual compliance with all parties.
- Project Planning: Lead the development of comprehensive project plans for each assigned project, incorporating all requirements, constraints, and opportunities.
- Project Management: Direct all project activities, including design, planning, and execution, through completion.
- Business Development: Drive new business development opportunities to grow the organization.
- Risk Management: Manage financial performance while mitigating risk exposure.
- Team Leadership: Provide leadership and support to field teams.
- Record Management: Maintain all project records to ensure relevant information is documented and secured.
3. Industrial Project Manager Job Summary
- Team Building: Build and train a team, then guide them to the objective.
- Project Planning: Help build the project timeline, then apply the plan accordingly.
- Requirement Validation: Review and validate requirements from AGC.
- Process Standardization: Create and develop the standard operating procedures for all processes.
- Request Evaluation: Review, validate, and challenge the development requests from ERP to supplier.
- Implementation Follow-up: Follow up on development deliveries and ongoing implementation of the team.
- Training Development: Develop and maintain training materials and procedures for the key users.
- Testing Support: Support the design of testing tools and strategy.
- Migration Strategy: Complete building of a migration strategy with a specific focus on risk reduction.
- Progress Reporting: Monitor and report progress regularly to the team and management.
4. Industrial Project Manager Accountabilities
- Project Setup: Assist in developing the project chart of accounts, site logistics plan, and bidding projects.
- Contract Management: Maintain a thorough understanding of the contract and develop detailed project contract status reports.
- Cost Control: Oversee the pay request process, job cost report, and total cost projection reports.
- Quality & Safety: Ensure project quality and effective implementation of safety, EEO, and affirmative action programs.
- Staff Training: Train and monitor the progress of all project labor and staff.
- Resource Approval: Review and approve material, forming system, and equipment needs.
- Project Closeout: Develop, schedule, and lead project closeout processes.
- Stakeholder Relations: Develop and maintain effective relationships with vendors, subcontractors, and owners to represent core values.
5. Industrial Project Manager Functions
- Project Planning: Develop project plans that identify resource and budgetary needs.
- Meeting Facilitation: Host project meetings at least once a week with employees, subcontractors, and managers.
- Team Support: Provide feedback, advice, project updates, and encouragement to team members.
- Deadline Management: Manage deadlines and push the team to ensure timeliness.
- Vendor Coordination: Coordinate with vendors and suppliers.
- Multi-Project Oversight: Oversee multiple projects at once.
- Lead Development: Develop leads on potential new projects.
- Contractor Supervision: Supervise a team of welding and electrical contractors.
- Safety Compliance: Periodically conduct safety and operational inspections to ensure all employees and subcontractors are adhering to company safety standards and defined operational goals.
6. Industrial Project Manager Job Description
- Project Oversight: Hold overall responsibility for projects from the pre-construction to the post-construction stage.
- Feasibility Planning: Understand and assist in initial project planning, such as feasibility studies.
- Budget Management: Manage overall project budget from budget planning, cost estimate, tender or procurement, and contract administration.
- Risk Management: Be in charge of the project risk registry and risk management.
- Schedule Development: Develop and manage a detailed project schedule and work plan.
- Project Execution: Be responsible for planning and overseeing projects to ensure they are completed within the detailed project schedule and work plan.
- Performance Monitoring: Monitor and audit project performance, quality, and safety management.
- Stakeholder Coordination: Effectively coordinate and communicate expected deliverables with the consultants, architects, engineers, and contractors.
7. Industrial Project Manager Details and Accountabilities
- Document Management: Collect, review, and process the submittal and RFI project documentation and distribute to the appropriate project team members.
- Drawing Review: Receive shop drawings from subcontractors and suppliers.
- Subcontractor Coordination: Assist the project manager with reviews and communicate with subcontractors and suppliers with additional markups, comments, resubmittals, and approvals.
- Site Visits: Visit job sites with the project manager.
- Communication Support: Compose or transcribe meeting minutes, interoffice memos, and format correspondence to clients, vendors, subcontractors, and other project team members.
- File Maintenance: Initiate and maintain accurate project files, including logs for change orders, pending change orders, permits, submittals, RFIs, etc.
- Schedule Management: Develop, monitor, and update the project schedule and manage the project to assist the project manager.
- Closeout Documentation: Create and maintain close-out documents for project completion, such as O&M manuals.
- Estimating Support: Assist estimating staff with attending job site walkthroughs, quantity take-offs, and soliciting subcontractor proposals.
- Proposal Evaluation: Receive and evaluate subcontractor and material supplier proposals.
8. Industrial Project Manager Roles
- Project Definition: Define the objective and scope of projects with the identified customers.
- Strategic Analysis: Identify the strategic aspects, economic dimension, and all potential stakes.
- Business Evaluation: Evaluate the value addition and contribution and propose business scenarios, such as what, pros, cons, how to, resources needed, and risks.
- Process Compliance: Comply with the stage gate process following the project management reference and tools to ensure the conformity of the service delivered and customer satisfaction.
- KPI Management: Define, implement, and follow up on the project KPIs, key milestones, timeline, resources needed, and project structure, including governance planning, communication plan, and risk management.
- Risk Mitigation: Anticipate the risk to achieve the project objective, its possibility, its impact, and mitigate the risk encountered, including developing and following up on all possible actions to protect the project plan.
- Stakeholder Partnership: Partner with the different stakeholders, such as operations, quality, R&D, and supply chain.
- Team Leadership: Lead and drive a multidisciplinary team, including global engineering, supply chain, production, purchase, and quality, to complete all actions defined in the scope to achieve project objectives.
- Decision Representation: Represent the project team and the business team during the decision-making process.
9. Industrial Project Manager Additional Details
- Health Safety: Ensure health and safety is the number one goal by following policies, processes, and acting safely always.
- Facility Management: Manage, operate, and maintain company facilities within budget guidelines.
- Operations Planning: Plan operations to optimize facility efficiency, operation workforce utilization, materials, supplies, equipment, and tools, including tracking productivity for labor and material costs.
- Expense Control: Analyze and control operational expenditures to conform to budgetary requirements.
- Inspection Compliance: Ensure that all inspections, such as CVIP, tank, picker, are performed by due dates in order to comply with company requirements, policies.
- Specification Compliance: Ensure compliance with job specifications, including seeing that immediate corrective action is taken.
- Quality Assurance: Ensure that the quality of work meets or exceeds established company guidelines.
- Employee Supervision: Make job assignments, provide guidance, and supervision to all employees assigned to the project.
- Training Readiness: Assure that everyone assigned to a job is properly trained, equipped, and ensure materials, supplies needed to do the job are ready, available, including implementing, maintaining a level of cross-training so that effective functional backups can guarantee continuous service operation at all times.
- Team Cooperation: Be responsible for the teamwork, active cooperation among the operators, laborers, shop personnel, with other employees of the company.
- Process Improvement: Seek out input from employees, make recommendations to the branch management for improvements to machinery, equipment, and job site processes.
- Maintenance Program: Establish, maintain, and enforce a preventive maintenance program for all assigned machinery, equipment, including keeping machinery, equipment, and work areas clean, safe, and well-maintained.
- Equal Opportunity: Ensure a discrimination-free environment anywhere in the company regarding sex, race, creed, age, and religion.
- Bid Support: Provide input, feedback to branch management on bids before submission to the client.
- Spending Monitoring: Monitor branch spending on equipment maintenance.
10. Industrial Project Manager Essential Functions
- Team Leadership: Create and lead effective project teams, working with the technical team leads to deliver successful projects.
- Lifecycle Management: Be agile in picking up different parts of the project lifecycle and experienced in project delivery from idea to concept and project closure.
- Project Planning: Work with technical teams to obtain information to produce a project plan and maintain it.
- Requirement Management: Ensure requirements are being managed, recorded, and signed off in the designated tool for the project.
- Risk Register: Maintain a risk register of threats and opportunities for the program and validate contingency costs against these.
- Dependency Management: Document and manage assumptions and dependencies for the program and produce reports.
- Resource Management: Manage the resource requirements of the projects, working with the resourcing function.
- Contract Negotiation: Negotiate business and legal provisions of construction contracts.
- Issue Resolution: Resolve issues with win-win solutions and collaboration.
- Leadership Skills: Display natural leadership skills and ensure that project responsibilities are carried out promptly and accurately.
- Bid Strategy: Develop strategies to win project bids, including preparation of bid documents, negotiating and awarding subcontracts, along with delivering formal sales presentations.
- Customer Relations: Build trusting relationships with potential customers and earn customer satisfaction.