PSMJ Team Member David Burstein

David Burstein, P.E.

Director | Senior Consultant

"Long-term strategies and goals are effective only when they are tied down to individual actions and accountability."
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Expertise: Project Management | Financial Management | HR Management | Strategic Planning & Growth

Bio

Dave Burstein is a Director and Senior Consultant with PSMJ. He provides consulting and training on a wide range of management and leadership topics. Prior to joining PSMJ, Dave worked for 26 years at Parsons Corporation, one of the world’s largest and most respected engineering-construction firms. During his tenure at Parsons, Dave held a variety of positions including President of Parsons’ 1,600-person, environmental subsidiary and President of Parsons’ 120-person, planning subsidiary.

While serving as President of two subsidiaries of Parsons Corporation, Dave participated in several major strategic planning efforts. Since joining PSMJ, he has facilitated strategic planning retreats for over 100 A/E/C firms ranging in size from fewer than 10 employees to more than 1,000 employees. Reflecting on this experience, he co-authored Strategic Planning: Preparing Your Firm for Success in the Future, first published in 2004 with a second edition published in 2009.

Dave is also one of the nation’s leading authorities on project management for the A/E/C industry. He developed and published a system for controlling budgets and schedules that is now known as Earned Value Management. In 1981, Dave co-authored (with PSMJ’s Frank Stasiowski) Project Management for the Design Professional, the first textbook on project management for the A/E/C industry, which has been published in both English and Spanish and sold over 80,000 copies. Dave has since authored two other textbooks on this subject and has developed software solutions to help PMs manage their projects more effectively. Dave also served as principal editor for “Chapter 1: Project Management” in McGraw-Hill’s Standard Handbook of Environmental Engineering, originally published in 1991 and again in 1998. Dave has presented hundreds of project management seminars to thousands of project managers in A/E/C firms.

Upon joining PSMJ full-time in 1998, Dave developed PSMJ’s Principals Bootcamp and Financial Management for A/E/C Firm Leaders, which are two-day seminars for current and aspiring principals in A/E/C firms. Since then, he has presented these programs hundreds of times. These have been conducted both in open enrollment settings and, for larger firms, on an in-house basis. The evaluations for these programs have consistently averaged more than 4.8 on a 1 to 5 scale (i.e., more than 80% of the attendees have rated Dave’s presentation of this program as a 5).

David has both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from New Mexico State University and has completed the Crosby Executive Quality College program. He has been a registered professional engineer in many states and is a Diplomate of Environmental Engineering.