Analyst vs. PM vs. Operations - Short #261
HVAC School - For Techs, By Techs
Bryan Orr
4.9 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this short business-oriented podcast, Bryan breaks down the differences between three commonly confused positions/roles: analyst vs. PM (project management) vs. operations.
When you own or work in a small business, you might wear a lot of hats: estimating, writing proposals, troubleshooting, being a customer or coworker's therapist, etc. This work can be organized, and problem-solving roles include analysts, project managers (PMs), and directly responsible individuals (DRIs). Sometimes, the same person might do more than one of these (or all of them), but separate people can do these as long as you know what success looks like for each of these.
Analysts gather data (such as costs, labor hours, inventory, and SME interviews) and ask big questions. They don't try to fix the problem right away; their job is to seek ideas, pay attention, document, and organize. They think in terms of stories and problem statements, and technicians can benefit from this type of mindset on service calls.
Project managers translate the data, goals, and even the plans, and these people organize those items so that they can be executed in real life: creating checklists, gathering manuals, scheduling, and implementing basic SOP. PMs set a plan, but they have to maintain flexibility and drive execution (but may not be responsible for the outcome).
The DRI owns the outcome; this person may or may not be the project manager. If there's a new program, software, or procedure, this person drives those. They are the operator and may not be involved in the analysis or planning, but they own the execution and are responsible for those results.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello again. This is the HVAC school podcast. I'm Brian. This is the podcast where I give overly enthusiastic intros, but then sometimes talk about business stuff that I think can help everybody understanding the difference between not only different types of people, but different roles. And I think it's important. |
| 0:21.4 | One of the first things I learned in business was making sure you get the right people |
| 0:24.1 | and the right seats, doing work that suits them as best as possible. |
| 0:28.8 | And so that's what we're going to talk about today. |
| 0:30.3 | But before we do that, we want to thank our great sponsors. |
| 0:33.4 | Carrier and Carrier.com. |
| 0:35.4 | Refrigeration Technologies at Refrigetec.com and specifically the new Viper Wetrag Heat Shield. |
| 0:42.3 | The revolutionary flame-resistant welding pad designed to be used either wet or dry. |
| 0:49.1 | Find a Viper wet rag heat shield at a distributor near you or go to TrueTechTools.com |
| 0:54.1 | and use offer code, get schooled for a great discount at checkout. |
| 0:58.4 | Field Piece and Field Piece University. |
| 1:01.6 | Field Piece offers high quality product training for HVAC techs and distributors. |
| 1:06.7 | Whether you're using the tools or selling them, |
| 1:08.8 | Field Piece has training options for you. |
| 1:12.0 | There are categories for evacuation, recovery, leak detection, and heating. |
| 1:16.9 | Within the course, for heating appliances, you get to learn how to do combustion analysis |
| 1:20.8 | and measure static and gas pressure. |
| 1:23.5 | All very important things to know. |
| 1:24.6 | If you're a technician who's working on gas, let me tell you. |
| 1:27.3 | It's all interactive. Learn how to use the tools like job link probes and how they pair with apps to help you analyze the system, create invoices, and so, so, so much more. That's three soes. That's a lot of soes. Some courses even have Nate credits, like the Recovery Best best practices and VFD troubleshooting courses. |
| 1:45.6 | Find out more. Go to fieldpiece.com slash fieldpiece dash university. That's fieldpiece.com |
| 1:50.5 | slash field piece dash university. |
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