#015 – Project Management is Transferable with Alexander Lowry

I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexander Lowry who has gone from Consulting to Financial Services to rolling out programs at Gordon College.  We talk about major career pivots and how Project Management is a transferable skill set.  Alexander paints a compelling alternative to an MBA with the programs he is rolling out.

 

BIO

Alexander Lowry is a professor of finance at Gordon College and Director of the school’s Master of Science in Financial Analysis program.  He’s also a Board of Directors Member for fintech and financial services companies. Which means he’s transforming, accelerating, and advising businesses that his students want to work for.

Show Notes:
  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. Company URL: http://www.gordon.edu/graduate/finance
  3. Company Twitter: http://twitter.com/GordonMSFA
  4. Company LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/showcase/gordon-college-master-of-science-in-financial-analysis/
  5. Personal LinkedIn profile: www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderlowry
  6. Personal Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/AlexanderSLowry
  7. Music: www.hooksounds.com

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Get your free audiobook by visiting managingprojects.ca/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast.

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Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

#014 – Women in Project Management with Elise Stevens

While women have been recognized as equals throughout various industries in recent years, the number of women in the project management field has barely risen. Elise discusses some reasons for this as well as speaks of her work to raise the profile of women in Project Management.

Bio:

Elise works with women in project management roles to reinforce within themselves their true value to their team, company and industry.  She provides a channel for women’s voices to be heard, supported and embraced in project management. It’s time for women to dream big in the industry, and to know that they can achieve their career goals.

Elise works with incredible women who have extensive knowledge, skills and passion for their career, but unfortunately, the high pressure and status quo within the workplace has left them feeling emotionally exhausted; they have lost confidence in their own hard-earned skills and are considering leaving their roles.

For over two decades, Elise has worked closely with project managers to positively impact and innovate effective management processes. She has collaborated with a range of organizations including Queensland Urban Utilities, Ipswich City Council, Coca-Cola Amatil, Hutchinson Telecoms and Ansett Australia.

 

ELISE’S SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS:

  • Lifting the Visibility of Women in Project Management
  • Engaging and Retaining Women in Project Management Roles
  • Why Diversity in Project Management is Imperative
  • How Women can lift their profile in Project Management
Show Notes:
  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. www.elisestevens.co
  3. https://twitter.com/ElisethePm/
  4. https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisestevens/
  5. https://www.instagram.com/elisestevens.co/
  6. https://www.facebook.com/elisestevens.co/
  7. Music: www.hooksounds.com

 

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Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

Get your free audiobook by visiting managingprojects.ca/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast.

Want to get more helpful project management insights like this directly in your inbox? Subscribe to the Managing Projects newsletter (see subscribe in right side menu).

 


Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

#013 – Estimating IT Projects and an Update

I will be presenting on Estimating IT Projects at PD Days in Moncton May 23rd.  I also talk about my new on-demand Estimating IT Projects training course.

Show Notes:
  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. Music: www.hooksounds.com
  3.  www.chalder.ca
  4. PMI NB – PD Days
  5. Course Information link: Estimations Course mailing list and info.

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

Get your free audiobook by visiting managingprojects.ca/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast.

Want to get more helpful project management insights like this directly in your inbox? Subscribe to the Managing Projects newsletter (see subscribe in the right side menu).

 


Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

#012 – Generational Communication with Mohammad Mahasneh

In today’s workplace you can have 4 generations of people:

  1. Generation Z – Born after 2000 (completely into a sharing)
  2. Generation Y – Born 1980-2000 (group work – find things on their own – online when young)
  3. Generation X – Born between 1960-1980 (likes lists :-))
  4. The Boomers – Born 1945-1960 born into radio (studied humanities, logic and wants to build legacy)

Listen in as Mo gives some clarity to HOW each generation should communicate with the other to increase productivity and reduce stress.

Bio:

Mohammad is a seasoned Communications Strategist, Instructor and Trainer. He brings to clients a global vision with specialized focus and experience in reputation and crisis management, executive and personal branding, and corporate communications.  After realizing firsthand the crippling effect of miscommunication in the workplace, Mohammad joined Donohue Learning Technologies to focus on helping others reduce their stress and bridge communication gaps in workplaces across Canada and the US.  He is currently working on two research studies with renowned Communications Expert, Dr. Mary Donohue, on engagement and generational influence in the workplace.  As a Strategic Communications consultant, Mohammad’s career included the development and execution of advocacy campaigns, stakeholder relations and reputation building programs for some of the largest corporations in Canada and the US. He managed communications strategy and media relations for Queen Rania of Jordan and helped develop a top of the line curriculum for a Master’s Program in Journalism for the Jordan Media Institute. Mohammad is multi-lingual (English, French, Arabic); holds a BA in Political Science from Concordia University and a certificate in Digital Strategy & Communications Management from the University of Toronto.You can also follow Mohammad on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn

Show Notes:
  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. Music: www.hooksounds.com
  3. Mohd@DonohueLearning.com
  4. Mo: +1 (647) 404-0020

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

Get your free audiobook by visiting managingprojects.ca/audible. Thanks to Audible for supporting this podcast.

Want to get more helpful project management insights like this directly in your inbox? Subscribe to the Managing Projects newsletter (see subscribe in right side menu).

 


Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

#011 – The Humanistic Approach to High Performance Teams

If you want a high performance team you want shared vision (Gamasutra) and psychological safety (Google). Bringing your whole self to work is crucial. People have a 1-10 ratio (fastest to slowest). Teams have a 1-2000 ratio (fastest to slowest).  This interview will change the way you think about the workplace and teams.

Bio: Richard Kasperowski is a speaker, trainer, coach, and author focused on high-performance teams. Richard is the author of The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. He leads clients in building great teams that get great results using the Core ProtocolsAgile, and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University. Learn more and subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at www.kasperowski.com.
Show Notes:
  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. Contact: richard@kasperowski.com
  3. LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasperowski/
  4. Music: www.hooksounds.com

 

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

Want to get more helpful project management insights like this directly in your inbox? Subscribe to the Managing Projects newsletter (see subscribe in right side menu).

 


Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

 

Transcription of Interview

Intro: Welcome to managing projects the podcast for project managers in search of trends and insights. Join us as our guests dig deep into the thought provoking topics that matter most to project management professionals. You can find all the episodes at managing projects.ca. And now here’s your host Ron Smith.

 

Ron: Welcome to this episode of managing projects. Today I will be chatting with Richard Kasperowski. Richard is a speaker, trainer, coach and author focused on high performance teams. Richard is the author of The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. He leads clients in building great teams that get great results using the core protocols, agile and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University. So welcome to the show Richard.

 

Richard: Hi Ron – thanks.

 

Ron: So listen I saw one of your talks online. I know that you cite a few different sources for part of your talk. And one of them was very interesting a source named Jeff Sutherland did a study on productivity. And I wondered if you kick us off with what that study was about.

 

Richard: Sure. Yes I think you’re watching a video of keynote I did at the agile games conference a few years ago.

 

Ron: Yeah that’s right.

 

Richard: So this is the this is the Jeff Southerland who’s the co-inventor of scrum. So Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber co-inventors of scrum and Jeff a couple of years ago he wrote a book called Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. So his thesis is that if you’re using scrum, it is possible to have teams that are four times more productive – twice the work and half the time.    It’s sort of aimed at executives and leaders more than at practitioners so doesn’t doesn’t get into details of how scrum works. It describes reasons that you might want to try it or were why you might want to focus on teams and on team productivity and team efficiency. One of the things he cites is a study of computer science students at Yale. He didn’t actually I don’t know if he went to Yale. No he did not go to Yale. He went to the Air Force Academy I think. So he cites Joel Sapolsky.    Joel’s article he wrote on a blog from 2005. Joel was a student in computer science students at Yale and he kept in touch with a teacher of a particular class that everybody in CS at Yale takes.    As part of this class, the students that they’ve got a bunch of programming problems I think each problem ticks that they get like two weeks to get it done. And and students report how many hours they spend to get the get each assignment done. If you look at the fastest students in that class there Yale students right. So they’re all like pretty high pretty pretty high end performance no matter what they’re like in the in the upper half.

 

Ron: These are the high achievers.

 

Richard: Well yeah you know it’s Yale. This is the high achievers out of the population of everyone who’s college age right. So they’re like they’re like ninetieth percentile individuals at least. These aren’t these aren’t people who who struggle to learn hypothetically. In this course, in over years and years of doing it, so that they’ve been doing the same assignments over and over for for like more than a decade. So that the teacher has a lot of data. And from the data set what they know is the fastest students get these assignments done in one to two hours and the slowest students take about ten times as long. Right. So that’s interesting there’s a big difference even even when we’re looking at people who are ninetieth percentile or better for it for individual performance. There’s as much as well there’s a five to 10 times productivity difference between people in the class.

 

Ron: I’ve noticed this as well myself, depending on who’s doing a piece of work on a project team, you know you have your superstars that can crank it out really really quick and you have the folks that just take a lot longer.

 

Richard: Yeah. And what’s cool about this if you’re measuring this in this kind of stuff at work it’s it’s actually really hard to do single variable experiments where the only thing that’s different is the person doing it. When we’re doing it at work there’s all kinds of variables like the other people on your team or whether you’ve solved a problem like this before or when two people are if you could possibly get two people their two teams to work on the same problem so that the only variable is the teams. There’s there’s always other variables. So what’s what’s interesting here is that it’s the same assignments over and over every student to solving the same problems it’s the same teacher. There are very few variables aside from who are the students doing it. So then Joel refines the data even more. And what he does is he says well that that’s that’s a wide disparity. Maybe some of the students actually aren’t very good students and maybe they switch majors or something or they drop the course. So he changes it to look at the top quartile of the students in the class that basically the ones that get A’s and B’s the students that are really successful in the class. He drops the other 75 percent of people from the work. So this is like now we’re looking at only the good students in this course only the best students in this course and even then… And they’re the ones that that have they’ve gotten good grades they’ve passed all or almost all of the tests that they’ve submitted solutions to all the homework problems they’ve gotten really good grades on them. So even in this even in this subset of that population there’s still a wide disparity in how fast people get get the stuff done and the disparity is still like 5 to 1. So the most productive individuals even at the top tier are five times faster doing the same work than the slowest individuals. So that’s interesting that’s just a variation in individual performance.

 

Ron: It seems pretty easy to determine a resources productivity. But then did they get into starting a study team productivity as well.

 

Richard: Yeah. And by research I mean a person.

 

Ron: Right. Exactly.

 

Richard: And yet differences between individuals because that you know it’s a it’s a it’s a computer science class. They’re grading people individually in a couple of chapters later in his book. Jeff Sutherlands shares a story of a similar study at IBM and the difference in this study is that it’s about teams and this is you know this is a little harder to do. There’s a lot more variables. Although all the projects are different there’s different people on different teams but there’s a large enough sample size that it seems like a pretty good pretty good study. There’s 3800 software teams software projects in this study. So it’s a really big sample size and they’re all done by teams and in this study the best teams get their stuff done well we’ll said the slowest him’s take 2000 times as long to get their work out as the fastest teams. This is a huge performance difference between teams that the fastest teams and the slowest teams and it’s two orders of magnitude bigger than the difference between individuals. Right. Right so for individuals at Yale it was ten to one. And here it’s 2000 to 1. That’s huge.

 

Ron: Did they guess as to why. There would be that much of an amplification of that difference in the in the book.

 

Richard: Jeff doesn’t share why. I haven’t found the original publication of this like I’ve been able to find the original the original publication but the Yale data. But the point that Jeff is making is if you want if you want really fast software projects that you want really high quality software projects focus on the teams not on the individuals. The difference between team performance is two orders of magnitude greater than the difference between individual performance. So even if you had all the best individuals on a team they still might underperform by two orders of magnitude. That’s really interesting and of course he’s he’s talking about scrum and is about teams working together. So he’s he’s making a case for the executives and leaders who are reading his book that that scrum or something like it some way to get a team to work really well together is where you ought to be heading as a leader or a member of the team working on working together building something

 

Ron: That’s funny. You’re making me think of another time in my career when we were building a team and there was someone in the company who was seen as a quite a leader you have a guru you might say. And what was discussed was do you and other gurus with them or will they just fight. And so anyway building that team. The thought was that you know if you had one you know a stronger leader built around with some other people who were just going to come behind them and learn as opposed to argue. Now that’s really really interesting.

 

Richard: Yeah yeah this really piqued my interest right and I’ve been I’ve been interested in teams and helping teams be their most awesome for a long long time couple of decades since I was since I was a young software developer.

 

Ron: So in your talk you also cite Gayman sutra saying that right. I ask that question every time I say. I tell people that as it game-a-sutra is that Gama-sutra. It’s one of those maybe it’s game as interim maybe it’s Gamasutra. So it’s a it’s a website. It’s a periodical about videogame industry. And so I’ve taught a class somewhere and the team later asked me if I’d seen the study come out like a couple of weeks before I went to teach this class for them and it was it was really cool this study that they did. So in the in the academic literature when people are looking at team performance workplace performance that they try to measure things very objectively and they’re looking for different    characteristics. Different behaviors that might correlate to success to have performance in the Gamasutra study which they called the game outcomes project. And you can find it on the Gamasutra website. They they took 200 different metrics to 200 different dimensions of Team behavior. And they wanted to know which of those correlated to success in video game projects. They found they did this around 2014. They found they found a population of 120 different projects to look at. They came up with a set of objectively metrics for how successful each video game was as well as subjective metrics. Did this list of 200 different things that might correlate to success according to the academic literature. Because I didn’t want to have to invent new things to measure and they wanted to see if the literature was replicable. They were actually doing good science replicating somebody else’s research. So what they found in the in this project the game project was that the one thing that correlated more highly to videogame success than anything else was shared vision. So that’s really interesting for for objective success. They looked at things like like financial return on investment. So some companies spent a bunch of money developing this project. How much money did they make back. So that’s profit or loss. They looked at just this really simple metric – was the project delayed, was the product canceled. Right. If it if it actually got to the end and they they could publish their game. That was that was a positive outcome. They looked at critical success. What did the critics think about it in reviews that in the press and they looked at whether it met the company’s internal goals whatever those might have been. Right. And they put that together into a scorecard of whether one of these 120 projects was successful or not. And what they found was the thing that they correlate most with shared vision. They also found these four other things that they actually ranked all these 200 different things in order of correlation but that the top five were shared vision, managing risks, everybody buys in on decisions they avoid death march kind of time crunching. And it’s safe to take risks on these sorts of teams that are successful and shared vision tops the list for the Gamasutra study.

 

Ron: So do you know Richard how they measured that. Was it was an interview style with each resource to figure out whether they would agree they hold a common shared vision.

 

Richard: Yeah. So they they they replicated the methodology that’s typically used in the academic research and the methodology is typically a self report survey from each member of a team. And what you want is a 100 percent response rate from all of the members of a team to be able to measure these things in a team like you know that they would ask everybody on likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. I believe the people on my team share the same vision or I believe or I feel safe when I’m with the people on my team. These sorts of things. This is the kind of survey that they give to measure these sorts of things. It’s a very it’s a very typical way to measure these kinds of things.

 

Ron: You’re bringing up some of these topics that I know are also part of our of your conversation as we go through this interview. So safety at work as a logical safety you have. You speak about some research that was done as well that came out of the Microsoft project teams.

 

Richard: Yeah and this has been replicated over and over this kind of research. Stuff about safety correlating to high performance teams originated in healthcare. It’s been replicated in many different industries on thousands of teams that that teams that measure high and safety also measure high end performance Google replicated this research a couple of years ago. They shared their story the New York Times. I think exactly two years ago in February 2016 similar kind of thing as Gamasutra. Everyone at Google works on a team. Some teams are better than others. Kind of like the IBM study some teams are better than others and they know they’ve got objective performance metrics for teams. With what they want to know at Google. As a business is these teams that are better what are they doing that’s different. And could we get all of the teams to do whatever those most successful teams are doing so they replicated the research they called it Project Aristotle. They spent a couple of years. They got something like 200 teams to volunteer to participate in the research. They measured all the teams and all these different performance characteristics from the literature and in the Google work the one that correlated most highly to success or to high performance on teams was psychological safety. So they got it they got a similar result that was in the top 5 of the Gamasutra study along with they talked about shared vision stuff like that. These were also of the top five in Google’s work. So they replicated the research just like Gamasutra did for Google for the teams at Google the answer was psychological safety. So that’s that’s really interesting. If you want if you want a high performance team: this is kind of what    gameasutra is saying and you want a high performance team you want shared vision and then in Google’s work they’re saying if you want a high performance team you want psychological safety. You want people to feel safe when they’re with each other like it’s safe to take risks it’s safe to be yourself it’s safe to admit you don’t know something that you made a mistake. So you can get the answer so you can improve together as a team faster basically so you can learn faster.

 

Ron: You also talk about a book by Frederick Lalaux. Is that how you pronounce his last name. Think so reinventing organizations. Yes.

 

Richard: So Frederick is this Belgian guy with this French sounding name. He talks about things like well you know sort of like fiction of work life balance. Like people on awesome teams are people in high performing organizations. Do they leave part of themselves at home when they come to work. Do they leave their work at work and go home. Not really the kind of bring their whole selves to work and they bring their whole selves back home. And by doing so these these sorts of organizations seem to outperform others. So he has a bunch of case studies in his book Reinventing organizations. Different companies different size organizations and a lot of different industries. And he’s looking at organizations that have a structure and management system that I call humanistic or holistic. His work is based on integral theory and in Lulaux work. He lays out a scale for how organizations fit for how people organize themselves historically. All the way back from the first groups of humans to today. The most interesting parts of it to me are    the more recent organization styles because they’re more relevant to us today in the sort of creative work that many of us do. And I call I called the two styles mechanistic or achievement oriented versus humanistic or are holistic. So he might call these he actually color codes them these might be orange organizations that that’s more mechanistic industrial edge sort of management structure versus green or teal this is more humanistic holistic self-management self organization these sorts of things. And what he finds in his case studies is that the the organizations that are that are structured in a way that the people have more more autonomy they care about each other like they’re humans that they talk about each other like they’re people even versus resources. Resources is kind of like an industrial edge way of talking about people calling them people is a humanistic caustic way of talking about people. Just just calling them people keeping them human. When you call them resource it’s kind of dehumanizing like they’re just replaceable. So you know this is like I was just I was just looking at an old blog that I wrote. And I called it The Diamond Age. It was sort of based on Neal Stephenson’s novel from a few years ago the Diamond Age. What do you do differently if you’re running an organization and limited resources, scarcity of resources, was not your problem. Industrial style management mechanistic style management is kind of based on the assumption that that there is scarcity and that we have to be really efficient to make sure we don’t waste anything. What if there was an abundance instead? And there kind of is abundance. People humans for the work we’re doing today were full of potential were full of full of creativity were full of ideas and. And it’s up to us as leaders and people guiding organizations and leadership thinking within organizations to offer these ideas that there is abundance. And there are different and better ways of getting that abundance and getting the full creation of that abundance from a group of people right. So the industrial era way of working doesn’t really make sense. If you’re talking about abundance and creativity and like daily invention which is what we do as software developers and technologists and you know and creative thinkers.

 

Ron: I have been an audible member for a long time. I’m taking a short break from the interview to let you know how you can support podcast. Today’s episode is brought to you by Audible when we spoke with my case a few weeks ago. He had several book recommendations. One of them was by Liz Wiseman. Her book is titled Multipliers in this book she talks about the contrast between a multiplier and diminisher. The full title of the book is how the great leaders make everyone smarter. You can download this week’s recommendation or pick another audio book for free and support this podcast. All the same time. How cool is that. You can do this by visiting managing projects dossier for Flash audible. Now get back to this interview.

 

Ron: So many companies today would have this sense of this industrial mystic type approach to how they’ve even approached software development in this waterfall type model that everyone used to buy into now and now there’s so much of a shift towards agile.    The philosophy that they describe is that we are just going to take these smaller pieces of work and we’re going to iterate through them and we’re going to we’re going to dig deeper in the in the moment of the work. But there’s so much more involved in that. So I think it supports what you’re talking about where if you look at the Agile Manifesto it talks about compassion having compassion for your… and I won’t use the word resources… and I did use the word resources earlier in this interview. Compassion for your people. And there’s also another attendant that says we believe that the people that are working on these projects are doing the best they can. Having having no taking into account the circumstances that they’re in. That’s the philosophy that you run these projects under. It’s interesting so I’m also a co-host on another podcast called Ardent Development. And we just released a chat that we had with April Wensel. She started an organization called compassionate coder. And this is what she’s talking about is realizing this empathy in I.T. and to your point exactly to say we’re not shoveling coal.    We have a task that we’re we are going to do exactly the same replicated task like it’s a machine over and over again because the creativity and the the ability to compete in the market at times means you’re building these you’re creating something new. Right. I can relate to what you’re saying wholeheartedly. Where it does seem like the industry is waking up to it out of an old style of management that is very much industrial. You know we crank out code for a living. We use the exact same thing every day. What’s interesting is when you create something that really is for the first time I’ve had the opportunity to be involved with some projects that we really were doing something for the first time. And it is a very different management mindset that you get yourself into it’s very much in the creative space. You can’t knock on the doors of everyone else that’s done before you just say well how did you do it. You know what. You know what difficulties did you run into.

 

Richard: Yeah. And and that’s one of the things that’s different about our creative work versus said shoveling coal or whatever. Every time we do it it’s a little bit different even if it’s something we’ve done before. It’s you know it’s integrating that same kind of solution maybe with with different code. So even if it’s something we’ve done before we’re always doing it in a new way. It’s not just stick the shovel in and get the same amount of coal out and stick it in the fire. It’s always a little different.

 

Ron: Talk to me a little bit about core protocols.

 

Richard: Yeah OK. So I think you mentioned this book to me it had been on my reading list for a while actually just cracked it open this morning thinking fast and slow. So you know instead of thinking about industrialism and how to get the most efficiency. Well how would you get it. Maybe you think about industrialism how would you get the most efficiency out of creative people. And I think the answer is to tap into the fast brain of people so this is like closer to the brain stem versus the prefrontal cortex. So you know prefrontal cortex this is the logic part of the brain. This is the the part where we ruminate over things it takes us a while to get the right answer. This is the human part of the brain the mammal part of the brain. It’s actually the slower part of the brain. The more brainstem limbic system. Sometimes we call it the reptile brain. This is closer to the top of the spine it includes things like the amygdala. People associate this part of the brain with with with fight or flight with emotion and things like that. This is the fast thinking part of the brain. So what if you could get people to tap into that part of the brain and tap into that part of the brain as a team not just as an individual because remember that the difference between team performance in individual performances is like 2000 X versus 10 x. So if you really want awesomeness you want team awesomeness. What if we could get a team to tap into that fast part of the brain that really creative without without thinking about it and taking a long time? I think this is what the core protocols is about at some level. So the the story the core protocols is the story of this team that you mentioned at Microsoft and Jim McCarthy and Michelle McCarthy.    They Jim and Michelle joined the team it was the compilers group it was something like 150 people. It was a mediocre team at the time they joined and somehow it became a really successful team like maybe the most successful team at Microsoft in its time maybe the most successful software team in the industry at the time. So they built it eventually with me and as they transform from mediocre to excellence. The thing that they built was visual c++. It was like for its era the mid 1990s it was a technical wonder it did things that no other product could do. It kind of lowered the bar for people to be able to build applications and write code. It made it much easier than it had been. It was so good it could put other companies out of business like Borland’s was a competitor. Borland went out of business because that because Visual C++ was just so good Borland came back to life a little later. Like at least the name came back to life. Somebody somebody bought the name and started marketing it or that name again but it wasn’t the same company they actually they actually went out of business. Jim and Michelle had this experience of Team awesomeness and they kind of wondered whether they could do it again that they felt like they got lucky which is how I usually feel when I look back at my my best teams in my life. I feel like I got lucky so they left Microsoft. They started up a team research lab and they tried to figure out what were the ingredients for really great teams like that. What they did was they would invite a team in to their lab and they do a five day long experiment. On day one they would give the team an assignment and they would just watch for five days. On day five, everybody there could tell whether the team was successful or not. How good of a product they had built together. They did this five or ten times. They started to notice some patterns and they documented these patterns using that pattern language idea was popular in the late 1990s. So they documented the behaviors of successful team as patterns and they called these patterns protocols because a protocol is a way that humans communicate with each other very structured way for two humans to communicate with each other. Think diplomatic protocols – the way the way diplomats talk to each other between countries. They’re very precise to make sure that there’s no myth that there’s very little opportunity for misunderstanding each other and that’s kind of what a protocol is. As as software developers we think of that as the way the way my code communicates with somebody else’s code we use some sort of protocol. And it comes from comes from the way humans communicate with each other to make sure everything is clear. So then the next phase of their experiment was to say if you know those teams in their lab that were successful were they just lucky or could this be replicable. Could they teach these behavior patterns to tombs and replicate that success. And so for the next five or 10 teams in the lab they did a little intervention. Intervention is the psychology experiment word that means we would do something a little different. And their intervention was teach the core protocols. Teach these teach these protocols to the teams on the first day of the lab and see what happens and what they noticed was every time they taught these behavior patterns of successful teams, to new teams, those new teams were also successful. So that they knew where they were on to something here. They weren’t doing this as a academically rigorous research because they didn’t care about academic credentials or you know that they just wanted to know if they could find the ingredients of team success and do it on purpose. And they did. And they replicated this hundreds of times and other people have replicated it so it’s not just if Jim and Michelle intervene. Then you get successful teams. Other people have have taught these patterns to teams and they.

 

Richard: Give me a few of these protocols that they would introduce him to some of these teams.

 

Richard: Yeah. And and as I described some of these you’ll see that they closely correspond to the ideas of humanism or are holistic organizational structures. One of the starter ideas is freedom or autonomy or opting in. Right. So “check out” is that one of these patterns. Every pattern has a name and then and then some. Some context in which it’s applicable and a way to a way to do it yourself. So check out is the name of one of the patterns check out you use it whenever you can’t stay engaged with your teammates and that might mean you have something more important to do. That might mean you just don’t feel right at the moment with your teammates for some reason. It might mean that just you just need to go clear your head and checking out works like this. You just say I’m checking out and you leave the room.

 

Ron: So I’m picturing say say a standup. As an example you’re a project manager you’re running a standup in agile and you get all your team together and you’re all standing in the room and as quickly as you can you say what you did yesterday and we’re going to do two more. And somebody in the corner says I want to check out.    It’s funny I was having lunch with a friend of mine and I was telling him about this idea. And I wanted to debate with him how he would feel about it as a manager because in some companies what pops into the manager’s head is well that’s part of your job. You know Sadly or Billy whoever wants to check it right now you’re actually getting paid to participate you’re in the room right now. So some people will respond to this negatively and say it right. Exactly so. So so talk a little bit more… can you challenge the person after are you not supposed to challenge them?

 

Richard: There’s no challenge because that would that would eliminate the psychological safety for being able to do it. Right. So here’s why it works. Oh and that that’s that idea of what we’re paying you to be at this meeting. So you have to stay here. You have to participate. That’s mechanistic industrial era kind of thinking. We’ve got we’ve got resources in the room and we want them to perform the best. And you know it’s resources again instead of people. That mechanistic industrial age kind of management. The the evidence. You know this is evidence based by watching high performing teams. The evidence is that on high performing teams people opt in to be together. People are on that team voluntarily because they want to be because they believe in the vision of that team because they have a shared vision with people on their team not because somebody commanded them to be on that team. Now of course he can command people to be on the team. But in the evidence from watching high performing teams they weren’t commanded to be together on the highest performing teams they’re together because they want to be. And this is this is kind of like the way at least half the teams at Google for example are formed they’re formed organically because people want to work together on a team. That teams engineer at Google gets an idea and their 20 percent time and they’re really keen on the idea they get some other engineer to join them on it and that person 20 percent time they think they’ve got something good they share it with. And of course they’re doing it together because they want to share it with. They find a project manager or somebody like that to join them on the team. Then nobody is commanding that project manager or join them on the team to do it because they like the idea and they like these other people and they think they’ve got something that they can do together. And then they just recruit other people to join the team.

 

Ron: It brings up a very pleasant feeling of what if everyone on your team as they were driving into work were choosing. You know for instance you’re walking you’re walking to your next meeting happens to be a stand up and your peers says I have to go to this stand up now – ugh. Or I’m choosing you know I’m I’m going to stand up and then you know the attitude behind it speaks volumes. I wonder what the percentile is of the people and this was what the debate was over lunch with my with my friend that we debated this. I said to them I actually think if the employees are choosing to be there that very seldom would that check-out happen because your thought process is like I’m choosing to do all this stuff. This is where I actually want to be right now.

 

Richard: Yeah so people often ask me like what. Well what happens when you when everybody decides to check out or ever decides to pass on what’s going on with the team. Well that’s probably behavior of people on a team who are forced to be together who don’t really have a shared vision. They’re not really into the product they’re building they should probably all find a team they want to work with it instead of being. If you want if you want a high performance team then we want people who want to be there voluntarily not people who are forced to be there. And if you want a lower performance to him then you can command people to be on that. And we know from the resource what the result will be.

 

Ron: If you took this approach though, you would find out so much earlier. You know you haven’t gone through all the painstaking work that the team didn’t want to be a part of. And then realize we’re out of luck. In that scenario where they said what everybody in the room are. So yeah it gives you an opportunity to say oh I’m not understanding… Something’s terribly wrong and we have a chance to talk about that.

 

Richard: Right and agile we have this expression we we at least say, I don’t know if we all believe it, but we just say it’s good to fail fast or we like to fail fast. Right. So what if we could fail really fast with even the people who were on the team building the product. What if we could know by the end of the day whether this is the right group of people why do we have to wait six months and waste all that time and waste all that money. Let’s just find out today if this is the record that people.

 

Ron: I came across another protocol in the research. You probably pointed it out in your talk or I found it somewhere. Was this sense of if you’re holding a meeting you’re actually agreeing that you will be present if you’re if you’re working with people. So for instance you would be sitting in a room where a meeting is happening in your laptop is going and you’re typing something or you’re checking something on your phone. But this is almost a team promise that you say I’m going act this way so I will be in the room I’ll be present and I’ll give you my best because I’m here.

 

Richard: And if you can’t actually leave. Yeah it’s a commitment to be engaged when present and if you can’t be engaged that’s when you leave. That what checkout is all about checking out of the room when you cannot be engaged when you’re present with your team or you’re in the room.

 

Ron: You are saying I am fully engaged.

 

Richard: You got it. Your physical presence is a signal to everybody else on your team that you are totally there not just your body but your mind and your spirit your emotional self. Every part of you is there fully.

 

Ron: So how do you gauge that? I heard some examples of – you would actually have these words. I feel sad. I feel mad. You know whatever. And this is a this is a pattern that you would go through with the different folks that have just joined your meeting is that right.

 

Richard: Yeah. So, this is back to Jim and Michelle’s work watching the high performance teams and their lab than reteaching these patterns to additional teams. They noticed that on high performing teams the successful teams in their lab. The people on those teams would share their emotional state with each other no matter what it was and they wouldn’t get judged for it and nobody would try to fix it. They were they were welcome for who they were and how they were no matter what. So this is a characteristic of you know the evidence is watching high performing teams the characteristic is on high performing teams. People share their emotional state and they don’t get punished for it or ostracized for it. It’s just part of who they are and we welcome who they are. So the behavior pattern as a as a protocol is you just say how you’re feeling. You say I feel mad and maybe you explain it. I feel glad and maybe you explain it so the people on your team can understand you a little bit better in your current emotional state. And then when you’re done everybody says welcome. OK – it’s kind of corny that everybody says welcome after you say I’m feeling sad about blah blah blah. But what happens when that when we do that with each other is it’s sort of it’s a really nice acknowledgement from everybody on the team that they heard you and that it’s OK that you’re part of the team no matter what your emotional state is. So yeah this check in protocol is sometimes I call it the emotional Check-In. It’s a nice way to… It’s a very effective way to reengage with your teammates anytime.

 

Ron: Do you find that there is a percentage of the population that says oh this is wonderful I can see how this is humanistic. I love it. And there’s this other percentage that says “Blaw” well why do we to do this stuff. I wish we didn’t like what. So what’s your percentage of those groups. What’s what’s been some of the reaction.

 

Richard: Yeah I’d say if we divided the world into these more mechanistic organizations in these more humanistic organizations I think in the Lalaux’s book he says something like 80 percent of today’s organizations are more like mechanistic and maybe maybe 10 to 20 percent or more like humanistic. And if you try to share something like this with the people who are in the mechanistic side of things which which is most people it just doesn’t make sense to them and will say that’s OK. If this doesn’t make sense. You know nobody’s going to force you to do it. If you’re sort of at the cusp between mechanistic and humanistic maybe you’re open to this and that’s exactly who this who this works. The core protocols is for people who are sort of at that cusp and who want to want to operate in a way that’s more humanistic individually or with their team or with their whole organization.

 

Ron: Well I for one would welcome the move away from the mechanistic organizations into a humanistic.

 

Richard: And there are there are a lot of people like you, right. It’s a big planet. We’ve got seven and a half billion people. Twenty percent of the big number is a big number so there’s a lot of people who are open to this kind of way of working together.

 

Ron: Well Richard I think I could talk to you all day about this stuff. This is this is a very deep topic. If people wanted to learn more about your work or attend one of your sessions where would they find you online?

 

Richard: Visit my website kasperowski.com. I’ve got a newsletter you can sign up for. Lots of people are interested in high performance teams who are interested in this humanistic holistic way of working. Those are the kinds of people who subscribe to the newsletter. So if that’s you, know what to do.

 

Ron: Awesome thank you for this. I’ve enjoyed this very much. Maybe I’ll get a chance to see you in person at one of these conferences.

 

Richard: I sure hope so. Thanks so much Richard. My pleasure. Thanks a lot.

 

Outro: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the managing projects podcast find show notes and more at ManagingProjects.ca and follow us on Twitter at Manage_proj. If you enjoy the show helped us out by recommending it to a friend or leaving a review on iTunes. Talk to you next time.

 

 

#010 – Groupthink and Ineffective Brainstorming with Steve Martin

“Groupthink leads to deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgement.” – Irving Janis

Steve highlights the conditions that foster group think.  He discussed the devil’s advocate.  He teaches the perfection game and discusses the history of brainstorming and how realistic it is.  Did you know people will go through polarizing amplification of bias in groups?  Listen in as we discuss anchoring and idea generation to produce higher quality of ideas using 6-5-3 and Delphi techniques.

Steve Martin (PMP, PMI-ACP, CSP, CSM, CSPO…too many!)
Professional Bio:  Steve is a trusted management advisor and seasoned business transformation leader with over 20 years experience. He uses Agile and Lean principles to help organizations to define their strategic “big picture” and then leads teams to seamlessly execute tactical plans to iteratively and incrementally deliver technology-based products or solutions.

Steve is a sought-after speaker at major conferences, such as the Agile 20xx conferences, Scrum Gatherings, and PMI Global Conferences and PMI Leadership Institutes, and has a passion for training.

Website: www.cottagestreetconsulting.com. The Workshops tab has a list of upcoming public courses, such as CSM (Certified ScrumMaster) plus a private course offering list. You can get free articles, white papers, and selections from prior conference presentations as well from the Resources page. It’s all free! My only request is to give feedback on how well it worked or if it didn’t so we can improve them for others going forward.

Show Notes:

  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. Contact: steve@cottagestreetconsulting.com
  3. LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/agilesteve
  4. Music: www.hooksounds.com

 

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

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Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

 

Transcription of Interview

Ron: Welcome to the managing projects podcast. My name is Ron Smith your host. Today I have Steve Martin with me and Steve has appeared on the show once before. He and I spoke about troubled project recovery and he works with teams in the agile space. So if you haven’t heard that episode that’s a fantastic one to go listen to. So today’s episode we are going to be talking about groupthink and ineffective brainstorming. So welcome back Steve.

 

Steve: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you inviting me back to the show. Especially with this topic of group think and ineffective brainstorming because it’s so related to the troubled projects that we’ve talked about.

 

Ron: It is and there was a temptation that I had to go into that. So I’m glad to have you back because this is a topic that could take its own episode.

 

Steve: Yeah so when it comes to groupthink the term was coined actually in the early 70s by a researcher Irving Janis. What he noticed is there are certain situations where groups of people just make really bad decisions. And one of the quotes that he had from his research he was a little bit pessimistic and I just love some of the words that he used because it really paints a picture. So to quote him and from his study… basically groupthink happens when you’ve got a group that makes bad or faulty decisions because of group pressure. And when you’ve got that group pressure it really leads to a deterioration of… and this is the quote: deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgment. He is not mincing words he’s just basically say these groups when they get together they’re so into it they just really ignore alternatives. They are convinced they’re right. And when you have these decisions that are shaped by group think they really have a low probability of success. So he’s really pointed with these words there. There are certain conditions that tend to foster some group think and that’s when you’ve got folks that might have a similar background. And what I mean by this is folks that all come from the same university or from the same program. So if you got folks that are from a same regional area, singular gender, singular race or ethnicity or a singular background. Anything like that, that tends to foster some group think. Some other conditions are if they’re insulated are just completely protected or siloed from outside opinions. They’re just on their own they’re just doing their thing. They are empowered. They’re on their way. They’ve got no clear rules to make decisions. They’re just going to go for it. But even when you have those three things whether it’s similar backgrounds they’re insulated, or siloed and they have no clear rules, what really cements it together is that they have a high degree of pressure to produce something and there is a low motive low motivation or a low incentive to realistically look at things outside of what they already know. They’re under pressure. They have to drive to results and they have to drive the results right now. And so, they’re not going to take the time to look outside of their circle to get those opinions. And making sure diversity doesn’t mean just to have one token person on that team.

 

Steve: When you do this, you actually have to create the team in a way that is going to enable those diverse opinions to actually be heard and be considered. And so just having one person on there that’s just not going to do it.

 

Ron: Can you talk a little bit about the whole devil’s advocate. Does that play into the group think.

 

Steve: Yeah. So when you start taking a look at raising alternative opinions or alternative suggestions again if you’re under high pressure you tend to get more of the groans in the room. If you’ve got a group that says I don’t even want to be in this meeting in the first place I just want to do my job. Why are we hear? So every person that speaks up is just preventing me from doing what I really want to be doing. Whether it’s coding or designing or whatever it is. I’ve seen some groups put in things like well we’re going to have a mandatory devil’s advocate. All right this week that you’re going to be the mandatory designated devil’s advocate. You need to actually have someone who has a genuine Devil’s Advocate perspective and be able to argue it with a degree of interest and a degree of coming from the place of wanting to make this better. And that’s why there is there’s this concept of what one of my colleagues called being a skunk at the garden party which is very similar to like a devil’s advocate. But this is somebody that’s personally vested. Sometimes I invite these people to these meetings and people look at me like why would you invite this person. Because I know: A) that they may not like me, and B) they have an opinion. And I think if you invite this person and you can have them bring a friend, so it’s not like six people on one, where you can create the atmosphere of pros and cons to have a collaboration as opposed to just a combat. You can get to where it is that you need to go. But here is my advice to that skunk at the garden party. Don’t go in there with the attitude of I’m going to disagree with everything that you’ve got to say because chances are there is going to be at least one or two things that skunk actually agrees with. Start with that. Hey I like this or I like this. I think that’s in the right direction. I do something called the perfection game. This is what I learned from my mentor when I was learning how to facilitate the perfection game is this. I like this… what would make this perfect… would be if you also did… or what would make this perfect is… if you just tweaked this this way. And so it’s that old game of replacing but I love this. “But” there goes the flags. And the reason why I think that is this… now are people going to listen to that 100 percent of the time? No it’s going to be one of those trust things that over time you’re going to build. But I’ve actually had skunks at the dinner party turned into actually advocates for the team over time.

 

Ron: They’re a great advocate. Right. Because, they are someone who’s been turned and who was not shy to be talking about the topic in the first place.

 

Steve: Absolutely. Absolutely.

 

Ron: So we got group think and then in the midst of that we have brainstorming so how did you brainstorming knowing that you don’t want group think.

 

Steve: So when you start to think about the history of brainstorming… the brainstorming idea actually came from an ad executive from the 1950s. And so that’s how long this this quote concept has been around and 70 years later folks are still trying to hang onto the concept that brainstorming is the way to go to generate new ideas. What this guy Alex Osborne said in the 1950s when it came to brainstorming was throw out as many ideas as possible don’t worry about feasibility about the craziness build on ideas and don’t criticize. But what we found when we do this it actually doesn’t work so well. Actually the research that has been basically proven time and time again is that brainstorming to generate ideas in this manner. Groups that do this actually come up with less ideas and have lower quality than if you were just to sit there by yourself and come up with ideas in a silo. All by yourself. Yeah so brainstorming actually yields some really poor results. Which is really… it’s just one of those things of when you start looking at groupthink and you start looking at individualistic behavior. There’s actually four behaviors that as individuals it actually impacts the group. And if you’re doing a group brainstorming session these things really take into account. Like for example: if you have an individual bias against something or towards something when you get into a group whatever that bias is going to be amplified. And so, whenever you start talking about a certain idea or concept you can have that bias as an individual but when you start talking about it with that group and especially if you’re like minded you’re going to become more polarized in that view. This was really kind of interesting. In one of the studies that one of the researchers did this was back in just around 2015 or so they called it the Colorado experiment because they held this in Colorado. The researchers did a study of a fairly controversial medical procedure and they gave a poll to two different groups of folks from Colorado Springs which tend to be more conservative than folks from Boulder Colorado which tend to be more liberal and so they answered their views as individuals about this medical procedure. Then what they did is they got people together like in a town hall if you’re from Colorado Springs you went here if you’re from Boulder you went there and then you started to discuss with people of like minded views. They went back and as individuals they took that same poll again. They found that the results became more polarized. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. So if you are in a group of folks and you start going down a certain direction you’re trying to brainstorm. You’re going to go into that direction of whatever that bias is. Because the third thing we are saying that we find especially when you start doing brainstorming as a group right out of the gate is that there’s this concept of anchoring. Whoever says the first statement… that’s an anchor, and the next statements that come after that are in relationship to whatever that first statement is. And so, whatever that first statement is – that’s that’s where you’re going to follow. And typically, the fourth thing is that wherever that anchor comes in is typically something that they know already. It’s something that they know. So it’s they’re going to emphasize something that’s a prevailing concept that they already know.

 

Ron: Everybody gets.

 

Steve: Yeah we get this. We don’t have to talk about it. We know this and we’re going to anchor over here. And so that’s why we come up with different techniques to make brainstorming a little bit better. And that’s where I try to say let’s change the word from brainstorming. What if we called it something like idea generation and there’s so many different places where we do idea generation. Over the course of either a project or creating a product idea generation comes probably mostly in some sort of requirements or features or figuring out whatever it is that our customer needs. There’s a lot of ideas that come up with that same thing with design. There’s a lot of things that come up with that. How we test. There’s a lot of ideas that come up with that and so we always go in with what it is that we know and you’re going to follow the actions a statement of whatever prevailing bias needed to go into that direction anyway. You’re just really missing the idea generation concept is how do you do something new or innovative if you’re just going to go down the route that you’ve always been. No matter if you say we’re going to do this different.

 

Ron: So what does idea generation look like. How would you run a group through that process.

 

Steve: Well there’s a couple of different ways that you can do this. When I work with organizations that are looking at products or are trying to think of what’s the next set of features or whatever it is that our customers want. I tend to do it in a two stage process in the first stage. It’s about generating ideas as an individual. And then the second stage is sharing those ideas that you came up with us as as an individual, grouping those ideas, and then figuring out prioritizing which group should we go after first. And so when you go into for example an agile work room there’s a reason why there’s a lot of techniques of them using posted notes. Because as an individual, if he can write ideas down one by one as an individual and then you throw them up on a wall you will actually get more ideas higher quality and of greater diversity than if you were just to shout them out and only have one or two or three people really drive the conversation.

 

Ron: That is how I do my risk identification on projects you’ve posted notes people write it down quick. They have a very short time frame. Then we’re done. We’re done writing it down to the point everybody has written down maybe three or four minutes.

 

Steve: Yeah and I typically limit it to around a four minute time period. And then once they’re on the wall the next thing that I do is and this is the tough part. Silently. Silently, have the whole group of nine or 10 people whoever came up with the ideas go up to the wall and start group them into certain groupings that they come up with. So if there’s a theme of risks about a technology stack – okay those will group them over here. If there’s risks around resources okay we’ll put it around here. If there’s risks around certain dates or market drivers okay we’ll put them over here. If you have them do it silently. And that’s the trick. You start tapping into other forms of communication. And I know this is really crunchy granola. Yes I was born in California. But what happens here is you start to look at people’s body language and how they’re reacting to things and when they can’t talk and you get to see how tense somebody’s body is and they just want to put it here but you’re not letting me put it to you get to observe that and you can have a discussion about those things. So the third part of the exercise is coming together and saying oh right these are the groupings. Do these make sense. But if there are things that people feel very strongly against that’s the conversation I want to have I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on stuff we already agree. Then of course the last step is OK of all these things here which ones do we feel are most important. There’s a couple of different voting techniques that you can do. Dot voting or a secret ballot voting or put it into a survey monkey and do a survey monkey. There’s a bunch of different things that you can do. I like dot voting because you just get it done and done. It’s right there in the room.

 

Ron: So one of your presentations you mentioned the 6 3 5 technique.

 

Steve: Basically imagine you’ve got a group of six people. Each person has a sheet of flip chart paper in front of them. So we’ve got six pieces of flip chart paper. Six people. And so what you do is you put one person in front of each flip chart and you say OK here is the problem that we want to solve. All six of us want to solve the same problem. OK. As an individual write down three or so ideas and stick it on your sheet of paper. Give them a minute or two to do that. So at the end of that minute or two each sheet of paper should have roughly three sticky notes on it. Then everybody says Okay take one step to the right. So I’m now looking at the person who just put three ideas up there before me. OK we’re going to do this again take another minute or two. Look at those three ideas don’t consider your ideas. Leave them there. Consider these three ideas that somebody else came up with and start building off of those three. You have two minutes to build off those three. And so at the end of that second round you now have six ideas. Take another step to the right. Okay. Now you’re looking at six ideas from the first two people in front of you. Again don’t look at what people done before leave that behind. Look at those six ideas that you have right now and add three more to it. Build off of what they have. And so when you do this you’re taking five steps to the right. That’s for that five comes from and that 6 3 5. You come back to your original sheet of paper. You now have 18 ideas. All built off of your original three and you’ve got six people times 18. You have roughly just under 110 ideas. In about 15 minutes. Then you can start getting into the grouping exercise. Then you could start getting into the voting exercise. But this is another idea generation technique building off of previous people’s ideas. Now I tend to do something like this if we’ve got more of a completely blue sky or green field are completely hey everything is wide open. I sometimes do this if I want to get role clarity for people on a team. OK. Business analysts these are your roles project managers. These are your roles. If you’ve got a team member this is your role. If you’ve got a quality person this is your role if you’re somebody representing the business this is your role. Each person would have their own flip chart piece of paper. So it’s just again one of those ways to very quickly come up with ideas from multiple perspectives.

 

Ron: So the first time we had you on we talked about troubled project recovery that was a really great. And I almost jumped into the group think topic then, so connect for me this whole group think in the midst of this troubled project recovery.

 

Steve: Yeah. So I typically like to use the Delphi Technique which is the coming up with a number of ideas as individuals and then popping them up there when I do something like that. I tend to not ask the questions of troubled projects of what made this troubled because again that’s is focusing on the negative. What I try to do in this case here to generate ideas is I might ask questions like What advice would you give to somebody joining the team.

 

Ron: Run.

 

Steve: And if the answers run why? Because I don’t want to say no ideas a bad idea but if somebody if somebody is going to give an answer like that everybody’s entitled to an opinion.

 

Ron: You’ll probably get that one out of humor if nothing else. Yeah I get it.

 

Steve: There’s some things that I put on there like what are some tools that would be helpful for you?

 

Ron: Well my goodness. It’s great to talk to you again. Second time we’ve had you on. I’m going to put your contact information in show notes for people who are listening just let people know how they can get a hold of you or see what you’re up to.

 

Steve: Yeah. So you can take a look at my Web site. It’s set www Cottage Street Consulting dot com. That’s all one word. Cottage Street Consulting dot com or you can e-mail me at Steve at Cottage Street Consulting dot com. And when you go to my Web site you’ll see a couple things up there that might be of interest. Since I do speak quite a lot at different conferences and write quite a lot of white papers. There is a lot of my presentations in white papers that are up there for you to download for free. And then, I also have a list of my upcoming speaking engagements, public workshops, as well as my private workshop list where you can either click on those register right away or you can contact me through my email and we can talk about some private onsite things.

 

Ron: Thanks so much for joining us today.

 

Steve: Thanks. It’s been a pleasure.

 

Manuscript from Fog Creek Software

I wanted to do a comparison on Project Management Software and reached out to Fog Creek software first.  They use to have an evidence based scheduling tool that was a neat feature in a product called Fogbugz.  The way that tools works is to analyse past estimates vs actuals (evidence) to guess how a particular developer should really be estimating.  They’ve now moved this evidence based scheduling into a product called Manuscript.

I signed up for the demo and was sent a followup email from the company (Will) asking how I was making out.  To my surprise I was impressed that Will interacted with me on a few emails and was willing to share a demo he just recorded which I’m pasting into the post.  Kind of nice to get some human interaction these days!

They have a good Kanban view option and I like the ease of the tool.  Check out this 11 minute video provided by Will!

I’ll be sure to add to this post in the future – but wanted to pass this along 🙂

#009 – World Vision International Projects – Part 2 of 2

Note: this is part 2 of a 2 part series.  How many Project Managers deal with any of the following on a regular basis on their projects: floods, political unrest, changing of cultural norms, gender equality, health epidemics, gang lines, or refugee camps?  Listen in on a behind the scene look at some World Vision International projects.

The Youth Ready Project as well as Kendra’s story Chris mentioned in the interview is embedded below with other videos provided to me from world Vision for this episode.

World Vision Speaker Bios:

Miriam Booy is the ‘Director for Collaboration’ working in our ‘Programs & Policy’ team at World Vision Canada. She has worked for World Vision Canada for 7 years, based in South Africa for 2 of these years. She has supported programs in East and West Africa directly and has recently shifted in the past year to support the operations of our programs globally. Having grown up in Tanzania, East Africa, she has been surrounded by poverty and various forms of exploitation her whole life and is passionate about sharing these stories with Canadians and together doing what we can to improve the lives of children around the world.

Ermira Simeqi is the Program Portfolio Manager, working with Programs and Policy team at World Vision Canada. She had worked with World Vision Canada for over a year now, in the beginning supporting Latin America and Caribbean country programs and has recently shifted in supporting East & South Asia Countries.  Ermira has worked as a Program Manager within Albania & Kosovo with World Vision directly managing the implementation of the projects in the field.   Ermira is passionate of improving children’s lives  and families well-being in the most vulnerable areas around the world. 

Chris Ortiz is a Program Portfolio Manager with the Programs and Policy team at World Vision Canada.  His portfolio includes programming in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras as well as the Youth Ready Project.  He has managed this portfolio for the past year.  Previously, Chris was the Regional Program Manager with Canadian Programs at World Vision Canada.  Having eleven years of experience in urban community development in Toronto, Chris is passionate about seeing transformation in all the lives of community members.  Chris is Bolivian-Canadian.  He spent his childhood years in Bolivia and has been a resident of Toronto for the past 30 years.

Show Notes:

  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. World Vision
  3. Sponsor a child
  4. Contacts:
    1. Miriam Booy
    2. Ermira Simeqi
    3. Chris Ortiz
    4. Twitter: @Steven_C_Ortiz
  5. Music: www.hooksounds.com

 

World Vision Videos:

The World Vision interview of a 10 year old who was working in the field and is now in school.

The Youth Ready Project Chris talks about in the interview.

Kendra’s story Chris talks about in the interview.

 

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

Want to get more helpful project management insights like this directly in your inbox? Subscribe to the Managing Projects newsletter (see subscribe in right side menu).

 


Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

 

Transcription of Interview

Intro: Welcome to Managing Projects! The podcast for Project Managers in search of trends and insights. Join us as our guests dig deep into the thought provoking topics that matter most to project management professionals. You can find all the episodes at managing project status. And now here’s your host Ron Smith.

 

Ron: This is the second talk in a two part series that we had with World Vision. If you didn’t hear the first episode I would strongly encourage you to go back and listen to that episode. So let’s get back to the second part of the chat that we had with Miriam, Ermira, and Chris.

 

Ron: So Ermira, I understand your from Albania. and you use to directly manage an Area Development program. Can you just describe this experience. What would you do if things did not go to plan?

 

Ermira: Sure yeah. So I worked with World Vision Albania for eight years as a program manager. And our work was mostly focused in rural areas as the most vulnerable families and children were located in those areas. So I would say that successes and challenges are both part of their reality especially when you work in the field and the needs of the communities change very fast. I can give you. I can bring here an example of the hard realities and the how the needs change very very fast in the communities. Once we were designing the plans for five year period. And according to the community needs the focus of the projects would be an education, child protection, economic development, and child sponsorship as one of the main pillars of our work. So the design document was like finalized and ready to be sent to the donor. And in the same time there was another separate assessment that was being conducted in communities. And the purpose of that assessment was to measure the household quality of life. The assessment results are based both in primary data collection and secondary data analysis as well. And one of the questions was related with HIV AIDS awareness advocacy and prevention at that time. So there is a whole of this assessment showed that the households were either not aware at all about HIV AIDS or there was stigma and taboo about it and they did not like to talk at all about HIV. I can share example an answer from from a woman in one of the villages when she was asked about the fact if she was aware about HIV AIDS and what does this mean. She answered her answer was like this like God forbidden. I will never buy this food for my children my family. So she she had no clue. She had no idea about what HIV AIDS entered for sure. How can you prevent something if you’re not aware of that. So in the other side the secondary data collection that were analyzed by Health Department showed that the number of people being positive to HIV AIDS was increasing from year to year. So finding myself in this scenario as a project manager and based on the community needs we had to revise our designs and our plans. And include health as a sector that World Vision will be focusing in communities in the future. So in this scenario we had to go back to the donor to ask for extra time to ask for the second revision of our designs. So this is just one example and one project showing how important it is to be flexible and to adapt to the needs of the communities especially when you work directly in the field.

 

Ron: So I have heard of a couple of examples. Chris of just giving an example a few minutes ago of Kendra who had a stand that was she had begun the process of selling and then it got washed away in a flood. I can just imagine all the different variability of these projects. So sometimes it would be you know a physical impact of a storm or a flood or political unrest to realizing that you are dealing with these major health issues and concerns. So in the example that you gave did you add to the scope of the project health or did it impact what you were planning on doing with the education of the child protection or economic development? The first the first stage of your plan was or did you just add to it?

 

Ermira: That’s a good question. No we just added to the plan. Thankfully we did not have to remove any of the previous projects that were planned. But we added on top of this. On the top of our design health basically tell us advocacy at that time and then in the years to come. The project was developed in including other stages as well.

 

Ron: The addition to the project was around the HIV. Was simply around awareness. Where was it dealing with it?

 

Ermira: The first stage was advocacy and awareness. And then in the fourth and the fifth year of the project we were able to identify people that were like infected with HIV AIDS and to work with them and their families to support them like from the economy perspective as well. So yeah that was pretty much the intervention that we we did at that time.

 

Ron: There are heavy projects. So when I when again so my project management experience has been around working for a corporate company building a product or some type of service. And it’s only as fulfilling as you’re helping that company to meet some type of financial goals or that kind of thing. You must find it rewarding or a sense of you are helping in these global issues. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

 

Ermira: Of course. Like as I said the work of the project manager like is challenging in a way that is rewarding and the other in the other aspect because when you see that with the support and with the projects you are running in the communities. You see change in lives of children you change it you see change in the lives of women and families. I think that’s the most rewarding aspect of our work as project manager.

 

Ron: So Miriam I want to ask you you’ve had fuel experience living in the Sudan and South Africa. What’s project management in the field means you can do. Can you give some examples from the Sudan.

 

Miriam: Yeah for sure. You know I actually give one from South Africa Ron. I really think in my field experience over the past few years and the past decade really working working in the field and also here in Canada. I’ve really learned that you have to really understand the root cause of the problem that you’re trying to solve. And and so often you know we think we know the solution and we think you know that it can be quite linear. Where you know if you train the teacher then they will teach the children better who will then learn to read who will then graduate and and have a better life. And so you have this linear path that you think in project management is going to yield a particular result. And we all know that that life is not like that especially in these context as you’ve heard from Chr Ermira. It’s much more challenging than that. And so I think I’ve really learned that you really have to look at the root cause of the problem and be sure that you’re addressing it in the right way so. So when I worked in South Africa you know one of the biggest issues was gender based violence and violence against women is extremely high there. And so you know we were trying as World Vision to address that and really thinking about doing a good analysis of what was the root cause and what we found was it really came back to some of the cultural norms and interpretations that that people had of the differences between men and women. And even some of the faith leaders were kind of using the Bible and interpreting the Bible in a certain way to thinking that that men were more superior than than women. And so one of the projects we had was actually working with them to you know being a Christian organization we could sort of work with them to look at how is the Bible interpreting this is there you know is there essentially equality between men and women and how do we understand this. At the most basic level. And so taking time to think through cultural traditions and norms faith traditions and how that helps us inform our perceptions and therefore our actions and what we do really helped bring transformation to to some of this violence that was happening in the communities. And I remember some pastors coming up to me and saying yes I’m now helping my wife in the home I’m helping her to do tasks in the kitchen and help to get firewood in. And not just expect that she will do everything for me. And so I really could see some of the transformation between gender norms happening there which was really exciting to see. So again you really have to look at what is the root cause here. How do we understand that and how do we address it to bring about social change.

 

Ron: Well that’s so interesting. So you would work with these pastors that are on the ground embedded in the communities and you would begin some of your education in your teaching through them for them to speak out and to start some of these cultural changes would be spoken in through the pastors of their churches and in who they’re working with in their communities.

 

Miriam: Absolutely. And then they become you know once they themselves are transformed in their own lives then they become change agents because they’re very influential leaders in the community so they can talk in their churches they can talk in the communities and they can inspire further change. And so it’s just a rippling effect.

 

Ron: You know I’ve heard it said before. People who go on mission trips or go to some of these countries. I think you know North Americans sometimes I’ve heard them have the attitude Oh it’s ok. You know get out of the way I just roll up my sleeves will fix whatever is there and what I’ve heard from people who have spoken with who are going on these trips is it’s not that way. You need to be working with the community for this type of change to be happening and it needs to. So that is long running as well. So it doesn’t revert back after you leave. I bet that it is complicated to have some of these social norms that are built up over decades and to try to address some of them.

 

Miriam: Absolutely. Absolutely yeah and that’s that’s the great advantage of you know a virtue of our child sponsorship model because it does enable us to be in a community for 15 years and or more sometimes and we can really get to know local leaders helped to to change perceptions. And you know it’s not just going in and out in one or two years or on a short term trip like we’re were saying. It’s really working with the community to inspire social change over a long period that ultimately will impact the lives of children and these communities becomes sustainable. I’ve been to these communities where you know people will say OK World Vision we’re done we can we can do it on our own. We don’t need you anymore. And that’s that’s the most exciting thing to do that then they are able to continue to to create an environment where children will thrive without us being there.

 

Ron: That is absolutely fantastic. Fantastic now on my way in this morning I was speaking with a colleague of mine. You know I was so excited about this interview and I was telling them you know I’m interviewing World Vision this afternoon. I was very excited. And the person I was speaking with though said you know I’ve thought of doing that I’ve thought of sponsoring a child. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how one would go about doing that. So please would you would you tell us and for the folks listening for our listeners I will be putting links to how to sponsor a child. World Vision was kind enough to send me some links. Some youtube videos of some programs that are happening. The project that Chris had spoke about I understand that there’s a video being produced that I would put up as soon as I can. As soon that it is available to me on the show notes on the web page on managing projects. Before I let you go what are the different ways to get involved. One I know that you’re going to see who’s sponsoring your child. But just walk me through that. How do you go about.

 

Miriam: Absolutely yeah. Thanks so much Ron for for putting up the links for us and the videos and we hope your listeners will check them out. It’s really easy there’ll be a link to sponsor a child you just click on the link in and it will take you to the page and you can actually choose. You know that particular child from a particular country that you might be interested in. I know people who sponsor a child for every you know at the same age as every child that they have in their family. It’s a great way to to show your children you know what poverty is and how to connect with someone in a different part of the world. Your children can even write to the child and communicate with them. And it’s a great way to foster that personal connection. So go on the Web site. Pick a child. They’ll send you all the information about your your child’s community about the needs in that community and about what your money will be going to support and then you’ll get updates throughout the year of how your child is doing and what’s happening in the community as well. And then just you know other ways to get involved is just to be you know an advocate understanding what’s happening in the world understanding that there’s you know we we’re so lucky here in Canada and that there is children in so much need around the world and really being an advocate for that and telling others. I think it’s a great way a great way to get involved as well.

 

Ron: One of the videos that I have that I’m going to post that you provided it was a child who was a very young child. I think he was 10 and he was picking coffee and sort of being in school and very long days and it was very striking to say I think he started with something crazy like 5:00 in the morning till 7:00 at night or something I might have that wrong but it was something like that it was an extremely long day. And when you think about you know children who grew up in North America they need to be shown that that is happening.

 

Miriam: Absolutely. Absolutely yeah. There’s you know when you hear those stories about what children are facing whether it’s working or or or facing abuse or just or just hungry and not able to get food. Your heart just breaks and and you really have to do something because we’re so you know you don’t control where you’re born in the world. And we’re so lucky here and it’s you’re right. We have to we have to tell our children that that there’s other children that need help so much. I think one aspect that we haven’t really touched on but is really critical too is World Vision is there in the places of the world that are hardest the hardest places of the world. So you know countries like Sudan or Somalia right now where you know there’s there’s conflict there is hunger you know recurring drought just very fragile places where children are often forced out of their homes. So they’re on the move. They could be in refugee camps. And you know very volatile situations and World Vision is huge is often one of the first on the ground the first to respond with emergency supplies. And you know that looks a bit different than our sponsorship programs because you know you can’t though those are places which are you have to respond very very quickly. You have to give distribute food and distribute emergency lifesaving nutrition then it’s less about training but more about just giving basic needs for survival. But we’re in those context to all over the world and we’re committed to being there even when it’s difficult even when we face insecurity from from militant groups. You know our staff are on the ground responding and and we’re there until we we hope to be able to move into a more stable stable context where people can then begin to rebuild their lives and and where children can go to school again and where they can start a project like Youth Ready that Chris was talking about. We are focusing more on entrepreneurship and skills development and all of that so. So we’re there in emergencies we’re there in the long term sustainable contexts and really trying to meet meet all of those different needs. But we can’t do it without without the support of Canadians. So we really do appreciate your listeners and you know we really seek your yeah continual support to make this happen. And and just a huge thanks to those who are already supporting us because it really does go a long way.

 

Ron: You know I’ve met a few people in the last year or two who were sponsored children. They’ve gone through. One was an orphan and another one had gone through the sponsorship program. And I don’t know what my expectations were of them after they went through but I learned that the one that was an orphan that was supported. She had been working with this organization. It wasn’t Worldvision it was another organization that had helped her. But what surprised me was that they were able to help her to such an extent that she was provided with education. She was provided with care. She went to university and I was surprised to hear her story she went and she started working for a telco locally. And then she gave up working in the telco to go back to work with that organization because she was so drawn to it and thought you know that’s the work that I want to be doing because it’s so much more fulfilling. You know they gave so much to me. But I think what if those programs weren’t there what chance does an orphan have with the program so. So thank you to Ermira, to Chris and to Miriam for your time today. Thank you for your work. I think it’s very it’s you must find it rewarding but it must be kind of it must kind of beat you up some days as well to be and to be in the trenches there. So thank you for that. Thank you for sharing your story. And I do urge the listeners to to check out these links if you have not sponsored a child before you should go to the Web site. I will have a link. It’s very easy process. If you have sponsored one consider another. Thank you so much for your time today appreciate you very much.

 

Miriam: Thank you so much for having us Ron.

 

Ermira: Thank you. Thank you Ron.

 

Chris: Thanks so much Ron.

 

Outro: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Managing Projects podcast. Find show notes and more at ManagingProjects.ca. And follow us on Twitter at manage_proj. If you enjoy the show help us out by recommending it to a friend or leaving a review on iTunes. Talk to you next time.

 

#008 – World Vision International Projects – Part 1 of 2

How many Project Managers deal with any of the following on a regular basis on their projects: floods, political unrest, changing of cultural norms, gender equality, health epidemics, gang lines, or refugee camps?  Listen in on a behind the scene look at some World Vision International projects.

The Youth Ready Project as well as Kendra’s story Chris mentioned in the interview is embedded below with other videos provided to me from world Vision for this episode.

World Vision Speaker Bios:

Miriam Booy is the ‘Director for Collaboration’ working in our ‘Programs & Policy’ team at World Vision Canada. She has worked for World Vision Canada for 7 years, based in South Africa for 2 of these years. She has supported programs in East and West Africa directly and has recently shifted in the past year to support the operations of our programs globally. Having grown up in Tanzania, East Africa, she has been surrounded by poverty and various forms of exploitation her whole life and is passionate about sharing these stories with Canadians and together doing what we can to improve the lives of children around the world.

Ermira Simeqi is the Program Portfolio Manager, working with Programs and Policy team at World Vision Canada. She had worked with World Vision Canada for over a year now, in the beginning supporting Latin America and Caribbean country programs and has recently shifted in supporting East & South Asia Countries.  Ermira has worked as a Program Manager within Albania & Kosovo with World Vision directly managing the implementation of the projects in the field.   Ermira is passionate of improving children’s lives  and families well-being in the most vulnerable areas around the world. 

Chris Ortiz is a Program Portfolio Manager with the Programs and Policy team at World Vision Canada.  His portfolio includes programming in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras as well as the Youth Ready Project.  He has managed this portfolio for the past year.  Previously, Chris was the Regional Program Manager with Canadian Programs at World Vision Canada.  Having eleven years of experience in urban community development in Toronto, Chris is passionate about seeing transformation in all the lives of community members.  Chris is Bolivian-Canadian.  He spent his childhood years in Bolivia and has been a resident of Toronto for the past 30 years.

Show Notes:

  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. World Vision
  3. Sponsor a child
  4. Contacts:
    1. Miriam Booy
    2. Ermira Simeqi
    3. Chris Ortiz
    4. Twitter: @Steven_C_Ortiz
  5. Music: www.hooksounds.com

World Vision Videos:

The World Vision interview of a 10 year old who was working in the field and is now in school.

 

Youth Ready Project Christ speaks about in the interview.

Kendra’s story Chris talks about in the interview.

 

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

Want to get more helpful project management insights like this directly in your inbox? Subscribe to the Managing Projects newsletter (see subscribe in right side menu).

 


Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

 

Transcription of Interview

Intro: Welcome to managing projects. The podcast for project managers in search of trends and insights. Join us as our guests dig deep into the thought provoking topics that matter most to project management professionals. You can find all the episodes at ManagingProjects.ca. And now here’s your host Ron Smith.

 

Ron: I am so excited about this episode. We have World Vision. We’re going to be talking with some of the World Vision staff about some of the projects that they run. The international projects. I would like to do a few introductions here. The first person I want to introduce is Miriam Booy who is the Director for Collaboration working in the Programs and Policy team at World Vision Canada. So she’s worked for World Vision for the last seven years. Some of that time she was based in South Africa – two years worth. She supported programs in East and West Africa directly and has recently shifted in her past year to support the operations of the programs globally. She grew up in Tanzania, East Africa and she’s been surrounded by poverty and various forms of exploitation her whole life. She’s passionate about sharing these stories with Canadians and together doing what she can to improve the lives of children around the world. So welcome Miriam.

 

Miriam: Thanks Ron it’s great to be on the show today.

 

Ron: Oh it is wonderful to have you. And there are two other guests. The second person I’d like to introduce is a Ermira Simeqi and who is the Program Portfolio Manager working with programs and policy team at World Vision Canada. She’s worked with World Vision Canada for for over a year. In the beginning she was supporting Latin America and the Caribbean country. The Caribbean sounds like a nice place to be this time of year by the way. And programs and has recently shifted in supporting East and South Asia countries. Ermira has worked as a Program Manager within Albania and Kosovo with World Vision directly managing the implementation of the projects in the field. Ermira is passionate of improving children’s lives and families and well-being in the most vulnerable areas around the world. So welcome to you Ermira.

 

Ermira: Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here today.

 

Ron: And the third guest that we have is Chris Ortiz who is a Program Portfolio Manager with the Programs and Policy team at World Vision Canada. His portfolio includes programming in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras as well as the Youth Ready Project. He’s managed this portfolio for the past year. Previously Chris was the Regional Program Manager with Canadian Programs at World Vision Canada. Having 11 years of experience in urban community development in Toronto. Chris is passionate about seeing transformation in the lives of community members. Chris is a Bolivian-Canadian. He has spent his childhood years in Bolivia and has been a resident of Toronto for the past 30 years. There’s something so compelling about the World Vision story about being a project manager there. This is why I’m so excited because these projects they’re not just building a product for a company and helping a company succeed. These projects are impacting lives. That’s why I’m that’s why I’m so excited about this to have you on the show today. So Miriam who is World Vision Canada? And what’s their mission?

 

Miriam: Yeah thanks Ron. So World Vision is a global organization. Global humanitarian and development organization in around 100 countries around the world with 40000 staff. And we like to describe ourselves with the three Cs. So I’m going to tell you what the three Cs are the first one is is child focused. So we are a child focused organization that works towards improving the lives of the most vulnerable children around the world in the most vulnerable places. And you might have heard of our funding model of sponsoring a child. And so that’s one of the ways that we support children directly. People send monthly donations to support a child in another country and improve their lives. So child focused is the first one. The second one is community based. So we work with communities we in rural areas primarily but also in urban areas. We’re very grassroots and we partner with leaders and communities with partners and communities not coming in like we know everything but by working through the local community to help them to meet their needs and improve their lives. And then the third C is Christian. So we are Christian in our identity and it doesn’t mean that we actively proselytize and try to convert people but rather it’s the motivation behind what we do. And we find that being Christian can actually be to our advantage in some countries because we can work closely with religious leaders with faith leaders to bring about cultural change that sometimes non Christian organizations can’t. Because faith leaders are very influential in these contexts. So those are the three C’s child focused, community based, and Christian. And that’s that’s really who we are.

 

Ron: Let me ask you a couple of questions on that. So child focus. Your first C. What are the ages of kids that you work with? Is there a beginning age, and an age where you know in their teens you’re no longer with them. What does that look like?

 

Miriam: Yeah. So we are primarily focused on children up to the age of 18 working in their different life cycles. Children who are just born and looking at their nutrition in their early childhood development at a young age up to the age of 6 making sure that that they’re well nourished and you know in those first few very important years. Children 6 to 11 making sure that they’re able to read and that they’re attending school. And and you know that they’re protected and cared for. And then children 12 to 18 helping them to as they’re growing into an adult and learning life skills and preparing hopefully to go to further education. Helping them to make good choices. I think the project that Chris will talk about which is called Youth Ready really looks at that at that age group 12 to 18. So those are sort of the three different age groups and we target our projects towards those age groups because each of them have different needs.

 

Ron: And you are community based so I understand that you would work with the communities themselves to help to identify their most pressing needs and what they feel that they should be developing working with these different communities.

 

Miriam: Yeah absolutely so. So as we talk about project management we go into a community and do very detailed assessments to determine what is the need of that community. Is it water? Is it education? Is it health care? And to make sure that we’re targeting the project towards that the need that the community feels like they have. And we work with them on that and we work with other partners. And then you know what we’ll make a five year plan and execute that plan execute that program and then have an evaluation and sort of ask ourselves within our project did we meet the needs that we intended to meet? Did we achieve change in literacy levels? Did we achieve change in nutrition levels did we achieve change in the levels of child protection that we wanted to. And then we’ll evaluate and redesign and typically we’re in a community for 15 years so we’ll sort of go through three cycles of this sort of project management assessing designing implementing and evaluating.

 

Ron: So Miriam I’m recalling that my wife and I have sponsored a child from World Vision. And it’s funny when we first did this it felt very personal to pick a child to sponsor. We went through the list in the country to choose from. We found that to be a difficult process actually. But my mindset was very much. I imagined that you know I was sponsoring this one particular child and as I as I’m realizing and learning more about world vision. That is true true I was sponsoring that one child but it actually… World Vision would actually pool the funds for the children in a geographic area and run a project to help a community worth. Could you speak a little bit about how that pooling happens. The numbers of people that would be impacted by the project?

 

Miriam: Yeah absolutely. And you’re absolutely right. You know we we have a connection with the one child and the one child really benefits from your sponsorship. And and you can write to them and get to know them on a personal level but the impact is so much greater because the money of of several children is pooled together so that the community projects are implemented to benefit the whole community. And that could actually look like an area of 20 to 30 villages and even around 20 to 30000 people within that area. And so if you can imagine if you build a well the well will impact your sponsor child but it will also impact all the villages which access water. So the impact is so much greater than the one child that you sponsor.

 

Ron: Can you talk a little bit Miriam about what does that look like the program management in the context of World Vision Canada.

 

Miriam: Yeah for sure. So we we work through our field partners and we have field based offices as I mentioned in 100 countries around the world. And those field offices our local staffs to implement the projects and manage the projects for us. And this is really key because as you can imagine projects are so much more effectively managed by people who are from that country who speak the language who know the needs the best who are from that same culture. So they manage the projects for us locally but we in real vision Canada also kind of have a bit of an indirect form of project management because we still have to kind of sign off on the plans and the budgets that are sent to us by the field offices to say that we agree and we support the project that’s happening and that our Canadian dollars are being spent in an effective way. So so we have a bit of an indirect form of project management here that we work with our field partners to understand their needs to get more funding for them when they need that. And to really be a bridge. We’re kind of like a bridge between the donor and the sponsor here in Canada and the field, our field partners, and we managed the project together.

 

Ron: I want to ask a question to Chris now. I understand you’re the Program Manager working within Latin America. Chris can you describe a bit about the programs that you manage and how you work with the partners in the field?

 

Chris: Sure happy to Ron. It’s great to be here with you. Yeah I’ve managed programs in Central America including Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. So I work closely with each of those World Vision country offices to provide direction and control over the programs supported by our World Vision Canada office. So I also have a major project that is funded by a Canadian Foundation. It’s a three year project and is being implemented in two countries El Salvador and Honduras. The project is called Youth Ready and it intends to equip youth with life skills and prepare them for employment so to manage this project I worked closely with our bi-national project manager who is the point person from the field. His name is Carlos Diaz. He’s a great guy. He’s he’s from Honduras and he manages two teams that have a total of 15 staff. So what this means is that I have to have a lot of communication with Carlos. I have to visit the field to also monitor and evaluate the process of the project. So there’s a lot of close communication and a strong relationship between us.

 

Ron: Do you have these remote planning sessions working sessions over the internet?

 

Chris: Yeah that’s right. So Skype is probably the tool that we use most often. So you just send each other messages and then have a skype call. We also use another videoconferencing system here where we have larger meetings and for the most part we’re able to communicate clearly through that and then the field visits I think are the ones that are most important because you get a chance to build the report and get to know the staff and also the participants of the project.

 

Ron: So how often would you go on a field visit?

 

Chris: So we like to visit each country that we manage once a year if possible. But with this special project it’s in two countries and so we’ve had to visit it and see the work firsthand. And so I’ve been traveling quite a bit this past year I’ve had to travel eight times. Two times to each country to visit the Youth Ready project.

 

Ron: Can you can you give me a before and after? You’re going to work with a child that is in some situation and then this program is helping them to get employment. I heard as your main goal. Can you tell me give me an example of someone that has gone through the program that you’re working with the hopes to get them from point A to Point B?

 

Chris: Sure. So I’ll tell you a bit more about Kendra one of the participants but a bit of a background to the project. So the youth participate in two phases over the course of one year. So first they get a foundation through facilitated group learning where they focus on the three Ls: literacy, life skills, and livelihood preparation. And then the second phase of the project is when the youth embark on their livelihood pathways. These are the three E’s known as education, employability, and entrepreneurship. So this project is just a year in so we’ve had 998 youth in total in these two countries go through the first phase. So they have you know improve their literacy skills be digital literacy we have computer labs there. They’ve looked at their life skills they’ve found out who they are. They’ve designed a life plan and then they’re getting ready to choose their education or their next path which is whether they want to go back to school or they want to start working or start business. So I mentioned Kendra and she is in Honduras. She was one of the first participants and she was able to listen to the life story of one of our mentors. She found out that this mentor was cooking her own food and selling it and she was motivated to start to make her own tortillas and to sell that as a way to support her family. And so through this project Kendra was able to identify who she is identify what she wants to do in life and find a way to earn an income. And so she is in that process and at the same time. One thing that has affected her is the context of the country. In Honduras there were floods and there’s a lot of political turmoil right now. And so she was affected by a flood that washed away her hut where she was selling those tortillas. And so we had to provide additional support to her. So I say all this just to give you a picture of Kendra who is receiving this project. She’s a participant of the project and she’s bettering her life. She’s you know gaining some income and then an emergency disaster happens and it washes away her her tortilla stand. And now she needs to kind of start again. So with international development what we see is that we’re able to provide supports but then also there’s emergencies or crises that happen. And so we might take two steps forward and then take a step back and that’s just the nature of the type of work that we do.

 

Ron: It sounds so compelling almost 1000 youth at this point going these types of programs. And so you had mentioned Kendra was one of the first to go through the program and you are typically working with youth from 12 to 18 years old. What’s the timeframe there if you start working with a 12 year old for the first phase going through the three L’s. How long does that typically take to work with someone through that first phase and then the second second phase?

 

Chris: Yeah that’s a great question Ron. So this special project Youth Ready project also works in areas where we have our community projects or community development programs there. They have sponsored children up to the age of 18. Now with this specific project we start working with you youth at age 15. So what they do with the first phase is approximately six months and they’ll get umm. Twice a week they’ll meet in a group where they have a facilitator that goes through a curriculum. As I said they identify who they are what their strengths are and that’s a really transformative process. And we saw a lot of transformation just in that first phase of six months. We have a lot of great stories that we’ve collected from the field that we were able to to share with the donor. The donor is very happy to see this transformation even early on in the project. The second half of the project also takes six months where the youth are supported as they develop their entrepreneurial ideas or they go back and study or get some education for their trades.

 

Ron: So if I were to give to sponsor a child through World Vision that well you typically think of sounds like it’s a different funding mechanism. So you have donors for this particular project that are outside the sponsored child program.

 

Chris: Yeah that’s correct. So we do have different ways that people can support our work. So this particular project is through a Canadian Foundation. Sponsorship continues to support the communities as well. We also receive funding through grants through a global affairs Canada. That’s a large source of our revenues. And some of our programming can overlap. And so I think it’s important for people to know that when they are able to support World Vision whether it’s through a disaster as they give to a cause or if they sponsor a child we can really see a transformation in the child’s life. Also in the community as well.

 

Ron: I love hearing stories so compelling.

 

Ron: Hey this is Ron. Since there was so many great things to talk about in this interview, I decided to break this chat up with World Vision into two parts. Tune in next week for the next episode where I will play part 2.

 

Ron: Thank you so much, all of you, for your time today. Appreciate you very much.

 

Miriam: Thank you so much for having us Ron.

 

Ermira: Thank you. Thank you Ron.

 

Chris: Thank you so much Ron.

 

Outro: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Managing Projects podcast. Find show notes and more at ManagingProjects.ca and follow us on Twitter and manage_proj. If you enjoyed the show. Help us out by recommending it to a friend or leaving a review on iTunes. Talk to you next time.

 

#007 – Troubled Project Recovery with Steve Martin

Steve gives great tips such as using the Lean Model Canvas (LMC), Business Model Canvas (BMC), insights from the Standish Chaos report discussing success of small vs large projects, calming the masses, empowerment by middle managers, the pause, and more…

Steve Martin (PMP, PMI-ACP, CSP, CSM, CSPO…too many!)
Professional Bio:  Steve is a trusted management advisor and seasoned business transformation leader with over 20 years experience. He uses Agile and Lean principles to help organizations to define their strategic “big picture” and then leads teams to seamlessly execute tactical plans to iteratively and incrementally deliver technology-based products or solutions.

Steve is a sought-after speaker at major conferences, such as the Agile 20xx conferences, Scrum Gatherings, and PMI Global Conferences and PMI Leadership Institutes, and has a passion for training.

Website: www.cottagestreetconsulting.com. The Workshops tab has a list of upcoming public courses, such as CSM (Certified ScrumMaster) plus a private course offering list. You can get free articles, white papers, and selections from prior conference presentations as well from the Resources page. It’s all free! My only request is to give feedback on how well it worked or if it didn’t so we can improve them for others going forward.

Show Notes:

  1. Host: Ron Smith
  2. Contact: steve@cottagestreetconsulting.com
  3. LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/agilesteve
  4. Music: www.hooksounds.com

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

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Ron Smith

Ron is a Project Manager with Chalder Consulting Inc. www.chalder.ca

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

Check out the contributors page.

 

Transcription of Interview

Ron: Welcome to the managing projects podcast. I’m your host Ron Smith. And today I have Steve Martin from Cottage Street Consulting. He has 20 years experience and he is the founder of that company. Steve’s a sought after speaker at major conferences all over the place. He speaks at the scrum gatherings, PMI global conferences, and PMI Leadership Institutes and has a passion for training. So today on the episode we are going to be talking about troubled project recovery which is near and dear to my heart. So without further ado welcome Steve.

 

Steve: Hey welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me appreciate it.

 

Ron: My pleasure. Just give the highlights of what a project like that looks like. And I know you haven’t an agile slant that you like to be focused on those particular kinds of projects that are involved in agile.

 

Steve: Yeah and kind of the funny thing is is regardless of whether you’re agile or not, there are certain characteristics of some things, I think that we’ve all pretty much felt, no matter how good we are when a trouble project just happens to pop up. Whether you inherit it or unfortunately this even has happened to me. You’ve created a trouble projects. So what it looks like is basically tensions are really high. I find that the people on the teams, the management the executives the customers all of them their patience is just really short. There are folks that their expectations are just not being met and they’re just really frustrated and they’re they’re just a little bit on the miserable. And when you get down to it they’re just trying to hang in there. It’s just really not a positive or fun experience.

 

Ron: More so than your typical project and has a list of issues and a list of risks. This somehow passes a threshold of you’re in the uncomfortable now. Sometimes when I describe this I would say there’s no real clear means to fix the project. You’re in there and there’s no plan out.

 

Steve: Yeah, you’re just beyond the eye of the storm. You are the storm with everything. We’re in it with everything swirling around here. You just kind of sit back there and you just kind of go help.

 

Ron: So the interesting thing about I.T. though is that if you’re one of our listeners who works in I.T. and you haven’t been involved with a troubled project buckle your seat belt because at some point in your career the chances are you’ll be in one.

 

Steve: And when I’ve been the one that has created the trouble project that is one of those like Huh a little humbling experiences that you know. Out of all of these things here. There’s there’s tremendous things to learn. So I tend to look at these really as learning opportunities as uncomfortable as they are, they really are an opportunity for us to learn and become better as either project managers as just like managers or even executives moving forward.

 

Ron: So I’m picturing the plane flying over the company, they parachuted you in, parachutes open and you’re drifting into the company. Step one where do you start us off. Where do you get your boundaries or your scope here.

 

Steve: So it’s really kind of funny when folks give me a call a it’s usually somebody from the business or somebody from the technology side and they’re just saying things are not going well. I want you to come in and fix it. And I’m more than happy to come in and help. But the first conversation I have with the person who gives me that call is really having that conversation should you even be doing this project in the first place. You know and they’re like us we want to hire you to fix this. I’m like that’s fabulous. You know I’d love to take your money. But should you even be doing this in the first place? And the biggest tricks that I say here is is I want you to think about this project or the product that you’re working on from your competitors perspective. If you were your competitor would you do this project today? Would you even take a project like this and even begin it. Because if you can start removing yourself from that situation and that’s you know really passionate you’ve got a lot of stake into that particular position or whatever it is that you can working on. There’s a lot that you’ve invested in and you want to kind of rescue your baby. Should you even have the baby to begin with. Then when you start thinking about it from that competitor’s perspective. Would the person down the street do this project it just kind of opens up that conversation of – ha let’s talk about that.

 

Ron: So do you have any framework you like to use when you’re in that conversation.

 

Steve: Well there’s a couple that I like to use. You know if it’s just a singular project or something that is fairly much contained there’s something out there called a lean model canvas or LMC and you can go out there and search on any of these with any of the search engines if you search for a lean model canvas… When you look at one of those and you pop it up it’s got a bunch of different questions on there and it’s intended to be a short conversation about an hour or two. And these templates that you can find out there for like for a lean model this are intended to be on one sheet of paper. Because if you can’t describe these things in small chunks and focused around your conversation you haven’t quite got it yet. That is part of this lean model can this they talk about things such as you know what’s the problem you’re trying to solve. What’s the solution that you have. And what is it that’s very unique about you and your situation and what is the unfair advantage that you and your company can bring to this particular product that you’re working on. And yet it really brings that to life. You know what is it about this that truly makes this special. And then it has some other things in there such as like who are your customers, what are your costs and where do your revenues come from. And if you have all of these types of things there’s a couple more things on that canvas. If you have this conversation and problem solution uniqueness who is your customer anticipated costs and revenues from here and you have these things in front of you. It makes things just a little bit more objective. Now if it’s something that’s bigger than that if it’s more like a portfolio or you’re looking at a company strategy or a set of projects or a set of products I actually tend to like something called a business model canvas or a BMC. And on there again it is a one pager and what you try to do in this here is look at your business. So it’s just beyond a single project. You look at your business like what are the key activities your business what are the key resources of your business what’s the value proposition of your business and who are the customers and customer segments that you are going to be working with. So it tends to look across that portfolio level as opposed to a singular project level. And of course it looks for costs and revenue streams as well but it has that bigger picture. So whenever you use a LMC for some of the smaller things or BMC for some of the bigger things… It is trying to get those objective evaluations down on one sheet of paper using bullet points. So you can have that conversation with the folks in the room. Now the question becomes Who are those folks in the room. Well you shouldn’t be doing this with just you know let’s say just the business or just I.T. or just one department. When you create projects and you execute projects they take multiple folks. You know it’s not just one department it’s multiple departments. So you want to have a group of five to nine or so folks in that conversation around that model canvas.

 

Ron: I really like this approach. I’ve seen it with startups, actually, where we use the lean canvas and they basically have four sheets of paper in front of them and you can tweak different areas of the box. You could say well if you were selling to this market were or that you’d have different sheet for that variable or say your product strategy is this or it’s you know this feature set. You can have that and I really like it because you can talk through your variables very quickly and you can basically throw out the ones that don’t make sense.

 

Steve: Yeah. I think there’s some great things that we can learn from multiple tool sets from multiple industries. Lean startup has a set of tools. There’s a variety of tools as part of you know various agile approaches such as scrum, such as Kanban, such as XP or Extreme Programming. There’s some fantastic concepts that you can borrow from Lean. Which was based out of the Toyota production system in the whole, “How do you make your operations have less waste along the way so you can deliver better and faster”. So there’s so many tools that are out there. What we try to bring in as our part of thinking in these turnarounds is what are these tools that we have available so we can generate those conversations on are we really doing the right thing.

 

Ron: So that is your step one when you’re hoping to get the ‘why’. The why would you do this project. Are you gauging how committed is the company to this?

 

Steve: Yeah and I’ve also seen companies you know with a high degree of commitment and that is an amazing thing. But I want them to have a high degree of commitment for something that’s going to have a return or something that’s going to be viable for them. If they’re going to put that commitment and invest their time resources and money into it. I want it to be successful and I’m sure they do too. I want something to come out of it that’s positive.

 

Ron: Do you get into the sizing of the project in this as well. You’re trying to you’re trying to figure out is this a small project that just went sideways or is it part of a monster sized project for the company.

 

Steve: Well I think to kind of lead me right into the next thing that I do and I take a look at the size of the project you know there’s been a lot of reports that have been done about smaller incremental projects having more success than larger ones. One of them is the most famous from the Standish chaos report. Of the survey projects from around 2011 to 2015. This is around 50000 projects around the world. So it has a really nice representation. They found that of all the successful projects 62 percent of them were successful if they were small, and only 6 percent of the successful projects were considered large. So if you are ten times more likely to be successful with a smaller project. I want us to take a look at some of these big ones that we’re looking at because that could have been one of the reasons for the trouble in the first place. I want to see if there’s a way that we can break this down into smaller chunks or smaller increments. Not only so that we can’t focus but we can also limit technical risk because if you are working on something smaller you’re not working something terribly big. Chances are you can focus in an area and reduce some technical risk. But you can also validate whether or not you’re going in the right direction with that product with your customers and your stakeholders. And so if you can do a chunk let’s say in a 3 months time period and get it out there you can actually get a win. Hey look we actually got something out there. No it’s not the full thing but we’re showing progress and are moving the steps forward.

 

Ron: Celebrating the wins in these troubled projects is a must.

 

Steve: Yeah and if you can build on that positive momentum instead of just set you know the dreaded drumbeat – you know folks coming in every day and you build on that positive momentum even if it’s small you get a lot more spring for your step out of that. And you can’t really deal with that emotional and psychological hit that they took.

 

Ron: Where do you head next?

 

Steve: I also want the group to consider a roadmap. I find that many troubled projects that I’ve run into don’t have an idea of a roadmap. They want everything all at once and the very first release because in past projects they’ve only had one release. If they didn’t get it in that one release, they were never going to go back and get more funding afterwards to go do those secondary things. So it’s no wonder that you go into some of these organizations and you think about requirements or features on a scale of high medium or low. Everything is high. Everything can’t be high all at once. And so if you can create a roadmap that says okay and the first chunk we’re going to look at this. We think the timeline looks something like that. Our second chunk looks like that and our search looks like that. And then for each of these chunks these are the customer segments or the people who are going to target for these various things if you can start to be transparent for how you’re going to build these things. It’s going to remove some of the uneasiness some of the uncertainty about whether or not you can actually deliver some of these things because you’re being very transparent with this is the path of how we’re going to do this. And so again what you’re trying to do is ok once you build off the first one you’ve had yet first increment success. Chances are folks are going to look at that second and third and maybe the fourth increment with a higher positive light.

 

Ron: One of the things that I notice when I have done these in the past is how down the team is. There’s a lot of emotions. You know what I’ve noticed as well is it’s not just the team members. Sometimes their families back home are saying hey, Billy has a job down the street. He’s an I.T. as well. He’s fine. Maybe they’re hiring. And so when I say that kind of tongue in cheek but the reality is that sometimes you’re dealing with people’s you know raw emotions. They’ve been there for awhile and they’re tired. And they had you know missed vacations. And there is this constant push-push let’s just make it to the weekend and that happens again again again again. So what do you look for. What have you seen of kind of the emotional connection of some of your team members and how do you try to kind of unlock that and work with a team that you get working with.

 

Steve: Well I think there’s three different levels or three different areas that can help with that emotional support. And this is where I find the greatest amount of my coaching when I’m on site. It’s really kind of funny sometimes they say are you sure you’re not a psychologist? Should we just get one of those chaise lounges and put it off in the corner? I feel like you’re a good psychologist when this when this happens. So if you’re a project manager or you’re somebody who’s on a project team you’re in there in the moment. And the biggest thing that you can do especially if you’re a leader or you see one of your team mates that’s just starting to flip out and there just say it’s not a good day. It’s not a good day. You know you need to reach out to that person before it spreads to other folks. What I have found in my experience is that whatever emotion is prevalent in the room that’s the emotion that’s going to continue building momentum moving forward. So if you have a negative room it tends to become more negative. But if you’ve got a positive room it tends to become more positive. Take that person out for coffee. Take that person out for lunch. Remove them from the team take them off to the side. I’m not saying remove them permanent from the team but you know take them away from the team and have a conversation with that person of what’s frustrating them because sometimes they just want to get it out. This is really making me mad today or this is really frustrating me today. Figuring out once that frustration is out there. How do you address that. The next thing that you can do from a management or an executive level is… I know that managers and executives are getting really antsy. Especially executives who got a lot of money on the line and they have a lot of their reputation on the line. When are you going to deliver? When are you going to deliver? When are you going to deliver? Stop asking that.

 

Ron: What should they ask instead?

 

Steve: Yeah, that is a great question. We all know that we want to deliver. What we should be doing instead is OK. We know that these are the objectives this is a vision. How can I help the teams with that vision. This is what I know I can do. I can talk with the stakeholders to manage expectations and put a protective bubble around the team so you’re not getting hit with angry phone calls from stakeholders. I can have proactive conversations with the stakeholders management teams or the customers teams or the sales teams to say okay here’s a roadmap here’s where we are. Would you like to have a demonstration at the end of the month of where we’re at or at the end of the week. You know so calming the masses and saying okay this is what we can do in order to make this happen. Or if there are things that the teams run into that they need the help. Hey we’ve got these three things that we’re working on that we think we can only get two out of these three things done in the time frame. And so the instant reaction I get from most managers executives will suck it up. Put your shoulder into it just get it done. Which ones most wins do you. Yes so the question we need to ask there is OK let’s focus on these two or you say which are the two that you recommend you ask the teams and if the teams don’t know I can choose for you. Do you want me to do that? Most of the teams already know which one or two that they want to do. And they say OK what is the increment that we need in order to get that third one done. Add more time, more resources, where more resources even applicable. You know I’m blanking on the name of the law. But there is a management law out there that just throwing more people onto a project actually makes the projects go slower.

 

Ron: Really what you’re doing is strategizing with them. What can we accomplish next. What’s feasible. Okay we’ve got the plan lets go. I like it.

 

Steve: Yeah, and there’s multiple studies out there that show when you have that more participatory approach you actually long term get better results. There is one study that was looking at. I’m kind of a glutton for punishment. I’m in a doctoral program right now. I’m researching empowerment by middle managers specifically and what the research is telling us is that, yes, if you are a middle manager or even executive you go in and you tell somebody to go do something. Yes you’re going to get it immediate bump. But but that bump is going to be short lived. And what happens when you go in there and you start telling people what to do. Over time those teams are going to tend to wait for direction as opposed to being proactive. If you’ve got more of the participatory approach. Yes initially it may not seem like you’re getting as far and as quick but over time they tend to be more innovative quicker have more by end and have more pride in the product that it is that they’re actually creating. And so the trick for managers and executives is to create that environment of yes there is a sense of urgency that we’re going to be looking at this together from a team perspective from a management perspective and executive perspective all together to get this project back on track and where it is that we need to go.

 

Ron: Steve can you come in and fix our troubled project – a way to translate that. How do you get the team unstuck? Because the team is often very competent for whatever reasons they’ve hit some roadblocks that their stuck or they’re moving too slow or what have you. But when you get that with the team moving and you can start to see the velocity of their work, that’s when they start to believe oh maybe we have a shot at this. What you said about almost being a psychologist… first of all they’re nervous. So let’s take a 50 person team and they’ve been struggling. Guy comes in on the parachute. And I think one of the one of two things goes through that teammates mind at that point. One is is this guy going to help or is he going to put a stick of dynamite in it and may we may we potentially be out of work soon. I think that is what goes through their head. They are very nervous. And so I think what they’re looking for is they’re going to make a determination on you, the trouble Project Recovery guy or gal. And say, do I trust this person with what I’m about to tell them? Do I need to be in defense mode or do I need to be in contributing strategy mode where I’m going to put my shoulder into it with them.

 

Steve: Yeah, and that all happens really, really quickly and how the management and the executive team brings me into an organization or any turnaround person into an organization is so incredibly critical because naturally folks are already upset and and folks are already tender and that who is this person coming in. And can I can I even work with this person? And like you like you just basically said am I even going to have a job. I mean so there’s a lot of fear in there. And so going in there with a heavy hammer tends to not work out so well. When I was very young and doing this you know 10 15 years ago that’s the way I went in it. Yeah those didn’t work out so well. Come from the perspective of listening to what it is that they’re saying as opposed to the emotion and how they’re saying and you can really get far. The next thing that I like to do is hold a retrospective and I want the whole team there. This is hard for managers and specifically. They’re the ones that really have the hardest time with us. What do you mean you want to do a pause. We’re already behind to and you’re going to take two days to pause. We’re going to lose two days of productivity by far. When I’ve had that two day pause, and we do this very specifically, I’ve had more success with turnarounds by just saying you know what we’re going to hit upon us. We recognized things are not going so well here. We see the frustration in everybody’s eyes and we don’t think that’s good for you. We don’t think it’s good for the product. We don’t think it’s good for the company and we want to have an open conversation about how we can make things better. And so borrowing from actually comes from some XP practices or extreme programming practices. This concept of looking back so you can improve how things are looking forward. And so the whole idea with a retrospective. Some folks say OK what are the things we talk about what are the things that went well and what are the things that didn’t go so well. That’s kind of just on the surface of what a retrospective is. What a retrospective is, is figuring out what are those continuous improvement things that we can do to make our lives better. And so if you go in there with that retrospective point of view as opposed to a lessons learned point of view to me lessons learned as more backwards here’s what went good here went bad. You know if we had to do it over again you know here’s what we can do. The idea with the retrospective is you’re looking forward fate is in your hands. You’ve got the wheel. How do you want to improve things moving forward. And so if you start looking at those things from all the perspectives from the people who were involved that got there in the first place chances are you’re going to have four or five ideas really good ones that people have come up with that for some reason they just weren’t given the voice in order to try that. And so if he can surface those sayings on day one of a two day pause, and then on day two you can think about things such as you know creating a road map for the people who are involved. And where do those continuous improvement things that we just identified from day one that we’re going to embed into that roadmap. Again we’re putting more of the fate and more of the control and the people who got there and were just slowly and incrementally starting to shift things moving forward. And so if you’ve got the team there the management there and then the executives you know your executive sponsor there and you can have this facilitated by somebody who is experienced in doing this. You can start to move things around.

 

Ron: I find it an interesting discussion when you get yourself in those retrospective reports. The team often thinks that they’re playing by a certain rule book. So the rule book would include: we have to build all of the scope, we have to follow all the processes as they are to a tee, and they have other rules that they’ll throw in there too and they will think they’re ironclad. We must do this this. This is what we were asked to do we must do this. And they believe that they’re handcuffed. And to say is that a true assumption? Let’s list all of the the big rock items that are immoveable with that roadblocked wasn’t there. How could you get it done? Well Steve. I really like this topic recovering troubled projects. So thank you today for talking to us. So if folks did want to reach out to you. Where would you point them?

 

Steve: So there’s a couple of places. I have my web site www.CottageStreetConsulting.com. That’s all one word. And on Cottage Street Consulting dot com there’s a couple of different pages on there. You’ve got some resources from some previous white papers, some blogs, some previous conferences. All that stuff you can download for free so you can take a look at the information there and you can also take a look at my workshops page and I’ve got my public courses offered there as well as my list of private courses as well. And click on anything in there and you will be directed to my e-mail which is Steve at Cottage Street Consulting dot com.

 

Ron: Well thank you for your time Steve. It’s been great talking to you.

 

Steve: Thank you so much for having me.