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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…

Show Notes:

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

Use the comment section below to comment on the interview.

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

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rondsmith

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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.