Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

As leaders we should bring clarity of purpose into our teams in times of crisis. Hear how to take action when things look overwhelming, stay grounded during crisis, and lead through tragedy. In times of crisis, it’s not the title you have but what you do.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Are you learning project management from the school of hard knocks? Listen in for some pragmatic, practice-based insights into project leadership. Hear advice about psychological safety, building appreciation, organizational learning, risk analysis and much more. Tips to boost your project success and encourage self-managing, high-performing teams. Table of Contents 01:18 … Meet Kiron04:53 … Psychological Safety07:15 … Soliciting Feedback09:25 … Building in Appreciation11:22 … An Appreciation Board13:32 … Accountability from Within14:31 … Embedded Continuous Improvement15:04 … Unconscious Yet Effective Delegation16:54 … Translating Lessons Learned into Organizational Learning18:12 … Information Radiators for Lessons Learned19:25 … Psychologically Safe Evidence Based Retrospectives21:50 … Leader Goes First22:57 … Retrospect on the Retrospectives24:00 … When Someone Leaves the Project25:45 … Building Bridges with Functional Managers27:02 … Risk Management27:57 … Risk Management as Insurance30:16 … Delphi Technique on Qualitative Risk Analysis31:54 … Words of Advice32:54 … Get in Touch with Kiron34:01 … Closing KIRON BONDALE: When I started my career in project management, I was obsessed with the process side of it, the practices, the tools, the techniques of project management.  I wanted to build the world’s greatest schedule.  I ignored the people.  And I forgot that it’s people that deliver project outcomes, not the processes, not the practices. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Listeners, remember if you’re claiming PDUs, check out our website for the instructions for the new procedure.  I am Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates. BILL YATES:  Hi, Wendy. WENDY GROUNDS:  Good morning, Bill. BILL YATES:  Good morning to you. WENDY GROUNDS:  Today we’re very excited to have Kiron Bondale joining us by Skype.  Kiron is a senior consultant for World Class Productivity,and he’s worked in the project management domain for over 25 years.  He is also an active member of PMI and has served as a volunteer director on the board of PMI Lakeshore Chapter for six years.  And Bill, you’re going to tell us about his book. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I really enjoyed Kiron’s book.  It’s called “Easy in Theory, Difficult in Practice.”  He’s a prolific writer.  He’s been blogging for years.  And he’ll describe what inspired him to write this book.  But this book is really practical, filled with advice for project managers, very topical.  We’re going to poke into some of the examples, but I really encourage people to check it out.  Meet Kiron WENDY GROUNDS:  Kiron, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. KIRON BONDALE:  Thank you for giving me the opportunity.  I really appreciate it. WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to ask you first, why did you write the  book, and what was your thought behind this book? KIRON BONDALE:  Yes.  It really was prompted by a challenge my father had given me almost two decades ago now, where when I told him I was thinking about starting a blog, and he looked at me, and he kind of said, you know, blogs are for amateurs.  And this is in the early days, when there weren’t a whole lot of people in the blogosphere.  But he kind of said, you know, forget about these 400, 500-word things.  If you want to be serious, write a book. And my father and I, we disagreed on a variety of topics over the time we spent together.  But that kind of challenge stayed in the back of my head all of these years.  And when I got to roughly about 500 articles in the blog, I started thinking, you know, rather than having to create something from scratch, there’s enough good content there that it probably begs the question, could I not collate it, curate it, create a book from it?  And having some free time on my hands over the Christmas holidays last year, I decided, hey, might as well commit to doing it, then I buckled down and got it done. BILL YATES:  That’s impressive, 500 articles.  That’s intimidating, though.  How did you pick through it and figure out, okay, what’s book-worthy? KIRON BONDALE:  Yeah, that’s a great question, Bill.  It’s challenging because the articles I had really reflect the evolution in my thinking about project management, Agile, different topics that I write about.  And so I would go back and look at an article I’d written in maybe year one, year two, that was a great article.  But you could tell it was getting long in the tooth relative to current thinking.  And so even though something was a good article when it was written doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good article now. And so actually I would say the majority of my effort in producing the manuscript was actually going through and reading word by word to say, will this article stand up, stand the test of time?  Is it still one that I feel is relevant that way?  So you’re absolutely right.  It was extremely challenging.  Probably the second biggest challenge was figuring out how to categorize the articles that I ended up selecting.  And I kind of tried my best, but some of them just sort of fell into a miscellaneous grab bag at the end. BILL YATES:  Yeah, I liked that at the end of the book, the miscellaneous.  One of my favorites was some of the lessons of project management from the game of golf.  KIRON BONDALE:  Various people have now challenged me, now that I’ve put the book out, to say, “Well, what are you going to do for a follow-up?”  And I just don’t think I have it in me to create a book with original content.  So I think I might just end up going back to the well again, digging up another set of lessons from the archives. But this time I’m really tempted to take one where I’ve used analogies.  So lessons from golf, lessons from baking, lessons from “The Simpsons,” that sort of a thing.  I’ve written probably a hundred articles that are of that nature.  And so once I get to the point where I have enough to choose from, I might just do a book where it’s all the analogies of project management, or lessons that we learn from analogies and metaphors. BILL YATES:  That’s too good.  Yeah, that was one of the things that cracked me up as I read the book was just how many references you had to movies.  It’s like, I don’t think there was a movie that you referenced that I had not seen and could quote a line from.  So that was a lot of fun for me. KIRON BONDALE:  The funny thing, though, is now having been writing for 11 years, it’s funny how many of these quotes I’m recycling.  That famous quote from “The Karate Kid Part II,” Mr. Miyagi’s “Best way to avoid punch, no be there.”  The number of times I’ve gone to that quote in different contexts of articles, I never get tired of it. BILL YATES:  It’s a great quote. Psychological Safety WENDY GROUNDS:  One of the things that we wanted to talk about today. For leaders, they’re not only having to confront psychological safety on their teams, but also individually having to consider psychological safety nets.  So what is your advice? KIRON BONDALE:  There’s a couple of popular models or approaches that have been talked about.  Amy Edmondson works with the Harvard Business Review, has done a great deal of research on it.  Timothy R. Clark’s got a four-stage model that he produced on psychological safety.  I try to really simplify things when I’ve been presenting about it.  Three steps are what I look at.  It’s about plan it, live it, champion it.  As leaders, we need to do those three pieces. Planning it is thinking about things like, well, how do we set ourselves up for success from the get-go?  So when your team is initially together, and you’re putting together the working agreements, those rules of engagement, ground rules, whatever you want to call them, it’s we bake psychological safety into that.  If the team members don’t know what it is, we spend some time educating them about it.  So that’s an example of planning for it. In terms of living it, that’s really saying that as leaders we need to model the behavior we expect from our team members.  And so that means that we need to act in a psychologically safe manner.  So, for example, when a team member brings bad news to us, how we react is extremely important.  We might say the right things.  But if our body language betrays us, and we’re getting red in the face, or it looks like we want to leap out of our seat and throttle the individual, they’re not going to feel really safe about it. We also want to demonstrate vulnerability.  That’s another way of living it, is showing that it’s okay to be vulnerable.  When we make a mistake, fessing up and saying “Hey, I made a mistake.”  When we don’t know something, saying “I’m not sure.  What do you think?”  That’s a method of showing it’s safe to express vulnerability. And then, finally, championing it.  An example of that would be having the courage to speak up when you see that someone is eroding psychological safety, whether that’s someone that reports to you as a team member, or it could be actually somebody that’s superior to you.  It might be the project sponsor.  It might be another senior stakeholder.  We need to start to show that we have a zero tolerance policy for activities or behaviors that are going to damage psychological safety. Soliciting Feedback  BILL YATES:  One of the things that I struggle with is I may recognize something as, okay, somebody just made a statement or sent out an email that could erode the team’s psychological safety.  But you know what, it didn’t really bother me.  I wasn’t offended by it.  I know this person, and I know how they really intended it, so I’m just going to let it go.  And I think for me one of the challenges has always been my feathers are not easily ruffled.  I think I’ve got a pretty high threshold.

Pioneering the development of human monoclonal antibodies as potential treatments for viral diseases, in 2019 the Crowe Lab did a simulated pandemic outbreak and developed a record breaking rapid antibody discovery platform. Dr. James E. Crowe, Director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center shares how in 2020, as they were getting ready to do another simulation, right in the middle of their preparations COVID happened. Hear the fascinating story of how his team pivoted to launch a project with no reagents, no information, and no samples.  Table of Contents 01:37 … Meet James03:12 … What is an Antibody?04:17 … Monoclonal Antibodies06:44 … The Human Immunome Project09:25 … Secrets in our Bloodstream12:02 … COVID Response15:55 … Getting the Team to Pivot20:02 … Concerning Vaccine Hesitancy26:25 … Decision Analysis and Risks28:06 … Deciding on Intellectual Property34:02 … Formal Project Management in the Lab36:35 … After Action Reviews38:01 … Project Management Processes and Practices42:45 … Get in Touch with James43:50 … Closing JAMES CROWE: I like the complexity of it, and I like working with project managers because they like seeing the complexity.  And the bottom line is getting things done in a complex environment.  That’s getting stuff out the other end and not being discouraged by that, but enjoying the complexity. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast for project managers by project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds; and, as always, here in the studio with me is Bill Yates. Listeners remember if you’re claiming PDUs for our podcast, as well as for our courses, check out our website. Our PDU claim page has been updated with the new instructions.  We are so glad you’re joining us today.  We have a special guest.  This is Dr. James Crowe, and he’s a physician scientist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  He’s the director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center and the Ann Scott Carell Chair.  He’s a Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology. BILL YATES:  Dr. Crowe has pioneered development of human monoclonal antibodies as potential treatments for viral diseases.  He’s going to describe to us what that means.  I think we’ve all heard about antibodies lately.  But he can describe it from a science perspective.  And they’d done a lot of work on antibodies prior to the COVID pandemic.  But when the pandemic hit, his team pivoted, and we’ll talk with him about that.  In fact, the Crowe team won an award in December 2020.  They were recognized for their work on COVID antibody research, and that’s a fantastic award that recognizes the achievement that they’ve had in that field. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  So he gives some great project management advice in this podcast.  It’s really interesting to hear his perspective.  And also something we ask James is why we’re still debating the social good and the necessity of vaccines.  And he touches on that, as well.  So let’s talk to James.  Hi, Dr. Crowe.  Thank you so much for joining us today. Meet James JAMES CROWE:  Yeah, thanks for having me. WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re just so excited to talk with you today, to clarify some issues about vaccines and about immunization.  And I think you’re just the right person to talk to.  But I want to just go back a little bit and find out what is your mission as a scientist in the vaccine area?  How did you get started in this?  And what really is your goal? JAMES CROWE:  Well, I trained originally as a pediatrician, and ultimately worked in various places around the world.  I traveled in Papua New Guinea and Sub-Saharan Africa and various exotic places, thinking that I might spend my life trying to make the world a better a better place for children who are in challenging situations.  And when you’re there, you see infectious diseases as a big part of the challenge.  Ultimately I trained as an infectious disease specialist to try to work on prevention of disease, infectious diseases, particularly for the world’s most vulnerable people.  And that ultimately led me to science. BILL YATES:  Before we dive too deeply into this, Dr. Crowe, you spell your last name with an “e.”  The founder of our company is Andy Crowe.  He’s my boss.  He also spells it the same way.  So the big burning question that I’ve got to deal with first is are you guys related?  Are you guys cousins or something?  Do you have any idea? JAMES CROWE:  Well, that’s a funny question.  I am working with one of my cousins on a major big science and health initiative right now.  But it’s not Andy, and I don’t think I’m aware of Andy.  But yeah, our family name comes from the U.K., so we’re British somehow back in the day. What is an Antibody? BILL YATES:  Very good.  Well, Wendy and I have watched the TED Talk from – I think it was 2017? JAMES CROWE:  I think that’s right, yes. BILL YATES:  That was so impressive.  You talked about the immune system there.  And it was visually stunning.  I encourage our listeners to take a look at that.  They can find the TED Talk just by, you know, we’ll have a link to it, but they can search your name and TED Talk.  But in that you describe the immune system, and you lay out a description of antibodies.  And we want to talk about that research that you’ve done.  But just help us with some definitions here.  What is an antibody? JAMES CROWE:  Well, antibodies are the body’s natural defenses.  They’re a type of molecule called a protein.  So when your body sees an invading entity like a germ, you swarm around that with lots of cells that are in your blood or in your tissues, and they recognize there’s something foreign there.  And then they mount a response, and they start kicking out these molecules called antibodies, or proteins.  And those antibodies are like your body’s natural drugs.  They protect you by covering the germ and making it inactivated so it can no longer infect other parts of your body, and also so that you don’t spread it to other people.  So antibodies are really the body’s natural defense against infection. Monoclonal Antibodies WENDY GROUNDS:  In your lab, It’s called the Crowe Lab at Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, you’re pioneering the development of human monoclonal antibodies as potential treatment for viral diseases.  So can you explain what is a monoclonal antibody? JAMES CROWE:  Well, the word “monoclonal,” if you break down the Latin, “mono” is one and “clone” is something that’s always the same.  If you make them, they’re identical.  And so in your body’s natural defense, if we took a blood sample, we would find millions of different antibodies, but probably only a few of those are for any particular germ, like flu or anything that you’ve seen before, one of your vaccines like measles. And in our work we search – it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, and we find the particular individual antibodies in a person’s blood sample that are best suited to inhibit the germ that we’re working on.  So we can find a single antibody that is the key to immunity, and we can remake that antibody in our lab, and we can even remake it in a factory very cleanly and use it like a biological drug. And the beauty of that is then we can transfer that one antibody, that monoclonal antibody, into another person and achieve instant immunity, so we can transfer the best of one person’s immunity into another person, and immediately they have that immunity, which is a very cool thing about how our process works.  And it’s not just a trick, this is used in medical practice now. BILL YATES:  And just for reference, how long have you been at Vanderbilt now?  Because this has been a pursuit of yours for many years; right? JAMES CROWE:  Yeah, it has been.  I started working on monoclonal antibody ideas around 1990.  I’ve been at Vanderbilt 25 years.  I know, because I got a little gold pin this year, and they sent a chair to my house. BILL YATES:  Congratulations. JAMES CROWE:  I started to think, wow, maybe this a sign that the end is near here.  But I got my 25-year gold pin this year.  So I have been working on this stuff a while.  But I have more enthusiasm now than I’ve ever had for this because the technologies in the field of science are converging to allow us to do things with speed and scale and effectiveness that have never been possible.  It’s this very, very exciting time to work in science and medicine. The Human Immunome Project WENDY GROUNDS:  One of the projects that I saw you were working on in your lab, and you talked about this in the TED Talk, was to sequence all these antibodies and put them in a database.  Now, this just sounds a massive project.  What does that mean for immunotherapy, and how is that project going? JAMES CROWE:  Right, well, this is a project that we term The Human Immunome Project.  So “ome” is when you’re studying all the elements of a system.  And we modeled that term on The Human Genome Project.  So when I was a young scientist, I remember sitting in the crowd of a meeting I was at.  And Craig Venter, who was one of the leaders of The Genome Project, was there, saying he remembered when he spent, I don’t know, five or 10 years cloning a gene.  He worked 10 years to get a gene.  And then it started getting faster, and they would get 10 genes in two years.  And eventually the aspiration was why don’t we collect all the genes in the human genome. The kind of dirty little secret there was they didn’t do the immune system genes, which we’ve called the Immunome, because in your immune system you mix and match genes.  You combine them.  And that diversity that you can achieve by combinatorial diversity is sort of like playing cards.  You can make a lot of hands of cards if you mix and match them.  So the immune system can make an enormous diversity, and people did not aspire to sequence or catalog all the antibodies that could be made.  But I started thinking, why not?

For project managers who are ready to up their game with risk management, Prasad Kodukula clarifies Next-Generation Project Risk Management and talks us through six specific risk response tools that will help you manage risks more effectively.

Hear about creating healthy Agile teams. Trust, healthy conflict, commitment, and peer-to-peer accountability build healthy teams. When you have “One Team” that is focused and stable, you are closer to producing winning results.

The podcast for project managers by project managers. Projects are more successful when we play to the strengths of the team. Hear about a new technology platform for building high-performing and successful teams. Create a winning team culture by identifying the unique preference, proficiency, and personality that an individual brings to the table. Table of Contents 00:05 … New PDU Claim Process00:54 … Meet Darrin02:53 … Cloverleaf: How it all Began04:56 … Consistent Team Performance09:19 … Choosing the Right Tool for a Successful Team12:10 … When to Pivot your Plan14:39 … What can Cloverleaf do for a Project Team?17:53 … Partnering with Other Assessment Tools19:49 … After the Assessment: Getting Stuff Done24:09 … Tools for Team Members27:06 … Application for Traditional or Agile Methodology27:57 … Keeping Remote Teams Motivated31:25 … Being Authentic32:32 … “Corporate Bravery”33:45 … Get in Touch with Darrin34:53 … Closing WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  New PDU Claim Process Just a little update about claiming your PDUs. The steps to submit a PDU for our podcast, as well as for our InSite courses to PMI, has changed. Our PDU claim page has been updated with the new instructions. Make sure not to use the auto-fill but type in Velociteach and the title, when you are submitting your PDUs. We do apologize for the inconvenience but thank you for listening and please contact us if you need any additional assistance. I’m Wendy Grounds; and as always, here in the studio with me is Bill Yates.  Please make sure to visit our website, Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to the show so you will never miss an episode.  While you’re at it, if you find value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes or a comment on our website.  Or if you’d simply tell a friend, that would help us out, too.  Meet Darrin We like to share stories of interesting projects, and we like to talk with experts who are doing new and exciting things which can impact the world of project management.  And that brings me to today’s guest, Darrin Murriner.  He is the cofounder and CEO of Cloverleaf.me.  It’s a technology platform for building high-performing teams.  Prior to founding Cloverleaf, he managed large and complex teams at companies such as Arthur Andersen and Fifth Third Bank.  And he is the author of a book called “Corporate Bravery,” and he’s going to tell us a little bit more about that book later on.  But Bill, do you want to tell us a bit about Cloverleaf? BILL YATES:  Yeah.  We have had conversations and dedicated podcasts to talking about team building and talking about assessing strengths.  We’ll reference some of those later in the ‘cast, I’m sure.  But we know that successful teams lead to successful projects.  So any tools that we can put in the hands of our listeners that will make them better at equipping their teams and making them more effective, man, we’re excited about showing those. Someone brought to our attention this toolset called Cloverleaf.  And fortunately, we’ve got the CEO, Darrin, who’s going to talk with us about Cloverleaf.  It’s a teambuilding tool.  And you can take something like StrengthsFinder or Myers-Briggs or DISC or other assessments that you do on your team, and you have all this data, and then you need something to help you take those next steps.  So I think this conversation will give us some ideas. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right.  A thing to note, I just want to say to our listeners, is that we don’t receive any compensation for talking about Cloverleaf.  We just came across them.  Someone told us about them.  And we want to share that with our audience.  We’re not getting a free subscription to Cloverleaf for our team. BILL YATES:  We need to ask Darrin about that, yeah.  We’re not getting anything for this.  Again, this is just a toolset that we wanted to make people aware of. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right.  Let’s talk to Darrin.  Hey, Darrin.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for joining us today. DARRIN MURRINER:  I’m glad to be here.  Thanks for inviting me.  Cloverleaf: How it all Began WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to find out what inspired you to establish Cloverleaf, how it all began.  And I want to know where the name comes from, as well. DARRIN MURRINER:  Yeah, I’m happy to provide some background and context.  I’ve always just really been interested with management and what good leadership looks like and these different concepts.  So I don’t have a background in HR.  I don’t have any certifications in that space.  But just I have always been interested in that. In the last job I had before we created this business, which is where I met my cofounder, one of the things that we did is we had cross-functional teams of five or six people.  And this was a design video agency.  The process that we used was very consistent:  eight to 10 weeks in duration, kind of the same delivery model, the same stages in the process.  And we did anywhere from 100 to 150 of these concurrently.  What we saw was the distinction between what made a successful video project and what made a, I don’t want to say “unsuccessful” video project, but like subpar, right, was really the combinations of people that we put on these teams and how we resourced and equipped them to be effective in that eight- to 10-week team experience.  So we got to just see this Petri dish of people working together and how that was the “it” factor, right, of success. And if you think about it, that might have been a digital video agency.  But our economy in general is primarily how we create value is through collaboration and taking my ideas and putting them with your ideas and creating something of value for organizations.  And whether you’re like in a product role, or you’re in technology, or you’re in a creative space, more and more that’s just how we create value for the organizations.  It just really started us down a path.  We wanted to create a technology product that could provide transparency to that process and equip leaders and anyone on a team with the tools to be effective with that knowledge and that understanding. Consistent Team Performance BILL YATES:  I love your analogy of a Petri dish.  And I take no offense; I’ve certainly been in an HR situation before where I think I am the virus growing on this team, infecting everybody else for good or for bad.  Now, you mentioned that you had a cofounder that you were working with at that time. DARRIN MURRINER:  Yup. BILL YATES:  So tell us more about that.  How did you come up with this idea as you were working and getting this consistency and then determining which teams really outperform or perform more consistently than others?  How did the two of you stumble into that? DARRIN MURRINER:  Yeah, it really was just a conversation.  I mean, it was the observation, which again kind of that’s part of the reason why I say the Petri dish, because it’s truly just like a scientist, where you’re kind of stepping back and looking at things with a really unique perspective.  That wasn’t in the project on a day-to-day basis.  But I got to kind of step back and ask questions that maybe other people weren’t asking on a day-to-day basis because they were just so into the weeds. And Kirsten, my cofounder, her role was leading those project managers.  So her and I both kind of had this really unique blend on these teams at a higher macro level.  And we just really started a conversation around hey, you know, the culture of these teams, the culture of our organization, we had a premise that how culture is created is through the unique preferences that people bring to the table and to the conversation, and that if you really want to try to either measure culture or identify culture, it needs to start with those unique individual preferences that the people that form a team bring to the table.  It’s less about this kind of like top-down view or top-down perspective of culture, and it’s more this bottom-up kind of approach.  And we felt like that was a very unique way to approach this. One of the questions you asked earlier was about where did the name come from, and it really stems from that.  I kept using those term preferences just now.  Whenever we would talk to people about this concept, so like, hey, we want to build this business, and it’s going to be a technology, and it’s going to do these things, and I would always draw these three concentric circles.  And one of the questions that we would ask leaders before we launched Cloverleaf is, “Hey, how do you staff people on teams?”  Right?  “How do you choose the people that are going to be on teams?”  And they would say, “Well, are they available, how much spare capacity do they have, and do they have a technical skill set that is needed for the job?  So if it’s a technology team, do they know Java?”  And that’s as far as it ever went.  No one asked questions beyond those two questions. And what our experience was in this digital video agency is that neither of those questions really had a significant impact on performance; right?  You had a ton of people who knew how to animate and knew how to do video editing and knew how to story-tell.  But it was that combination of putting those things together that really made that outsize differentiation.  And so when we drew those three concentric circles, we said, “Hey, the first is just proficiency.  What skill set, what experience do you have and bring to the table?”  And that’s where most organizations stop. Then we said, hey, there are these preferences, these cultural norms.  They could be values.  They could be any number of other words we might use to describe it.  But it’s these things that motivate you, that inspire you, that drive you to do the work that you do. And then the third thing, just to kind of keep the whole “P” alliteration,

The podcast for project managers by project managers. How can practitioners incorporate sustainability and social value into their current practice? Karen Thompson and Nigel Williams are the co-creators of Responsible Project Management, an initiative that aims to accelerate achievement of sustainable development goals, encouraging responsibility in the context of projects and project management. PLEASE REFER TO OUR ‘CLAIM PDUS’ PAGE TO NOTE THE CHANGES TO THE PDU CLAIM PROCESS. Table of Contents 02:12 … The History of Responsible Project Management06:42 … Comparing Responsible Management to Corporate Social Responsibility07:45 … Changing the Role of the Project Manager10:43 … Correctly Defining Sustainability12:24 … Who Might I be Hurting through This Work?16:38 … Questions to Ask as a Responsible Project Manager19:51 … When it’s Not about Success or Failure22:19 … How to Raise Awareness amongst Stakeholders24:48 … A Manifesto for Responsible Project Management29:40 … 2021 The Year of Responsible Project Management32:02 … Learn More about Responsible Project Management33:13 … Closing WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill Yates.  And we’d like to wish you a very happy New Year.  This is 2021, and we hope it’s going to be a good one. BILL YATES:  Oh, yes.  It’s got to be. WENDY GROUNDS:  It’s got to be better.  We like to talk with experts who are doing new and exciting things in the world of project management.  And that brings us to today’s guests.  Dr. Karen Thompson is a senior academic at Bournemouth University Business School in the U.K.  She’s a project professional turned innovative educator.who has done a lot of research and education in managing projects sustainably. And we have Dr. Nigel Williams, the Reader in Project Management and research lead at the University of Portsmouth.  Karen and Nigel co-lead the Responsible Project Management Initiative, which is aimed to encourage sustainability and social responsibility in an ethical manner by project managers. BILL YATES:  Yeah, sustainability is a topic that we’ve hit on a few times.  And I know just recently we interviewed Scott Berkun, and we focused on his book, “How Design Makes the World.”  Berkun talked about four questions in that book, and the fourth question:  Who might be hurt by your work, now or in the future?  This conversation that we’re going to have today just goes right in line with that.  I think some projects produce amazing things, could be a product or a service.  But we don’t really think about the fallout. We had conversations with Henk about the ocean cleanup project; right?  Episode 106.  Orbital space debris.  We talked with Dr. Heather about that problem in Episode 75.  We all want our cell phones to work.  We want to have GPS.  But what happens when the satellite dies? Sustainability is something that we’re passionate about.  This kind of takes it to another level.  It’s challenging to me as a project manager to think about, okay, in my day-to-day work, how can I be considering these questions?  So I’m excited about this conversation. WENDY GROUNDS: Not so long ago we spoke to Kaitlyn Bunker about the Islands Energy Program.  And that was also an incredible program where they’re really thinking about what is the good that we are bringing in our projects. And with that, let’s get talking to Karen and Nigel. The History of Responsible Project Management Karen, could you tell us a little bit about the history of Responsible Project Management, how you started it? KAREN THOMPSON:  Yes, certainly.  Well, how it started was way back in 2017 I’d just finished my Ph.D.  And one of the things that I uncovered while doing that were all the claims that project management research – there were criticisms around it not being relevant enough to practice.  So in 2017 I held a sort of networking event where I brought together practitioners and researchers and educators for a sort of an event to try and start stimulating discussion around research. And making it more relevant to practice. Sustainability wasn’t specifically on the agenda at that point.  But it’s something that’s been in the forefront of my mind for a very long time, and a great frustration, that projects contribute massively to economies around the world to change.  And if we don’t manage that change responsibly, then we’re contributing to degradation of the planet, social division and so forth.  So in 2018, in the summer, we held a workshop at Bournemouth University, where we brought together researchers, educators, practitioners to start exploring what being responsible might mean in the context of project management. So several points we touched base with.  One were these 17 United Nations sustainable development goals, and another was the literature on responsible management.  The Business School at Bournemouth University were advanced signatories to PRME, which is the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education.  But project management has tended to develop over the years in something of a little bubble.  There’s been lots of developments in management that haven’t necessarily always found their way through into project management. Either the literature from an academic perspective or indeed from practice.  So that was partly where we started. We chose the word “responsible” really to echo those sustainable development goals and responsible management ideas. Really also with the view that project management underwent a rethinking around 2003/4.  There was a network that was funded to start looking at issues and project failure and how that could be improved.  At the same time, interestingly, sustainable development went through a rethinking exercise.  As far as I know, the two initiatives were completely separate.  And both fields, one of the things they recognized was sort of a bit of a PR problem.  So sustainable development, it was recognized that it was the narrative that was causing a lot of problems.  So we’ve been talking about sustainability for a very long time.  But as is becoming ever more apparent, very little action had been taken.  The way it was defined was around future generations. Well, the future we were talking about in the 1980s is now.  We need to refine our definition.  It’s no longer appropriate to be thinking about this just for the future.  These impacts are here now.  So we want to act on those.  And similarly, the problem is a well-managed project, the project manager and the project management is invisible.  So we firmly believe that Responsible Project Management can help accelerate achievement of the sustainable development goals.  And the other aspect that I’m sure Nigel will pick up on in a moment is that sustainable development has tended to focus on the environment.  Now, actually, if you look at the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, you’ll see an awful lot of them are about society and about people. NIGEL WILLIAMS:  Right.  I’ve been involved in the project management community for some time.  I used to run Organizational Project Management PMI for a bit, and stuff.  And I found out all the conversations that were happening there were pretty much the same, that there’s lots of discussion about project success.  There’s a lot of discussion about tools and techniques.  It felt we’re having the same conversation over and over.  So there were developments happening in the general management world that weren’t really reflected in project management.  I think the last big think was Agile maybe. The idea of responsibility in management is a long-debated issue from the early conception of modern management.  And even from the ‘50s there were lots of debates as to what is the social responsibility of business.  So a little later on we developed corporate social responsibilities where organizations had an official stance as to how they should deal with communities and so on.  Comparing Responsible Management to Corporate Social Responsibility So how responsible management differs from corporate social responsibility is that it looks at managers, individual managers, who take ownership of environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and enact them in their daily practice in an ethical manner.  So that’s where we separate responsible management from corporate social responsibility.  Now, in project management, it’s doubly so because project managers have a lot of uncertainties that they deal with that can’t necessarily be prescribed in advance by the organization. So if you work in a traditional operational environment, a lot of the organizational rules can be scripted in advance because a lot is known in advance.  If you work in something like projects, you deal quite a lot of uncertainties, and project managers have to create responses to a lot of unforeseen circumstances.  So you really want to have managers who internalize the idea of responsibility, rather than simply relying on external perspectives on responsibility. Changing the Role of the Project Manager BILL YATES:  Karen and Nigel, I can already feel the tension of the project manager who has certain goals and objectives that they have to reach.  And now we’re saying, okay, as you do that, there’s a whole ‘nother dimension that we want you to consider as you carry out your project.  What is the impact you’re having on society, on the environment, on those stakeholders or those people that are even part of the project team?  I’m delighted to have you guys talking with us about this.  Just jumping right into that, how does this concept of being a responsible project manager change the role of the project manager? KAREN THOMPSON:  I’m very aware that the role of the project manager is already very stressful.  Managing cost, time,

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The podcast by project managers for project managers. An episode about detecting imminent failure and dealing with project issues that could lead to failure. The project manager’s approach to supporting the team, addressing issues, and communicating resolutions is crucial for any project facing adversity. Table of Contents 01:56 … Meet Susan03:54 … Susan’s Project Story08:30 … When Nobody Speaks Up10:59 … Warning Signs15:55 … When is the Project Manager at Fault19:38 … Sequestering the Team22:25 … Maintaining Communication Channels26:40 … Root Cause Analysis28:30 … Documenting Lessons Learned31:06 … The Resolution of Susan’s Project34:05 … Get in Touch with Susan35:03 … Closing SUSAN IRWIN:  It’s not about ego.  It is about furthering the practice of project management, it is about making everybody great.  It is about working together as a unified team. Not just a project team, but a project manager team, to make each one of us great. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill Yates.  So an interesting thing happened to us the other day. As we were preparing to record this podcast, two days ago, we had some equipment failure. BILL YATES:  Yes, we did. WENDY GROUNDS:  And that amounts to a project failure. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  Have you ever had a project fail, Bill? BILL YATES:  Yes, I certainly have.  I think most who are listening to this can relate.  I think it was quite ironic that we would have a project failure, even with our episode as we were going to record this. First time.  That’s too funny. WENDY GROUNDS:  Fortunately, Danny got us fixed up, and we’re ready to go today. BILL YATES:  You know, Wendy, it occurs to me this topic is one that is really rich.  And we offer an online course by Neal  Whitten on this topic of project failure.  It’s called “17 Top Reasons Why Projects Fail.”  Neal goes through those.  He introduces those 17, and then of course talks about how we can avoid them.  So another way we can go deeper in this topic. WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re actually talking with someone who has experience in project failure.  Our guest is Susan Irwin, and she’s an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama, Collat School of Business. BILL YATES:  Wendy, this is going to be a pertinent conversation for our listeners.  And I’m excited to have Susan with us.  She has great information about both how to detect when failure is imminent with a project, and then advice.  So she gives four areas of advice for those that are dealing with project issues that could lead to failure.  So let’s get into it with Susan. Meet Susan WENDY GROUNDS:  Susan, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. SUSAN IRWIN:  Yes, thank you.  I’m so excited to be able to share my ideas. WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re looking forward to hearing your story.  But I want to ask you about your career background.  Can you tell me how you got into project management? SUSAN IRWIN:  So I’ve been doing this for about 15 years.  And so like most project managers that have been doing it for this long, I actually stumbled into it by happenstance. I was a developer by trade.  I was really content on spending my life in the development side of the house.  A manager at the time saw something in me, and this was back when project management was first starting to come into industry.  You didn’t really see it much outside of the government sector.  He asked me if I wanted to step into this role as a project manager. I really was apprehensive about it because I didn’t really see at that time the value in project management.  I felt that project managers were more of the gatekeeper and less of the facilitator of getting work done. And so I begrudgingly did it, and I fell in love with it. So I went in, I did my PMP certification, and fell in love with it. And where I originally thought it was more of a gatekeeper or wasn’t allowing you to move projects forward. I actually found that, no, project managers do open up that gate and do facilitate and do shield the team and make sure things get accomplished.  So I went and did an MBA with an emphasis in project management, and then went on ahead and did my Ph.D. in information technology with an emphasis on project management.  So I teach classes and I often tell my students, as you can tell by all my certifications and my degrees, my love of project management now that has grown over the years.  And I love the fact that now you can get those degrees in project management that didn’t exist before. BILL YATES:  That’s true. Susan’s Project Story WENDY GROUNDS:  You had written an article on project failure. And I want to just lead into that with you telling us the story about this project.  Could you introduce what happened? SUSAN IRWIN:  Yes.  So I was actually the portfolio manager, or the program manager, on this project, and I had 13 lanes.  Our project was at a local bank here in town. We were to move our third-party processing from one vendor to another.  So we interfaced with our new third-party vendor. And then we had outside components that also interfaced in with our third-party processors.  So they obviously had to move, as well.  This particular article stemmed out of an issue where, at the time, we had received a go from all parties involved. So from the original organization, from the new third-party processor, and from the third-party vendor that was interfacing in.  And so we had received a go that we were ready to move this into production. Now, this was a two-year project, multimillion-dollar project.  So we were about two weeks away from our targeted go-live date.  About a week later, we had a meeting with our new third-party processor, and one lone individual threw his hand up and said, “I really don’t think we’re ready,” and explained the reason why.  And so really what he was expecting to see from test cases he had not seen come across. So that spurred into a bunch of discussions with different individuals.  And so we had, just to kind of give you our leadership perspective, I had a business sponsor, I had an executive business sponsor, I had a technology sponsor and executive technology sponsor. So as you can tell, frustrations are high, people are concerned. People are going, well, how am I culpable in this situation?  How did we get here?  And so I had one individual who went and gave the story to the chief technology officer, the CTO at the time, that this was a failure of project management, without any background or anything.  I was extremely upset because the narrative of this was we had no facts to base this on. And so this article was my response to that, as opposed to sending the scathing email that I wanted to do. But as I started looking at this, I started thinking, well, if I’m going through this, maybe other people are going through this, as well.  So fast-forwarding into the situation we had, at that point in time we were a week out.  We had already done a go here.  And we needed to figure out how are we going to get from where we’re at to where we need to be. And figure out how we can get some semblance of a go-live date in very short form because, every single time we move this date out, there’s a cost implication to it.  So pulled the team together, had daily meetings with everybody.  Pulled this list of all the things that the third-party processing vendor was expecting to see, and worked with this third-party processor to get those in place. Make sure we have those tested, and then get those signed off. And then, as we started digging deep into this, I had an opportunity to speak with my portfolio manager about this. And I said, you know, we typically put safety gates in to ensure that we don’t have these project failures.  So you have risk and issue management.  Well, we actually had a risk associated to this vendor as not being prepared as we originally thought. So we had that safety gate in that we were tracking.  Then we had a go/no-go decision point that we were tracking.  Then we had a meeting with the bank, the third-party processor, and the outside vendor. And so we had another safety gate where we had between the third-party processor and us. And we had another safety gate between us and the third party.  So as you can tell, we had safety gates in place.  But we blew through all of them. Because in reality the root cause of this was no one felt like they had the authority to be able to stand up and say, hey, we’re not ready.  Here’s a problem, and this is what’s happening. When Nobody Speaks Up BILL YATES:  This is so, so interesting.  And so relatable, unfortunately, I think, to most of our listeners. We’ve all been in situations where the wheels fall off of a project.  I’ve got to ask you, so when you say you blew through the safety gates, by that do you mean the indications were there that, okay, we’re not really passing the quality checkpoints that we had in place, but nobody’s wanting to raise their hand and bring attention to it?  So is that what’s going on? SUSAN IRWIN:  Well, yeah, we’re blowing through these, so we’re getting a go.  We’re getting through each of these meetings.  Nobody’s raising their hand.  And it’s not until post-go, when we’re having one of these meetings, we’re up against the go-live date, that a single individual raises his hand and says, “We’re not in a position where we can go, and here’s the reason why.” BILL YATES:  Wow.  So nobody was brave enough, if you will, to say, hey, the emperor has no clothes kind of a thing.  Looks like nobody wanted to do that. SUSAN IRWIN:  Yeah.  That’s 100 percent correct.  And again, I had been doing this for 15 years, you know, and several years before that in the technology management side, just without the title.

The podcast for project managers by project managers. The sales team and the project manager - how to improve that complex relationship.  Advice for the project teams who have to deliver what sales has sold and why sales professionals should be kept engaged in the project from start to finish. Table of Contents 01:56 … Meet James 03:06 … BrandMuscle 04:17 … The Sales Guy’s Perspective 08:56 … The Pressure on the Sales Team 11:37 … How to Deliver what Sales has Sold 15:17 … Project Handoff 17:20 … Scrutinize the Contract 18:48 … Advice for the Sales Team 21:33 … The Project Kickoff 23:57 … Sales and Identifying Risks 25:13 … The Project Handoff 26:56 … Leadership Influencers 28:07 … Career Advice 29:42 … Connect with James 30:23 … Closing JAMES MORSE:  ...as you balance that relationship with sales, you naturally develop a trusting relationship between the project team and the sales team.  And that’s so helpful because then I trust the salesperson to deliver something correctly, and they trust me to actually deliver on that and make sure that that project gets in time, is in budget, is in scope, and it delivers a happy customer. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our opportunity to meet with you and talk about issues that project managers are facing today.  We hope you’ll continue to tell us what you like and offer your suggestions.  You can leave a comment on Google, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or whatever podcast listening app you use.  You can also leave comments on the Velociteach.com website or on our social media pages.  I am Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates. BILL YATES:  Wendy, we’re going to have a fun conversation today.  We’ve got a great topic. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, we have.  And we have a great guest, too.  So his name is James Morse, and he serves as the Vice President and Head of Product for BrandMuscle.  He’ll tell us a little bit more about BrandMuscle coming up. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And James is unique in that he served the project manager role and also the sales role, project manager first in his career and then later in sales, and so really what we’re going to talk about is the hatred between project managers and sales. WENDY GROUNDS:  I’d say a particularly strong dislike. BILL YATES:  Yeah, there’s so many project managers who have discovered that their sales team has made some promises or overcommitments that now the project manager and the team have to deliver.  So we’re going to talk about that. WENDY GROUNDS:  I think so, we’re going to boil it down to communication. BILL YATES:  Yes, we are. WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s talk with James. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  James, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for being our guest today. JAMES MORSE:  Thanks for having me. Meet James WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you tell us how you started your career, and how you ended up in the role that you’re in today? JAMES MORSE:  Yeah, absolutely. So I think I’m very lucky to, right out of school, have gotten an opportunity within project management, which I think a lot of my peers didn’t necessarily do.  They started with other careers and kind of paced into that, so I really hit the ground running.  I was doing new client onboardings and implementations, which has really just been a lot of the breadth of my career when it comes to project management.  And then I’ve slowly just transitioned into different opportunities, typically in SaaS and software, which has taken me to where I am currently with BrandMuscle. So I’ve been with BrandMuscle for a little over seven years, similar background even within the organization.  I started with new client onboardings and implementations in the project lead role and just slowly grew within that to project manager, to senior project manager, leading our team of project managers within implementation, and then transitioning to more of that pre-sales role, the sales engineer, solutions consultant, however we want to think about that.  And then ultimately I actually just moved into our product team, leading up our entire product strategy space. BrandMuscle WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us about BrandMuscle, the company that you work for. JAMES MORSE:  So we fall into the – we call it “Through-Channel Marketing Automation.”  So if you look at the analyst space, that’s the title and terminology they’ll use.  But really what it is, is technology that empowers channel partners of all types.  And when I think of channel partners, ultimately these are people who sell products and services through a channel on behalf of our clients.  So it could be a nationwide insurance agent.  It could be a Pandora jewelry retailer, a franchisee, an alcohol and beverage distributor.  Ultimately they take corporate brand assets, their messaging, the advertising, co-op funds, really demand generation activities to drive local sales and market locally to reach their customers, and so that’s where BrandMuscle steps in.  So we offer both software and services to act on behalf of corporate at that national or global level to enable local marketing. WENDY GROUNDS:  Where are your offices based? JAMES MORSE:  So we have four offices in the U.S. – Cleveland, Ohio; our headquarters is in Chicago; Kansas City; Austin, Texas.  And then we have two offices in India, in Bangalore and Noida. The Sales Guy’s Perspective BILL YATES:  James, the experience that you’ve had with BrandMuscle I think is going to help you relate to so many of our listeners, and the fact that you’ve done project management.  So you’ve also been the liaison between a project manager and the sales team, and you’ve done the sales role, as well.  Which brings me to the elephant in the room, which is many times project managers dislike, despise, want to torture the sales team.  Do you agree with me that that can be the case in many instances? JAMES MORSE:  I completely agree.  I wouldn’t even limit it to just project managers; right?  The entire organization can sometimes loathe the sales team. BILL YATES:  Yup.  Yeah, it’s a love/hate.  I mean, if you don’t have sales, you’ve got nothing.  You’ve got to sell something before any other business will happen.  So it is the catalyst.  But all kidding aside, I mean, there are times when we can look back on our careers as project managers and go, wow, that project was especially difficult because there was a miscommunication between sales and the customer and us, you know, the team that actually had to implement it.  So that’s the elephant in the room that we thought, this is the perfect opportunity for us to discuss this issue and share some advice.  There are some reasons that sales and project managers, sometimes they don’t get along. And one of those, I think back, because a lot of my background is software, many times we would go in as a team to implement a solution, and we had a very clear understanding of how this was going to work.  We’d done these types of projects before.  And then we realized the salesperson has sold vaporware to our customer.  There’s a capability that doesn’t exist, and we’ve got to figure it out, and so many times, you know, we’re finding that out in front of the customer.  The customer says, “Okay, well, Bill, I’m excited about you and your team doing XYZ.  So this is going to completely change how we do our business, and we’re excited about it.”  And I’m looking at him going, “Whoa, it doesn’t work that way.” JAMES MORSE:  Right. BILL YATES:  So that’s one of them.  Wendy, we were talking through this.  Sometimes it’s a scheduling issue, too. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  Sometimes there’s a bit of unrealistic timing.  The salesperson could have said, oh, yes, we’re going to have that done.  We’ll have it done before Christmas, or before the holidays or something like that, and this isn’t going to happen.  Timing is off. BILL YATES:  As a project manager, you are meeting with the customer, and you realize, okay, there’s a disconnect here. So James, maybe bring us some fresh ideas, help us look at it from both perspectives since you’ve served in both roles.  Share the perspective of the sales guy. JAMES MORSE:  You know, I don’t think it’s very different in the grand scheme of things from us as project managers; right?  Ultimately, the salesperson wants to do right by the buyer, the client, the stakeholder, however we want to think about them.  It’s just in a different term, and so I think that a lot of times the salesperson might not be ingrained into the everyday activity.  So we talk about software; right?  They may not know every little bell and whistle the software can do, and oftentimes they may hear something and think something else, and so there’s just a disconnect there. So at the end of the day I think that their intent is pure.  I think sometimes that the execution could be off.  And you know, oftentimes I think that even as project managers, whoever we deliver to, the client or even internally, who our stakeholders are, might think the same thing about us at times.  I was given this project.  What do I do with it, whatever it may be.  It’s just where do we look at that in the overall stream.  So I think that moving to the sales role really helped put that into perspective for me, having done project management.  And honestly, that’s how it was sold to me within BrandMuscle.  Because that elephant in the room is how I felt about sales, is I had been delivering projects and being handed things that, when I think of that iron triangle, right, its scope, its cost, its timing, I thought all the sales team cared about was the cost.  They wanted to look at it from a top line revenue perspective.  And I cared about all three. And so I think moving into the sales role helped me understand where they were coming from because that still is a lot of it.