Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. Every two weeks we get together to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager. We cover what it takes to get certified, what it takes to do the job of project management. I’m your host, Nick Walker. And beside me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. They are project managers for project managers. They instruct other project managers and those working to become one. So, guys, last time we talked about projects that are in trouble. And we want to catch the trouble before they go up in flames. We talked about a lot of ways to do that. So let’s recap just a little bit and then go forward and talk about how we get to the end and really make this project a success. ANDY CROWE: You know what, Nick, this is something we need to be talking about in the project management community. So the approach that most companies take is they say, well, we’re going to look at ways to never get in this situation. But the truth is over two thirds of projects come in over time and over budget, and they don’t meet the critical success factors. They don’t hit that target, that elusive butterfly of success. They never capture it in their net. And so what do you do if you’re in that situation? And to be honest, I’ve taught and mentored PMs before who live in that situation, so it’s not an unusual thing. It’s just difficult to talk about. NICK WALKER: Two thirds of projects. That’s an amazing statistic. ANDY CROWE: Yeah, the actual numbers are worse than that. But we’re going to be happy and say two thirds. BILL YATES: And it’s a reality. So why not get tooled up in learning how to do this part of my job as a project manager? And we, you know, the first session we talked about the first step is identifying that, identifying when I’m in a project that is in serious trouble, so how to detect it. We talked about smelling the smoke and looking at the canary. ANDY CROWE: Yeah, Bill liked the more intuitive approach, and I advocated for the data-driven approach. But those two meet, absolutely. Those two intersect. BILL YATES: Absolutely. NICK WALKER: And then we have to come up with just the correct approach. And there are a couple of different ways to go there, too. BILL YATES: Yeah. Some companies, they go with the tiger team, the parachute in the expert that’s me to come fix everything. And then what we really focused on more was the do-it-yourself, the you are leading a project. You’ve determined that it is in serious trouble. So what are you going to do about it? NICK WALKER: And I loved how you emphasized so much the need to try to keep calm because intuitively this is the time that you’re going to be the least calm, perhaps. BILL YATES: Yeah. You’ve gone to that “in case of emergency” box. You’ve busted it open, and you’re trying to calm yourself down so that you can actually lead the team with competency and professionalism. ANDY CROWE: Right. We talked about last time nobody’s at their best leading out of fear. NICK WALKER: And then there was that aha moment for me where we talked about trying to move forward, but in order to do that you’ve got to move backward before you do. BILL YATES: Right. Yeah, you have to do root cause analysis. You have to fully understand what is the problem. Maybe, to Andy’s point before, we’ve got some reports that have shown some troubling trends. We have the data in front of us. Now we’ve got to roll our sleeves up, get into it, and figure out what is causing us to miss our milestones. Why are our budgets suddenly blowing up? Why are all the errors and defects suddenly cropping up where they weren’t before? ANDY CROWE: So Bill, let me ask you a question in starting us off in the next step here. You’re dealing with a lot of different dynamics. Some of those may, we talked about the last time, when those relate to scope and how to simplify and refocus on critical success factors. BILL YATES: Right. ANDY CROWE: What happens when all of that’s okay, and the real problem is in the team? What do you do? BILL YATES: Yeah. Now, if you identify the problem as being related to team members, what do you do with that? That’s tricky. That’s tricky. ANDY CROWE: It can be tricky. I think the first thing you’ve got to do is, again, even some root cause analysis there. But I’m going to confess something here at the risk of smearing my reputation myself a little bit. I have – I used to be on a tiger team that was sent in to troubled projects for customers. I worked with a consulting company. And we went around, and when a project was in trouble, we came in and tried to help right that project. One of the first things that I think you need to do a lot of times is get rid of the bad actors on the team. I think you need to let people go, if you remotely have that authority or influence in order to do so. So I’m a big fan of that. I feel like – I think, ultimately, every failure is a leadership failure at some level. And so a lot of times what would happen is they would have let the project manager go, and they brought in our team to kind of help figure out what was going on. So that had already been taken care of. The PM had already been let go. Sometimes it hadn’t. Sometimes it was a technical lead. Sometimes it was a business analyst. Sometimes it was a programmer, et cetera. And I’m a believer that, you know what, be decisive. Take decisive resource action. BILL YATES: It’s tough. For a leader to lead, you’ve got to have followers. And those followers, they’re looking very closely at the leader and how does she respond in a situation? How does he lead in a situation? It’s one thing when you’re partying, having fun because you’re hitting the milestones, the customer’s happy, the budget’s – you’re finding more money. You know, we want more scope. We want more of everything. ANDY CROWE: Everybody should have one project like that in their life. I have. I’ve had one. BILL YATES: But for the rest of us, the reality is, so we’re dealing with this troubled project. People are looking to see how the leader is leading. And in many cases that is the project manager. Is that person decisive? Are they able to, again, completely get their hands around that root cause, that trouble? And if that is an individual, if I look in my hands, and I’ve got a person in my hands, then what am I going to do about it? ANDY CROWE: Well, I can answer that. So you act decisively. BILL YATES: Yup. ANDY CROWE: You let the person go on the project. You move them on to someplace they can be more successful. So there’s some of that is for the sake of the project in general, sort of at a high-level holistic sense. But there’s science behind this. So Virginia Satir came up years ago with something called Family Systems Theory. And it really translates beyond the family. Family Systems Theory says that you may not be able by yourself to change the whole dynamic. You may not be responsible for the whole dynamic. But you can change the way you’re behaving in a system, and that will change the whole system. Letting somebody go who’s perhaps not performing at peak performance, who hasn’t been doing what they’ve been doing, just changing that one ingredient will change the whole thing. And think about it this way, too. Think about it in the sense of ingredients. You’ve probably cooked before. I love to cook. And when you do, sometimes you can no longer taste the individual ingredients. But it’s the way they’re combining. It’s the chemistry and the interaction of those ingredients that’s actually producing something that sort of transcends the individual pieces. BILL YATES: Right. ANDY CROWE: That’s what happens with teams. Teams – and it can happen in a good way. And we’ve all seen that. And it can happen in a very toxic bad way. And so sometimes, even if it’s not the person’s individual fault, moving them off the project will change the whole chemistry, the whole interaction, and the whole dynamic. And it sends a good message. NICK WALKER: So it’s not always the project manager that needs to leave. ANDY CROWE: Right, correct. Now, that’s our tribe. So we’re kind of dealing with our own dirty laundry here. But, no, it oftentimes is not. But if the PM has any authority to reshape the team, just rebooting the team and refactoring it can oftentimes be a good thing. BILL YATES: And I want to go back to that notion that the team’s watching. I’ll confess, the older I get, the more I’m convinced that a strong leader assesses the team and determines, is there a weaker person on this team, or people on the team that need to be let go? Because those top performers, let’s say – let’s just use a rating. We’ll say I have eights, nines, and tens on my team. If there’s a six on the team, or a five on the team, the eights and nines and tens are watching me as the leader to see do I put up with that, do I tolerate it. ANDY CROWE: Correct. BILL YATES: What do I do with that individual? Do I try to train them? Do I try to improve their performance? At what point do I make the decision I need to move them off the team? Because the eights, nines, and tens are saying, I want to be on the best team, and I want the strong leader who will make my team stronger. NICK WALKER: And you know, Andy, something you said just really underlines something that was in a conversation I was having just yesterday with a friend of mine. We were talking about a team that I’m on. And he says there are three C’s with teamwork. One is competence, character, and the third one is chemistry. And it seems to me that chemistry is so incredibly vital and maybe even the hardest one to achieve. ANDY CROWE: It is the hardest one because you can’t always anticipate how different team personalities,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our every week chance to meet and talk about what matters most to you as a professional project manager.  We talk about getting started, getting certified, getting the stuff of project management done. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and beside me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  They are project managers themselves.  They mentor other project managers and those working to become one.  And guys, today’s topic addresses what might be to some teams sort of an elephant in the room, the fact that many projects don’t move along as we originally envision.  In fact, Andy, sometimes, as a friend of mine once put it, you know, when the manure hits the combine blades... ANDY CROWE:  Right, the fertilizer hits the ventilation system, sure. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, right. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, and you know what, a lot of times figuring out what to do with a troubled project, with a project that’s in distress, and where do you start?  And a lot of PMs spend time in this space.  This isn’t an unfamiliar territory for a lot of people. BILL YATES:  Yeah, people should not be surprised by this.  This happens.  This is a part of project management.  There’s a quote by William A. Cohen.  He says:  “All successful projects are simply a long series of adversities that must be overcome.  Adversity is normal.” NICK WALKER:  So we just need to look reality in the face and say, okay, this is just going to happen.  Adversity is going to happen.  But is there a difference between just simple adversity, you know, little roadblocks that come in the way, or something that is really in flames? ANDY CROWE:  Well, there certainly can be.  A lot of times project managers start a project.  They don’t have any input into the finish date.  They don’t have input into the schedule, necessarily, or the budget.  And now they kind of have to find some way to meet the goals of the project.  By the time that they get added, they’re already in trouble. NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  So sometimes it’s even almost too late.  So what do you do at that point?  How do you sort of regroup and pick up? BILL YATES:  Yeah, and that’s what we’ll focus on today is looking at those troubled projects, those that are in recovery mode, those that need turnaround. ANDY CROWE:  Right.  And so Bill, maybe not just the ones in recovery mode, but the ones that need to be in recovery mode. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  Maybe they’re going along, business as usual.  They haven’t detected trouble yet.  So let me ask you, if you’re thinking about a project, what’s the canary in the coal mine to you to know if there are problems on the project, to know if it’s time to kind of circle the wagons and start thinking about it differently, put it in recovery mode?  When do you – what are some of the triggers? BILL YATES:  Yeah.  There are – that’s the perfect place to start.  There are many triggers to me, many signs to look at to detect trouble.  And some of those are real soft skill type things.  You’ve got to read people.  Others are hardcore metrics.  So you start, if I think about soft skill stuff, Andy, I think about some of the past projects that I’ve worked on where things, the train came off the rails.  And many times you could pick up on it in your interaction with a customer.  The customer’s attitude towards you or towards the project or towards the team changed. ANDY CROWE:  Right. BILL YATES:  In some cases, the customer disappeared.  They no longer had an interest in the project.  And that was scary.  That’s scary. ANDY CROWE:  Well, as long as the money’s still flowing, I guess it’s not all that scary. BILL YATES:  Yeah, right.  Yeah, you may think, you know, well, there are times when I wish my customer would go away so we could get something done.  But what I’m talking about here is the sudden neglect.  It’s like you’re dating someone, and they’re not returning your phone call. ANDY CROWE:  The new term for that is “ghosting.”  You’re being ghosted. BILL YATES:  Right.  So your customer starts ghosting you.  There’s no longer an interest.  Or they seem – maybe they’re not showing up for the status meetings the way they used to.  They’re not being responsive when you’re asking for decisions to be made.  So customer or senior management, you know, could be that my customer is still engaged, but maybe this is a project I’m doing for external purposes, and my internal manager is kind of giving me the cold shoulder.  They don’t have that availability or interest anymore.  That to me, too, is something I need to investigate that could be trouble. ANDY CROWE:  So that requires some intuition, though, on the PM’s part, you know, because you can drive yourself crazy trying to read into every non-returned phone call or every missed meeting or things like that.  I’m a data guy.  And to me, I like to see information.  So one of the things I love to look at, I love earned value metrics.  And I’m a believer in the saying – there’s an old saying that two points make a line, and three points make a trend.  And I pay attention to that because when I see, for instance, if I see a performance metric, your schedule performance index or your variances trending down over two or three reporting periods, then I’m going to start paying a lot of attention to that, if I see things consistently coming in. I also watch – and I’m a big believer in holding people accountable to individual estimates.  And when I say “accountable,” I’m not saying you would necessarily let somebody go because they missed several estimates, but you loop back with them.  You help them kind of steep in that.  You show them, hey, you estimated here, and you came in here.  And in fact I’m working on a chart right now that tracks people’s accuracy to their own estimates over time. BILL YATES:  Excellent. ANDY CROWE:  Because I’m fascinated with that metric.  It helps.  The more accurate you can get your team to estimate, the better off you are. BILL YATES:  Oh, yeah. ANDY CROWE:  So I pay a lot of attention to that. BILL YATES:  That’s good over the life of the project, too.  So that makes sense to do that, to really jump in and hold them accountable right upfront with that. ANDY CROWE:  How about rework? BILL YATES:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, yeah.  Rework is a big one to me.  That’s a key metric.  If I’m tracking rework, and to your point about trends, if rework is trending up suddenly?  Or change requests.  Let’s say there’s a sudden spike in change requests. ANDY CROWE:  Right. BILL YATES:  Those are warning signs to me.  That canary is starting to show signs. ANDY CROWE:  Those are kind of evil twins, rework and change requests. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  They sort of go together.  There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over. BILL YATES:  Yeah. ANDY CROWE:  And so you’re forced to relook at something.  People just didn’t get it right at some point. BILL YATES:  There’s another for me, too, Andy, where if I think about, let’s say we’re tracking expenses, and we look back over the past month, and maybe we paid a lot more overtime, or paid higher consulting fees than normal.  That tends to raise an eyebrow for me, too. ANDY CROWE:  This is getting a lot more attention at a federal level, too.  This whole idea of overtime is starting to – people are paying more attention to it.  So businesses definitely care about it.  Now the government’s starting to care about it in a very different kind of way and forcing people to track it and account for it a little bit differently. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  So it’s going to get more attention.  There’s no question. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  In a larger project, sometimes if you’re the project manager, and you have a larger project team, and a certain area starts to have higher consulting fees or more overtime, that could be an indication to me that, okay, they’ve got an issue they’re dealing with.  They don’t really want to tell me about it yet. ANDY CROWE:  Right.  So my wife had a professor in college, and she went to Furman University, that you perhaps know well. BILL YATES:  Go Paladins. ANDY CROWE:  And her professor’s quote that we still use many years after we’ve graduated was “Things take longer than they do.” BILL YATES:  Nice. ANDY CROWE:  So I think every project manager can relate to that, absolutely. BILL YATES:  Yeah. ANDY CROWE:  So we have a problem. NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  And it seems like a little delicate balancing act here sometimes to determine just how big of a problem. BILL YATES:  And let me – one other symptom that I don’t want to overlook, too.  Nick, sometimes as a project manager you’ll pick up on things within the team.  There could be some conflict on the team that you don’t understand.  Is this personal, or is this because they know there’s a bigger issue that, again, I don’t have full exposure to yet?  Or do I just have, like, warring parties on the team?  What’s going on here?  Is this something that’s going to upend the cart?  Is this going to throw us off?  Because suddenly I’ve got like a team funk going on here.  I can’t explain it. ANDY CROWE:  So this is the thing.  The PM, the project manager’s at a point, and you’ve got sort of senior manager of the organization and sponsors above you.  And you can picture that as a triangle with the top pointing down.  And if that makes sense, the tip, the sharp point of the triangle is down. Then on the other side is the team.  And the PM is right in between those two and is sort of at this friction point.  It is a challenging job. And so the PM a lot of times will pick up on team distress and distress within the senior management of the organization, sponsors, et cetera,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● TIM KELLY NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s a great opportunity to talk about what matters most to you.  Whether you’re a professional project manager, or maybe you’re working toward one of your certifications, we want to help spark your imagination, light a fire under you, and encourage you along the way.  And we do that by talking about issues, friends in the field, and hearing from those in the trenches who are doing the job of project management. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two guys who know the score when it comes to project management.  They’ve been there, done that.  They know what it takes to succeed.  And they are here to help you succeed.  They are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, as we look back over our previous podcasts, we’ve had some amazing guests on our show.  And Andy, it looks like we’ve got another heavy-hitter today. ANDY CROWE:  We do.  We’ve got a great guest.  Tim Kelly with McKesson is in the house today.  So welcome, Tim. TIM KELLY:  Thank you. NICK WALKER:  Let’s meet you, Tim; okay?  Tim Kelly, an executive director of technology for McKesson.  He’s with the company’s Business Performance Services business unit.  He has more than 20 years of experience in information technology, information systems management, software and product development, program and project management, as well as wearing many other hats.  Tim, welcome to Manage This. TIM KELLY:  Thanks.  Awesome to be here. NICK WALKER:  Tell us a little bit more about you.  We want to get to know you a little bit better. TIM KELLY:  I have a kind of a unique background.  I grew up managing McDonald’s restaurants, and that was an opportunity to shape the foundation of how I understand people and how to manage profit principles.  So it was a unique opportunity. NICK WALKER:  You know, a lot of people might laugh at that:  “I started at McDonald’s.”  But that is a perfect example of putting what you’ve learned into practice in bigger arenas. TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.  I was studying economics at the University of Utah and had an opportunity to practice what I was studying at the same time.  I learned management principles and clearly a number of key projects.  An example would be trying to put a new HVAC on the roof.  So it had to happen, and you had to figure that out as a manager of a restaurant.  So absolutely had an opportunity to apply the principles.  I wasn’t yet certified at the time, to be clear.  This was many years ago.  But I did recently have a chance to hook up with Velociteach and become certified. BILL YATES:  Yeah, so 2009, Nick.  I had the pleasure of standing in front of a class and looking at the eager eyes of Tim Kelly as he was mastering the Project Management Institute’s framework on project management.  And Tim and I are friends.  We go back further than that.  But it was a rare treat for me to have a buddy in the classroom. TIM KELLY:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  And it was a lot of fun helping you reach that goal. TIM KELLY:  It was awesome.  I tell you what, I also trained for a number of years.  So I opened a training business with Packard Bell NEC in my past.  And just a quick plug for the work that you guys do, the approach, the mnemonic approach about how to retain and learn information, absolutely awesome.  Scored very highly on both the pretest at the end of Bill’s session and then of course did really well on the exam.  So not only did it prove useful from an exam perspective, but I think the approach allowed me to retain the content and then leverage that in business.  So that’s just true-to-life real stuff from someone who’s gone through it and then had to leverage it. ANDY CROWE:  Outstanding. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, bring us up to date now.  What are some of the hats you’re wearing right now? TIM KELLY:  Let me walk you from, if I could, from when I became certified.  I had an opportunity to do some new things for the first time.  And again, the certification was the foundation of that.  I led product development and essentially grew a team of five engineers in building a new product for Hughes Telematics at the time, which then became Verizon Telematics.  We grew that five individual team members into 120 people across 12 delivery teams and built a product that gets plugged into a vehicle, transmits data to a cloud-based communication platform, and then shares that data with both, in this case, State Farm, who was a consumer of the content, and with the consumer so you could see the data. So it started kind of my product development software engineering experience, after I was certified.  Then went on to work for McKesson and an opportunity to lead customer and technical support, which were my foundations and my roots because I began doing that with McDonald’s.  You see a thousand people a day, and you learn how to be nice to people.  It’s important. BILL YATES:  It’s funny.  Nick, I want to jump in.  I remember talking shop with Tim when he was working with Hughes and developing this technology.  Well, later in life, and I may have told you this, Tim, later in life I plugged one of those devices into my vehicles. TIM KELLY:  Oh, did you. BILL YATES:  Yeah, to try to get a reduced insurance rate.  So thank you, my friend.  I think.  The jury’s still out.  Hopefully it will be a decrease and not an increase. TIM KELLY:  Yeah.  It was a complex exercise, a lot of patents for the business.  Again, lots of learning, though, the foundation and the work you guys did for me. NICK WALKER:  Tim, one of the things we’ve talked about on this podcast again and again is the Agile world.  Tell us a little bit about how you’ve applied all of that to the project you’re working on. TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.  A quick bridge from that huge telematics experience.  We started with Agile for the first time.  I had not been an Agile practitioner before that.  And I was not certified in Agile at the time.  But we leveraged it, and I learned a great deal.  We scaled the teams. Joining McKesson later on, four years later, began in customer service, moved into engineering, began applying Agile principles again, and had several teams, five different product teams with McKesson at the time, responsible for electronic medical records and practice management applications.  And it became very clear that these five different product teams could operate independently, and they could do reasonable well with Agile. But if you have a large product that comprises many teams, then Agile in and of itself, even lean Agile, tends to not break down, but become challenging when you want to scale large teams and have them understand the product vision, how they interact together.  And that was a challenge we faced and one we had to wrestle with.  And that’s when we began to look at the Scaled Agile Framework. BILL YATES:  SAFe. TIM KELLY:  SAFe, exactly.  And SAFe is a freely available framework for scaling Agile.  There are others out there.  We chose the Scaled Agile Framework because we thought it had the most experience.  We studied the case studies that go with it, and we found it to apply best to our scenario.  And in my world we have 23 delivery teams, 160 resources across a broad spectrum of the technology framework.  So not just product development or Agile teams, which is a little bit unusual because we are a business performance services, a service-based company. So we have IT back office, which is unusual to think, am I going to apply Agile to IT back office?  We did that.  We have 60 people in that space across various IT functions, and we have a business intelligence team, both managing, developing, managing their infrastructure.  And we applied SAFe to that group, as well.  We have classic product development in engineering, and we applied it to that group.  And then, last but not least, probably the most exciting part of the puzzle is that we have portfolio and program management, which is the core of driving SAFe successfully. NICK WALKER:  Can we back up for just a second and tell me, what is SAFe?  How does that fit into this scenario? TIM KELLY:  Yeah, SAFe is a model where you can take Agile teams, and kind of the secret sauce or the value proposition in SAFe behind just lean Agile... NICK WALKER:  Secret sauce.  Did you see what he did just there? BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. TIM KELLY:  Little McDonald’s trade secret – is that you can, when teams get very large, how they interact to be the most efficient for both either a large-scale business or just a product, it tends to break down when you have all those teams together.  Bringing people together, a classic thing, is that we’re all over the U.S.  So we have 160 resources that are not in a single location.  So they’re all over.  But finding ways for them to communicate successfully together and partner together to understand the vision, scale and schedule the work, and prioritize it with the business is what SAFe does. NICK WALKER:  So SAFe is a new approach overall and is probably new to a lot of people that you’ve been working with.  It was new to you. TIM KELLY:  Absolutely. NICK WALKER:  What are the challenges that come with applying a new approach? TIM KELLY:  Yeah, thank you for asking.  It is – you have to both educate – I had to educate myself.  We have to educate our business partners.  And as I think about the transformation we were trying to effect, and the transformation – it’s a big program.  Maybe for all the listeners, that’s the way I would frame it is there is an enormous number of things to do.  They are linked together in smaller projects.  And the biggest challenges, of course,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we meet to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We’re into project management certification, doing the job of project management, and we get inside the brains of some of the leaders in the industry. I’m your host, Nick Walker; and beside me are the resident experts Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  Now, in a perfect world you could look up “project manager” in the dictionary, and you’d find their pictures right beside the definition.  They are the epitome of project management.  They’re project managers themselves.  They instruct other project managers and those working to become one. Now, guys, we decided that this topic deserved a double header.  So we’re going to pick up where we left off last time.  The subject, Andy, performance reviews. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, Nick.  In the podcast number 12, the last time, we dealt with this topic kind of generally.  And this time we’re going to get a little bit more specific.  We’re going to get into some best practices, some practical tools and techniques. But to me, one of the things that we can do here is look at other organizations who are doing it right.  Last time we talked about a couple of ways that were outmoded, maybe that didn’t work so well anymore.  Now we want to look at the ones who are doing it right.  What are they doing?  How are they approaching it?  You know, because things change.  The same techniques that worked in the 1940s maybe don’t translate so well today.  A lot of organizations are doing some of the things the same way we did them in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it’s time to take a fresh look at it.  So we’re going to try and update that. But the bigger point here, this is one of those areas that causes project managers a lot of anxiety in giving performance reviews.  They don’t want to do it.  They get torqued up about it.  And a lot of times it’s even worse when you’re on the receiving end.  You know, you sit there, and you and I both know, everybody, everybody who’s listening to this podcast has probably had the experience where your manager gives you a performance review.  You hear several things you’re doing right, and then maybe one thing that you’re not doing so well.  And what do we walk away and focus on and obsess about the rest of the week is that one thing.  So we’re going to look at all of this today, but we’re going to get a lot more practical. NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Before we get into some of those best practices, let’s rewind just a second, talk about maybe what sets a good performance review apart from a bad one.  Last time we talked about the old school we’re all familiar with, the annual review, the bell curve.  Now we’re talking about a new way, less formal, more frequent reviews.  We talked about some of the companies that have been involved in this new way, Bill. BILL YATES:  Right, companies such as Accenture, Adobe, Deloitte, and GE.  Those are some places where we can take a peek and see what’s working for them and distill some best practices from that and share that. NICK WALKER:  So some of the things we want to get into today are how to give a performance review; when to give a performance review; how to receive a performance review.  So let’s talk a little bit about some of these.  Let’s spend some time talking about when.  When is the best time to do this? BILL YATES:  Yeah, and this was interesting.  So we talked about the breakaway from the annual review and how, like the companies I just mentioned, they’re ditching the annual review and saying this doesn’t make sense.  There’s too long of a gap between the performance and the review, the feedback.  Let’s make it more frequent, and let’s make it less formal.  Quarterly seems to be the rhythm that is coming out in most cases. However, we talked about in our first episode some of the Agile practices and some of the things that we saw with that.  Andy mentioned some of the rhythms that are built into Agile, and the retrospectives that are done there, and even the daily stand-ups.  So I think the challenge for the project manager is to look at their business, to look at their projects and think about, all right, what makes sense?  When is a logical place for me to stop and have a review, have a conversation with team members?  That can vary; right?  Kind of depends on the projects, the length of the projects that we have. And even, you know, I think about our own experiences, Andy.  The reporting cycle that we run into, some organizations have a reporting cycle that lends itself really well to a quarterly review.  Financially, for instance, we may do a review then.  So depending on the type of project setup that you have, or the key metrics for your organization, you may find an ideal time to hit the pause button and have that performance review. ANDY CROWE:  You know, Bill, I had an interesting interaction with a company that’s deep into Agile.  And it was at a project management event I went to recently, and we were discussing the podcast in general and discussing the fact that we were talking about this.  They said, you know, we do Agile.  And so really with the level of Agile transparency that we embrace, everything’s on the wall.  All the performance metrics are on the wall.  We don’t really do reviews because it’s all publicly reviewed all the time. And that sounds good at first, but really you don’t assume that people are going to get it that way.  You don’t assume, A, that people are necessarily going to take away – some people have blind spots.  And even though they can see that they’re lagging behind, they may not understand completely the impact on the organization and some of the reasons why.  So that needs to be discussed.  But then there’s another reason for compliance.  So you have to do reviews. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  You have to do them for HR purposes.  Big organizations, small organizations should do reviews.  And I agree with you.  I think quarterly, making them smaller, making them more frequent, little bit more manageable is a better way to go. BILL YATES:  Yeah. NICK WALKER:  And I love the NFL illustration that you gave last time about how the coach gets in there, gets into the player’s face right away. BILL YATES:  Yeah, right. NICK WALKER:  Makes an impact. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  And, you know, in Atlanta, sometimes the owner gets in the NFL player’s face right away, too. BILL YATES:  Dallas fans can relate to that, as well.  Yeah, but Andy, to build on your point, you think about that in an Agile world, maybe the team sees.  They can look at the kanban.  They can look at the burn up, the burn down charts and see how the team is doing.  But they may not have a good sense for how they – they may not know the personal impact they’ve had.  So again, back to that sports analogy.  Hey, the team won.  We came back in the fourth quarter and won the game, so everybody’s excited about that.  But the coach is still going to have that review for each position player as to how – what was your performance?  What was your contribution to that? ANDY CROWE:  You have to because people do not always construct the same narrative for their performance or lack thereof than the team or the coach does. BILL YATES:  Right.  That’s true, yup. NICK WALKER:  There’s probably some managers listening to this, though, who are saying, okay, this sounds great.  Sure, that’s ideal to do these reviews immediately.  But isn’t that going to cost me a lot in terms of time and money and productivity? BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Great question.  Sure.  Yeah.  I think about a colleague I ran into recently, and he had a team of 25 or 30 under him that he had to review.  And he had been – “Hey, I haven’t seen you for a while.  Where you been?”  “I’ve been on the road doing performance reviews.  It’s that time of the year.”  And, “Oh, wow, how many you reviewing?”  “Twenty-five, 30.”  “Really.”  And so he was telling me the hours and hours he put into this. ANDY CROWE:  There’s a flag on the field right there.  That is absolutely too many people to have to manage and review. BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  So it was interesting.  But because this is less formal, this should be less costly.  And I think, again, doing the research, I think Accenture had a great example.  The CEO of Accenture had a quote.  They determined that they would disband rankings, their old system, in 2016 and go with a more fluid system of ongoing feedback.  And in doing that, there’s a great quote.  Nick, you’re the professional.  You can actually handle these tough names.  You can pronounce them correctly.  So I’m going to toss this to you. NICK WALKER:  Sometimes I can.  But this is a French guy.  And my French is so bad that even my French professor in college made fun of my accent.  But CEO Pierre Nanterme. BILL YATES:  There you go. ANDY CROWE:  We’ll live with that.  And Mr. Nanterme, if that’s incorrect, you’re welcome to contact the podcast, and we will issue a correction. NICK WALKER:  Might even get a mug out of it. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, he might even get a mug. NICK WALKER:  But CEO Pierre Nanterme said, “Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process.  It’s huge.”  He says, “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.”  Yikes. BILL YATES:  Ninety percent.  That, see, to a manager, to someone who’s – again, I think of that guy that I ran into, the colleague who had been on the road.  I think if you said, hey, guess what, next year you’re going to spend 10 percent of the time on this.  Really.  Well, huge savings; right?  It frees him up to do – and project managers, you can relate to this.  It frees you up so you can actually do your real job. BILL YATES:  Right?

Giving and receiving performance reviews is an anxiety-producing event. We’re talking through that from a project manager’s perspective.

The inclusion of Agile into the PMBOK Guide, gives us an indication of how Agile is changing the world of project management.

David Gibson joins the team in the studio to talk about his experience in strategic planning, customer engagement, business development, and being the program manager for the Pentagon’s MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected military vehicle.

Tune in now for our most intriguing episode yet. Dr. David Bray joins the crew to discuss his career leading up to becoming the CIO of the US Federal Communications Commission. He also shares his philosophy on "change agents" and how to empower the edge.

Louis Alderman and the team focus on the 6th Edition of the PMBOK Guide and discuss the recent exposure draft and how it will impact the PMP Certification Exam in the future. Tune in for the latest and greatest.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● NEAL WHITTEN NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s a great opportunity to talk about what matters most to you, whether you’re a professional project manager, or maybe you’re working toward one of your certifications.  We want to help spark your imagination, light a fire under you, and encourage you along the way.  And we do that by talking about issues and trends in the field and hearing from those in the trenches who are doing the job of project management. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two guys who have been in the trenches.  They know what it takes to succeed.  They are here to help you succeed.  Athey are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, here we are again.  And we’re going to be joined by another expert in just a moment.  But I’ve got to confess to you I’m a little antsy to be outside right now.  We’ve turned the corner into spring.  There’s just something about the freshness of everything in this season, something in the air that... BILL YATES:  Nick, it’s called pollen. NICK WALKER:  I wondered what that was.  Yeah.  Yeah, the tree pollen, it gets me.  But the brightness, the newness of the season kind of makes up for the sneezing almost.  So spring is here.  It’s nice to have that.  But I’m really looking forward to hearing from our guest today.  Neal Whitten is a project management professional.  He’s a speaker.  He’s a trainer, a consultant, and a mentor to those who are up-and-coming in the field of project management.  His newest book is called “The Gift of Wisdom:  Lessons for a Lifetime.”  Neal, welcome to Manage This. NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, thank you.  I’m honored to be here. NICK WALKER:  It’s always good to kind of hear a little bit about folks’ backgrounds before we kind of delve into everything.  Tell us a little bit about kind of where you’ve been. NEAL WHITTEN:  Okay.  So we’re going to start by putting the audience to sleep.  I have a degree in electrical engineering.  Hired on at IBM as a software engineer and took early retirement there, and have been on my own for over 20 years, doing my own thing, but all related to project management. NICK WALKER:  A lot of our listeners may already be familiar with you, your work on Velociteach.com.  You’ve created a lot of content for us.  You’re kind of another resident expert, really. NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, this is absolutely true.  You know what, we all are legends in our own mind, let’s just put it that way. BILL YATES:  Well, I’ve got to jump in on that. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, Bill. BILL YATES:  This is Bill.  It’s interesting, the studio that we’re in, Neal has been in this studio to produce about close to a dozen eLearning courses for us now.  And one of the things I love about the perspective of Neal, I mean, you hear it.  He was with IBM for 25 years.  He’s an electrical engineer.  Yet so many of the topics that are passion points for him have to do with soft skill, their leadership, their how to be strategic and think big picture.  And so we’re privileged and honored to be partnering with Neal. NICK WALKER:  And you trained, Neal, in a lot of environments, a lot of different various organizations.  What common thread do you find in all of these organizations? NEAL WHITTEN:  I’ve trained in every environment that I can imagine, frankly.  Let me give you an example of something that happened not long ago which is indicative of what a lot of us trainers face.  So I get a phone call from a potential client.  Client had been referenced to the training that I do and said, “Neal, I’m interested in you coming out and giving us some training, and it’s typically in leadership types of things.  But I have a problem, and I need your help on it, and this is the problem.  We’ve had a lot of trainers come out, trainers just like you.  And when they’re through training, they get good evaluations.  People like it.  They feel like they’ve learned a lot.  And when the trainer has left, the information has stuck for all of a week, maybe a month, and there’s a few pockets that may have lasted for a while.” But, the client says, “What are we doing wrong?  Or what are you, as a trainer, doing wrong?  Or is project management overhyped?”  And the answer is, first of all, project management is not overhyped.  It may not be being used very well.  And then I proceed to talk about how you can actually institutionalize project management in an organization and get it to stick. NICK WALKER:  So what are some of the steps that organizations can take to make it stick? NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, actually, in my view, there’s five steps.  And I will tell you I had written an article not long ago for PM Network magazine, and it describes these five steps.  But the first step is to identify a project management champion and set a plan.  Now, that sounds like a pretty easy thing to do, but you’ve got to have one person, not a department, not a sideline thought, but someone who’s actually dedicated to project management, owns it and is held accountable for it, and puts a plan in place.  And when I say a plan, think about where you are today.  Think about where you want to be, I would say two years from now.  Look at the gap in between and lay out a plan that is measurable from quarter to quarter.  And if you find that you’re falling behind some quarters, then – this is run like a project – then go ahead and put some actions in place to get yourself back on track.  But somebody’s got to be held accountable. ANDY CROWE:  Neal, from a leadership standpoint, that makes so much sense.  I love the phrase “One head to pat and one butt to kick.”  And so it kind of ties to that, in a sense, of having one person who’s a champion, but then one person that you can hold accountable, as well. NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah.  And what’s interesting, when you do identify that champion, I expect the champion to not be a senior manager.  It needs to be someone who’s an expert in project management.  But you do need a senior manager who also champions you.  So those are the two people.  But the non-senior management is the one held accountable. BILL YATES:  Now, Neal, one thing that I’ve heard you say before related to this role is “No wimps need apply.”  What do you mean by that? ANDY CROWE:  Bill, I think he’s talking about the two of us.  We’d be out. BILL YATES:  Sorry, this is not applicable to you. NEAL WHITTEN:  I’ll tell you what I run into everywhere I go, guys.  Again, I’m an old guy.  I’ve been around a lot.  And I believe in people.  And I know what they’re capable of doing.  I find that most people have so much more talent than they actually exercise.  And when I say “No wimps apply,” if you want to be the best, if you want to work in the best organization, produce the best products, that’s not an accident.  And you don’t need to apologize for being the best.  Sso when I say “No wimps apply,” I’m talking about if you want to be a project manager, forget about running the entire organization from a project management perspective.  Just being a project manager, it’s important that when you come to work every day you understand you own the business of that project.  You are a businessperson first and a project manager second.  And when you think that way, that leadership starts oozing out. BILL YATES:  Perfect.  And I love, you know, you pointed out the great combination is to have that senior leader who supports that project manager.  Then, as a project manager, I feel like this person, she’s got my back.  She’s going to give me the resources that I need.  The door will be open when I have an emergency, a risk has occurred, we need to respond to it.  So there’s a relationship there that’s very healthy for an organization. NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah, let me say something about that senior leader that the project manager has as his sponsor.  What a lot of us do is, when we have a senior leader around, we expect to get direction from that senior leader.  I’m not talking about that at all.  I want this person who’s a project management expert giving direction to the senior leader, telling that person what is needed in the organization in terms of funding, in terms of training, in terms of the sequence of steps we’re going to go through to get from where we are today to where we need to go. NICK WALKER:  All right.  So we’ve got our project management champion.  Where do we go from there? NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, the second of the five steps is define a project management methodology.  And I don’t expect the methodology to be foolproof because that’s impossible.  It’s going to need to evolve over time.  It may include Agile.  There’s opportunity for Agile, there’s opportunity for non-Agile, and there’s opportunity for hybrid.  What’s key is this:   Define something.  You have to have a baseline from which to start.  And even though you document it, don’t assume that by people reading that document, they’re going to understand it.  They won’t.  You need to have a class, whether it’s a half-a-day class or a day class.  You figure it out in your organization. But you also need to figure out, when you put the methodology down, how are you going to teach the hard skills?  Because people, you don’t just say in your project management plan “We need to gather requirements.”  How are you going to do that?  How are you going to perform risk assessments?  And How are you going to control change control, that sort of thing.  So those things have to be taught in addition.  But that’s all part of the second step. BILL YATES:  When I hear “project management methodology,” of course we have to tip our hat to the PMBOK Guide.  But I think you’re talking about something even more practical, perhaps, than the PMBOK Guide, when we’re defining a methodology and what’s really going to work for an organization.  So my question, Neal:  Who should own that?