Episode 19 — Advice for Someone Just Starting in Project Management

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 the things that matter most to you as a professional project manager.  These include the ins and outs of just doing the job of project management; how to get certified and stay certified.  And we hear from some of the leaders in the industry. I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  You’ve got questions?  They’ve got answers.  Hey, guys.  It’s been a couple of weeks since we were all together.  It’s good to be back with you. BILL YATES:  Yeah. ANDY CROWE: It’s good to be reunited. NICK WALKER:  I hope you both look forward to this time as much as I do.  This is a great time to get together.  And I mentioned that we like to deal with questions.  One of the questions we’ve been hearing about is earning PDUs.  As most of us know, we need 60 PDUs, those are Professional Development Units... BILL YATES:  Correct. NICK WALKER:  ...every three years to keep the PMP credential current.  And when somebody works that hard to get that credential, they don’t want to lose it. BILL YATES:  That is true. NICK WALKER:  Simply because they don’t get enough PDUs. BILL YATES:  Right. NICK WALKER:  So we’ve mentioned it before, but it’s probably a good idea to go into more detail.  We actually offer PDUs, free PDUs to our listeners. ANDY CROWE:  Right.  This podcast is good for PDUs.  And Nick, just one thing to add a little color to that is it’s not just the PMP.  You’ve got to have them for all the PMI credentials.  So PgMP, CAPM, PMI-ACP. BILL YATES:  ACP, yup. ANDY CROWE:  All of them.  PfMP.  So this is the currency of our people. NICK WALKER:  Let’s talk a little bit about how to get some of those PDUs from this podcast.  Each Manage This Episode, I understand, is registered with PMI as a “Category A PDU.” BILL YATES:  Yeah.  That means it’s top of the line, top-shelf platinum level. NICK WALKER:  Oh, yeah.  And, you know, we’ve aligned each episode to the appropriate areas of PMI’s Talent Triangle.  Tell us a little bit about that. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  You’ve got to have – so there’s three legs of a Talent Triangle, hence the word “triangle.”  There’s technical skills, there’s leadership, and there’s business savvy.  And you have to have at least eight PDUs from each of those legs.  So now the days are gone when you can read a book and claim all of your PDUs from reading a book or from giving back to the profession, which used to be a lot of people would get involved in their chapter, and they would give back, and they would get their PDUs that way.  Now you have to have a certain number from training.  And so this really comes in handy here. NICK WALKER:  And the great thing is we make it simple here.  All you have to do is go to Velociteach.com and select “Manage This Podcast,” Manage This Podcast from the top of the page, and you’ll see a big button right there.  It says “Claim PDUs.”  And that spells out the steps.  You can find the PMI Activity ID by selecting the episode from the list.  You’ll see that near the top of the page, as well. BILL YATES:  Correct, right, you’ll see it right there.  And that’s the data that you need to submit that PDU claim.  And like you said, the Claim PDUs button, that spells out all the nitty-gritty details for those PMs.  And they can follow along and check off the list and see it right there on PMI.org. NICK WALKER:  So this is an easy way of getting the PDUs.  I hope lots of folks will take advantage of that.  So let’s give them some information so they can... BILL YATES:  Earn the PDU, yeah. NICK WALKER:  Yeah, let’s do it.  You know, sometimes it’s good to kind of take a step back.  You know, we’ve talked about a lot of things over the last several weeks with all these podcasts.  But a lot of people are interested in a career in project management.  But maybe it’s a good idea to talk about where to begin.  Can I get a little background from you guys, just to help us know how you got started? ANDY CROWE:  You know what, Nick, there are – I get this question so many times that somebody comes along, and they say, “My son or my granddaughter is graduating from college, and he or she wants to be a project manager.  How do they get started?”  And it’s a really interesting thing because there are a lot of paths into project management.  I’ll tell you this.  My own opinion is it’s easier, and doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s easier if you’re coming from a domain where you have some expertise.  And this is one of those things that not everybody agrees on this.  This is my opinion.  I think it works better for a project manager to kind of stick within some domain, like construction, like information technology. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I mean, you think about so much of what you have to do as a project manager is either come up with estimates or figure out resources or lead your team in doing that.  So if you know something about the industry and about the types of projects – you’ve been involved in them, you’ve had your sleeves rolled up, you’ve had your hands in the dirt – you’re going to do them better.  And you’ll be able to assess and see if something is reasonable and have some expertise in that. ANDY CROWE:  So the argument on the other side of that, and it is a fiercely debated topic in our world, but the argument on the other side of that is that, if you have good business analysts, and the business analysts are doing the job that a BA is supposed to do, then the project manager can basically outsource all of that and keep the project finely tuned and moving.  Trouble is, my experience doesn’t line up with that so well.  The one project where I got really burned, I was out of my domain.  I was trusting BAs, and I did not get good data.  And if I had only had some particular expertise to know that, I would have done better. Now, that said, there’s merit on both sides of it.  But I believe it’s easier to become a project manager if you know something about what you’re doing.  It’s certainly a lot lower risk.  You don’t want to go in and become a construction project manager and not understand construction. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  You’re going to get into trouble.  So that’s my thing.  You know, my path, Nick, I came up, I started out my career as a C++ developer.  So I was a coder.  And I got promoted up to team lead, which was interesting because I was not the most tech, and I probably wasn’t the most talented developer on my team.  And suddenly they said, “Hey, you’re going to be team lead.”  Wasn’t asked what, whatever.  But it was a promotion.  And a promotion’s a promotion; you know?  So I said, “Great.” BILL YATES:  So you said, “Yes, sir.” ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, okay, this is good news. BILL YATES:  That’s me. ANDY CROWE:  So I was excited about that.  Suddenly I was the leader of a team.  And I’m getting to define coding standards, and I’m getting to approve designs and architecture and all this stuff.  And I was able to do those things.  And after about two years of that, maybe 18 months, I was recruited to become a project manager in an organization.  And I had no idea what I was doing.  But here’s the problem.  It always looks easy.  And you know the Peter Principle.  The Peter Principle says you’re promoted to your level of incompetency.  You’re promoted up until the point when you can no longer do the job.  And Scott Adams came along later – was it Scott Adams who does “Dilbert”? BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah. NICK WALKER:  Yeah. ANDY CROWE:  Scott Adams came along later.  He wrote a book called “The Dilbert Principle.”  And “The Dilbert Principle” said, look, the Peter Principle there was some good there because in the Peter Principle you had – your boss, even though he or she was incompetent, they could probably do your job better than you could. BILL YATES:  Right. ANDY CROWE:  You know, they’ve done it, and they got promoted.  Said, but with the Dilbert Principle, the Dilbert Principle says they look around, and they find the poor sap who can do the least amount of damage and make him or her the project manager.  Okay?  That’s the Dilbert Principle.  So the PM is going to be somebody who is just, you know, hopefully they’re not going to screw things up.  That can often be the case.  And I’m worried sometimes that I started my career dangerously close to that because I was recruited as a PM because of my technical knowledge, because I understood the way the coding worked and things like that, the way software architecture worked. And suddenly I was asked to do a project plan.  Nick, I had no idea what I was doing.  To me, that meant a Gantt chart.  That meant a schedule.  And so I put together a great schedule.  And my boss looked at it and just had this moment, you know, it was a face-plant moment.  And he said, “Look, this is not going to work.  This is not a project plan.”  To me it looked great.  I thought, of course it is.  If it’s not, what is it?  And he took me back, and he said, “I want to show you what one of your colleagues gives me when I ask for a project plan.”  And he opened up a binder.  And I was floored. Bill, I had never seen anything like this.  This was all the stuff that’s supposed to be in a project plan.  A schedule, yes; but a schedule management plan, and a communication management plan, and a change management plan, and on and on and on.  Risks identified.  Lists.  Stakeholders.  Contact info.  Everything this guy needed to manage a project was in that binder.  And I was totally blown away.  And when I saw this – the thing is, I may be slow, but I can be taught.  And so when I saw this, the light bulb started coming on.  I said, “I’ve got to learn to do this.”  He said, “Here.  You can have this copy.”