Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

Kory Kogon talks about the science behind extraordinary productivity. Hear how to get the right things done, both personally and professionally, and with quality.  Kory highlights three productivity challenges: decision management, attention management, and energy management, and she describes the 5 choices to implement to master these challenges.

Negotiating, recruiting, career planning, interviewing... rarely taught, crucial skills that are indispensable to career success. Listen in as Mark Herschberg, author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You, gives valuable career advice about pivoting and about the value of knowing your Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) tactic to deliver significant negotiating power.   Table of Contents 01:40 … Meet Mark02:58 … Pivoting Your Career04:56 … Impact Of COVID on Career Progress06:27 … Post Pandemic Work Shift08:19 … Being Intentional with Relationships11:01 … How to be Better at Interviewing15:11 … What are Good Interview Questions?21:17 … Preparation for Negotiations23:48 … The BATNA Approach27:10 … How to Anchor your Negotiations31:37 … How to Contact Mark32:48 … Closing. MARK HERSCHBERG:  So you want to prepare ahead of time, think about what is it that you want to get out of this negotiation.  What’s your ideal outcome?  What’s your BATNA, your Best Alternative To Negotiate Agreement?  That’s the point at which you walk away.  You shouldn’t take anything less.  What are some possible scenarios that might come up?  What are some tradeoffs you might want to do?  And what might the other side be doing?  WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  I am Wendy Grounds, and joining us on Skype is Bill Yates.  Today we’re talking to Mark Herschberg.  Mark was educated at MIT, and he’s spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune 500s, and academia.  Mark helped create the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, MIT’s career success accelerator, where he’s taught for 20 years.  Bill, you’ve read Mark’s book, and you’re going to tell us a little bit about that. BILL YATES:  Yes.  The goal of his book is to be a career success accelerator, just like you mentioned.  And there is so much application to project management.  He’s got a chapter on communications, and the leadership chapter talks about how do we motivate team members, different ways to do that.  There’s some familiar topics here, things like Tuckman’s Ladder, the five different stages for project team development, looking at the 5 Whys technique, the Iron Triangle.  So he goes into some of these things that we’ll look at as project managers and go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that.  And then he goes deeper, and those are the topics that we want to talk to him about today, things like negotiation, interviewing, tips that I think project managers can really benefit from. Meet Mark WENDY GROUNDS:  Mark, welcome to Manage This. MARK HERSCHBERG:  Thanks for having me.  It’s a pleasure to be here today. WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to hear a little bit about your book.  You authored “The Career Toolkit:  Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You.”  What prompted you to write this book? MARK HERSCHBERG:  Years ago, when I first started hiring people, software engineers, project managers, I found when I had asked them a technical question, I’d get a technical answer.  But when I would ask a question like what makes someone a good teammate, what are the communication challenges we face, I would get blank stares.  And I realized we never teach this in our undergraduate curriculum.  So I had to start training up folks that I was trying to hire. At the same time, MIT was getting similar feedback from corporate America and began to put together their own program.  So I heard about this.  I was about a year ahead of them.  I said, “You know, I’ve been working on this.  Can I help?”  So I then got involved with MIT.  I helped develop this program.  I’ve been teaching for the past 20 years.  But of course these skills, it’s not just for MIT students.  It’s not just for students.  They are universal skills.  Again, corporate America said these are the skills we want to see,

If your team alignment is off, this misalignment becomes amplified with remote teams. Hear about tools to manage the human side of your project as we take look at The Team Alignment Toolkit.

Hear about an award winning project to repurpose a 125-year old train station into an aquarium. A project that includes designing destinations and creating animal habitats that tell lasting stories.

The 2020 national elections proved to be divisive and controversial. Join us as we take a look behind the scenes with Gabriel Sterling, who became the face of Georgia elections. Gabriel publicly debunked election conspiracy theories and confronted the provocation of threats against election workers. We talk with Gabriel about people, processes, and technology as he describes the unique challenges he faced as the project manager in the role of Voting System Implementation Manager. He explains the request for proposal (RFP), procurement process, and negotiations on a project that aimed to launch the largest implementation of a technology platform for elections in the history of the United States.

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,

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,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. 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. Table of Contents 02:03 … Meet Prasad03:19 … Next Generation Project Risk Management09:12 … Tool 1: Ambiguity Risks12:49 … Tool 2: Emergent Risks14:07 … Dealing with Unknown Unknowns18:40 … Tool 3: Opportunities23:07 … Tool 4: Integration of Cost and Schedule Risks24:34 … Communicating Risks to Upper Management28:59 … Tool 5: Adaptive Technique – Iterative and Incremental methods32:02 … Tool 6: Risk Response Strategies35:14 … Get in Touch with Prasad35:44 … Closing Prasad Kodukula:  We’ve got to break down those silos so that we can communicate more freely, more quickly across different functions because when we are talking about resiliency, we want to make sure that we could put together a cross-functional team very quickly that could work cohesively together. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Listeners you can still claim your free 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 autofill, but type in “Velociteach” and the title when you are submitting your PDUs.  We do apologize for the inconvenience. I am Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill Yates.  Bill, today we’re talking with Prasad Kodukula.  He is a PMI Fellow, a PMI advisor, thought leader, coach, author, and entrepreneur with more than 35 years of experience. BILL YATES:  Yeah, I think people will quickly figure out Prasad is an overachiever. WENDY GROUNDS:  Absolutely. BILL YATES:  He’s taken three big awards with PMI:  the 2010 Distinguished Contribution Award, the 2016 Eric Jenett Project Management Excellence Award, the 2020 PMI Fellow Award.  So this guy is very well decorated. WENDY GROUNDS:  He is also a self-proclaimed global ambassador of project management.  He’s spoken on project management and innovation leadership in nearly 50 countries, and I enjoy talking to him about South Africa.  He goes there quite often.  Unfortunately, with COVID, he hasn’t been able to get there. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  But we were able to talk a little bit about South Africa, which was really cool. BILL YATES:  Talk about home. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  So Prasad is going to talk with us today about one of the topics that’s of keen interest to him and certainly to us.  He’s going to look at risk management and describe six next-generation tools for risk management. WENDY GROUNDS:  Prasad.  Thank you so much for joining us. PRASAD KODUKULA:  Hello, Wendy.  Thank you for having me. Meet Prasad WENDY GROUNDS:  Prasad, with a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering, you obviously did not set out in your career intending to become a project manager.  How did you discover that this was the path for you? PRASAD KODUKULA:  Well, that’s an interesting question.  You are right, Wendy.  I did not start to make a project manager in my career.  And it happens with a lot of people.  It happened to me by accident.  So I call myself an “accidental project manager.”  So I started as an R&D engineer, and within two or three years they asked me to manage projects.  I didn’t know anything about it.  I said sure.  Sounded like a pretty good idea, sounded like a nice title to have, so I became a project manager by sheer accident. BILL YATES:  That’s hilarious because, you know, you think, okay, here’s Prasad, an accidental project manager, which you’ve won three amazing awards with PMI.  You’re a PMI Fellow, which is really the feather on the top of the cap.  That’s an amazing award.

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.