Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

Andy and Bill tackle your questions in this episode of Manage This. We appreciate your feedback, and we’ve dedicated this episode to your questions. Andy and Bill share their career stories and the relatable challenges they have experienced as PMs.

Tricia Molloy talks to us about setting and achieving goals. Tricia explains the Reticular Activating System, Vision Boarding for project success, overcoming obstacles, and techniques for reducing stress and distractions.

How have primary functions of the business analyst evolved? Have tools, practices, and expectations changed? What BA skills are most important today? In this podcast, BA expert Laura Paton discusses the changing mindsets and roles of the BA.

Agile is not for everyone. Project managers face 2 big questions: do you want to make the transition to agile, and can you make the transition? Steve and the team discuss the indicators as to whether or not a not a project manager is a good fit for agile.

The Mercedes-Benz Stadium and Home Depot Backyard. Hear how project managers Bill Darden, President and CEO, and Matt Dale, VP of Darden and Company kept these world class sports and entertainment facilities on track. Hear about their efforts to manage expectations, communicate clearly, and drive decisions.

Wayne Turmel is the cofounder of the Remote Leadership Institute and the author of many books, including a coauthored book with Kevin Eikenberry, “The Long-Distance Leader:  Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership.” The dynamics of managing virtual remote teams. Learn strategies for maintaining productivity in long-distance project teams.

When trouble hits, many managers cut and run. In this podcast, we interview Steve Corcoran who talks about the importance of building trust to address adversity.

If the Business Analyst and Project Manager are both superheroes, can they coexist? Kupe says “Yes”! Jonathan “Kupe” Kupersmith joins the team to answer questions from a BA’s perspective relating to decision making and the value a BA can deliver.

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every other week we get together to talk about the things that matter to you as a professional project manager.  And it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a PM veteran or someone simply exploring what the field is all about.  We’re here to offer some ideas, some perspective, and draw on the experiences of others who have been down that road and have realized success. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two who are still on that road, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. ANDY CROWE:  Thanks, Nick.  We’ve had so much interest in the topic of artificial intelligence within project management, and we’ve got somebody here who knows a lot about AI who’s going to be processing that with us. NICK WALKER:  Our guest here in the studio is Chris Benson.  He’s an artificial intelligence machine learning strategist, a solution architect, and a keynote speaker who specializes in deep learning.  That’s the computation technology that is driving the artificial intelligence revolution. Chris is the co-host of the Practical AI podcast, produced by Changelog Media, designed to make artificial intelligence practical, productive, and accessible to everyone.  He’s the founder and organizer of the Atlanta Deep Learning Meetup, one of the largest AI communities in the world, with nearly 2,000 members.  Chris, it’s great to have you here on our podcast. CHRIS BENSON:  Thank you very much.  Happy to be here. NICK WALKER:  Could we start off by just defining for our listeners what artificial intelligence is? CHRIS BENSON:  So artificial intelligence means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.  In my view it’s really a marketing word more than it is anything else because over the years the definition of artificial intelligence has changed and evolved.  So what you might have thought of in the 1980s is vastly different from what it is in 2018.  So before I define it, I want to point out I was in a group of artificial intelligence experts that Adobe was hosting about six weeks ago.  And in doing that, they asked us all that same question; and all 10 of us gave 10 different answers. ANDY CROWE:  Well, and the joke is, if you ask two economists for a definition, you get three answers. CHRIS BENSON:  Absolutely. ANDY CROWE:  Same idea, huh. CHRIS BENSON:  Yup.  So it was very much that.  So I wanted to note that.  Take what I say with a grain of salt. ANDY CROWE:  What do you think it is, yeah. CHRIS BENSON:  So what I think it is, is a narrow definition.  I would consider that in 2018 artificial intelligence is synonymous with deep learning, which is the application of deep neural networks. ANDY CROWE:  Interesting.  Well, learning is certainly a part of AI that I think that’s almost a universal component that goes across most definitions.  Most definitions talk about the ability to imitate intelligence and things like that, imitate human intellect.  But that ability to learn and grow as a neural network is an interesting part of it.  So how do machines learn? CHRIS BENSON:  So there’s different techniques.  And those all broadly fall under the definition of machine learning.  The thing that separates deep learning, which is how I’m defining AI, from the rest is that it can take an enormous number of inputs – we call them “features” in data science – and process them in a highly nonlinear manner and give inferences, which are essentially probabilistic predictions on what the answer might be. For instance, to make it real:  If you have machine vision, and you are putting a cat in front of the camera, and it will come back and identify that it thinks it’s a cat.  It might come back 97 percent.  But the difference is these technologies aren’t going to come back with 100 percent.  They’re probabilistic technologies.  But they can make these identifications using a model that is many orders of magnitude more complicated, and therefore in some ways more capable, than previous models of machine learning. ANDY CROWE:  I have a funny comment to that end.  About two weeks ago I looked across the street, and I saw something, and it’s funny what your brain does when it doesn’t have something that fits a pattern or that makes sense.  And I saw a cat coming across a street.  It was a couple hours before dark.  And I looked at it, and this cat was enormous, and it was walking funny, but my brain’s telling me, well, it’s a cat.  And I called my wife over to see.  It was a giant raccoon coming across the street. CHRIS BENSON:  Oh, okay. ANDY CROWE:  And, yeah, now that’s a daily ritual.  That raccoon crosses the street.  But it’s interesting that you say that, that it’s not 100 percent certain, because I was pretty certain, and I was wrong. CHRIS BENSON:  Yes.  I mean, there’s an analogy to be made there is that, saying this very loosely, neural network technologies are essentially modeled after the brain, a mammal’s brain.  Not just a human brain, but any mammal’s brain.  The cerebral cortex, specifically.  And so, with that said, you can take sometimes tens of thousands of inputs into that.  And, yes, we make mistakes.  And just as we make those mistakes, today’s neural networks make those kinds of mistakes all the time before the training gets right. BILL YATES:  I think it’s worth noting that your wife pointed that out to you, that mistake. ANDY CROWE:  She did not.  I self-corrected. BILL YATES:  You self-corrected. CHRIS BENSON:  He got there before she could get to it. ANDY CROWE:  As we talk this through, project managers are looking at this idea of AI.  And a lot of people believe that it may have an earlier impact on project management than some of the other domains.  Which is interesting to me.  I’m not sure I agree with that.  What do you think? CHRIS BENSON:  So I don’t know if it’s having an earlier impact because talking with people all the time about this, I see it having an impact everywhere, in just about every industry on the planet.  And matter of fact, I haven’t been able to come up with an industry that I don’t think will be impacted in the years ahead.  Some maybe sooner than others, but you’re already seeing it across medicine and transportation, financial, you know, security, you name it.  It’s already starting to have a place.  Machine vision’s everywhere.  Natural language processing is everywhere.  These technologies are becoming pervasive.  We’re all using it every day, every time you’re doing Google searches or using your email or whatever.  So it’s already affecting our lives in a profound way. BILL YATES:  That’s true.  Even in my home, you know, I think of my friends Siri and Alexa.  iTunes is getting smarter; whatever streaming service has these recommendations and suggestions.  It’s as if they can see inside of me. CHRIS BENSON:  They literally know more about you than you consciously do yourself in many ways because everything that you do is data for them, and it is constantly crunching that data behind the scenes. ANDY CROWE:  Well, so now that gives us an interesting transition because project managers are also supposed to predict, to some degree.  That’s an important part of our job.  It’s not all of our job by any stretch, but it’s an important part, is to look at things going on and to spot some signal in the noise, if you will, or some trend that maybe the team doesn’t even consciously know yet.  Maybe the customer hasn’t picked up on this.  Maybe the developers don’t know.  But the PM sees it.  That seems like a pretty natural fit for AI. CHRIS BENSON:  It’s a very natural fit, especially so – and there’s a question that I’d like to even pop in before that, and that is, what will AI do well for us in general?  And that is today very specific problems that are highly complex.  So if you have many, many different inputs that come into a problem, but you’re narrowing the scope of what it’s trying to accomplish to something that’s very specific, then in many cases we’re seeing AI technologies that are improving upon even human experts.  And I would say that that is likely one of those. ANDY CROWE:  So that’s interesting to me that AI is sort of tuned toward very specific and very complex problems.  The human brain is amazing at general things.  Not everybody can make change, you know, for a $5 bill.  And so it’s kind of funny that the human brain can do a lot of broad things, but not everyone is really good at super complex things. CHRIS BENSON:  Yeah, you’re making a great point there.  And that’s that we should not think of today’s neural networks as analogous to an entire brain.  So you could think of it as a very small collection of neurons in your brain that has been trained through your own activity to do a very specific task or identify something.  That’s what today’s neural network would be.  So if you were going to get to a level of complexity in dealing with daily life, where you’re doing that kind of generalization, that would be like having lots and lots and lots of deep neural networks that are all put together to sort of simulate what your brain is doing. ANDY CROWE:  Well, and psychologists tell us those neural networks sometimes compete, as well. BILL YATES:  Right. CHRIS BENSON:  They do. ANDY CROWE:  And that’s interesting from my standpoint, that then you have some kind of function that prioritizes those things and knows which ones to listen to and which ones to tune out.  That’s fascinating. CHRIS BENSON:  Yeah, our own brain creates all sorts of noisy signals because each little piece of our brain is being trained for specific things, and they don’t always go together well.  And so just like that, that’s actually in robotics right now we’re seeing that,

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s our chance to meet with you and discuss what really matters in the world of project management, whether you’re new to the field or have been doing it for decades.  We want to encourage you and challenge you, to cheer you on and help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can come along the way.  We talk to the experts, people who have gone before us, so we can benefit from their experiences and their successes. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the guys who make it all happen here, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. ANDY CROWE:  Nick, it’s great to be here today, and I’m really excited about this ‘cast. NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Spoiler alert, it’s very possible that we’re going to laugh some today.  Our guest is Sean Glaze, an author, speaker, and teambuilding facilitator who is all about inspiring groups to have fun laughing together so they can have more success working together.  He’s the author of three books:  “The Unexpected Leader,” “Rapid Teamwork,” and “The 10 Commandments of Winning Teammates.” Sean has been a successful basketball coach, an educator for more than 20 years, and in that time has gained some valuable insights into how to develop winning teams.  He’s the founder of Great Results Teambuilding, which he uses to share those lessons all over the country, through entertaining speaking engagements and teambuilding events.  Sean, thanks for joining us here on Manage This. SEAN GLAZE:  Appreciate it, Nick.  Looking forward to being here and sharing some great information with your audience. NICK WALKER:  Sean, I’m always fascinated how skills developed in one area can transfer over into others.  For example, when did you realize that the lessons you’ve learned from years of coaching basketball could translate well to business leaders? SEAN GLAZE:  That is a tremendous question.  And honestly, it was probably about eight years into my coaching career when I realized I wasn’t as good a coach as I thought.  I had spent most of that first decade as a coach, like many project leaders, like many team leaders regardless of industry, focused on strategy.  And for basketball, that’s X’s and O’s, and that’s skill development and strategy.  And you realize after you go through a couple of seasons where you know you’ve not gotten as much out of your talent as you should have that there’s something missing.  And what I had neglected for nearly a decade was culture. And everybody has probably heard culture eats strategy for breakfast, but as a young coach I had never heard that.  But I certainly lived it.  And so the eye-opening mirror moment for me was recognizing, at the end of a really tough losing season, I’m going to have to change if I want my team to change.  And leading teams as a project manager, as a coach, you realize that strategy is what you want to do.  Culture determines how well your people are going to do it.  And so the relationships and connections that I then began to focus on made us far more successful in the future.  And I realized that what I had done with my team could hopefully help other leaders with their teams, regardless of athletics or business or others. ANDY CROWE:  You know, as I listen to this, Sean, I’m thinking, strategy you could change over a long weekend.  But culture is a slow turning ship a lot of times to turn that around.  And especially if you’ve got a toxic culture or a problematic culture, to reframe that in a positive way takes a lot of time and tremendous energy. SEAN GLAZE:  Absolutely.  And that’s something I think first as a leader you need to know what it is you want.  Because if I don’t have clarity about what I want my culture to be and what actually constitutes culture, I can’t deliver that or influence that on my team.  So a lot of my growth as a leader was me educating myself.  And hopefully those are some things that I’ll be able to share today so that your audience can move forward after the podcast to actually do a few things differently so you do impact that culture. BILL YATES:  Sean, when we were talking before, you said there were five dangerous words.  That relates to this area.  What were those words? SEAN GLAZE:  I think the five most dangerous words that any leader and any teammate could utter are “That’s just how I am.”  Because that becomes an excuse for poor behavior.  That becomes an excuse for poor culture.  That becomes an excuse for poor performance, versus me taking ownership of my opportunity to grow.  And that may not be comfortable, but I’ve got to be willing to be bad long enough to get better in that role. ANDY CROWE:  Fortunately, I’ve modified that to say “That’s just how I’m wired.”  So that makes it all okay; right?  That’s different.  We just totally transformed that.  Okay, maybe not.  Maybe that’s not so good. BILL YATES:  Sean, one of the things that I was looking forward to asking you:  Who had the greatest impact on you?  Maybe it was a coach or a mentor.  Who influenced you as a leader? SEAN GLAZE:  You know, that’s something that I’ve been asked before, Bill.  And I don’t know that there’s been one specific coach that was that guy for me, or that was that female coach that kind of was the example I wanted to emulate.  I think what a lot of leaders do, if they’re lucky, is they do have somebody that pours into them, becomes somebody that is an active mentor.  I would guess that, from my conversations with others, that most people, like me, are really a combination of what they’ve taken in terms of a buffet, meaning that I like what this person does, and I like what that person does in different areas. So there have been a number of really high-quality mentors where I’ve taken, not just X’s and O’s stuff, which is important, but a lot of the culture stuff, and how do they build relationships, and what are they focusing on that’s not going to just be important on the court, but off the court.  And that’s the same thing with leaders in whatever industry is my interactions with my people are going to be far more important than just on this project.  I want to make sure I’m building relationships.  And those are some of the mentoring, I guess, influences that have really impacted me and hopefully made my teams that much more successful. BILL YATES:  Yeah, that’s good, that’s good.  You know, you talked about chemistry and culture.  And one of the things, when you and I were talking before, one of the things that you said that I thought was very quotable and right on point was, and I’m quoting you, Sean:  “People are hired for their technical skill and fired for their attitudes and behaviors.” ANDY CROWE:  I love that. SEAN GLAZE:  Yeah. ANDY CROWE:  So how can we – I agree with that.  I think you have, you know, there is complete agreement in the room.  How can we as leaders influence that? SEAN GLAZE:  Well, as leaders, you became a leader because of your technical skill, because you actually had mastered one role and were elevated to a new role.  And so as leaders, part of your job is to learn a whole new set of skills as a leader.  So how do I lead people instead of just leading myself? ANDY CROWE:  Well, and you know, the Peter principle is famous for that.  It says you keep getting promoted until you reach your level of incompetence.  And so you get promoted to the point where you can no longer do the job.  But the advantage to that, and there is an advantage to that model, is that my boss can probably do my job better than I can, at least as well as I can.  He or she has mastered that level of technical proficiency.  And so there are some advantages to it. SEAN GLAZE:  You would hope.  And I think we’ve all experienced that leader who maybe couldn’t do our jobs. ANDY CROWE:  The pointy-haired boss in Dilbert, right, yeah. BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah. SEAN GLAZE:  But you mentioned the Peter principle, and I really would take issue with some of that ideology because I think that certainly we are elevated to new roles because of our proficiency in previous roles.  But we become better if we choose to stay coachable. ANDY CROWE:  Right. SEAN GLAZE:  And I think that, as leaders, part of hopefully this podcast and part of your continuing growth as a team leader is your willingness to stay coachable and to continue to accrue new skills and new information so you can develop yourself and then be able to develop others. ANDY CROWE:  I’m more cynical than you are, Sean, but that’s okay.  That’s just how I am. BILL YATES:  How he’s wired. SEAN GLAZE:  That sounds familiar. ANDY CROWE:  But as I think through that, I bet everybody listening to this can, if they’re been in the workforce for any period of time, five years or so, you can close your eyes, you can picture one person who’s been promoted, they’ve done great, they’ve been promoted, they’ve done great, and then at some point... SEAN GLAZE:  Until. ANDY CROWE:  ...they give up, or they’re in over their head, or they don’t care anymore.  It’s hard to know what happens.  But they run out of gas at some level.  And the scary thing is sometimes that level is at a point where they can really do some danger; you know?  So you never know. SEAN GLAZE:  So, yeah.  And back to what Bill had mentioned, the quote “People are hired for technical skill and fired for interpersonal skills,” I think that absolutely plays into what you’re talking about, Andy, in that as leaders or as teammates, in any role in the organization, it’s not just what I’m good at in terms of technically, but what I’m good at in terms of relationships that develop our team success. ANDY CROWE:  It is an old saying that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.  It is absolutely true.  And somebody told me that early in my career,