Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Learn from the intriguing parallels between a jazz ensemble and an effective project team. Gerald J. Leonard demonstrates that music and project management share common principles as he offers a unique perspective on fostering a high-performing project team through the integration of music, productivity, workplace culture, and neuroscience. Table of Contents 01:41 … Combining Jazz and Project Management05:12 … Gerald the Author07:31 … Incorporating Jazz and Project Management09:39 … A Cadence to Managing Projects11:50 … Recognizing the Traits13:57 … Mentoring and Coaching14:52 … Kevin and Kyle16:10 … Jazz and Productivity20:01 … Gerald’s Recovery Story23:04 … The Pomodoro Technique and Flow26:03 … Motivation and Accountability31:23 … Employee Burnout34:33 … Getting into the Right Rhythm36:08 … Contact Gerald37:42 … Closing GERALD LEONARD:  ...it’s like playing jazz where things are moving quickly, meeting every day, things are happening.  Every two weeks you’re delivering something.  So things are happening really rapidly, and they can adjust because the customers say, “Hey, I don’t want that.  Let’s move to this one.  I want this requirement now.”  And you have to move and adjust.  Well, that’s like playing jazz.  Again, the song is moving pretty quickly.  So everyone has to, one, know their part, but also really lean in and listen. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome, fellow project champions, to Manage This! I'm Wendy Grounds, and joining me in the harmonious studio adventure today is Bill Yates, and Danny Brewer, our sound guy. Hold onto your project plans, because today we're diving headfirst into a fusion of beats and business. You heard it right – jazz and project management are about to collide in a symphony of ideas with a trailblazing maestro of maximizing potential, Gerald J. Leonard. Gerald is an IT project management consultant; but he also has two degrees in music and is an accomplished bass guitarist.  As a professional bassist, he uses jazz metaphors to illustrate how to build supportive and effective team cultures. Creating successful projects and high-performing teams is much like building a jazz ensemble. This isn't your average podcast – it's a symphony of ideas, where project management meets the jazzed-up art of success. So, buckle up, hit play, and let the show begin! Hi, Gerald.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. GERALD LEONARD:  Wendy and Bill, thank you so much for having me.  I’m really happy to be here. Combining Jazz and Project Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you tell us, just as an introduction, how you’ve combined your dual careers as a professional jazz musician and as a project management consultant? GERALD LEONARD:  Yes. I had done my bachelor’s and master’s in music, studied through the Manhattan School of Music with a gentleman at Juilliard, and played professionally in the city.  And then I did some ministry work back in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and I wanted to get back into music, but now I was married with two kids. I was kind of done with clubs and those kinds of things and thought, “Okay, so how can I keep playing and also make a good living and raise my kids?” So I got into IT at a time where, if you could spell IT, they were letting you in.  And so I got in.  You know, and I had my master’s already, so I thought, “I’m not going to go back to school for another degree.”  And then I realized they had all these certifications out there, the Novell certifications, the Microsoft certifications, the MCSE certifications, and all these different things like that.  So I just started going that route.  That led me to a place where for years I was doing project work, became a project management consultant with a number of different companies, did work for the National Archives and major corporations, helping them at the enterprise level.  And then I would go and play shows, or I’d play a concert, or I’d play a recital.  And I started noticing that sometimes I’d go into a gig, and I have no idea who the musicians are.  After the second rehearsal, we’re all best friends, we’re hanging out, we’re showing each other’s family pictures, and we’re talking about our careers and where we went to school, and we’re just connected emotionally. And there are a number of projects that I was on.  I remember one with the National Archives, we had a great team together.  And I thought that this is like playing jazz.  This is like playing music because everyone on the team, the developers, the business analysts, the testers and so on, me as the project consultant, we all kind of brought our expertise to the table.  And working with a gentleman named Larry Hines, his name’s popped in my head.  He was like the executive sponsor, our main audience, and he gave us the big picture of what we were trying to accomplish, and everyone just kind of subjugated their expertise to the focus of making this a great project. It actually turned out to be a really, really great project back in the day with the National Archives when they were doing, like, an electronic archiving system.  So that started the germination for me of seeing how music and what I’d learned as a kid playing music and all the things I’ve learned as a musician were being applied into my business world.  And then after that, all the other projects, there were elements of the vibe, or a feeling like I was playing music or a feeling like I’m working with other musicians. Then I’d go do music, and I was able to take the things that I was working with from business and apply them to my music so I was like running more efficient rehearsals or more profitable concerts and so on.  So it just all kind of tied together, basically culminated into me and around 2015 meeting with a gentleman named Dr. Willie Jolley and his wife Dee.  Willie’s one of the top five speakers in the world when it comes to motivational speaking.  Dee had her master’s in education. And I went to them for like a weekend workshop.  They honed in and said, “You know, you really help companies with their culture. And at that time, the song “All About That Bass” was out.  And Willie said, “If you could write a book and incorporate your bass with your consulting,” and he’s just, “Man, you’re going to make millions, do amazing work.” Gerald the Author I took that idea, and over time that book became “Culture is the Bass.”  You let that settle.  Just think about your favorite song where you’re kind of like bopping your head and listening to it.  When it starts off, you hear the drums and the bass.  And that bass sets the tone for is it rock?  Is it funk?  Is it R&B?  Or is it country?  What is it?  You can tell right off the bat based on the bass line. And I always thought you walk into Nordstrom, or you go shop on Amazon, or you go into your favorite local store, it has a vibe.  It has a feel.  And there’s something about it that you like that keeps bringing you back.  It’s the culture, which is kind of like the bass line.  And so my second book turned out to be “Workplace Jazz” because a lot of work went from really large project teams back in the day.  I mean, sometimes you’d go on a consulting engagement.  There’s 20 people, and companies were paying for it.  And pretty soon it whittled down to where you go on a consulting engagement, and there’s three of you.  Or there’s four of you.  And it’s like, we’re it, guys.  We’ve got to make this thing work.  We’re the quartet.  Right?  So that book was about what I learned from playing in small ensembles, and how it would mimic the concept of agile work as a project manager. And then in 2015 I wrote a course, because I had done some work with the Center of Medicare & Medicaid Services where I helped oversee two major programs in project management where we did certification courses.  And so I then wrote a course for myself to take the PfMP certification because I already had my PMP, the Project Management Professional Certification, and I had already spent my 10 years doing it, and I wanted the top certification, which is the Project Portfolio Management.  I had been doing that work for a while.  But at that time there were very few books around that are courses.  So I wrote my own course and took the exam and passed it.  And so a lot of my material now is based on that.  And in fact my last book, which was a business novel, called “A Symphony of Choices,” where a bass player becomes the orchestra manager and has to manage the orchestra.  So he reaches out to an old professor to teach him how to do that.  And the old professor, Dr. Carl Richardson, teaches him my course in small bites, all about Project Portfolio Management, decision-making, workplace engagement, and project management.  And basically mentorship saved a concert season Incorporating Jazz and Project Management BILL YATES:  That is so cool.  Well, I feel like we’ve got a sense for who you are.  And your right brain and your left brain are at 100%.  They are kicking along, man.  This is so cool.  So we want to go deeper into this topic of music and draw on the parallel of music and project management.  What are the key benefits of incorporating jazz music into project management practices? GERALD LEONARD:  Well, you know, when you listen to jazz, what you’ll notice is that they always start off with some kind of a melody; right?  And it may be a short melody, maybe a blues type of melody.  But they have this theme of music, right, that they keep coming back to.  But then once they play that, one of the musicians steps forward, and they start soloing. And soloing is simply, they’re not just like making this stuff up.  They understand the patterns of what they’re playing against.  They understand what they’re playing and how it correlates to what’s being played.

Are you unlocking the potential of a neurodiverse workforce and fostering a project team that capitalizes on the strengths of each individual? In this episode we talk about dyslexia and how it impacts a team's productivity and success. Dyslexia is quite common, affecting 15-20% of the population. Carlene Szostak and Madeline Szostak Hoge discuss the challenges faced by dyslexic employees, and offer innovative strategies to ensure that the workplace becomes a supportive environment that advances employee performance and productivity.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. A project story about a massive initiative focused on an EPIC implementation at University Hospitals in Cleveland. Hear why this project to streamline patient information, enhance care, and improve operations has the tagline "Best Implementation of all time." Table of Contents 04:29 … University Hospitals of Cleveland05:11 … The EPIC Integration07:18 … The Size of the Initiative09:51 … The Cost11:21 … Convey Calmness and the Right Mindset14:47 … The Guiding Principles18:38 … “Best implementation of all time.”21:48 … Kevin and Kyle23:17 … Risk Management28:09 … Time to Pivot31:31 … Big Bang Go Lives32:41 … Project Team Selection34:23 … Enterprise Program Management Office Perspective35:54 … PMO Resources38:15 … Takeaways from the Project42:56 … Find out More44:03 … Update44:36 … Closing WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer, our sound guy.  Thank you so much for joining us today.  We have three guests, which is something new for us, and we’re quite excited to have a really full house on the Zoom studio today.  Our first guest is Sami Othman.  He is an operations and IT leader who designs and executes breakthrough IT solutions that optimize financial performance and efficiency in organizations.  Sami is currently the IT leader assigned to the effort of the project that we’re going to tell you about today.  He’s leading the transformative initiative to move University Hospitals of Cleveland to an integrated electronic health record system.  This is what they call Epic, and it is certainly an epic 600 million investment project that will standardize all hospitals into a common system and streamlining processes and consolidating one patient record. Another person involved on this project is Lora Niazov, and she’s currently the director of the Enterprise Program Management Office at University Hospitals. Lora has also just become is an Adjunct Instructor of Project Management at the John Carroll University  She has over 20 years of experience in healthcare, information technology, and manufacturing industries. And then the other person on the project is Gubran Ahmed, and he is an experienced program management office leader with demonstrated success and strength in strategic planning, process improvement and problem solving, change management, and relationship building across many functional areas in organizations.  Currently Gubran is working at University Hospitals and is leading the Enterprise Program Management Office with a portfolio carrying a budget of over $200 million, encompassing 150 active projects.  And he tells us a little bit about that, as well, in the podcast. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Yeah he does.  And all three guests are going to provide a unique perspective on what they’re doing with this massive program and how they’re seeing it unfold.  And this is big. WENDY GROUNDS:  This is Epic. BILL YATES:  This is Epic.  The name of the software is so appropriate.  There are 29,000 users.  We’re talking 22 terabytes of data and 3 million patient records that are a part of this conversion and implementation.  I can’t wait to get into it, hear some of the nitty-gritty from them, and hear some of their takeaways, their advice from implementation of this size. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, their project tagline is “Best implementation of all time.”  We really do think so. BILL YATES:  Yeah, I can’t wait for our listeners to weigh in and say, “Yeah, that does sound like it.”  Or “No, mine’s better.  I’m going to tell Wendy about it.” WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  And listeners, if you have an epic project, if you are working on a project that you think the story is worth sharing, that you’ve got some incredible lessons learned, or you’ve got a project that you think you’d like our audience to hear about, please reach out to us.  Lora sent me an email, and here we are.  So we’re happy to hear from you. BILL YATES:  There you go.  That’s right. WENDY GROUNDS: Lora shared some exciting news with us as well, that the University Hospital Department of Enterprise Program Management has just won PMIs top 3 PMOs in the world!  They are going to be in Atlanta at the end of October to see if they are winners of the PMO of the year award. Take a look out for that if you’re following the PMI event at the end of the month. If you listen up at the end of the show, I am going to give you an update from Lora on their EPIC program and how their “Go Live” is going. So take a listen at the end of the show. Now, because we have three special guests today, I am going to welcome them each personally.  So first of all, my first contact was Lora.  Lora, welcome to Manage This. LORA NIAZOV:  Hello.  Thank you so much for having me.  I am very excited to be here.  I listen to this podcast all the time. And I also share it with my team.  And I appreciate you making a little bit of time for us.  Thank you. WENDY GROUNDS:  Sami, thank you so much for joining us today.  Welcome to Manage This. SAMI OTHMAN:  Oh, thank you so much for having me.  I look forward to our time together today.  I think we’re going to have a lot of fun together. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  We’re excited to hear about this project.  And last but not least, Gubran, thank you very much for being part of Manage This. GUBRAN AHMED:  Hi there.  Thanks for having us.  I’m looking forward to the conversation, as well. University Hospitals of Cleveland WENDY GROUNDS:  So we’re going to jump right in.  And I want you to just set the scene for us of the story of this project.  Tell us about University Hospitals of Cleveland.  How many hospitals and ambulatory locations does this include? GUBRAN AHMED:  The University Hospitals has been around for more than 155 years.  It has the mission of healing, teaching, and discovering.  And we roughly have a network of 21 hospitals.  That includes five joint ventures, more than 50 health centers and outpatient facilities, and we have over 200 physician offices in 16 counties throughout Northeast Ohio. WENDY GROUNDS:  This project is encompassing all of that? GUBRAN AHMED:  Yes, that includes everything. The EPIC Integration WENDY GROUNDS:  So now you’ve been working on this huge initiative.  You’ve been implementing an integrated electronic health record system, which you call Epic.  Can you describe Epic to us? LORA NIAZOV:  Yeah.  So it’s been a wonderful journey.  A little bit about Epic.  It was started by Judith Faulkner in 1979.  It’s a privately held company.  What I find fascinating is that everybody always talks about Steve Jobs and Apple.  And there’s very little buzz about Judith, when really she was a software developer herself.  She started the company in her basement.  It’s a multi-billion dollar organization right now.  The leading hospitals of the world use this software to take care of patients.  It’s a pretty fantastic story from a female leader in software development, especially from the ‘70s. So what Epic does is it provides an integrated health record system for all of patient data across your entire patient journey and story, whether it’s surgery or a visit with your primary care provider or whatever it may be.  It holds all of your information, and then you can share it across different hospital systems to enable continuity of care for you.  So that’s what we’re implementing. BILL YATES:  This is so important.  And then thinking about the complexity of that many health centers, that many offices, that many doctors that have to be coordinated. It is fascinating to me though, Lora, that the company started in 1979.  Just think of all the evolutions that they’ve made.  And it’s amazing that they were obviously able to take on new technology and figure out how do we implement this and still abide by HIPAA and all those things.  And they’re still a successful company and still the market leader today.  That really does speak to their longevity. LORA NIAZOV:  Yeah, it’s a wonderful place.  They’re based in Wisconsin.  They have over 10,000 employees.  We’ve met many of them, I feel like, at this point, with our implementation. BILL YATES:  All 10,000, yeah. LORA NIAZOV:  Yes.  And they have a wonderful fun culture being a software developer, and it’s been a wonderful journey.  We’re lucky that we get to partner with this amazing software.  It’s been a long time coming. The Size of the Initiative WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you give us a sense of the size of this initiative?  For example, tell us a little bit about the schedule and the budget and the number of people that are going to be expected to use Epic. SAMI OTHMAN:  Yeah, sure thing.  So if we back up a little bit and start from the beginning of this program, the board of directors of University Hospitals Cleveland approved this program, the UH Epic program, back in December of 2020.  And then, once we kicked off the new year in 2021, we focused on getting contracts signed with Epic and with our implementation advisor.  So that occurred in that first quarter of 2021. During the course of the middle year of 2021, we focused our efforts on standing up the actual program team, which is primarily made up of our IT resources.  So we leverage our own resources and just literally transition them over to the UH Epic program team.  So that process took place over the course of a few months.  We kicked off the actual program October of 2021, culminating with the final Go Live, which is scheduled for September 30th of this year. Now, the first Go Live that we had was March of this year, and it was primarily focused on our primary care practices.  But September 30th really is the rest of the health system.  So all of the hospitals and clinics that Gubran had mentioned earlier,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Mastering effective meetings is essential for project managers, as successful meetings contribute significantly to project success. Rich Maltzman and Jim Stewart say we should apply the same strategic mindset to meetings as we do to projects, and they offer insights to enhance your facilitation skills to conduct successful meetings. Table of Contents 03:07 … Great Meetings Build Great Teams04:30 … Criteria for a Good Meeting05:44 … Allow Humor to Influence Meetings06:46 … Making a Sad Meeting Better08:32 … Why People are Attending a Meeting09:55 … Project Manage Meetings13:27 … A Meeting Planning Mindset15:12 … Don’t Worry about Being Liked17:06 … Kevin and Kyle18:12 … Dealing with Conflict in a Meeting21:12 … Goa the Garrulous23:16 … Pat the Passive-Aggressive25:56 … The Fear of Forage28:29 … Risk Register29:45 … Virtual Meeting Success34:01 … Get in Touch35:00 … Closing JIM STEWART: If you blow the meeting, you get to make first impressions once.  So the level of planning should be commensurate with the meeting. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy Danny Brewer.  You can catch us wherever you listen to podcasts.  One of the apps that we’ve come across is Podurama.  It’s a free app for podcast lovers, and we are also there.  If you want to listen to us, take a listen on Podurama.  You’ll find a link to them on our transcript. We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, and advice from industry experts. One little thing to mention is we got an email from Feedspot, which is a content reader that helps people keep up with their websites.  And they told me that we are one of the Top 30 podcasts for managers on the web.  So we were very excited to hear that.  Shout out to Feedspot.  Thank you for voting for us. And we have some industry experts joining us today.  We’re very excited to bring you Jim Stewart, as well as a previous guest, Rich Maltzman.  Since 2003, Jim has been the principal of JP Stewart Consulting, and he’s a certified PMP, and he possesses multiple agile certifications.  He is a longtime member of the Project Management Institute and served for several years on the board of the local chapter.  With Rich Maltzman, he also is the co-author of the book “How to Facilitate Productive Project Planning Meetings” and its update, “Great Meetings Build Great Teams:  A Guide for Project Leaders and Agilists.” Rich Maltzman also has his PMP.  He has been an engineer since 1978 and a project management supervisor since 1988, including a two-year assignment in the Netherlands. Rich is also focused on consulting and teaching, and has developed curricula and taught at several universities.  But we’re very excited about their book “Great Meetings Build Great Teams,” and that’s what we’re talking about today. BILL YATES:  Yes.  This is a key to success for project managers is being able to successfully facilitate effective meetings.  So this is going to be a great conversation.  Plus, just reading through the book, there are so many familiar names and concepts that are there.  They make reference to Andy Crowe and the “Alpha Project Management Study” in his book.  They make reference to Alan Zucker, our instructor, who’s fabulous, and some of the blogs and research that he’s done.  And they also talk a bit about Wayne Turmel and virtual meetings.  We had him on Episode 64.  Wayne was terrific.  And also Carole Osterweil.  She was on number 90, Episode 90 with us, talking about facing uncertainty.  So lot of familiar folks that are being referenced here, and we look forward to talking about having more effective meetings. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Rich; and hi, Jim.  Thank you so much for being with us today.  It’s so good to have you both on the podcast. RICH MALTZMAN:  Glad to be here. Great Meetings Build Great Teams WENDY GROUNDS:  So we want to first find out – we’re going to be talking a lot about the book that you wrote, “Great Meetings Build Great Teams.”  Can you tell us the why behind this book? JIM STEWART:  Sort of my idea in a sense, but not really.  I worked with a guy at Brandeis University, and this gentleman has since retired.  But when I was thinking about writing a book, discussing ideas, says, “You know those meetings you used to run at those pharmaceuticals?”  He says, “I would read a book about that.”  That seems kind of dull, but okay.  So I contacted Rich, who I’d known, and now we have this second revised edition. And the why is because I guess it’s like asking why you need to be able to lay concrete, or why you need to be able to put a foundation on a house.  It’s fundamental stuff that has to be done.  And Rich and I, I know I can speak for Rich on this, I would think the majority of people running meetings aren’t doing a particularly good job.  And so we’re a bit evangelistical about that, about saying people should run meetings well.  The title of our book is “Great Meetings Build Great Teams.”  So we’re trying to get people to, A, run meetings better; and B, communicate better. So I think good meetings are meetings of the minds, and well-run meetings build great teams.  And we feel like we have a better mousetrap for that, and we can make that happen.  That’s really the why. Criteria for a Good Meeting WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you tell us what your definition of what a good meeting should look like?  What are the necessary criteria for a good meeting? RICH MALTZMAN:  Yeah, I’m going to take a creative approach here.  Think of it in terms of the ingredients of that meeting.  You need preparation.  You’re going to have a clear purpose, like a recipe, maybe even a picture of that cake or roast, whatever it is that you’re cooking.  You need the right people at the right time.  You need an agenda, a guideline of some kind, maybe a pinch of entertainment or excitement and fun, some means to record all the great ideas and conversation that’s taking place.  And one of the things that was actually in the title of our last book, facilitation skills.  This is a separate skill from running a project.  You need facilitation skills to make sure that everyone is joining in; and that, as we’ll talk about later, you don’t have people hijacking the meeting.  So those are the ingredients.  And I think if you put those all together with the oven preset at 350, you end up with a pretty good meeting. JIM STEWART:  And I’d like to add to the end of that, if I can, Wendy, which is that facilitation is at least as much art as science.  There’s even certification in it.  Facilitating is not an easy task, especially if you have 20 people from different cultures in a room with different expectations. Allow Humor to Influence Meetings BILL YATES:  The emphasis on facilitation in the book was one of the things that I really appreciated.  Another thing I appreciated in the book was the sense of humor you both have.  Just throughout the book, you guys drop these anecdotes.  You have little quips.  I really appreciate that.  I love it.  And I can see how that would influence more effective meetings, too. RICH MALTZMAN:  That’s intentional.  Jim is well known for his comments, snarky comments that he sticks in. JIM STEWART:  Yes.  However, however, you’re actually funnier than me.  Rich and I, when we meet, our meetings when we discuss the book, the first thing we do is rock and roll trivia.  The next thing we do is we clown around a bit.  We just do.  That’s our nature.  We found that we both like that.  And I think we talked about it in the book a little bit, be careful with the humor because it does grease the wheels, but you have to be really careful.  The humor that Rich and I grew up with earlier doesn’t fly.  The humor that makes fun of somebody doesn’t fly.  You have to be very, very careful.  When in doubt, don’t, is my mantra. Making a Sad Meeting Better  BILL YATES:  Yeah, in Chapter 2, right from the start you had me because, again, you talk about the musical references and the humor.  The title of the chapter is “Take a Sad Meeting and Make It Better.”  I love that.  What are some indicators of a bad meeting, and then how can we turn this around and improve our meetings? JIM STEWART:  It’s an interesting question.  First of all, even before you get to the meeting, there’s a grapevine.  People in your company will know who runs the good meetings and the bad ones.  So there’s that.  But if you go to a meeting, and the person running it is non-dynamic – I had that at the place where I was coaching.  It’s a young woman becoming a scrum master, and it was just not uninteresting subject matter.  It just was dull the way she presented it.  You have to sound like you’re interested yourself.  That’s the first thing.  You have to sound like you’re interested in what you’re talking about.  So that’s number one. Number two is having the agenda.  If I have no agenda, what are we going to talk about?  Number three is you’re 10 minutes in, and you’re discussing the first item because the owner is allowing Joe, Mary, Bob, whomever to hijack the meeting instead of saying okay, as we say on the agile side, “Elmo! Enough, let’s move on,” in a polite way.  And if somebody says, “We need to discuss this,” we go to the group and say, “Is this a showstopper?”  Is this, if we go down in the submersible to the Titanic, this thing’s going to implode?  Is it that level?  Or is something going to lead to a separate meeting?  You can make those decisions on the fly. So I think a bad meeting is when you come out, there’s either no agenda, or there was an agenda, and somebody says, “How did it go?”  We got through the first item.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Projects are instrumental in defining an organization's vision for a more sustainable future. Dr. Joel Carboni talks about Sustainable Project Management, and the goal to achieve a stated objective while considering the project outcome’s entire lifecycle to ensure a net positive environmental, social, and economic impact.  Table of Contents 02:23 … Green Project Management03:41 … Multifaceted Sustainability04:42 … The UN Sustainable Development Goals08:35 … Green vs. Sustainable Projects09:51 … The Lifecycle Impact of Projects12:09 … Barriers to Sustainability Adoption13:25 … Questions to Ask on a Project Kickoff15:40 … Ren Love: Projects of the Past17:49 … Changing Role of the Project Manager18:54 … Raising Awareness20:54 … How to Influence Stakeholders22:47 … How to Evaluate Impact24:30 … PRiSM Project Delivery Methodology26:02 … The P527:42 … P5 in Action30:24 … Project Managers can Affect Change31:37 … Contact Joel32:18 … Closing JOEL CARBONI: We’re not being taught to think outside the box of initiate to close.  It’s what is the impact of our work, and what happens beyond handover?  What happens at the end of the asset’s lifecycle?  So when we look at green projects, it’s are you taking a total asset lifecycle focus?  And that’s what we have to do. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds.  With me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy, Danny Brewer.  We’re so excited that you’re joining us, and we have a really interesting conversation today.  We’re talking about Green Project Management. Our guest is Dr. Joel Carboni.  He holds a Ph.D. in sustainable development and environment, and he has over 25 years of experience in various areas of project management including government, finance, consulting, manufacturing, and education.  In addition to serving as president emeritus of the International Project Management Association (IPMA) in the United States, Dr. Carboni is also the founder of GPM, Green Project Management.  And he’s the GPM representative to the United Nations Global Compact, where he was a founding signatory of the Business for Peace initiative and the Anti-Corruption Call to Action.  And he’s a contributor to the development of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. BILL YATES:  SDG is a Sustainable Development Goal.  We’ll hear from Dr. Carboni that he actually worked with the United Nations to define those 17.  Just some quick examples of some of those.  One of those is climate action; another is clean water; another is no poverty.  A final example, quality education.  So those are some of the sustainable development goals that we’ll refer to. Also Dr. Carboni is the creator of the PRiSM project delivery methodology.  We’ll make reference to that and the P5 standard for sustainability in project management.  He’s written training programs on green and sustainable project management that are offered to more than 145 countries.  He’s the lead author of the book Sustainable Project Management, and he is a well-traveled man.  We are fortunate to catch up with him and get to talk to him today. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Joel.  Welcome to Manage This. JOEL CARBONI:  Thank you.  It’s good to be here. Green Project Management WENDY GROUNDS:  We are looking forward to getting into this topic.  I’ve been watching your website and been looking at Green Project Management for a while.  And I’ve always said, “Hey, I want to have Joel on the podcast.”  So I appreciate you being here.  Now, you’ve done a lot of work in sustainability.  You established Green Project Management.  Can you tell us a little bit more about your organization? JOEL CARBONI:  Yeah, sure.  So GPM, Green Project Management, we’re a social enterprise.  And that sits in between a nonprofit and a for-profit company.  So what makes us unique is that a large portion of our income or revenue is redirected into social and environmental good.  So we don’t just make a profit, we try to funnel that back into the projects and for social good.  I started GPM as an idea back in 2009 and did so on a small side table in my bedroom, the idea that projects could be the delivery mechanism for sustainable development.  And since that time, we’ve grown year by year.  And we offer tools and methods, certification for people, our most popular being the GPM-b™, and also our organizational sustainability assessment model and other tools.  So we’re quite happy with the growth we’ve seen and what we’ve become. Multifaceted Sustainability WENDY GROUNDS:  Many people when they hear about sustainability, they just think about environmental issues.  Tell us a little bit more about what are all the issues of sustainability and how you teach that. JOEL CARBONI:  That’s a good question.  So sustainability is multifaceted.  We work with a lot of organizations, and I think it’s a little bit irresponsible for organizations who just focus on net zero.  We hear that a lot.  Net zero by 2050 or, you know, that aspect of sustainability is really all they focus on.  We can’t ignore human rights, which is a core concept of sustainability, as well as a fair and just economy.  We have to focus on all these at once.  So keeping all these balls up in the air, it’s a wide spectrum.  And so we have to figure out how do we actually address this.  That’s why we go always back to projects because projects address the economy.  They address change, and they employ a wide range of people and have an effect on the environment.  So we have the ability to address all these different factors by still doing good with our projects. The UN Sustainable Development Goals BILL YATES:  We are going to reference an episode that we had in the past.  It was Episode 120.  That was the first time that I got exposed to this idea of the 17 United Nations SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals.  We had Karen Thompson and Nigel Williams as our guests, discussing responsible project management.  Let’s bring these back up for those who are not as familiar with those 17 SDGs.  Remind us what they are and why they’re important to a project manager when it comes to creating value. JOEL CARBONI:  Sure.  That’s a good topic.  You know, the SDGs, I can say that I love them, and also I hate them.  And fun fact, I actually helped write them.  So, you know, I do have extensive experience, and my Ph.D. thesis was actually on the MDGs, which preceded them before that.  So I’ve been working with SDGs now for a long, long time. The problem with SDGs, if I could start there, is that they’re not written for us to take action as people.  They’re written for governments and for nations to say, hey, how do you fit into this puzzle, and how can you set targets and goals to address this in your context; right?  For example, the first one is end poverty in all forms.  Great.  You know, but poverty is really an economic decision.  We could do this if we wanted to, but they don’t address the root cause about why poverty exists in the first place.  Why does poverty exist?  So in the targets and goals, they say we have several targets to meet in terms of ending poverty.  It should just be, let’s just end poverty.  Can we all agree and just work towards that?  It doesn’t tell you why it exists or what social constructs are put in place to maintain poverty and to keep the different cast where they are.  It’s kind of a mess. So the SDGs are good in a sense that they bring and they highlight problems that we have to be addressing as a whole planet.  But it doesn’t address root cause.  And that’s really what we have to figure out as project managers.  What can we impact with our work?  Right?  If you break it down into small chunks, okay, we employ people.  Are we ensuring that they’re paid a livable wage?  These types of things are really important. I’ll give you an example.  I was giving a lecture several years ago in the south of France.  So the SDGs first came out.  So this is back in like 2016 or so.  And I was giving a talk to probably about 300 students.  I thought they were students in the room.  This was a university.  I had this big football, or soccer ball we call it in the U.S., in my hand, and it had the SDGs on it.  So I tossed it up at the crowd, said hey, the first one that comes to you, tell me, what does that mean to you and your work? And this guy caught it.  He looked at it, and he was trying to make sense of it.  He goes, “It just doesn’t relate to me.”  And it was about inequality.  And I said, “Okay, tell me, what exactly do you do?”  He goes, “Well, I’m a project manager, but I work in agile. We develop software for the airline industry.”  “Okay. Well, tell me, do you build it all here in France?”  And he goes, “Well, most of it.”  I said, “Okay, what do you not build here?”  “Well, some of it we outsource to different places.”  And I said, “Okay, where?”  He said, “Some goes to Pakistan.”  I said, “Okay, pause right there.  Tell me, do you select the vendors yourself?  Are you in that selection committee?  Are you part of that?”  “Well, yeah.”  “Okay, is any of your criteria ensuring that the people on the other end, your vendors, are paid a livable wage or work in healthy environments?”  “No.”  “Okay, what are your criteria for selecting a vendor?”  “Cheapest price.” And there you go; right?  We’re part of the problem, but we could be part of the solution if we put KPIs and measures into our selection criteria for vendors that actually address that issue.  So once I made that connection, he went, “Oh, now I see.”  And he started looking at all of them going, there’s inroads to all these through our work.  I’m like, there is.  But you have to take the time to actually break it down and go, what does this really mean to me?  At face value,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Amy King is a champion for the homeless! Hear how she boldly addresses the need for safe, rapidly deployable, living shelters, to deliver the dignity of private space for the homeless. This is a complex project which integrates social services to provide a healing community environment in each village, and also seeks to debunk adverse public perception towards homelessness. Table of Contents 02:28 … Meet Amy04:00 … The Homeless Problem05:11 … Homelessness Data06:41 … Designing the Shelters09:27 … Looking at a Pallet Home10:47 … The Prototyping Phase13:29 … Pitching the Project14:59 … The First Client16:35 … Talk to People with Lived Experience17:32 … Impact Stories19:38 … Returning Home21:15 … COVID as a Catalyst22:43 … The Impact of a Pallet Village25:30 … Forming a Team27:33 … Kevin and Kyle28:53 … Overcoming Obstacles33:01 … Requests from Cities33:30 … Overseas Market34:55 … The Goal to End Homelessness37:39 … “What I Wish I Had Known”40:55 … Where to Next for Pallet?42:32 … Access to Housing for the Homeless43:43 … Intrinsic Motivation for the Project45:36 … Find Out More46:06 … Closing AMY KING: So housing, there’s this really popular American narrative which is homelessness is a housing problem.  I 100% disagree with that.  ... A house, four walls and a roof, do not solve a person’s homelessness crisis.  Giving them keys to an apartment does not solve their homelessness.  You have to address the root cause issue.  That person will end up homeless again.  WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds.  With me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy Danny Brewer.  We are so excited you’re joining us today.  We have an incredible project story. Our guest is Amy King, and she is the founder and CEO of Pallet.  This is a public benefit corporation working to end unsheltered homelessness and give fair chance employment opportunities to people of all backgrounds.  Pallet has deployed more than a hundred villages across 85 U.S. cities.  Amy also co-founded Weld Seattle, which is a nonprofit that equips systems-impacted individuals with housing, employment, and other resources conducive to reintegration back into society.  And her passion is just incredible.  I think you’re really going to enjoy her story. BILL YATES:  Yeah, when you take a husband and a wife – and Amy has a background in psychology.  She is a psychologist by education.  Her husband is a master builder engineer.  When you take those two and combine them and take the passion they have, you end up with something amazing like Pallet. Just getting back to it, Pallet offers short-term shelter, community rooms, and private stall bathrooms.  A large interim housing community can be set up in a matter of days with minimal tools using this Pallet system.  Each Pallet structure is versatile.  Units can be used for a variety of purposes from sheltering evacuees to building command-and-support centers or for temporary housing for recovery workers.  Their motto is “No one should go unsheltered when shelter can be built in a day.”  WENDY GROUNDS:  And they’ve done so much more than just build shelters.  When you hear Amy talk, what started as a small project, it grew, and it became more and more, and they got involved in the community.  They got involved in the lives of the people who were living in these shelters.  BILL YATES:  And as we’ll hear from Amy, many of those that have experienced homelessness are now vibrant workers and contributors to Pallet. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Amy.  Welcome to Manage This. AMY KING:  Thank you so much for having me.  I’m excited to be here. Meet Amy WENDY GROUNDS:  We are really looking forward to getting into this topic and to hearing about the incredible work that you’re doing.  But won’t you first tell us a little bit about your background, your career, and how it led to fighting homelessness? AMY KING:  Yeah, absolutely.  So I actually studied psychology in school.  And I started out as a psychologist working  primarily with children, and then moved into the healthcare space and managed some surgical practices here at our local Level 1 trauma center called Harborview.  And then I did private practice for a while, so more on the business side of healthcare.  I learned a lot about business and kind of fell in love with business. At the same time, my husband, he’s a general contractor and has been for 20 years.  And so he started a construction company that we ended up very much by accident hiring people that were exiting the justice system to work in that organization, working with them, teaching and training them on the construction trades.  And my husband asked me to come work with him and help him sort of build out the business components of that entity, which I agreed to do, temporarily because I like being married to him.  I said, “I’ll do it for a while, and then I’m going back to healthcare.”  And then I just really fell in love with the people that were working with us, and I never left. So they really spurred us on to think about homelessness, addiction recovery, and justice system involvement, and kind of how that impacts people’s lives.  And Pallet, and we also have a nonprofit called Weld Seattle, those two entities were born out of that original entity.  So that’s kind of the wavering path I’ve been on since I got out of college. Yeah. The Homeless Problem BILL YATES:  You developed Pallet because you saw a problem.  Can you describe the homeless problem that you observed in your community? AMY KING:  Absolutely.  Yeah, when we started Pallet, you know, homelessness was really on the rise.  And it’s been a problem for a long time.  But public homelessness was really on the rise, and especially in cities like Seattle, where we’re from, where camping bans went away, and people were more publicly out in the open, and you could see them.  And the issue was more kind of in your face. And as we saw it and interacted with those folks, and we’re also employing people who had experience with living on the streets, we were learning a lot about trauma and how that kind of institutes these sorts of issues.  We learned a lot about broken societal systems and how they impact our ability to help people and respond to people.  And as we learned more, we just realized we couldn’t look away, and we couldn’t not do anything. Since then, of course, homelessness has really been on the rise, but being able to center voices of lived experience and spend our time around folks who have actually lived this way and learning from them has really shaped our response efforts, both from a product perspective and a model perspective.  And it’s been quite a learning curve for us. Homelessness Data WENDY GROUNDS: Do you have any data on homelessness? AMY KING: Yeah, I have so much data on homelessness! You may have seen the most recent PIT Count that came from the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the US Interagency Council on Homelessness. As of 2022, which is the most recent data, there were five hundred and eighty thousand people experiencing homelessness across the US. About forty percent of those live unsheltered. So they are outside or living in an uninhabitable situation, on the street, under a tarp, in a building that isn’t meant for human habitation. Interestingly enough, it’s important to know who the population is and characterize the population. We know that the data we have is not overly reliable and valid. But of the data we have, it shows that about seventy two percent of people experiencing homelessness are individuals, so individual adults that are living alone or have been estranged from their families. About twenty-eight percent are families. And about twenty-two percent of the folks that are experiencing homelessness are chronically homeless, meaning that they’re cycling through systems and they just stay outside and they’re struggling to get them engaged with services and move on. We also know that the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in America are people of color. There’s a large percentage of people that are LGBTQ, transgender youth, that’s a really high population. And then, males more than females, so a lot more men than women are experiencing homelessness especially unsheltered homelessness. So those are some of the high data points to know. Predominantly transient adults is who we serve though Pallet and who really fits our model well. Designing the Shelters WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us a little bit about the homes that you’ve developed, because I read on your website that you developed these homes out of Hurricane Katrina when you saw a need for people needing rapid shelters.  And now this has become also shelters for homelessness.  So just tell us about the actual homes that you’ve developed. AMY KING:  Yeah, so my husband, again, he was the original inventor.  He’s a general contractor so understands very much what it takes to build housing from a construction perspective.  After Hurricane Katrina he said, “It’s crazy to me that in the wealthiest country in the world that we crammed a bunch of people into the Superdome, and all of the health and safety issues that came out of that experience that were all over the news.” And really what it boiled down to was this idea of agency and independence of personal space, but with services.  And so it felt like we should be able to provide individualized housing post-disaster that allows people to feel safe and secure and not like they’re being exposed to health issues, which is of course even more relevant now because of COVID. But at the time, he felt like we should be able to do this better.  So he created the concept of a panelized shelter system, understanding that panelized construction is easier to deploy,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. How can agile project managers create conditions for self-organizing teams to thrive? In the agile world of a self-organizing team, the trend is to empower the team so the individuals doing the work can make decisions. So, what role do project managers play?  Hear about the three responsibilities of the new agile leader and some important skills to level up in order to lead an agile project. Table of Contents 03:03 … Humanizing Work03:50 … Empowering Decision-Makers05:21 … Changing the Role of Managers08:20 … Challenges for Project Managers09:32 … Complex Systems11:33 … Defining the PM Role13:58 … Coordinate and Collaborate16:35 … Who Does It Well?18:29 … What’s in a Title?20:33 … The Three Jobs of Agile Management23:49 … Project Manager Skills27:25 … Visualization Skills33:10 … Is Agile Right for Me?36:39 … Contact Peter and Richard38:19 … Closing PETER GREEN: ... one of the things that has been an underlying theme to these amplifier skills we’ve talked about – coaching, facilitation – is a real trust that the people doing the work can figure out how to solve it if I do the three jobs well.  If I create clarity, if I increase capability, and if I improve the system for them, they will be able to knock this project out.  They don’t need me to manage it... WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio are Bill Yates and our sound guy, Danny Brewer.  We’re so excited that you’re joining us, and we want to say thank you to our listeners who reach out to us and leave comments on our website or on social media.  We love hearing from you, and we always appreciate your positive ratings.  You will also earn PDUs for listening to this podcast.  Just listen up at the end, and we’ll give you instructions on how to claim your PDUs from PMI. Our two guests today are from Colorado and from Arizona, so we’re kind of jumping around the place.  But we’re very excited to have Richard Lawrence and Peter Green from Humanizing Work join us.  Richard’s superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities.  Richard draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science. He’s a Scrum Alliance certified enterprise coach and a certified scrum trainer.  His book “Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber” was published in 2019. Our other guest is Richard’s co-worker, Peter Green.  At Adobe Systems, Peter led an agile transformation and he co-developed the certified agile leadership program from the Scrum Alliance.  He’s also a certified scrum trainer, a graduate of the ORSC coaching system, a certified leadership agility and leadership circle coach, and the co-founder of Humanizing Work.  What I found interesting was, with all his other creative activities, Peter is also an in-demand trumpet player and recording engineer. BILL YATES:  Which will appeal to Andy Crowe, our founder, because he loves to play the trumpet.  Wendy, we are delighted to have Richard and Peter join us.  We’ve had conversations planning for this today with them, and they bring so much knowledge and experience to the table.  Here’s the thing.  Project managers traditionally are taught to direct and control team members.  So what role does management play in the agile world of a self-organizing team?  If my team’s self-organizing, what am I supposed to do; right?  How can they create conditions for self-organizing teams to thrive?  What is the function of managers in this new world, and what does an agile organization need from its management team?  Those are some of the questions that we want to tease out with them today. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, guys.  Thank you so much for joining us. RICHARD LAWRENCE:  It’s great to be here. Humanizing Work WENDY GROUNDS:  We first want to find out a little bit about you.  So can you tell us about Humanizing Work and the company you say strives to help individuals thrive at work?  So tell us a bit about your core philosophy. RICHARD LAWRENCE:  We believe at Humanizing Work that work can be a good and indeed important part of human thriving.  So we see our work at our company as having two sides.  First, helping organizations structure work so that it fits what’s true about humans.  For example, that we have a need to grow, that we benefit from connections with others, that we particularly thrive when we’re creating things, and that we want our work to have an impact on other people.  And second, helping humans develop the skills they need to do meaningful, complex work in collaboration with others. Empowering Decision-Makers WENDY GROUNDS:  Thank you Richard.  Traditionally, managers direct, and they oversee the work that their teams are doing.  They’re the problem solvers and the decision makers and things like that.  That’s what’s become expected of them.  But the trend is to bring the decision maker closer to the team so the individuals doing the work can make decisions.  How does that impact the role of the manager? PETER GREEN:  Well, I think to answer that question I’d start with why is that trend so really everywhere, omnipresent, right, in the business world.  And what we found is that, kind of relating to what we talked about the purpose of the company, is that the more empowered people are in their work, the more we push decision making to the individual and team level, the better outcomes we get, number one.  But part of that is that people are just more motivated.  They’re more engaged when they feel like, “Hey, I have some input into this decision,” or “I can wholly own this decision.”  We know from research on what leads to high engagement that the more autonomy people feel, the more they’re engaged in the work, and the better outcomes we get because of that. And so I would start with that, that there’s a demonstrable reason for this, not just while it’s important to have people be more motivated and engaged, that helps with retention. That is just an ethical way to run a business; but that it also leads to better business results when we do that.  We get better, faster decisions, and the engagement leads to good outcomes.  So I would start there, like, why empower people?  Changing the Role of Managers Then, if we agree that that’s a good idea, that we should do this more, then that really does start to shift the role of management from what you described as kind of doing the work, or telling people how to do the work, to something else. And we struggled with this question ourselves as we managed in agile organizations that were really trying to empower the teams to do the work themselves, and as we helped lots and lots of managers try to face the same question.  And originally we did not have great answers for them.  I remember a very early training I was doing with a team, this would probably be in about 2008, and I was training this team in how to do agile things.  They were trying to adopt scrum on this product team. And I remember this.  One of the managers on that team who was just really smart, really well-intentioned, still really admire this manager who came up to me on a break, I think somewhere towards the end of the second day.  And he said, “I can see how this is going to be really powerful for the team.  I can see how this is going to lead to really good outcomes.  My title is senior engineering manager.  I don’t have any idea what my job is now.” And at the time I didn’t really have a great answer for Chris, this manager, when he said, “So what do I do?”  And I felt like the answers that I had read about or that I had tried out sort of fell into three categories.  One category of answer was very fuzzy.  “Like, well, Chris, now you’re a servant leader.”  Well, what does that mean?  I kind of like the philosophy, but what does it mean to be a servant leader?  It’s not very tactical, or I can’t put my fingers on it; right?  Like what do I actually do to be a servant leader? There were some answers that just felt demonstrably wrong to us.  Like, oh, if we empower our teams, then we don’t really need managers anymore.  And we had just seen the opposite be true in really successful organizations that had really effective management.  And so while it is true that there are some organizations that are really interesting case studies of what happens if you don’t have managers – in fact, Richard and I met because he had helped an organization transform to where they had completely removed the management layers.  That’s what attracted me.  Hey, let me talk to this Richard guy and see what he has going on over there.  But that didn’t seem to be broadly applicable in every situation.  So we thought, well, that’s probably not the only answer, and probably not the answer for most companies. And then the third kind of answer that we heard was just incomplete.  Like we often heard advice like, well, managers just remove impediments to the team.  We said, well, that’s probably true, but that also feels like a pretty narrow job. So we started looking for how do we answer that question?  I always think if Chris were to ask me that question today, what would I tell him?  And the very cool thing is that we have kind of evolved in cooperation and collaboration with a ton of different organizations out there, a model for that.  And what we’ve boiled it down to is that managers really have three jobs in an organization if they want to empower their people. Challenges for Project Managers BILL YATES:  This is right where we want to head. But I want to step back for a second and kind of take a 35,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. If we can identify the reasons why people say no, we can be more effective in getting them to follow our requests. Patrick Veroneau introduces an acronym called GREAT to understand the resistance we may be facing from our team. An offshoot of effective leadership is being able to inspire other people to say yes to our requests. Table of Contents 00:32 … Rise Against Hunger01:57 … Meet Patrick03:39 … Six Principles of Influence05:49 … Signs of Resistance07:02 … Goodwill09:21 … SCARF13:07 … Reactance14:56 … Self-Awareness16:41 … Expertise18:46 … Build Credibility20:55 … Kevin and Kyle22:02 … Apathy24:51 … Trust and CABLES26:16 … Congruence27:22 … Appreciation27:35 … Belongingness27:48 … Listening28:22 … Empathy28:37 … Specifics30:45 … Contact Patrick32:15 … Closing Rise Against Hunger WENDY GROUNDS:  We visited Rise Against Hunger as a company, Velociteach, and we did some meal packing there.  We packed over 1,080 meals that were sent to – I think these ones were going to Zimbabwe. BILL YATES:  Nice. WENDY GROUNDS:  But it was going to people who are not in the position to just be able to get food as easily as it is for us.  Rise Against Hunger is an amazing organization.  They target remote communities with hunger pockets, and they send their packages of food there. BILL YATES:  We had such a great time as a team preparing these, you know, helping put these meals together, packaging them.  And we ended up with all these boxes of packaged meals ready to go.  It was so fun for the team to be together.  It was a team-building event with a purpose.  Those are our favorites. WENDY GROUNDS:  I highly recommend it as a team-building event.  I think that was really fun.  Everybody really pulled together.  We packaged a bit too quickly, almost.  We were so excited about doing this that we got finished too quickly, and then we had to wash dishes; didn’t we. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  But there’s nothing better in terms of bonding than seeing your coworkers wearing hair nets.  It was just... WENDY GROUNDS:  Oh yeah.  Oh yeah. ____________________________________________________________ WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer. We’re talking to Patrick Veroneau today.  And he’s the founder of the Emery Leadership and Sales Group, and they focus on helping employees and organizations bridge the gap between engagement and excellence.  He had his first management position with a division of Van Heusen Corporation, and he spent over 15 years in the biopharma industry in sales training and leadership development.  He continues to develop and refine leadership and sales models that blend evidence-based research and theory with what happens in the real world.  And what happens in the real world is often we’re trying to lead or to manage people on our projects, and we get resistance.  And so we’re going to be talking about that resistance today. Meet Patrick Hi, Patrick.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re so glad you’re here today. PATRICK VERONEAU:  Oh, thank you so much for the opportunity to be on the podcast.  Always great to talk about resistance. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  First of all, tell us about your company, Emery Leadership Group, and what inspired you to start it. PATRICK VERONEAU:  So Emery Leadership Group is primarily an organization that helps other organizations to develop better leaders and really to become more productive.  If you don’t have good leaders, right, if you don’t have people that can inspire other people to say yes to requests, then it’s very difficult to, I think, be as effective as you could be.  And there’s a lot of research in terms of what are the things that inspire individuals to want to say yes to our requests.  And that’s all that leadership is.  It’s an offshoot of influence to be able to lead people effectively. And that really is my background was in biotech for over 15 years.  I was a sales rep.  I was involved in training.  I managed.  And the benefit of that, in being in that industry in particular, was that all of the things that we did were focused around what’s the research that suggests that this is the approach that a provider should take with their patients, whether it was cardiovascular or oncology. And I had the opportunity to take that same approach in regards to leadership development, saying that there’s research that backs up why we make certain decisions.  If we leverage that, it doesn’t work all the time, just like treatments don’t always work, but there is a pattern that you can follow in terms of, if you behave in certain ways, the outcomes can be much more predictable.  I took the same approach again to leadership and also sales training, which is what I started at. Six Principles of Influence BILL YATES:  Patrick, we were talking just before we started recording, there was someone early in your career that influenced that.  And when we talk about “yes” versus “no,” it’d be interesting, I think, for people to know that background.  Talk a bit about the person that influenced you. PATRICK VERONEAU:  So while I was in the pharmaceutical industry, again, I had access to a lot of trainings and was always sort of looking for how do I continue to sort of develop my skills?  And to me, I thought, well, we sell science.  Why not understand the science behind influence to be able to be more effective at doing our jobs?  And there was a gentleman out of Arizona State University, a world expert in influence named Robert Cialdini, who’s written a number of books in that space.  And I was able to go through his workshops.  Most of his stuff is best known for the six principles of influence that he identified through all of his research, which are around things like liking and scarcity and authority and consensus, where those are our activators for us.  They’re almost like pulling levers for individuals to get them to say yes to our requests. And what always stood out to me was we talked about it in a way of ethical influence; right?  These same tools can be used either way.  And you see it quite often when people do the wrong things.  Bernie Madoff is somebody that’s probably an example that most know about that, if you were to go back and look at the tools of influence, he used many of those influence principles, but just for the wrong reason. So for me, the challenge that I found was these are great principles, right, the six principles of why people say yes.  But what I was finding and experiencing and I know for myself is that oftentimes I start from the place of wanting to say no; that I needed to get past that hurdle first.  And if I understood the reason why somebody was probably saying no, or what might prompt them to say no to a request, then at least for me what I found and what I was developing in those people that I was working with was that identifying the reasons why people say no allowed me then to decide which of the six principles probably would be more effective to use ethically to get them to follow my request. Signs of Resistance BILL YATES:  One of the things I want to talk with you about is formal authority and informal authority because project managers often have to lead people, even when they don’t have official authority over them.  Those team members don’t report to the project manager.  This can lead to resistance; you know?  I mean, that’s my nature.  If I have two bosses, so to speak, an official boss, and I’ve got somebody that I’m supposed to report to on a project, you know which way I’m going to lean, you know, which way is best for me.  That’s the manager I’m going to listen to.  So how can we recognize the signs of resistance from our team members, if it’s related to this idea of informal authority? PATRICK VERONEAU:  Sure.  So there’s an acronym that I use called GREAT.  And the reason I created that is because, to me, the question that I would ask myself, and still do in the work that I do, is how great is my resistance?  So I’m almost – having to answer that question then tells me where I’m going to go from there because that’s what we deal with is resistance.  So the GREAT model is an acronym for five resisters, the first one being goodwill, the next one being reactance, the next one being expertise or experience, the next one being apathy, and the last one being trust. Goodwill WENDY GROUNDS:  I think this is an excellent model for us to just go a little deeper and to discover what you mean by each one of these.  So let’s look at goodwill first.  Can you give us examples in ways that we can demonstrate that our request is in the best interest of the person that we’re putting that request to? PATRICK VERONEAU:  Yeah.  So goodwill really is about a feeling as though what you’re asking me to do doesn’t just benefit you; right?  If I’m managing a group, and I’m asking them to complete a project for me, if it’s myself that’s going to benefit from them doing all the work and really not showing any type of appreciation for them and what they’re having to do or how this is going to impact them, as well, then that immediately starts to build resistance. So if you think about the industry that I came from where, if I’m asking a provider to use a certain treatment, they’re often thinking first, is this really what’s best for my patient, or is this what’s best for your quota?  That’s goodwill, and we need to be able to demonstrate that; right?  And if I just came in with the “This is what you should use,” oftentimes the providers are going to be thinking, wait a minute, I know that benefits you.  You’re going to benefit from this.  But is it really what’s in the best interest of what my patient needs, or what we’re trying to do here as an oncology unit?

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Selecting contractors and negotiating the terms of a major project is one of the most difficult aspects of project management. In this episode Ed Merrow sheds light on fairness in contracting relationships, for the relationships to be self-enforcing, and how not to unwittingly set your contractors up to fail.  Table of Contents 02:53 … Meet Ed05:28 … Contract Strategies for Major Projects06:59 … Hiring Contractors is Never Easy07:55 … Key Principle #209:12 … #1 There is No Free Lunch10:20 … TINSTAAFL11:28 … #3 Complex Projects Need Simple Contracting Strategies13:03 … Collaboration15:07 … #4 Owners and Contractors are Different17:44 … #5 Large Risk Transfers are More Illusion than Reality19:25 … Importance of Scoping21:29 … #6 Contractors have Shareholders23:14 … Ren25:29 … #7 Contracting Games are Rough Sport27:05 … #8 Assigning a Risk to Someone Who Cannot Control that Risk is Foolish29:07 … #9 All Contracts are Incentivized33:20 … #10 Economize on The Need for Trust36:40 … The Value of Prequalifying Contractors40:13 … Getting the A-Team or the B-Team42:48 … Get in Touch with Ed44:02 … Closing ED MERROW: ...both owners and contractors play games.  Contractors usually win those games.  My advice is try to keep games out of your contracts.  Try not to put in a bunch of complex provisions whereby you think that the contractor will “have skin in the game.”  I want owners to remember that skin in the game is almost always owner skin.  WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This.  This podcast is by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio are Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We love having you join us twice a month to be motivated and inspired by project stories, leadership lessons, as well as advice from industry experts from all around the world.  We want to bring you some support as you navigate your projects. If you like what you hear, please consider rating our show with five stars and leaving a brief review on our website or whichever podcast listening app you use.  This helps us immensely in bringing the podcast to the attention of others.  You can also claim free Professional Development Units from PMI by listening to this episode.  Listen up at the end of the show, and we’ll tell you how to do that. Today our guest is Ed Merrow.  Ed is the founder, president, and CEO of Independent Project Analysis, the global industry leader in quantitative analysis and benchmarking of project management systems.  Ed received his degrees from Dartmouth College and Princeton University; and he began his career as an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.  He followed that with 14 years as a research scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he directed the Energy Research Program.  We’re talking to Ed particularly today about his most recent major research effort which is centered on the quantitative analysis of how contracting strategies and delivery systems shape project results.  His new book is on this subject, and it’s titled “Contract Strategies for Major Projects.” BILL YATES:  In our conversation with Ed on procurement and contract strategies, Ed is going to share with us the key principles of contracting that all those involved with planning and executing major projects should know.  Here are three things to listen out for on this episode.  One, contractors may make convenient scapegoats, but they are rarely to blame for bad projects.  Number two, we depend heavily on trust, yet trust is not a contracting strategy.  And number three, contractors are almost always more skilled at playing those contracting games than those owners are. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hey, Ed.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for joining us today. ED MERROW:  Well, thank you, Wendy.  I’m glad to be here. Meet Ed WENDY GROUNDS:  We are looking forward to getting into this topic.  It’s not something that we’ve talked about before, and I believe you’re quite the expert and the right person that we should be talking to today.  But before we go there, could you tell us a bit about your story, how you got into project management? ED MERROW:  It goes way back.  After I left UCLA, where I was a professor, to go to the RAND Corporation, that’s really when I started my journey in projects.  At RAND, I started the process of trying to understand why new technology projects overran so much, so often.  That research ultimately led me to start Independent Project Analysis back in 1987; and we’ve been going strong ever since, really trying to understand at a first principles level the relationship between what owners, in particular owners, do on the front end of projects and what we get out in terms of project quality at the end.  The contracting work that I’ve done is really very much part and parcel of that whole picture. BILL YATES:  This is going to be a powerful conversation for us to have for our project managers.  This is an area that just scares the pants off project managers, excuse the expression.  But when we get into procurement, and we get into contract types, many project managers just freeze and go, “Okay, this is scary for me.  The more I can understand, the better, the more prepared I think I’ll be.”  So this is a very valuable conversation we’ll have. ED MERROW:  It’s a very complex subject, that goes across economics, understanding markets, understanding competition, a lot of psychological factors associated with contracting.  You know, I always describe project managers as a pretty hard-headed bunch in almost everything except contracting.  When it comes to contracting, we often come to believe things that just plain aren’t true, in part because what we thought we learned about contracting in a particular project really was the wrong lesson.  I wanted to step back and say, look, can we actually put some data around this issue so that we’re better guided as to what works and what doesn’t? Contract Strategies for Major Projects WENDY GROUNDS:  Before we go into this a little further, I just want to talk about your book.  You wrote “Contract Strategies for Major Projects.”  Now, you have done a lot of research focusing on how contracting strategies and delivery systems shape project results, and you’ve shared those findings in this book.  Can you describe the goals and the particular audience for your book? ED MERROW:  Well, my audience is primarily project managers and, to some extent, business sponsors of projects.  Sometimes my audience will be procurement.  Sometimes the audience is the legal side of projects, both on the owner and the contractor side.  One of my hopes in writing the book is not only to shed some empirical light on the subject, but also to try to bring some sense of we need in our contracting relationships to be fair, and we need for the relationships to be self-enforcing, which is to say that the best contract in the world is the one that you sign, put in your lower left-hand drawer, and never see again.  That’s the perfect contract.  But when things don’t go perfectly, I want that contract to help us sort things out, rather than make things more difficult. Hiring Contractors is Never Easy BILL YATES:  One of the things Ed that we wanted to bring to you, just thinking of some of the great quotes you had in your book, hiring contractors is never easy.  And quite frankly, this is an area of great concern for project managers; you know?  It’s like, okay, we have a project that we need to have done.  We’ve got to go outside of our organization and hire some contractors to complete the work.  Or it could be the owner that’s going about that contracting and seeking those people out. This quote really made me laugh in your book.  You said, “The worst contractor ever was the one on the last project, and the best contractor ever will be the one on the next project.”  I like that.  I can relate to that.  You know, I’m an optimist anyway.  So I might look at it and go, “Man that was a terrible experience we had in this last project.  That’ll never happen again.  This is going to be totally different in this next project.” Key Principle #2 ED MERROW:  You see, I always tell owners, and sometimes it upsets them, I say, “Look, contractors do good projects well and bad projects poorly. You’ve got to understand that almost has to be the way it is.”  And I say that because, if a contractor can’t do a well-put-together, well-front-end-loaded, really strong business case project well, he can’t do any project well.  And the market very quickly eliminates those players.  Point of fact, contractors will do good projects well.  And when as owners you set them up to fail, they usually will.  Plain and simple.  And the fact that they’re easy to blame doesn’t really change anything. WENDY GROUNDS:  That was number two of your key principles of contracting.  I just took a look, and I thought, “I’ve heard that before.”  What we want to run through today, we’ve taken these from your book because we thought they were the most applicable to project managers.  So you have the 10 key principles of contracting.  And you warn your reader in Chapter One, you say, “If one pursues a contracting strategy that flouts one or more of these principles, it’s very likely trouble is ahead.”   #1 There is No Free Lunch So we’d like to run through these.  I’m going to start with number one, which you say, “There is no free lunch.”  Can you tell us what that means? ED MERROW:  Sure.  Contracting always involves some version of what’s called the principal-agent problem, which is to say that a contractor will never perfectly do what an owner wants.  It’s simply inevitable, if only because communication is less than perfect.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Will your project’s documentation pass the test of time once the project is done and the people are gone? Documentation is at the intersection of information management, organizational design, and personal productivity. Accurate documentation makes teams more efficient and effective. Table of Contents 01:23 … Essential Project Documents03:43 … Defining Information Management04:34 … Adrienne’s Story05:59 … Performing an Information Audit09:19 … Signs Your System is Out of Control11:33 … Dynamic Documentation12:44 … Improve Your Documentation15:19 … Budget for Closing Documentation16:57 … Finding the Right Balance19:12 … Kevin and Kyle20:27 … Strategies for Meeting Notes23:49 … Have a System25:54 … Getting Everyone Onboard27:25 … Documentation No-Nos30:06 … Personal Productivity31:06 … “The 24-Hour Rule”31:41 … Contact Adrienne32:43 … Closing ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR: I actually say documentation is at the intersection of information management, organizational design, and personal productivity.  So documentation kind of underpins these three major disciplines, but the personal productivity is often forgotten. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates and Danny Brewer.  We’re talking today to Adrienne Bellehumeur, and she is the founder of Bellehumeur Company and co-partner of Risk Oversight.  She’s based in Calgary, Alberta.  She’s also an expert on productivity, documentation, governance, risk, and compliance; and has delivered 15 years’ experience as an auditor, accountant, analyst, problem solver, and independent consultant. Adrienne developed a documentation approach called “dynamic documentation,” and she’s a published author of the book “The 24 Hour Rule,” and she’s going to tell us more about that book, as well. Adrienne likes to talk about processes, tools, and methods, and some of the best strategies to use to maintain effective, efficient, and timely documentation.  So as you may have gathered, we’re talking about documentation and information management.  So Bill, my question to you is what are some essential project documents that project managers should be maintaining? Essential Project Documents BILL YATES:  Oh boy, the list goes on and on.  They’re all essential, every one of them.  Let me start with the legal stuff first.  I think project managers who’ve ever done work with, either with outside contractors or their customers, an external customer, they would agree anything related to contracts, addendums, agreements, even the email threads where those may have been negotiated or key decisions were made, those should be considered mandatory.  You’ve got to have those backed up.  They can’t just be living on your hard drive.  They need to be backed up.  Also things like the project charter, anything with signatures that gives authority to the project. And then kind of going down the list, there’s scope things like requirements, scope statement, the product roadmap, the backlog, change requests, logs that keep up with things, task lists, or issue logs.  These are dynamic.  These need to live.  So you have to document them almost with a date stamp on them.  That’s true with a risk log or risk register, as well.  Major communications, major rollouts, maybe you hit a milestone or something significant, you want to keep those documents.  Think about, okay, could someone who doesn’t know anything about this project take a look at it six months, two years later and go, “Oh, okay.  Yeah, I get it.  I see why you guys made that decision.  I see who was involved in it and then what action took place after.” And then one of the biggest challenges, and I think we’ll hear this from Adrienne as well, when you’re getting ready to wrap up your project, that is one of the most difficult times to make sure that you’re doing good documentation.  It’s like more important than ever.  It’s almost like think about when you move into a house.  You have this checklist, the punch list, the final step before you go sign those contracts to own the house.  Well, for our projects, too, we’re trying to wrap things up, but we’re losing key resources.  The team is starting to get dispersed to more projects, and we have to gather that information out of their head and make sure that it’s been documented somewhere for future, for lessons learned, both for this project and into the future. WENDY GROUNDS:  Thanks, Bill.  That’s a lot to keep in mind.  Let’s see what Adrienne has to say, and let’s get some advice from her on how to correctly manage our information and our documents. Hi, Adrienne.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for talking with us today. ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Thank you.  Thank you so much for having me. Defining Information Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, the first thing is, I think just to kind of put an explanation out there, could you define what information management is really all about? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  So information management is basically the management of existing information.  If I have this piece of paper here on my desk, and I do something with it and put it in the right spot, I’d call that information management.  It’s actually a wide range of things that can be anything from organizing the files on your computer all the way up to an enterprise content management for a multinational company.  So it actually has a wide range.  Information management is a close cousin of documentation, which is my area of expertise, but a very wide discipline that often incorporates a lot of technology and tools and metadata and taxonomy and stuff like that in practice. Adrienne’s Story WENDY GROUNDS:  So where does your interest in information management and documentation originate?  How did you start out? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Oh, that’s a great question.  I mean, it spans many years.  I actually had a bit of a nerdy fascination with notes, taking notes in class.  And I remember having lots of cool notebooks, and looking around the classroom, wondering what are people doing with their notes.  This interest actually spanned throughout my career.  I’m a chartered accountant by background.  And I do remember how important documentation and managing information is in the workplace, and how actually poorly we train people when we enter the workforce.  So I’ve had a big interest in helping people to be better trained because I actually didn’t think the training was that good. And then as a business owner and consultant, I watched so much money being wasted in companies by consultants leaving without anything written down.  People can’t find documentation that they spent millions of dollars on a project, tons of money on resources that we have meetings and no record of what was said, and we can’t remember.  So this kind of threefold reason, it’s actually spanned many years.  I’ve seen so many patterns of a need for students, professionals, the knowledge workforce to have a better understanding of this practice. Performing an Information Audit BILL YATES:  This is so good.  I feel like we’re going to the doctor today.  And you are our specialist.  But let me just start out with this idea of an information audit. For our project managers that are out there, let’s say you performed an information audit on one of their projects.  What questions would you be asking the project manager and the team in that audit? ADRIENNE BELLEHUMEUR:  Often information audits are really tied to a problem you’re going to solve.  So if people can’t find something, or they’re struggling to get people to document, or Larry built your system from scratch and is retiring in two months, or Sally is the only person who knows how to run critical process.  Like I’m often brought in for very specific problems. But if I were running a more generic audit, which I do, I really focus on how users interact with their information.  I ask questions like what information or knowledge do you care about if someone won the lottery?  We don’t say “hit by a bus” anymore.  We say “win the lottery.”  What is actually getting used or not?  Can people follow, I call it the re-performance standard?  Can people use the standalone documents to actually do their job?  Or, and this is applicable to project managers because they often have to hand it off to others, it has to meet that re-performance standard.  Can it meet the clarity standard?  Do people understand what you mean without having to interpret it? The operative word I’m getting at here is “standalone.”  In today’s workforce, we need to build documentation systems that people can use the content and materials.  And this is broad, too.  It covers stuff like video and systems, SharePoint, everything.  When I say “documentation,” I’m not necessarily meaning a piece of static paper, but they have to be able to find things, understand, do their work, basically in the absence of the people who built them.  And this is just a new reality of the workforce. We have a new knowledge-based economy geared to how a project’s documentation and systems will sustain once the people are gone. BILL YATES:  I love that you use that keyword of “standalone.”  To me, I think that’s important to point out because I know I have certainly been a guilty party and thinking, okay, I was in the room when we made this key decision with the customer.  This defined the scope that we ended up delivering.  And I can just make some basic notes because I’ll remember just enough to jog my memory.  Well, that’s not really standalone.  Let’s say I get assigned to a different project.  To your point, it needs to be something that someone can pick up and read without me explaining it or without me being on the other end of a call.  And it needs to be standalone.