Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Knowledge Management is a key practice for top-performing teams. We can improve our projects by tapping into, and managing, project knowledge. Join us to learn more about managing project knowledge, knowledge sharing, and nurturing knowledge within an organization. Table of Contents 01:56 … A Definition of Knowledge02:59 … Difference between Knowledge and Wisdom04:53 … Tacit Knowledge - “Knowhow” and “Know What”05:43 … The Purpose of Managing Knowledge06:20 … Managing Project Knowledge08:10 … Overcoming Resistance to Knowledge Bias09:52 … Projects Run on Knowledge11:03 … Measuring Business Value12:27 … Drink Tea14:59 … Face-to-Face Communication17:09 … Nurturing Knowledge in an Organization19:27 … Kevin and Kyle21:08 … Rewarding Knowledge Sharing22:55 … Building Organizational Trust25:04 … Developing Knowledge-Oriented Team Culture27:11 … Recognizing the Value of Knowledge29:06 … Building Successful Knowledge Projects32:42 … Effectively Harnessing Experience36:22 … Contact Larry36:57 … Closing LARRY PRUSAK: There’s a lot of ways to instill trust.  Trust your children.  Trust your community and things like that.  It really pays off.  I mean, it’s not so much being altruistic.  It pays off.  Things work better when you trust each other.  Speaking as a social scientist, it lowers the transaction costs.  You don’t have to always be looking over your shoulder or sniffing out things.  It lowers the cost.  Oh, yeah, I trust him.  He’ll do what he said, or she’ll do what she said. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and here in the studio with me is Bill Yates. So we want to take a moment 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 and reviews on whichever podcast listening app you use. Today we’re talking about a topic we’ve not addressed before, and we’re very excited to dig into it.  Our guest is Laurence Prusak, and Larry has been studying knowledge and learning for the past 30 years.  He has been a consultant in these areas for Mercer and a co-founder for Ernst & Young Center for Business Value.  He’s the founder and director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management and co-founder of the Babson College Working Knowledge Research Program.  He’s been a senior consultant for NASA, as well as teaching in over 40 universities.  He has also recently taught at Columbia University’s program on information and knowledge, and he has co-authored 11 books. BILL YATES:  Wendy, we got this recommendation from Stephen Townsend to reach out to Larry and talk with him.  One of the books that Larry recently worked on is called “The Smart Mission:  NASA’s Lessons for Managing Knowledge, People, and Projects.”  So as we get into this topic, I think project managers will appreciate the depth of Larry’s knowledge on knowledge management. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Larry.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest today. LARRY PRUSAK:  You’re welcome. A Definition of Knowledge  WENDY GROUNDS:  So we’re going to be talking knowledge management, which is a new topic for us on our podcast.  And we’re very excited that we have you with us.  Before we begin, could you give us your definition of knowledge? LARRY PRUSAK:  It’s what a knowledgeable person knows.  Think about, if you go to a dentist, a dentist knows how to fix your teeth.  If he wasn’t knowledgeable, you wouldn’t be going to him.  We’re talking about working knowledge, the knowledge that allows people to do things.  There’s other sorts of knowledge.  There’s religious knowledge, aesthetic knowledge, all sorts of things.  But we’re talking about the knowledge that allows you to do something, and do it well.  Information is not knowledge.  Knowledge isn’t data.  It’s the skill, the basis of a skilled activity. BILL YATES:  One of the writings that you did years ago hit on this point about information.  And I love this quote.  You say, “Information about customers becomes knowledge when decision-makers determine how to take advantage of the information.”  So it’s all about that application. LARRY PRUSAK:  Let me give you a little story.  You don’t mind if I tell a short story. WENDY GROUNDS:  Oh, we love stories. Difference between Knowledge and Wisdom LARRY PRUSAK:  Years ago I worked for a very big consulting firm that loved to get their names in the newspaper.  I won’t say who they are.  And I got a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter saying, gee, we’re hearing a lot about knowledge, and people say you know a little about it.  So could you define the difference between data, information, and knowledge, and wisdom? Well, I was caught off-guard.  I was at my desk.  But somehow a stroke of inspiration hit me, and I told them, let’s say you’re preparing a meal for someone you really like, and really want to get it right.  If you look at a recipe book, the letters in the recipe are data – A, B, C, D – or the numbers.  That’s data.  Little bits of this and that.  When data is put together in a meaningful way, it becomes information.  So a recipe is information.  It tells you how to make something.  It’s two-dimensional.  You can’t talk back to the recipe.  It’s static.  It doesn’t move.  It stays that way.  We have a whole bunch of cookbooks here.  They don’t move. Knowledge is knowing how to cook, which is experiential.  You don’t know how to cook until you really cook, and cook for a while.  During this recent COVID epidemic I told my wife, “I’ll take care of some of the cooking.”  And I realized I am not a cook.  I had a mother, I had two wives, so I didn’t have to cook.  But eventually I saw that the more you cook, the more you gain a little knowledge, and you know how to cook.  And so if you cook a lot, as my wife does and many people do, you gain knowledge of cooking.  That’s different than information.  Wisdom is marrying a good cook. BILL YATES:  That’s true.  If our listeners don’t take anything else from this, that is a key point of wisdom, yes. LARRY PRUSAK:  Printed it in a journal, I got all sorts of letters, people accusing me of being sexist.  I said, “I didn’t say what gender.  I don’t care who you marry.  But if you have some wisdom, and you’re going to live with someone, find someone who can cook well.” Tacit Knowledge - “Knowhow” and “Know What”  WENDY GROUNDS:  And that’s what you mean by “tacit knowledge,” the experience-based. LARRY PRUSAK:  Yeah.  It’s not always tacit.  I know my friend Jiro Nonaka used that a lot, and it became very, very popular.  All knowledge is tacit.  Someone once asked me to write an essay on what I learned growing up in Brooklyn, New York.  And I could never say enough, I mean, there’s so many – the smells, the sounds, the problems, dah dah dah.  All knowledge is tacit.  Some of it becomes explicit.  But a better way of looking at those terms are “knowhow” and “know what.”  Know what, for example, if someone’s talking about France, you would know that Paris is the capital of France.  But knowhow, how to get around in France, how to act, how to speak, that’s knowhow.  Firms pay a lot of money for knowhow, but they don’t always know how to manage it. The Purpose of Managing Knowledge WENDY GROUNDS:  That leads to the next question.  What is the purpose of managing knowledge? LARRY PRUSAK:  Well, it’s the most valuable thing you have in an organization.  I mean, around here, some of the schools are a little short on cash.  You know, if they’d raise the taxes for the schools.  And there’s a bumper sticker that says, “Well, if you don’t like knowledge, try ignorance.” David Teece, who’s a professor at Berkeley, who I learned quite a bit from, he said:  “Any organization is really composed of knowledge and relationships.  That’s about it.”  Knowledge and relationships.  There’s many other things we all can name, but those are the two key things, what you know how to do and the relationships you have with your customers. Managing Project Knowledge BILL YATES:  You know, it’s interesting, Larry, as I was thinking about our listeners or project managers, many of them are PMP certified.  They’ve studied and been exposed to the PMBOK Guide from PMI.  And I remember going from the 5th to the 6th Edition of the PMBOK Guide, there was an additional process.  There are 49 processes that define some of the work that project managers do.  And one of those 49 in the 6th Edition is called “Manage Project Knowledge.”  It’s the first time it showed up.  And it just made sense, you know, it’s like, oh, well, this should have been a part of what we were doing before.  Now we’ve finally spelled it out. And Manage Project Knowledge is to tap into and leverage the knowledge of the performing organization so that I do my project better.  Then I also add to that knowledge management, that bank of knowledge, by the times that I fall and skin my knees with my customer; and then I learn from that, and I share that with my organization. LARRY PRUSAK:  It’s also gaining knowledge outside the organization.  I mean, I was a consultant at NASA for 20 years.  Finally, after I was there 15, they decided to look at knowledge outside of NASA because no one, no organization can ever know enough these days.  The world is awash with knowledge.  You can never know enough.  I don’t care who you are.  I did some work for one of our government intelligence agencies.  They, too, never looked outside Virginia, and they’ve completely changed.  They’ve totally changed that way, sharing knowledge with where it’s appropriate.  I worked at Harvard for a number of years.  They thought, if they didn’t know it, it wasn’t knowledge.  I think they still may think that way.

Manage This first hit the airwaves January 2016. In this episode, we celebrate seven years with over one Million listens! And we are so grateful to have you, our listeners, with us for the adventure. We have talked to many project managers and subject matter experts in our endeavor to bring you top-notch advice and encouragement as you navigate your projects.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Hear practical advice from Elizabeth Harrin on how to more effectively manage a significant project workload, and how to manage several projects at once. This episode is about saving time and working smarter! Table of Contents 02:07 … Meet Elizabeth03:44 … Inspiration for the Book06:56 … A Multi-Project Environment07:41 … Scheduling Challenges08:44 … Simplifying Scheduling10:55 … Managing Dependencies12:10 … Engaging Stakeholders13:46 … Sushi, Spaghetti, and Side Dish Workloads15:13 … 5 Major Concepts15:52 … Portfolio 18:39 … Planning19:32 … Kevin and Kyle21:03 … People Management23:39 … Time Limitations with Senior Execs25:45 … Better Connections27:01 … Productivity28:07 … Overcoming Procrastination28:57 … RAID31:31 … Positioning33:44 … The Five Email Rule34:44 … The Future of Project Management36:16 … Contact Elizabeth37:04 … Closing ELIZABETH HARRIN: ...And if we have organizations that support us, and the culture is there to understand the capacity for change, then we can fly.  We can do the things that our companies, our organizations need us to do because we do have the right skills to do it.  The challenge, the flipside of that is often we’re asked to do that without the resources, funding, and time to make it possible. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and in the studio with me is Bill Yates.  If you like what you hear, we’d love to hear from you.  You can leave us a comment on our website, Velociteach.com; on social media; whichever podcast-listening app you use.  If you have questions about our podcasts or about project management certifications, we’re always here for you. Today we’re talking to someone we’ve spoken to before, and she’s well known in the circles of project management.  This is Elizabeth Harrin.  She’s an author, speaker, and a mentor who helps people manage projects.  She has lots of straight-talking, real-world advice.  Elizabeth is an APM fellow and the author of seven books, and she’s on a mission to make sure you can deliver better quality projects with more confidence and less stress. BILL YATES:  In this episode we’re going to talk about Elizabeth’s latest book.  It’s called “Managing Multiple Projects.”  In that book she offers advice on ways you can more effectively manage your project workload.  If you’re like me, you typically had more than one project that you were managing at a time.  Elizabeth tackles that.  She gives great advice.  Every chapter ends with key takeaways and action steps.  Another thing I really appreciate about her writing style is she invites a lot of practitioners, project managers to give advice, share tips, share struggles.  You’ll see those interwoven throughout each chapter.  Great book, great resource.  I’m excited to talk with Elizabeth about it today. WENDY GROUNDS:  Elizabeth, it’s so good to have you back, virtually.  And welcome to Manage This. ELIZABETH HARRIN:  Thank you.  Thanks for having me back.  It’s great to be here talking to you today. Meet Elizabeth WENDY GROUNDS:  So I’ve read your book, and it is excellent, very helpful resource.  And I was also looking back at when we last talked to you, and it was sometime I think in 2018.  And I wasn’t even on the podcast yet.  I think it was right before I joined Manage This.  So it’s been a while.  What have you been up to in the last four years? ELIZABETH HARRIN:  That was quite a long time ago; wasn’t it.  So what I’ve been doing since then, well, I was leading projects until the autumn of 2019, so just before we went into the pandemic.  In the worst of the pandemic I stopped working in a corporate project management role, and I took a couple of years away from that to spend some time writing, including that book; teaching, mentoring, that kind of thing, doing some freelance work.  And I went back to corporate project management earlier this year, actually, yeah, earlier 2022, and to get back into what life is like as a project manager in a more virtual world.  BILL YATES:  It is different, certainly. ELIZABETH HARRIN:  It is different. BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  I love the fact that, as an author of books, you still have your hands in it.  And I appreciate that. Not only are you asking the opinions of project managers and surveying them and that influences your work, but also your own experience.  And I think that resonates throughout this book.  I’m excited about getting into it, and this is a great contribution to project managers.  So, well done. ELIZABETH HARRIN:  Thank you very much.  I’m really proud of it.  I know that I’m not that good at blowing my own trumpet, and I know we shouldn’t really be boastful about things that we’ve done.  But I love this book.  It feels like something I can be really proud of.  So I’m glad that you’ve responded that way because it would be awful if I’d written something I thought was really great, and everyone was like, meh. Inspiration for the Book BILL YATES:  Wah-wah.  Yeah.  I think right off the bat the statistic that just resonated with me personally and just from my own experience talking with our students and our customers, is that the reality is project managers are managing multiple projects, you know, to the point of the title of your book.  And as your research was showing, 85% of the project managers lead two or more projects.  That was my experience, always had at least two customers, usually three, maybe a few more at times.  But it just changes things.  And some of the advice you give in the book lines up with that so beautifully.  So before we get into that, what really led you to write the book?  Was it your own experience in managing projects?  Or was it also kind of the outflow of information that you were getting from other project managers? ELIZABETH HARRIN:  I think it was a bit of both.  It was coming back to work after maternity leave and realizing that I’d gone from one big-ish project which felt very together to a part-time job.  And as the part-time person I got a lot of small things to do.  So there was a change in my workload which led me to have to work in different ways.  And I started to listen to what other people were saying, as well, and this whole gap around the education around how do you juggle everything?  What do you when the project management process says do these 10 steps?  Do I have to do these 10 steps every time for every project?  Can’t I be a bit smarter about things?  And that seemed to come up quite a lot with people’s workloads.  And we were all struggling. So I got a group of people together, and we did a six-month deep dive, really, into sharing what I had learned about managing multiple projects.  And as a training exercise it seemed to be quite successful.  People seemed to get something out of it.  And I suppose my interest in the topic started from that, thinking through, wow, this is something that’s really missing in the way that we’re taught about how to manage projects because all the courses I had done, even the ones I teach, up until that point had just literally been around this fake fantasy world of all the stakeholders love the project, they all support you, everything happens according to plan, and you’ve only got one thing to do. And of course the stakeholders are all on 10 different projects.  Resources are all on 10 different projects.  We’re working for the person that shouts the loudest.  And that’s not real life.  It’s not surprising that project managers feel stressed in their jobs, when everything that we give them to do their jobs doesn’t really match reality.  I mean, that might be a bit facetious, and I’m sure that there are plenty of roles where it’s a bit more structured and organized.  But I think that’s real life for most people. So, as with any book, and as with any training course, you take it away, and you learn what you can, but you have to tailor it to fit your environment. If you’ve got more things in your toolbox, you can then say, well, this strategy will work for me.  This one won’t.  But if I changed it a bit, then it might work on that project.  And you can kind of build your own set of working principles.  And I think what I was trying to do was just start that conversation for people.  How can I lift myself out of the weeds?  How can I be smarter about how I work?  And maybe some of the ideas in this book will fast-track that for me so that I can get there better. A Multi-Project Environment WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s start right at the beginning.  Can you describe for us what a multi-project environment looks like, and the skills that someone would need to sharpen if they were taking on a multi-project workload? ELIZABETH HARRIN:  I think what it looks like is someone who’s trying to do several projects at the same time, maybe for different clients, maybe for the same client, whether that’s an internal customer or an external customer.  And they’re all at potentially different points in the project lifecycle, and they might be different sizes.  So there’s quite a lot of skills that come into play.  So I’d say, if I had to give the listeners three things to work on or to be aware of if they were about to start picking up more than one project at a time, moving into a role where that was a requirement, I would say scheduling, managing dependencies, and stakeholder engagement. Scheduling Challenges For scheduling, you can have lots of detailed Gantt charts for all your different projects.  But I’ve personally found that to be quite time-consuming to pull together.  So I am an advocate of scheduling my milestones where you can get away with it, or at least having a view of what are my main milestones on my projects?

The goal of cybersecurity is to protect the data and integrity of your computing from malicious digital attacks. The challenge for a project manager is to implement effective cybersecurity measures to secure yourself, your team, your clients, and your projects as attackers become more innovative. Our guest is Andy Sauer a cybersecurity leader who helps organizations build cybersecurity maturity. Table of Contents 01:47 … Meet Andy02:29 … Raising Awareness of Cybersecurity for PMs03:34 … A Case Study06:55 … Lessons Learned from a Cyber Attack09:23 … “Least Privilege Necessary” Model10:48 … Lack of Multifactor Authentication11:39 … Staying Ahead of Attackers13:35 … 10 Steps to Better Cybersecurity13:42 … Training for Phishing15:25 … Multifactor Authentication16:14 … Least Privilege Necessary17:34 … Apply Patches to Systems and Applications18:40 … Delete Old Accounts19:53 … Kevin & Kyle21:13 … Adopt Cloud Services22:15 … Building an Incident Response Plan25:16 … Establish Hardened System Baselines26:13 … Keep Your Backups Air Gapped27:21 … Store Security Logs and Watch for Unusual Behavior.30:18 … Security is Your Responsibility31:09 … External Cybersecurity32:25 … Concerning Emerging Technologies34:31 … Evolving Cybersecurity Threats36:32 … Get in Touch with Andy37:38 … Closing ANDY SAUER: ...it’s very easy to look at cybersecurity concerns and think, that is not my problem.  We have a security team.  We have an IT team.  But I promise you when the compromise happens, the folks in the IT and cybersecurity teams are often focused on the technical and getting the systems back up.  They’re not particularly concerned about your specific project and your workload. You have to take that responsibility. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  If you like what you hear, we’d love to hear from you.  You can leave us a comment on our website Velociteach.com, on social media, or whichever podcast listening app you use. Today our guest is Andy Sauer.  Andy’s a cybersecurity leader who helps organizations build cybersecurity maturity.  Now, this was someone that Bill had been in touch with. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  This is how I came across Andy.  I heard him speaking to a group of CEOs.  And what struck me was, okay, not only does he know cybersecurity, but he’s having an impact on this group.  I watched the CEOs taking notes, and some were texting.  It was funny, they were apologizing to Andy after his presentation.  “Hey, I wasn’t ignoring you.  You said something that struck me, so I was texting members of our team to see if we had done that yet.”  You know, I felt like, okay, for project managers, this is something we need to hear.  It’s something we need to be reminded of and raise our awareness.  So Andy’s going to be a great resource for that. WENDY GROUNDS:  We talked to Don Hunt before on cybersecurity, and that was a few years ago. BILL YATES:  Yes, yeah. WENDY GROUNDS:  So I think it’s good that we retouch the topic again. BILL YATES:  Right. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Andy.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thanks for joining us. ANDY SAUER:  Hey, there.  Thanks for having me on. Meet Andy WENDY GROUNDS:  So tell us a little bit about your background in cybersecurity before we get into talking about this topic.  And something about your role at Sentinel Blue. ANDY SAUER:  Sure.  I’m the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, for a small company called Sentinel Blue.  I’ve been in IT and cybersecurity for about 13 years, with the last five years really being focused in on cybersecurity, rather than IT.  Sentinel Blue is a cybersecurity services firm that works with small and medium-sized businesses, particular in the U.S. defense industry.  And our main focus is really on building cybersecurity maturity for those businesses.  And cybersecurity maturity can mean many things, which I imagine we’ll get into here. Raising Awareness of Cybersecurity for PMs BILL YATES:  That’s true.  Yeah, I appreciate the fact that, Andy, you’ve worked with small and medium-size companies.  And like we were talking about before we started recording, I think that’s really powerful for our project managers because many times they’re looking at their situation like, okay, I have to run this like a CEO of a small company.  I need to run this project team.  I need to be responsible for their behaviors.  And there’s just a lot at stake with cybersecurity. So we think, you know, the more we can talk about this topic and just raise awareness, it raises everybody’s game and helps them know.  Plus you’re on the cutting edge.  When I was thinking about, all right, Andy not only is in cybersecurity, but he’s doing this for defense contractors, that’s where the stakes are so high.  ANDY SAUER:  I think, you know, your project managers might be often not thought about in a cybersecurity context in terms of their contributions and their responsibilities.  It’s often so focused on the guys like me, the technical guys and whatnot, where what you bring up, a PM’s basically a CEO of that project they’re managing.  And security is a major component that I’m excited to talk to the audience about. A Case Study BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I think maybe the best thing for us to do is to jump into a case study.  You’ve got one that we’ve talked about before. ANDY SAUER:  Yeah, I do. BILL YATES:  Walk us through that.  That’ll kind of give us a construct to build off of.  ANDY SAUER:  Sure.  So everyone will have, you know, read about incidents in the news and whatnot.  But it can feel pretty distant when you read about what’s happening to Uber.  For small-medium businesses, Uber means nothing to us in terms of being able to relate to how things are run there.  So I’m going to share a story from a company that I’ve worked with a couple years ago, about two years ago.  They’re a defense contractor of about 500 to a thousand people.  They kind of ebb and flow.  A well-funded, doing well kind of contractor business, with an IT team, with a small security team, sort of all the things you want to see from an IT standpoint.  A mature company, making all the right moves. And in the middle of 2020, on a summer night, on a Friday night, after everyone goes home, something happened, and Saturday morning everything’s down.  And all the alarm bells are going off, all the phones are ringing, including my personal phone.  On my way down to the beach, in fact, I got a call, a very panicked call from the IT director there and said, “Hey, you’ve done some work for us in the past and some cybersecurity consulting.  We’re having what we think is an incident.  Can you jump on and help us out?”  And I ended up spending the next several days of my beach vacation listening in on conference calls in the war room that was established to respond to this incident. Now, they were hit by ransomware, which is something I think pretty much everyone in the business world has heard of at this point.  And you’ve heard some pretty horrific stories of businesses shutting doors.  Essentially what ransomware does is an attacker gets in, they drop some software in your environment, and that software encrypts your data.  And encryption’s going to prevent you from accessing it unless you basically have the key, the password to unlock it.  But the attackers have the password.  And the ransom is they drop some notes in there that say, “Hey, send us money, we’ll give you that password.”  And they hold your data for ransom. And that’s what happened here.  They were being held for ransom to the amount of about a quarter million dollars in bitcoin.  All of their systems were down.  All of their backups that they had made were gone.  This affected all their locations.  They have several locations across the United States.  Pretty rough situation for them, and they ended up paying out that ransom.  So just like that, a quarter of a million dollars in cash gone from the business.  Then the attackers returned the key, but it’s often a gamble whether or not they’re going to.  These are criminals.  They don’t have any code to follow.  But in general, you know, they’ll return the key, and which they did in this case.  But it was partially functional, so it didn’t get everything back up and running. So this company still suffered several weeks of downtime of critical systems, bleeding into months of restore work where their IT team was completely wrapped up in this.  They had to bring in external consultants to help with all manner of things.  So in total, you know, when I spoke to him in the aftermath, it was somewhere around half a million dollars that was spent that they were able to track in terms of cash moving off their books.  The opportunity cost, the lost time, the lost trust in that business, the fact that they had to go to all their partners and say, “Hey, look, this happened to us.”  You know, a lot of that’s intangible, but meaningful.  So very serious for them. Lessons Learned from a Cyber Attack BILL YATES:  And the impact on the team, you know, I’m just thinking of that, too, Andy.  It’s so frustrating when your work gets stopped.  And you have to let the customer know, or you have to let somebody else, you know, many times there are external stakeholders.  And it’s just such a point of frustration for the entire company.  So you’re right, that opportunity cost, it’s hard to put a dollar amount on that.  So talk us through what are some of the lessons learned from this particular incident. ANDY SAUER:  Sure.  So I think maybe the smartest thing to kind of go through is the sequence of events.  And, you know, what started as something that could be small and contained, exploded into this giant thing,

The podcast by project managers for project managers. This episode we share an environmental project story about CIRT, a startup company working on a solution to share recycling information to reduce waste. Kat Shayne and her team built a database to answer your recycling questions. Hear about the complex challenges encountered on this project. Table of Contents 01:37 … Meet Kat04:37 … The Origin of CIRT08:17 … Accessing CIRT08:55 … Building a Database11:19 … What is GiGi?12:42 … Identifying What Can be Recycled13:59 … Keeping the Data Current15:40 … Skills or Passion?17:51 … Satisfying Stakeholders20:00 … Tackling Obstacles22:44 … Lessons Learned Building CIRT24:48 … Measuring the Impact of CIRT26:14 … I Wish I had Known!27:53 … Advice to Project Managers29:49 … Get in Touch with Kat31:12 … Closing Kat Shayne: ...making sure that the people that are in place are doing the things that are their strengths, and providing access to resources and tools that help them work on their weaknesses. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates.  We like to bring you stories about projects.  And today we are bringing you a story about Katherine Shayne.  She worked in environmental sustainability focused on global materials management and marine plastic litter for the Jambeck Research Group and UGA New Materials Institute.  Kat has a passion for bridging science and technology with business and mitigation strategies in communities especially in terms of waste management and new materials. BILL YATES:  Wendy, have you ever been holding something in your hand, or you’re about to throw it in the trash, and you’re like, wait a minute, maybe I could recycle this. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, yes, many a time. BILL YATES:  So this is the question.  This is the problem that Kat and her team have been addressing.  At the University of Georgia Kat is the co-founder and president of Can I Recycle This.  It’s a startup company which is working on a solution to help people, people like me and you, governments, and businesses figure out what products or packaging are locally recyclable and how to get them to where they need to go. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Kat.  It’s great to have you on the podcast.  Thank you for joining us today. KAT SHAYNE:  Thanks for having me.  I’m really excited to be here. Meet Kat WENDY GROUNDS:  I want to hear a little bit about your background before we start.  You have a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of Georgia. BILL YATES:  Go Dawgs. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah. KAT SHAYNE:  Go Dawgs. WENDY GROUNDS:  What sparked your interest in environmental sustainability?  How did it all begin? KAT SHAYNE:  Actually, I did not plan on becoming an engineer at all.  I was an English major when I started at UGA.  And I was going pre-law because I’d already looked up one of the highest-passing degrees for the LSAT was English.  So I started off in English.  I was really passionate about writing.  And I had a class that was an elective science class.  It was with Dr. Knox.  He’s a climatologist at UGA.  And he had me in his class, and he asked me to come in for office hours one day.  He was like, what is your major?  And I told him I wanted to do pre-law. I really had a passion for policy and law. And he says, “Well, you really have a knack for this,” because it was a climate course.  He said, you know, “Have you explored engineering, applied sciences?”  I said, “No, I didn’t even know UGA had engineering.”    So I went and checked it out, and at the same time I was trying to find a little bit more purpose in my degree, you know, what kind of law did I want to go into if I was going to do that. Because my significant other at the time had been diagnosed with cancer.  And he was 20, and he had colon cancer.  So I was, how can this happen?  Why is this a reality?  Like I didn’t understand how that could happen, you know.  My stepdad had been getting a colonoscopy when he was 50, that’s when you start to check for those things.  So I was trying to find something where I could do good and do the least amount of harm, right, or trying to fix systems. And so I looked at engineering, and I said, okay.  I can either be reactive, go into law and try and fix it from something already happening, or I can look at systems and try to fix them before they happen, like design better systems, design more efficient systems, design systems that do no harm.  And so my significant other ended up passing away when he was 21 of colon cancer.  So that made it a mission to use the skills that I had and create better systems through engineering.  And that’s how I got into my sustainability path is because I was looking to create better products or better services that could do the least amount of harm, be the least toxic. BILL YATES:  So sorry to hear about that loss.  And what an impact on you at that age, to have someone that close pass away.  So sorry for that.  And it makes sense, too, you know, I can see how that would lead you to these bigger questions that many times, you know, it’s much later in life that we start to ask these questions of ourselves.  Okay, what am I going to do?  What is my purpose in life?  And how can I make a difference?  I love that, “So do good and fix systems.”  That’s a good mantra.  The Origin of CIRT That turns us to CIRT, or CIRT.  You developed CIRT because you saw a problem.  Tell us what CIRT stands for, and through that I think you’ll describe the problem. KAT SHAYNE:  In 2018 myself and Jenna Jambeck, Dr. Jenna Jambeck at the University of Georgia, started CIRT to answer the question Can I Recycle This?  So it’s an acronym.  We’ve shortened it now because we answer many, many more questions like can I reuse this, can I recover this, can I refill this.  So we map out materials recovery systems, mostly in North America.  But we are looking to expand elsewhere.  After I graduated from undergrad in engineering, I went on to work with Jenna in grad school because she was the only one doing research on plastic pollution, and I was really, really fascinated by it because when that leaks into our environment it’s really harmful to people and animals and our ecosystems alike.  So I wanted to make an impact in that area. So I started working with Jenna.  We were studying plastic inputs into the ocean.  So if you’ve ever heard that there’s going to be more plastic than fish in the sea, someone took a stat from our research and turned it into that other statistic.  And so we were getting a lot of attention, her group was, for that research.  That also meant we were getting questions about plastics and recycling and waste management from people all across the globe, really.  So we would get questions like what do I do with the No. 1 plastic that I have?  What do I do with my chip bag?  Or why is my recycling truck going to the landfill? We would get all these questions from people across the country and across the world about recycling and waste management.  So we decided to put together a way to find that out really easily.  So we built a database to answer what to do with a product wherever you are.  That was kind of the thesis for it.  How do we tell people exactly what to do with their products, after they buy them and after they use them?  So we initially came up with an artificial intelligence bot, and it was on Twitter, and it was on Facebook Messenger, so anyone could ask without having to download a new app; right?  Like I’ve got a thousand apps on my phone.  We wanted people to be able to use that with the apps they already had. And we were trying to sell it to cities.  Well, city timelines and budgets were just not in line with the startup, unfortunately.  So we pivoted, and we started to offer this information to companies, and it quickly caught on.  And so now we work directly with CPGs and large multiunit institutions to help procure, purchase, and use the right materials for recoverability. BILL YATES:  And what does CPG stand for? KAT SHAYNE:  Consumer Package Goods companies.  So you can think of like consumables to decking material, like all sorts of things that we use as consumers can be put into that category.  And so one other thing I wanted to mention was another reason we did this is because many recovery systems are very localized.  So when you think about your waste management, it’s usually based on your city or your county.  And so they’re very different as you move around the U.S. and into Canada.  So they can change mile by mile.  I mean, I’m in Athens, Georgia.  What I can recycle is not necessarily what you can recycle in Atlanta.  So they do change.  And they also are in flux.  So they also have changes per month.  So they might accept glass this month and not next month, and so we keep track of all that information. Accessing CIRT KAT SHAYNE:  We have a web application that is online, so you can access it through your browser.  The reason we didn’t go down the app road, we did have that on our product roadmap at one point, was the hurdle to adoption.  We wanted people to get this information as quickly as they could.  So the way that we’ve done that is we’ve created integrations for apps, for websites, for different types of ecommerce, so that this information can be used by the brand and the company or the organization to, A, get that information out to their consumers, or use it to purchase better products. Building a Database BILL YATES:  I don’t want to go too nerdy with you, but the idea of building out this database of information is just so intriguing to me.  I’m thinking of all the data science and the computer design that goes into that.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Two important interpersonal skills for project professionals to sharpen are negotiation and persuasion. Before you embark on your next stakeholder negotiation or try persuade an unyielding team member, take a listen to Carlene Szostak as she talks about successful negotiation and persuasion. Table of Contents 01:45 … Meet Carlene02:38 … Types of Project Negotiations03:40 … The Traits of a Good Negotiator04:38 … Preparing for the Negotiation Process05:45 … Finding the Why07:29 … Listen Well10:26 … Enhance Your Negotiating Power12:43 … Dealing with Unethical Tactics14:59 … Reading Body Language16:12 … Negotiating for a Project Extension17:02 … Traps to Avoid in Negotiations18:48 … When Negotiation Stalls21:57 … Kevin and Kyle23:13 … Factors for Successful Persuasion24:40 … The Right Mindset for Persuasion26:37 … Dealing with a Confrontational Person28:46 … Persuasion vs. Manipulation30:46 … Tips to Persuade an Owner or Stakeholder32:31 … Challenges Facing PMs Today34:01 … Contact Carlene34:30 … Closing CARLENE SZOSTAK: ... Well, with technology and with the ability to reach people regardless of where they are in the organization, those walls have come down.  And people that are in the position of power want to hear from the people closest to the projects.  So therefore the permission has been granted.  All we have to do is step into it. 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 we’re so glad you joined us today.  If you like what you hear, we’d love to hear from you.  You can leave us a comment on our website, Velociteach.com; on social media; or whichever podcast listening app you use. Our guest today is Carlene Szostak.  She’s a business leader, she’s a consultant, author, and an educator.  She’s an established senior leader with a broad range of experience managing people, process, and technology.  So we’re going to talk about negotiation and persuasion. BILL YATES:  You know, Wendy, one of the things that we’re talking about is the importance of getting to know the other person that we’re negotiating with.  And one of the books that I’ve read on negotiation is by Chris Voss.  It’s “Never Split the Difference.”  In that he offers some questions that I think are helpful for me when I’m thinking about a negotiation, and what does the person on the other side of the table want?  Here are some of these questions.  This is just food for thought. “What about this is important to you?  How can I help to make this better for us?  How would you like for me to proceed?  What is it that brought us into this situation?  How can we solve this problem?  How am I supposed to do that, that thing that you’ve asking?”  These are just some questions that are food for thought for those that are trying to get in the mindset of that person on the other side of the table. Meet Carlene WENDY GROUNDS:  Carlene, welcome to Manage This. CARLENE SZOSTAK:  Thank you so much for having me. WENDY GROUNDS:  Won’t you tell us how you got into project management? CARLENE SZOSTAK:  So my career started with the NFL.  Again, that had nothing to do with project management, but that experience segued me into working for a Fortune 50 company that had multiple moving parts.  And our senior leadership did not believe in project managers.  We hired the team, the team did the work, and that’s it.  And one very excited and future-looking leader on the C Suite came in and said, “Well, why don’t we just test the model?”  I had the opportunity in my region to actually get a project manager to work for me, and they opened our eyes on the things that we didn’t even consider we had to do or think about.  And ever since then I have been passionate about making sure that organizations have project management influence in anything that’s touched that makes a difference for the business to move forward. Types of Project Negotiations WENDY GROUNDS:  Carlene, we’re excited to talk about negotiation and persuasion.  I think it’s a topic that is close to the heart of project managers.  But before we get into that, could you give some idea of the types of negotiation that is commonly used in a project? CARLENE SZOSTAK:  Well, I would say that, as a project manager, they would probably say that they negotiate every day, all the time. BILL YATES:  Everything, yes. CARLENE SZOSTAK:  Exactly.  And working on projects are never routine based on my experience.  I would probably say that the most used is attempting to go with a win-win when they’re trying to resolve a conflict.  It could be a conflict between associates that are in impasse.  It could be a stall that just suddenly popped up.  Or it could be a request for a change of a deadline, or even stakeholders that suddenly decide that they want to have a report out and an explanation as to why we’re going that way.  I think it’s – I don’t know if you know the game Whac-a-mole.  It’s a county fair game.  I kind of see project managers doing that throughout their day. The Traits of a Good Negotiator BILL YATES:  Yup, that’s so true.  Things pop up, and you’ve got to deal with it.  In your experience with people that have gone into this area of negotiations, you’ve seen people do things well, and you’ve seen people do things poorly.  What are the traits of a good negotiator? CARLENE SZOSTAK:  I think just the training that a project manager goes through kind of sets them up for success.  But if I had to come up with the top three – I like working in threes – the top three that I would come up with would be the first one is to actually create a plan.  What the heck are they trying to accomplish?  And then the second one would be to organize it.  So identifying what’s important and what’s clutter.  And again, if we don’t sit down and take the time to do that, all of a sudden in negotiations you don’t know which way you’re going because you have all these ideas in your head.  So again, create a plan, organize what really is important and what isn’t, and then stay focused.  And so plan, organize, and staying focused would be my top three. Preparing for the Negotiation Process WENDY GROUNDS:  Creating that plan, what are some effective preparations that can be done to start that negotiation process? CARLENE SZOSTAK:  I guess I would start with talking about preparing.  And again, back in the day, this will show my age.  Back in the day we used to go to the library, we used to find microfiche, we had to read old newspapers.  It would take hours and hours and days for us to find out some information.  Now that information is at our fingertips.  So I would start there.  The Internet is a great, vast place to start with.  Go to using keyword searches, and of course friends in the network.  But knowing the history of the company, knowing the person that you’re interviewing in advance. So these are fundamentals.  And we should be doing that regardless of what we’re involved in, if it’s job hunting, negotiating a podcast, doing some background information.  I think LinkedIn is a great source from a business perspective.  Where did they go to school?  Who are they connected with?  Are they connected to people that you’re connected with?  And then reach out to those folks and find out kind of how the other person thinks. Finding the Why I didn’t talk about this earlier, but one of the things that’s important as you’re negotiating is thinking the Why? question.  And there’s a game that we used to play, I call it the Why? game.  I’m sure if we Google searched it there’s an official title for it.  But practicing asking a question and then saying, okay, and why?  And why?  And why?  So for fun, outside of a negotiation setting, I would recommend people practicing that.  How many whys can you get to before you’ve actually kind of exhausted it? Because sometimes when you’re prepping, you’re thinking at only one level.  And then once you get into the negotiations, the person says something, and then you can’t take it at face value.  You really have to say, so why?  And then you may end up finding out what the true truth is underneath that, if you take the time to ask the question.  So I would think that that’s probably the biggest thing from the preparation standpoint. BILL YATES:  I completely agree.  I feel like there are two key pieces of information that we need to prepare before going into a negotiation.  And I think we tend to focus on the first, which is the subject matter.  Which is, okay, what is it we’re talking about?  What are the details in the contract?  And what does my team run into?  So we really get hyper focused on the subject matter that we’re going to negotiate or discuss.  And we forget the person.  That’s the second one.  And it’s so important. Much of the reading that I’ve done on negotiations talks about empathy.  To your point, you’ve got to ask that question of why.  What motivates this person?  How are they likely to respond to this conversation we’ve going to have?  Based on their background, how do I expect them to respond?  Then how am I going to respond to that?  So it’s like a chess game almost, you’re doing a lot of planning in advance and thinking about different ways this could go.  Listen Well CARLENE SZOSTAK:  Yeah.  Now, one of the things we touched on a little bit, but I think we should emphasize here, is that even though we’re asking questions, the listening part is the important part, too.  I mean, really listening.  And so, your success happens when you hear something and then respond to it.  So I think successful negotiations isn’t just taking the first thing that somebody says, but listen for the story behind the answer, I guess would be the way I would go. BILL YATES:  Okay.  I’ve got to refer to a book, Chris Voss,

As a project professional, are you creating an inclusive, high-performing team that builds on each individual’s strengths? Hiren Shukla, the founder of Neuro-Diverse Centers of Excellence at Ernst & Young Global, talks to us about how to support neurodiversity on project team. Hiren shares the remarkable impact of this innovation at EY as they are tapping into the significant skills of the neurodiverse community.

Hear about SmartPM, a real-time automated analytics platform, which analyzes complex construction schedule data via machine learning to uncover actionable insights so construction firms can reduce delays and improve project outcomes.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Lessons learned from a space crop production project to develop sustainable fresh food systems, in support of long duration space missions beyond low Earth orbit. We’re exploring the world of astrobotany and the challenges of this unconventional project. Table of Contents 02:38 … Meet Ralph05:05 … Project Management Role at NASA08:30 … Space Crop Production09:44 … Project Stakeholders11:35 … Tailoring the Pitch12:39 … Growing Plants in Space16:46 … Plant Growth Substrate19:16 … Regolith23:15 … Types of Plant Crops for Space27:42 … Kevin and Kyle29:09 … Understanding Both Sides of the Project33:34 … Further Testing36:15 … Project Simulation Funding37:59 … Making the Most of Opportunities40:51 … PM Lessons Learned43:26 … Find out More44:34 … Closing RALPH FRITSCHE: I think it’s an advantage not having too much of a foothold in any camp because what it does is you bring a bias with you that you have to work through.  Not having that bias gives you the ability to understand the passions that each side brings to the table and to try to balance those.  Because personalities are such that I might have an engineer who’s very knowledgeable and demonstrative, and they may override the plant scientist person.  And you have to be able to see that dynamic if it happens and try to balance that out.  So it’s really almost acting like an orchestra leader trying to understand when the right time to engage one group versus another. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Thank you for joining us today.  This is where we interview top experts and project managers to get their unique perspectives.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates, who likes to dig deep into complex issues that project managers face today.  If you like what you hear, we’d love to hear from you.  You can leave us a comment on our website, Velociteach.com, on social media, or whichever podcast listening app you use. Our guest today is Ralph Fritsche.  He is with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which we commonly call NASA; and he’s a space crop production and exploration food systems project manager.  And he’s leading the efforts to develop sustainable and reliable fresh food systems in support of long-duration space missions beyond low Earth orbit. BILL YATES:  This is so fascinating.  This conversation with Ralph is just something I’ve been looking forward to because, I mean, Wendy, you and I, neither one of us are really green thumbs.  We can kill stuff. WENDY GROUNDS:  No, no, I’m really bad.  I’ve been trying so hard. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And here we’re going to talk with Ralph about growing stuff in space.  And it has to be edible, and it has to be the ultimate in terms of nutritious and tasty and sustainable and zero waste.  It’s like, ah, what a problem to solve, and what an interesting project to address. WENDY GROUNDS:  It’s such an interesting project because we spoke to Philippe Schoonejans a few months ago, and he was telling us it can take over eight months to get to Mars.  So it’s not like you can stop midway and resupply and get your fruit and veggies.  So Ralph’s team is trying to develop sustainable fresh food systems for these astronauts. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And Ralph’s had a 40-year career with NASA.  He’s done a little bit of everything, and he mentions a few of those in our conversation.  But talking about this latest project challenge for him is just mind-blowing. Meet Ralph WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Ralph.  Welcome to Manage This.  We’re so glad you’re joining us. RALPH FRITSCHE:  Thank you very much.  Pleasure to be here. WENDY GROUNDS:  Before we get talking about astrobotany, and I’m so geeked out about that, I want to find out a little bit about you.  Can you tell us about your career path?  Have you always been interested in space? RALPH FRITSCHE:  So, you know, it’s interesting, when I look back over it, I never envisioned or planned to be working in the space industry or on a space program.  But there are all these things that I can look back on my life that popped up that kind of probably said I was always destined to be here.  One of the first recollections I have, when I was a kid, I was doing one of these pencil-by-number paintings that they had back in the ‘60s, and it was of Ed White walking in space.  I was actually doing that when I heard about the Apollo fire that he died in.  Then I would follow all the other space missions, the early Gemini and even Mercury missions, Apollo. And so I was always interested in it.  But at the time I lived up in the New York area, eventually moved to Florida, right by the Space Coast.  And then I was interested at the time.  I went to college for physics and space sciences.  But always more from a cosmology perspective, not for human interaction in space.  But then being so close to the Space Center, when the time came to graduate, that’s where the jobs were.  And I got into it.  And I’ve been working at the Space Center or on some aspect of space program-related things for the past 40 years, everything from early space shuttle flights, went through most of the space shuttle program, up through ISS, International Space Station, the assembly of that. It was probably one of the highlights for me because I got to travel all over.  We worked with the Europeans on the Columbus module.  So we got to go to Europe several times.  Worked with the Japanese on the JEM module, got to go to Japan.  Before we actually built the station we worked with the docking module that allowed the space shuttle to dock to the Russian Mir station and got to travel to Moscow.  You know, I’ve got all these experiences that I likely would not have had otherwise.  But the interesting thing is where I’ve wound up now and working in crop production and plants.  Trying to feed astronauts in exploration missions turns out to be probably really the most interesting thing I’ve done from the practical perspective of helping humanity reach out beyond low-Earth orbit into the solar system. Project Management Role at NASA WENDY GROUNDS:  Explain your project management role at NASA. RALPH FRITSCHE:  Again, interesting.  We started off with, once we built Space Station, our group changed, and we began doing a series of research payloads.  So basically we transitioned from building Space Station to using it.  And so they were smaller research payloads, and they were space biology-related payloads.  Generally the way things are broken out within the science mission directorate and the biological physical sciences program is that plants are focused out of the Kennedy Space Center; animals are out of the Ames Research Center. So our stuff has always been focused on plants, microbes, things like that.  The small research facilities were generally things that were either a standard facility that we developed for multiple applications or unique one-off hardware packages.  And then we would work with principle investigators to make sure that we could match their experiments to the right hardware, or build hardware if needed, and then take that hardware all the way through the verification process and get it to fly in the International Space Station.  So they were very compartmentalized payloads that we would work a couple of years on each one, and then you pick up the next one. And then one day we were told that one of our funding sources was interested in doing space crop production.  We had grown plants on the Veggie payload.  We were getting ready to fly the Advanced Plant Habitat, another plant payload.  But the whole term of “crop production,” we weren’t really sure what that was at the time.  And I don’t think the asking people really understood, either.  But we knew there needed to be a role for plants beyond research into an application to feeding crew.  And so I was basically given that moniker before we really understood what it all involved. And now it’s kind of transitioned into trying to work a roadmap for the food systems for exploration to see where can plants play a viable role for keeping astronauts healthy and safe on these long-duration missions.  Really when you look at it, food’s the first line of defense for crew health.  And we know that when I start getting further away from Earth on the longer duration missions to Mars, for example, the prepackaged food that we have now starts to degrade in certain key nutrients after about 18 months.  And so we’re looking at three-year missions.  So the challenge is how do I supplement the crew diet with the kind of nutrition that they need, also doing other things like adding flavor, textures to the diet.  And so plants are really, probably I would say, the most known commodity for doing something in space. There’s a lot of different technologies that are still being developed, synthetic biology, things like that.  But they require a lot more infrastructure.  We kind of know how to basically grow plants now with all our practice in low Earth orbit.  And it’s now how do I move this into deep space environment, and how do I figure out what types of missions are going to require this supplemental nutrition?  What would those key nutrients be, so what plants do I grow?  So it’s really time to lay a long-term roadmap out there, see where do we do the research that’s needed, where do we deploy the systems, et cetera.  So it’s kind of a big range thinking out the next 30 to 50 years. Space Crop Production BILL YATES:  The complexity here just blows me away.  And just for a human to reach Mars takes so long.  So to your point, then, okay, we have meals that have an expiration date.  Okay, what are we going to do once they get there and do some work and then come home?  You know, they have to have food to eat.  This is so complex.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Andy Crowe shares project management advice and reflects on 20 years of training project managers at Velociteach. Hear about his bold move to step away from a successful project management career to launch Velociteach, and what he learned along the way. Listen in for tips on how to find balance if you’re overwhelmed, dealing with uncertainty, and managing changes. Table of Contents 01:20 … Behind the Book03:05 … Comparison to Other PMP Exam Textbooks05:05 … Defining Success05:48 … Lessons Learned Starting Velociteach07:14… Challenges that PMs are Facing Today11:07 … Kevin and Kyle12:45 … Most Successful Project13:31 … Project Manager Competencies15:33 … Acquiring the Technical Knowledge17:15 … Tools and Techniques18:52 … A Team Replaced or Project Cancelled?21:07 … The Overwhelmed Project Manager22:50 … Finding Balance25:19 … Managing Changes and Unpredictability29:07 … Best of Project Management30:15 … Closing ANDY CROWE: To me it’s such a joy to bring order into chaos.  It’s such a joy to deliver a solution, to make something, to build something.  I love that.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We are so glad you’re joining us.  If you like what you hear, please visit us at Velociteach.com, where you can leave a comment on our Manage This Podcast page.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and here in the studio is Bill Yates and Andy Crowe.  Bill, this is a very special day today; isn’t it. BILL YATES:  Yes, we’re celebrating 20 years, a 20-year birthday or... WENDY GROUNDS:  Love birthdays. BILL YATES:  ...anniversary for Velociteach.  That’s right, Velociteach started up in September of 2002.  And we just wanted to invite Andy into the studio just to pause and reflect on 20 years of Velociteach, and then ask him some personal questions; you know?  What makes a project manager successful?  What’s it like when your project gets canceled?  Tell us about starting a business.  So this will be a fun conversation, just to get inside the brain of Andy Crowe, CEO of Velociteach. WENDY GROUNDS:  And I think he has a lot of great advice for younger project managers or project managers who are struggling.  He has some really good advice.  So take a listen. Behind the Book Hi, Andy.  Welcome back to Manage This. ANDY CROWE:  Thank you.  I’m excited to be here. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re excited to talk with you today.  So Velociteach, it all started with a book.  And writing a book is a huge project.  Could you tell us a bit about your book, “The PMP Exam:  How to Pass on Your First Try,” and your motivation to write it? ANDY CROWE:  You know what, I was motivated because when I read other books I wasn’t happy with them.  And they didn’t explain things the way I did.  So, you know, certainly there were a lot of resources out there, and people definitely passed the PMP before this.  But it was something that I like to explain things.  I love to write.  I just write a lot regardless.  And so it was a good marriage of things.  As I was going through, I took all of my notes that I had used previously to study for the PMP and kind of put them to use and organized them.  And then it evolved over time. BILL YATES:  I’ve known you for a while, and I think that’s a  natural evolution for you.  That’s part of your DNA is you look at something, you go through something personally like the PMP Exam.  And you go, you know what, I think I would have done better if I’d had this, or if.  It makes sense to me that you would go through that, pass the PMP Exam, and then go, you know, I think I could write a book about this. ANDY CROWE:  Well, and also, you know, it was something that, as I’m going through trying to explain things, there were just things that I thought I would love to have stated that differently.  I would love to have explained this a different way.  And so, you know, some of the resources that were out there either talked down to you, or they explained things that, well, yeah, if you already understood them, that would help.  And if you didn’t understand, it didn’t help at all.  So I was trying to bridge that gap. Comparison to Other PMP Exam Textbooks WENDY GROUNDS:  What else about your book makes it different from other PMP textbooks? ANDY CROWE:  I think a lot of it is the voice we use and the way we try and relate back to the work that project managers are doing.  So there aren’t a ton of assumptions in there necessarily.  We try and explain concepts from the ground up.  A lot of illustrations, a lot of diagrams, a lot of examples.  And then a whole ton of questions.  I don’t know if any other resource has that many sample practice questions built in. BILL YATES:  One of the things that I think gives you a unique voice with the book is it includes both predictive and adaptive.  And I think when PMI expanded the test to include all the agile content, for us it was like, ooh, this is a great opportunity.  We’ve already written a lot of content.  You had the PMI ACP book already. And then I think it just added to the value of your book because then you added, gosh, dozens and dozens of pages to go into agile content, which again had the same mindset of this is how it makes sense to me.  This has been my experience. ANDY CROWE:  Right.  And you know, it was – that was a weird time in the industry because you had a lot of companies trying to suddenly brand themselves as agile experts.  And some of them had no idea, and some of them were trying hard to do agile through this waterfall or predictive lens.  So it was just a really interesting time with a lot of chaos.  And it was fun to try and step in and bring some order and some reason to that. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And I would say you brought simplicity to it. You know, being able to take a difficult concept, a complex concept, and bring simplicity to it.  And I think for many it’s just very hard to think, okay, predictive versus adaptive.  They’re very different.  But how can I understand them both?  ANDY CROWE:  Thanks.  You’ve not the first person to call me “simple.”  No, the two are in opposition to each other to a large degree, and they’re trying to accomplish the same thing through not necessarily opposite means, but certainly different. BILL YATES:  Yeah, very different. Defining Success WENDY GROUNDS:  Andy, with your book, what defines success? ANDY CROWE:  Number of units sold.  No.  I’m kidding.  Although, you know, it is nice to have some success in the market.  But to me the real success comes through the number of people who use it successfully, the number of people who pass.  And this is the only job in my life that I’ve ever had where people write thank-you notes.  So we’ll regularly get notes from people because this makes a difference in their career, makes a difference in their life.  And so that is wonderful, to get those.  That never gets old.  I read every one.  I try and response to every one I get. That to me defines success. Lessons Learned Starting Velociteach WENDY GROUNDS:  People are often afraid to step out and take a risk, to do that career change, and especially going alone in a new business.  Can you tell us a bit about starting Velociteach and your lessons learned in that process? ANDY CROWE:  That’s a big question, Wendy.  I understand that fear of taking a leap of faith.  You know, I had done training, a good bit of training at the very beginning of my career, and I loved it.  I loved training.  And what I loved about it was seeing the light bulb come on.  I used to teach for the federal government.  And this goes way back into the late ‘80s.  But I loved seeing the light bulbs come on.  I loved seeing people understand concepts and trying to help lead them along a path.  So that was a natural transition for me.  I absolutely loved project management.  I had been doing it. And I had been growing as a project manager, promoted up, director of project management for a public company.  And it was a nice marriage of the two.  But it was still a terrifying thing to do, and to jump out and make that change.  So I definitely understand it. Lessons learned?  I wish I had done it earlier, honestly.  I think, you know, it was something that I’ve never looked back and said, oh, this was a career mistake; or, wow, I shouldn’t have done this.  Not every venture like that works.  This one did.  And it was a real delight. Challenges that PMs are Facing Today BILL YATES:  Andy, when you look at project managers and the role of the project manager, what are the biggest challenges that PMs are facing today? ANDY CROWE:  You know, I’ve said for years it’s a tough gig.  Being a project manager is tough because you’re caught in a vise of organization expectations, customer expectations.  And sometimes they’re unreasonable on both sides, and they all pinch in on the PM.  So the PM’s got to try and figure out how to make this work and how to broker some kind of satisfaction among all the parties.  And of course you’ve got the team, as well.  And so a lot of times if the PM is sort of a pleaser personality, he or she is trying to make the customer happy, and the team gets creamed by having to work too hard, having to put in too much.  They’re redlining all the time.  It’s a difficult job. And then you’ve got a lot of organizations are mandating a specific approach that may or may not work well for that project.  So some organizations are purely predictive, some organizations are pure agile, and there’s really almost no appeal or no discussion, even though that may not be tailored just right to this particular project.  Again, the PM’s got to figure out how to make that work.  Some people are better at that naturally than others.  But I think there’s a lot of challenges out there. And, you know,