Manage This - The Project Management Podcast

Over the last couple of years, company culture has undergone significant transformation. The fact is every person on a project team has an influence on the culture. As project leaders, we shouldn’t take our responsibility to team culture lightly. We’re talking with culture expert Colin D Ellis about in-office culture, remote culture, and hybrid culture.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. As a project manager, do you have an obligation to support your team members’ development for the duration of your project assignment?  In this episode, Lisa DiTullio explains how to effectively coach team members and still get the work done. She describes how to create a learning, collaborative environment for your team, which will benefit each individual and the project delivery. Table of Contents 02:05 … Meet Lisa03:26 … Defining Coaching05:16 … Changing Landscape for Project Managers07:33 … Traditional Approach to Managing Projects09:45 … How to Coach and Deliver Successful Projects12:35 … Coaching Project Fundamentals16:40 … Asking the Right Questions18:04 … How to Evolve as a Manager Coach20:06 … Listen More, Talk Less21:58 … Coaching Through the Life of a Project25:01 … Fitting in a New Team Member29:40 … Keep it Simple to be Successful30:47 … Get in Touch with Lisa31:55 … Closing LISA DITULLIO:  And if they challenge you, like, “Well, wait a minute, you know this, can’t you just tell me,” you have to be prepared to be able to go back and say, “But when I give you the permission and the opportunity to think about this on your own, you will never forget it.  You will own it.  It is yours.  And then you can build off of that, and you can continue to succeed.” WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our bimonthly program, where we like to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  And we’re so glad you’re joining us.  If you like what you hear, please visit us at Velociteach.com and leave us a comment on our website. I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Our guest today is Lisa DiTullio.  Lisa is the principal of Project Chalk Talk.  She has over 25 years experience in establishing PMO and Portfolio Management models. She is also the author of several books and a regular contributor to industry blogs and various podcasts.  As past VP Portfolio and Program Management of Foundation Medicine, Lisa built the PMO from the ground up.  As past director of the PMO at Boston-based Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, Lisa was a core member of the turnaround team for an organization that went from being placed in state-supervised receivership in 1999 to being the number one health plan in America in U.S. News & World Report many years in a row.  So we’re going to talk with Lisa about the project coach. BILL YATES:  Yeah, some of these questions are going to be along the lines of, okay, do project managers also have an obligation or a responsibility to support team members’ development?  We’ve got to deliver successful projects.  What about our team members and their development?  It’s an opportunity to support team members’ development through coaching for the duration of the project assignment.  But again, you’ve got to find that balance of getting things done.  So we’re going to ask Lisa how coaching can be done simply, without getting in the way of successful project delivery. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Lisa.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thanks for being our guest.  LISA DITULLIO:  Thank you so much for having me.  I’m thrilled to be here. Meet Lisa WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re excited to talk on this topic.  But before we get there, can you tell us about your current work? What are you doing right now, and how you got into project management? LISA DITULLIO:  I fell into the profession like many of us have, which is totally by accident.  I never grew up thinking I was going to be a project manager.  Didn’t even know what a project manager was.  And in typical form, most folks who are good at their day job get rewarded by being assigned a project.  And that’s exactly how it happened.  I had no background.  I had no training.  And I just knew that I had to deliver a lot of work within a certain timeline.  And I knew that the pressure was on, and I needed to do a good job.  It was a very small team.  And we were dealing with a momentous project in healthcare, which has been my primary focus throughout my career.  And that’s how it happened.  It was just simply by accident. I still believe the accidental profession is alive and well for so many different reasons.  And I left my day job again at the end of last year and decided, you know, once you start a business, then you have no fears about doing it again.  And so I’m doing it again.  I’m just having a lot of fun because I’m staying in a very narrow alley which is teaching, coaching, mentoring. And being a little bit of a change maker in this profession.  I think it’s time for us to do so. Defining Coaching WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you tell us what coaching is?  LISA DITULLIO:  Yeah.  There are so many different definitions.  A lot of people think of the traditional definition of coaching as in an athletic coach who oftentimes will give you strong guidance on how to do something to get better, to really focus and work on your talents and your strengths.  The coaching that I’m thinking of and from how we’re going to talk about it today is really about empowering individuals in a completely different manner because most folks that we oversee – and for project managers what’s really interesting about it is whether project managers recognize it or not, for the life of a project, those project team members spend most time with the project manager rather than their functional manager.  And they will rely on that project manager or program manager, especially if they’re good ones, to guide them along the way. And it could be that guidance can be in a plethora of areas and topics and skills.  The difference, though, for project managers, is it’s not telling our team members what to do and how to do it.  It’s challenging our team members on figuring it out on their own.  But we always offer them a safety net so they will never fail.  But it forces a complete different mindset on a project manager because it’s a whole lot easier.  We’ll just tell them what to do.  In fact, it’s worse than that.  Usually the project manager is, by the time I tell you to do it, I can do it myself.  So think about what we’re challenging these folks to do, which is, you know, sit on your hands, listen intently, ask a lot of questions, and empower the individuals.  And ultimately, as you do this on your project teams, you are creating a learning collaborative environment on your team, which is the ultimate place to be when you’re delivering really complex stuff. Changing Landscape for Project Managers BILL YATES:  That’s good.  That’s a great description. And, yeah, there’s a certain arrogance that I think it’s easy for project managers to fall into because many times we kind of grow, like you said, we kind of grow out of a technical background where it’s like, okay, I reached a level of competency where now, I’m kind of in charge of this part of the project or the entire project team.  That’s a great wakeup call.  I appreciate you talking about that.  I also wanted to talk about that changing landscape that you see for projects and project managers.  How would you describe that landscape today versus what it used to be? LISA DITULLIO:  Yeah, it’s a great question.  And, well, first of all, as a world, we’ve gone through extraordinary change in the last couple of years, and I don’t think we’re ever going back to what we used to have before on any level.  Yet, when you look at the history of project management, so the PMI was founded in 1969, and Agile became a thing in the early 1990s.  And by the way, I’m a big proponent.  Put your weapons down, stop worrying and fighting over what methodology is the best.  It’s about what’s best for the organization to meet those needs. We also have an aging profession.  I believe the latest stats on PMPs, that over 50% of our PMP holders right now have less than five years’ experience under their belt.  So now you go back to that coaching mode.  So I believe it’s an aging profession, and I think it’s also equally fueled by the Great Resignation.  But for those who are still with us who have been really well trained, real experienced, and are a full believer of the methodology, which I think is still a great thing. As long as we’ve got some flex to it, they want to tell us what to do. And the coaches themselves don’t necessarily see flexibility in the way we deliver projects.  So you have to change your mindset to be flexible in order to coach really well.  Because the younger generation, first of all they were born out of the womb with devices.  They have a different way of thinking and behaving.  And they have some extraordinary thoughts, ideas, and suggestions of how we all could do this better together.  So if we don’t open our mindset, we will never be able to coach them to extraordinary things.  It doesn’t just benefit them as an individual, but benefits the delivery of a project in a program. Traditional Approach to Managing Projects WENDY GROUNDS:  Lisa, can you describe how organizations have traditionally approached managing projects?  And what are some drawbacks to this approach? LISA DITULLIO:  Sure.  And again, I’m going to try to stay out of the debate of what methodology is better.  But for most of us, regardless of the methodology that we rely on, we rely on process.  We’re heavily driven by process and templates.  And the problem with that is we get so intently focused on process and templates, we forget to ask ourselves what does this project really need?  And speed is of the essence for just about everyone.  We are investing millions and millions and millions of dollars on these really important projects everywhere in organizations. And there’s some belief right now that there’s more money on the table for our projects than there are for operations.  And I think it’s a very compelling argument.  As a result of that,

How is Agile relevant beyond IT? Alan Zucker explains how agile roots are in the Lean manufacturing movement as he shares about the application of agile practices for non-technology projects. He talks about agile as a mindset, the Gemba Walk, House of Lean, transparency in teams, value stream mapping, and much more. Recently Alan launched a new Velociteach InSite course: Agile Beyond IT, a hands-on application of agile practices for non-technology challenges. Table of Contents 01:59 … Agile Beyond IT03:09 … Blurring the Lines between Traditional and Agile06:04 … Fusion Cooking and Project Management07:21 … Agile as a Mindset not a Methodology10:19 … Self-Organizing and Self-Managing11:32 … Empowering Team Members12:36 … Iterative and Incremental15:12 … Iterative and Incremental in Non-IT Projects15:21 … The House of Lean17:43 … Transparency in Healthy Teams19:22 … The Gemba Walk22:53 … Agile Manifesto beyond IT24:59 … 12 Agile Principles beyond IT27:41 … Dignity28:49 … Value Stream Mapping in Non-IT31:39 … Advice for New Leaders32:57 … Get in Touch with Alan34:19 … Closing ALAN ZUCKER: Another is trusting the wisdom of the team, recognizing that you don’t need to come up with all the answers, or potentially even any of the answers; that your strength lies in bringing out the experience and knowledge of everybody else on the team. WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This.  My name is Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates.  This is the podcast about project management.  We are excited to bring our guest to you today.  This is actually someone we’ve had before. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  Alan Zucker is joining us.  He’s a certified project management professional.  He’s an Agile Foundation certificate holder, a Scrum Master, a Scaled Agilist, as well as a keynote speaker. BILL YATES:  We have a course that we are launching.  This one is called “Agile Beyond IT.”  It’s a part of our self-paced training in InSite.  Alan created the “Fundamentals of Agile” course for us, and the feedback was always positive, and sometimes he’d get the comment, “I don’t work in technology, so how does this apply to me?”  Well, that’s something that he’s dealt with a lot in some of the consulting and other training that he’s done for organizations. For several years Alan’s helped clients use agile principles and practices in diverse non-technology fields, everything from construction to not-for-profits.  These experiences are the basis for this class.  And he pulls some of the concepts from the agile principles and says, “Okay, here’s the principle.  How can we apply this beyond IT?”  Very practical, great advice. Alan has got multiple agile certifications from PMI, the Scrum Alliance, Disciplined Agile, and Scaled Agile.  He’s created courses for us.  He instructs for us.  He is in the classroom.  In fact, as we wrap up this session today, he’s going to begin a four-day PMP prep class for us.  And we’re delighted to have him with us. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Alan.  Welcome to Manage This once again.  Thank you for joining us. ALAN ZUCKER:  Hi.  It’s great to see you guys again. Agile Beyond IT WENDY GROUNDS:  Now, we’ve just mentioned that you have completed a course for us, “Agile Beyond IT.”  And we’re very excited to publish this one.  It’s an excellent course.  Could you give us a little bit of a background for this and why you picked that name for the course? ALAN ZUCKER:  Sure.  So a few years ago I created a “Fundamentals of Agile” course for Velociteach.  And it’s been very popular.  But as we were looking at some of the comments that people left, people were saying, “Well, this was a really great course, but it was all about technology, and I’m in a non-technology area.  How can I use agile?”  So we had some conversations, and we put together a course for people that aren’t in technology.  And it just so happened that around the same time I was thinking, how do I begin to sort of coalesce and distill some of the ideas I had around agile because I’ve been working with very non-traditional organizations and teaching them agile techniques to better manage their work.  Like I’ve done a lot of work with nonprofits, and that’s really been very interesting to show them, hey, you can use these agile techniques.  And they love it. Blurring the Lines between Traditional and Agile BILL YATES:  Alan, I’m going to quote Alan at Alan.  There’s a key concept that you share early on in the course.  And I’m going to quote it:  “As the profession evolves, successful project managers will be pragmatic and select the best practices based on the project context.  In other words, the lines between traditional and agile project management will blur, and we will pick the best tools and practices based on our project’s needs.”  I love that.  I completely agree with that.  But let’s dig into it a little bit further.  How do you see the lines blurring? ALAN ZUCKER:  So I think if we look at project management or the history of project management, traditional project management really came from construction, really from engineering and the expectation that we can design something and build it.  And if you’re looking at an office building, that’s what they do.  Turns out that my son-in-law is a construction project manager and has worked on some big buildings here in the DC area.  So you’ve got your designs and your specs.  You bring in the guys that do the excavation, and the concrete guys, and they pour the floors.  And then you bring in the plumbers and the carpenters and three different types of metal workers.  And it works where you’ve got a good design. Agile started in software development.  And agile works really well there because we’ve found and we know that we cannot fully articulate what we need upfront.  So the idea of iterating through and getting feedback and moving forward works well.  And I think that for a lot of us, if we begin to think about, well, what are the best practices from either side of the spectrum, we begin to pick and choose and say, well, it might make sense to do a daily standup, even if I’m working in a traditional environment.  Or that maybe we need to do more structured risk management on our agile projects. BILL YATES:  Yeah, those are good.  I love the concept of bringing the best out of both and blurring those together.  Now  whenever we talk about this, I’m sure we have some purists that are really on both sides, both camps. ALAN ZUCKER:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  Who do you think’s going to get more upset by that?  You think the Agilists or the Waterfall teams are going to be more upset by that? ALAN ZUCKER:  I think you’re going to have folks on either side that aren’t going to be very happy.  I think that the people on the Waterfall side, you know, if you’re working construction there’s probably less that you would adopt from agile.  And the things that we recommend would probably be, “Hey, that’s a great idea.”  I think the Agilists sort of came in as the insurrectionists 20 years ago.  And I think they are beginning to slowly move to say, well, there are things of value from traditional project management. Fusion Cooking and Project Management WENDY GROUNDS:  Alan, in your course you compared project management to fusion cooking.  Can you explain that for us? ALAN ZUCKER:  Sure.  I think that originally one of the ideas I was thinking of or the titles of the course I was thinking of was Agile Fusion, or Project Fusion.  I like the idea of blending and mixing.  So I think in the course I talked about this great sushi restaurant that I go to in Mexico, where they’re making traditional sushi, but then mixing in Mexican spices and peppers.  Or there’s a place here in D.C. where there’s Eggs Benedict, and then they use Beef Bulgogi as the topping.  And I think it’s just the idea that there is all these really great ideas that we can share and we can mix.  And if we don’t think about things in this very compartmentalized way, just phenomenal, inventive, creative things can happen. BILL YATES:  You make me think of I like watching Bobby Flay, the famous chef Bobby Flay.  There’s a show where people are trying to come on and beat him.  And he’s always taking some traditional recipe and adding his own style, and it’s usually some kind of like a serrano pepper or something that he adds to it that just takes it to another level.  And the judges love it.  So there’s that idea of fusion. Agile as a Mindset not a Methodology There are so many little pieces that we can pull from agile practices that are very applicable and very helpful in those environments.  And that’s what I appreciate about the course.  We’ll get into the details.  But instead of saying, okay, you must do this, it’s more of a, hey, consider the mindset behind this.  Consider the mindset of agile in this and what is something from that.  If we look at that mindset, how can we take that and move that into the way that we’re managing projects?  A vital point that you make is that agile, don’t think of it as a methodology as much as a mindset.  Talk more about that. ALAN ZUCKER:  So I came to project management from economics.  I have my master’s degree in economics.  So I was the accidental project manager.  And back in the dark ages, back in the 1980s, I was working for a firm that was doing environmental consulting work.  And I was working with a senior economist to develop a model of what would happen under different environmental regulations.  This was the dawn of the computer age. I built this massive model in Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1A.  And he had some ideas about, well, this is how the model should work based on some previous experience.  And I had a little bit of experience with personal computers. So we would build a little bit, and then we would troubleshoot, and we would go back, and we would review.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. How to flourish in your leadership role as your best self, inspire excellence in your team, and lead a highly fulfilled life.  “Arriving” is everything required to get into a position, but to stay successful, it is necessary to embrace the skills needed to “thrive” in that position. Listen in for useful advice on how to Arrive and Thrive and succeed in your leadership role. Table of Contents 01:47 … Arrive and Thrive - The Book04:15 … Who Should Read this Book?04:38 … Co-authors and Collaborations05:54 … Skills to Thrive08:36 … The Harsh Inner Critic11:29 … The Self-Centering Practice15:19 … Thriving and Combating Systemic Barriers19:53 … Lead with Our Best Self22:37 … Cultivating Courage25:16 … Instill Courage in Others27:18 … Becoming More Self-Aware29:34 … Reflective Sense-Making31:44 … Susan’s Lessons Learned33:56 … Get in Touch with Susan34:57 … Closing SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  ... we can’t control and change other people.  It’s annoying, but it’s true.  People don’t like to be controlled.  But we can make choices about how we show up.  So what we want to do is we want to narrow the gap between the time we are triggered and the time we react, enough to take pause between stimulus and response.  That’s it.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This.  This is the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates.  BILL YATES:  Yes.  Our guest is Susan Mackenty Brady.  She is the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women and Leadership at Simmons University, and the first Chief Executive Officer of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership.  As a relationship expert, leadership well-being coach, author and speaker, our guest Susan educates leaders and executives globally on fostering self-awareness for optimal leadership. WENDY GROUNDS:  The reason we’re talking to Susan today is she has sent us a book called “Arrive and Thrive:  7 Impactful Practices for Women Navigating Leadership,” which she has co-authored with Janet Foutty and Lynn Perry Wooten.  You know, women who arrive at the top should be able to thrive at the top.  There’s a lot of talk about how to get there.  But then once you get there, are you just surviving, or are you thriving in those positions as women in leadership?  And so we hope that this is going to be a really helpful book and a helpful conversation to women who are project managers and trying to figure out how to flourish in leadership roles today. BILL YATES: Yeah, I can attest.  There’s great value in this book, regardless of male or female. WENDY GROUNDS: Susan, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest. SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Thank you for having me. Arrive and Thrive - The Book WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, we’re excited to talk about this book. To start off, won’t you tell us why you wrote this book? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  You know, there’s two answers to that question.  You want both?  There’s first a real answer about how it came to be, which was because I am not an academic.  I have been in business and specifically in leadership development.  I’ve been a student and teacher of leadership since I can recall.  I’ve a Master’s in Behavioral Science and Leadership Education.  And I have to say, when I came to Simmons University and was awarded the endowed chair, it’s the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Chair for Women in Leadership, my first question is what does one do to be worthy of an endowed chair in an academic environment?  Because I actually didn’t know that non-PhDs were awarded chairs.  Apparently it’s more common than we know. But my answer was whatever you want it to be. So it was actually around a talking circle with two senior partners from Deloitte and the current President of the University, who awarded me the chair.  And we’re all C-level.  We’ve run organizations.  We’ve run business units, or we’ve arrived in leadership in many ways.  And the conversation was actually about the morning that we all had and how still hard it is to sort of have your own feelings, navigate conflict, keep it all together, manage the home front in the morning, come to work, da da da da da da.  I said, “There’s no forum for senior women to have this conversation, and it’s lonelier at the top.”  You know? And one thing led to another, and I thought, maybe we need to do the next-generation book.  So I’ve written extensively about advancing women and what organizations can do to help equity across all identities, advance in leadership.  My former book, “Mastering Your Inner Critic and 7 Hurdles to Advancement” was about sort of the invisible hurdles women struggle with to advance.  This one came to be with my co-authors Janet Foutty, and Lynn Perry Wooten. And the three of us pretty quickly unearthed these seven practices about thriving.  And so, I have to tell you guys, there’s been so much survival lately.  We survived the pandemic, unless of course we had loss.  Everybody’s fatigued.  It was so joyful to think about what is thriving and how can we help women in particular step in and thrive more, as opposed to just surviving? BILL YATES:  That’s good. SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Long answer. Who Should Read this Book? BILL YATES:  No, that’s good.  So who should read this book? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  This was a debate I had with my co-authors.  Look, the book’s title says “7 Practices for Women Navigating Leadership.”  There is nothing in this book that a man would read and not think, “Well, I could probably use that, too.”  So look... BILL YATES:  Yeah, very practical. SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  It’s written for women.  And I hope allies of all genders read it. BILL YATES:  Excellent, absolutely. Co-authors and Collaborations  WENDY GROUNDS:  Susan, tell us a bit about your collaboration on the book.  Who were your co-authors, and how did you team up to write this book? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Janet doesn’t like I say this, but collectively we’ve got 85 years of leadership experience, the three of us.  Janet Foutty is – so you know that Deloitte’s a partnership.  Janet Foutty is the executive chair.  She runs  the U.S. operation for Deloitte.  It’s a huge job.  And she has really made it in a very male-dominated industry and has a very unique point of view about business and about the kind of business that Deloitte is and how her leadership was impacted by that. Lynn Perry Wooten is a scholar and an academic.  She was at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan before she went to Cornell to lead there.  She is one of few African American women who preside at the top job at a University.  And she is well published.  So it was such an honor to partner with Janet and Lynn.  I learned a lot from the two of them, writing this book.  I played somewhat lead author.  They were collaborators, and they took lead on some of the practices because frankly it was more their expertise than mine.  It was a total collaboration in the end.  And a village of people helped us to create this. Skills to Thrive WENDY GROUNDS:  There’s a distinction between arriving, which is everything required to get into that position.  And then you need to stay successful once you’ve got your position.  You need to embrace what you call the “skills to thrive” in that situation.  So can you take this personal now and highlight one or two of your skills that have helped you thrive in your position? SUSAN MACKENTY BRADY:  Well, it didn’t come easy, but I suppose I’ve done a better job of listening.  My grandmother used to say, “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason, Susan.”  For an extroverted expressive, I have to tell you, leadership can be tricky because we can miss nuance, right, and interpersonal nuance.  I would say I’ve had a focused intention on developing my own emotional intelligence and narrowing the gap between my intention and my impact, which I’m happy to dive into because leadership is a relationship.  It’s a social construct.  And so there’s all this room for subjectivity. What I find is a lot of smart, well-intended leaders get involved in whatever they’re doing because of technical interest in whatever their functional area is.  And they get annoyed with and/or struggle with the subjectivity of relationships, which is obviously mastering some of those skills as leadership.  So that’s the student and teacher in me.  I’ve been working on that stuff for a while.  That’s number one.  So that’s interpersonal between me and others. The other, I’d say the second thing that has helped me a great deal is my relationship with myself, which is how do I manage my thoughts and feelings such that I can come from a place of warm regard and respect, even if I disagree with you.  Not just for you, but also for me; right?  So I think we get triggered out of feeling good enough about ourselves, and we get triggered into feeling like other people are disappointing us.  All day, every day.  Like it is what it is to be human.  You should have seen me with my daughter this morning.  So learning the speed of the return to healthy warm regard or compassionate center, or your best, most grounded, centered, aligned self.  Doing that consciously and quickly will help you navigate all relationships in your life, not just work. So I’ve taken those two things on:  intrapersonal, understanding my thoughts and feelings and how they impact my actions; and interpersonal.  I’m a learner.  There’s no perfection at this, guys, because people are unique and different.  And so what works with an approach with one person you work with probably might not work with another person.  And so this is tricky business.  But I think that those two things have both aided me and been my – they’re my vocation, my interest. The Harsh Inner Critic BILL YATES:  Yeah, it’s like, and to your point,

Matt Cooke, a lead project manager with Texas-based T&T Salvage LLC, describes the bold plan to remove the Golden Ray wreck from the Georgia coastline. Hear about the many obstacles and challenges the team had to overcome in this extraordinary wreck removal project.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Hear about the three attributes of restraint: speed, thrift, and simplicity – and how these traits can add to project innovation. Dan Ward describes using a restrained approach of short schedules, tight budgets, small teams, and deep commitments to simplicity to deliver best-in-class technology that is operationally relevant. He highlights how unnecessary complexity adds complications which can reduce innovation. Table of Contents 01:40 … Dan’s Book LIFT02:46 … High-Speed, Low Cost Programs in the U.S. Air Force04:28 … MITRE Innovation Toolkit06:12 … When it’s Not All About The Bass08:25 … Project Success on a Shoestring Budget13:33 … Speed, Thrift, and Simplicity16:03 … Unnecessary Complexity Reduces Innovation22:00 … Innovation Requires Diversity25:06 … Stay on Track with Innovation28:03 … Status Reporting32:19 … Eating the Failure Cake36:09 … Get in Touch with Dan37:09 … Closing Dan Ward: ...it turns out we get better results, more innovative results, more impactful results, when we move in the direction of speed, thrift, and simplicity, rather than moving in the direction of spending more time, more money, making things more complicated.  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. We have a special guest.  His name is Dan Ward.  And he’s an innovation catalyst at the MITRE Corporation.  Dan previously served for more than 20 years as an acquisition officer in the U.S. Air Force, where he specialized in leading high-speed, low-cost technology development programs.  Dan retired at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.  While he was on active duty he helped establish the Air Force Research Laboratory’s rapid innovation process. BILL YATES:  Dan Ward is also the author of three books.  We’ll talk about “LIFT” specifically in the podcast that he released in 2019; “The Simplicity Cycle,” 2015; and “F.I.R.E.” in 2014. WENDY GROUNDS:  In our conversation with Dan we have a particular theme of innovation and managing complexity. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  So Dan has researched, of course his career was dedicated to this as well, and he’s written books on this idea of innovation and applying innovation to various environments.  Certainly for project managers we can look at this, and we’re going to share some advice and learn some lessons from this man as we talk about innovation and how to apply it to our projects. WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Dan.  Welcome to Manage This. DAN WARD:  Wendy, thanks so much for having me.  I’m looking forward to this chat. Dan’s Book LIFT WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah, no, we are happy to have you.  And first thing we want to talk to you about is your books.  You’ve written a few books.  And your latest one is called “LIFT.”  Can you tell us a little bit about that? DAN WARD:  Yeah, absolutely.  So “LIFT” was such a fun book to write.  And it takes a close look at what I think is a really interesting part of history, the late 1800s, and then specifically the people who were trying to build airplanes in the decades immediately prior to the Wrights.  So all of these people failed.  None of their airplanes actually flew.  That wasn’t until 1903 when the Wrights had their first successful airplane. But these experiences, these experiments, and the way they handled their failures have a lot of really interesting applications for challenges people are working on today.  So in terms of like solving hard problems, managing intellectual property, collaboration, diversity, equity, and inclusion.  You know, we think we invented that.  No.  They were dealing with those types of issues in the late 1800s.  So really, anyone who’s trying to solve an unsolved problem or just even just a really hard problem, we can learn a lot from these aviation pioneers in the late 1800s.  And it was so much fun to tell their stories. High-Speed, Low Cost Programs in the U.S. Air Force BILL YATES:  Our understanding is you had a long career with the U.S. Air Force.  And through that there are a lot of lessons learned.  So we’d like for you to talk to us about some of your experience in the U.S. Air Force and leading high-speed, low-cost technology development programs. DAN WARD:  Yeah, absolutely.  So I spent about 20 years in uniform as an active duty officer, an engineer, and a program manager.  And, you know, pretty early on I noticed an interesting pattern, that most of my frustrations and failures were when I was part of a cast of thousands, and we were spending decades and billions to develop some new shiny piece of wonder tech.  And then all my biggest successes and my proudest moments in my career were when I had a small team and a tight budget and a short schedule.  So I kind of leaned into that.  I studied it.  I experimented with my own career.  And I wrote some books then about how to use this restrained approach of small schedules, tight budgets, small teams, deep commitments to simplicity; how we use this to help us deliver best-in-class, first-in-class technology that really is operationally relevant. So, for example, the last program I led while I was in uniform was actually the smallest program in my department.  We had the smallest team, the smallest budget.  The team was actually already shrinking before I took over.  The budget had already been cut.  And when they asked if I’d like to lead that team I was like, oh, heck, yeah.  This is a great chance to put my money where my mouth is.  And at the end of the day we delivered ahead of schedule.  Our first test flight – it was an airborne radar system.  We did our first test flight a month ahead of schedule.  We collected twice as much data as originally planned or promised.  And we came in $7 million under budget.  It was a great program to kind of cap off my time in uniform. MITRE Innovation Toolkit WENDY GROUNDS:  Dan, we want to move on to what you’ve done next.  You’re currently working for the MITRE Corporation.  Can you explain to us what your role is there, and also something called the MITRE Innovation Toolkit that you’ve been part of. DAN WARD:  So MITRE is a really cool place to work.  I love it here.  We are a not-for-profit company, and we are chartered to work in the public interest.  So we bring deep technical expertise to some of the government’s biggest problems and challenges, and that’s on everything from public health, things like the equitable distribution of vaccines, to cybersecurity, to improving the user experience for the IRS.  So my unofficial job title is innovation catalyst.  And I think my formal job title is system engineer of some kind.  There’s a bunch of other words in there.  But innovation catalyst is what I put on my business card. So I’m part of this team at MITRE called the Innovation Toolkit team.  And our mission on this team is pretty simple.  It’s to help people understand what innovation is and then how to do it.  So we’ve developed a set of tools.  We help people figure out which tool to use.  We’ve got about two dozen on our website.  And then when to use the tool, and why to use the tool.  We help them go through the process of applying these tools to their projects, their programs, their departments, their processes, their technology. And one cool thing about being a not-for-profit working in the public interest, our tools are all free to use.  So anybody can go to itk.mitre.org.  MITRE is spelled M-I-T-R-E, and ITK stands for Innovation Toolkit.  So that’s itk.mitre.org.  And you can download the full set, you know, all 26 of them.  There’s 26 tools there.  And for each one there’s a description of what is it, when would you use it, why would you use it, how would you use it, and then templates and downloads and enablers to help you put that into practice. When it’s Not All About The Bass BILL YATES:  That’s fantastic.  We’ve had some really interesting conversations on past podcasts about innovation.  I think about our conversation with John Carter.  John and Dr. Bose, they have the patent on the first noise-cancelling headphones.  And I remember, what was so fascinating was John described to us, he said, we started out on this project thinking that the bass was going to be the key.  We thought if we could make headphones that have really rich bass, that’d be the best, you know, the customers would love it.  But then some of the early feedback they received it was not about the bass. WENDY GROUNDS:  See what you did there. BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  Stepped into that nicely; right?  It was not about the bass.  It was about the noise cancelling, a feature that they had included that to amplify the bass, and not realizing that was going to be one of the keys.  So this idea of innovation is so interesting. DAN WARD:  So that reminds me of something actually from the book “LIFT.”  A German engineer named Otto Lilienthal, he was literally an engineer, like he developed engines.  And the engines that he had designed were lighter weight and more powerful than anything else on the market, so much so that he retired at like 40.  He retired fairly young and just dedicated the rest of his life to building airplanes.  Now, we would think that to build a successful airplane you need a lightweight powerful engine.  Oh my gosh, that’s his expertise.  What he discovered pretty quickly, though, is that it’s not about the bass. But it turns out that the engine wasn’t the next problem to be solved.  He spent most of his time building gliders, flying structures that do not have engines, because what he realized in just an amazing moment of humility, of just professional humility, was that, hey, he has good engines, but the engines aren’t the next part of the problem to be solved.  Until you manage stability,

The podcast by project managers for project managers.  Is your body language negatively impacting your project teams? Body language expert Jeff Baird shares some handy tips to incorporate into our non-verbal communication. Hear how we can tap into vast amounts of information from body language messages, and how to harness body language to come across as confident and persuasive. Table of Contents 02:42 … Meet Jeff02:57 … Combining the IT Data World and Body Language06:38 … Our Ability to Influence People09:01 … What is our Brain Doing when We Meet Someone?12:02 … How Can We be Deliberate with Our Body Language?14:55 … Power Body Language17:34 … Nonverbal “Hacks” We Can Use21:59 … The “Head Tilt” and the “Smile”23:43 … Body Language and Virtual Meetings28:27 … Improving Phone Presence30:26 … The 3 “Shuns” of Workplace Breakdowns35:42 … Creating a Safe Environment37:50 … Detecting Lies43:33 … Contact Jeff43:50 … Closing JEFF BAIRD:  There’s not good or bad body language.  There’s just how it’s going to be perceived in the eyes of the other person.  And as a side note, there’s two sides to this coin, too.  There’s what we’re doing with our body language and how people are perceiving us and how willing they are to listen to us.  And then there’s all the nonverbal signals that they’re sending back to us, too, that can give us clues as to how they feel.  And so there’s not good or bad body language.  I just want to help people to be congruent so that when they say something their body language is going to match that because oftentimes what happens is if those are not congruent, we’ll tend to believe what we see in body language over what they’re telling us with their words. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  We’re 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.  We know you’re also looking for opportunities to acquire PDUs, your Professional Development Units, towards recertifications.  And you can still claim PDUs for all our podcast episodes.  If you take a listen at the end of the show, we’ll give you advice on how to do that. Our guest today is Jeff Baird.  He has been in data analytics for almost 20 years, but over the years he has found that facts and numbers aren’t always enough to be able to persuade and influence, and how we present ourselves and our message really matters.  He studied the science of body language to learn what makes people tick.  Jeff is a keynote speaker, a certified body language trainer – I found out that that was a thing – and a certified Big 5 Personalities trainer.  Jeff has also done a course with us. BILL YATES:  Yes.  Jeff partnered with us to build out a one-hour course in InSite, which is our mobile learning platform.  And the course is called “Attracting Top Talent:  First Contact.”  This is so pertinent today.  It’s difficult to find good people for our teams.  And there’s more emphasis on hiring and recruiting than ever.  Jeff just has terrific advice in this one-hour course about how to attract top talent.  What are the steps that we can take to be more successful as we’re recruiting and interviewing people?  And to be honest with you, too, you can flip it.  I think, from a standpoint of someone who’s looking for a job, this is a great thing to look into, as well.  This course will give you advice.  What is the employer looking for, and what should my expectations be?  So we’re delighted to be talking with him about this area of communication.  And I just think it’s exciting to have him join us, give us tips, and raise our awareness for this area of communication. Meet Jeff WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Jeff.  Welcome to Manage This. JEFF BAIRD:  Good morning. WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re so glad that you’re here with us today.  It’s been a long time coming.  We should have done a podcast with you a long time ago. BILL YATES:  I know, this is great to finally have him in the room with us.  Verbally, anyway. Combining the IT Data World and Body Language WENDY GROUNDS:  Verbally in the room with us, yeah.  Just to connect the dots, so your career began in the IT data world?  And then you ended up in body language training.  That’s a big jump.  How did you do that? JEFF BAIRD:  Yeah, so I’ve been in IT for – I’m going to feel old now, but it’s been at least 20 years now.  And most of that time has been in data.  So much of my focus has been in data warehousing business intelligence.  It’s all around trying to provide good information to decision-makers so they can make good decisions on what direction to go with the company or the project.  And what I somewhat reluctantly realized as a data person I’d like to think that it is just that simple, that I could just provide some numbers to somebody, and then they’ll make the right decision. But what I was somewhat reluctantly discovering is that we don’t make decisions based off facts and data as much as I’d like to think.  Like we evaluate and make decisions more off our emotions and our gut feel than sometimes the facts.  And this is something that sales and marketing people have known for years.  But it’s a new realization for people that are in IT. But the data industry’s starting to clue in on this.  I went to some data analytics conferences not too long back, and they were starting to do sessions on how to invoke emotions with your data visualizations and how to do data storytelling.  And there was one presentation in particular that had a slide that said, if a decision-maker is given some data, given some facts, but their gut feel said something different, then 90% of the time they’re going to go with their gut feel.  BILL YATES:  Wow.  Okay. JEFF BAIRD:  That’s a huge number.  And what’s funny is I’ll show that slide to other data professionals, and it’s common for them to say, no, that can’t be right.  BILL YATES:  Yeah. JEFF BAIRD:  Not realizing that I just gave them data, but their gut said something different.  So none of us are immune from it.  And it’s not that we don’t make fact-based decisions.  We want to make informed decisions.  But we can’t dismiss this other part that goes into human decision-making.  We have to understand what’s going into the gut feel if we want to be able to influence and persuade, to lead and guide people, whether it’s a company or a team or a project.  We have to be able to understand that part. And so I started studying that.  I started studying neuroscience and psychology in parallel to my data career in an effort to kind of fix myself, to try to be more effective at my own game.  And one of the areas that affects our psychology and neuroscience and really moves the needle pretty significantly, is body language because so much of our assessment of a person and things associated with them is based on what we see in their nonverbals.  But we make these snap decisions about what we think about a person, how much we trust them, how competent they appear.  And then that affects our willingness to listen to them. And so I started studying that and had an opportunity to apply to be in this pilot program to become a body language trainer.  I didn’t know that was a thing at the time.  But I threw my hat in the ring, not really expecting to get accepted to it because they were taking applicants from around the world, and they were only going to take 10 people.  But I got the word back that I got accepted to it and went to about four to five months of training to become a certified body language trainer. And so I’ve been doing that kind of in parallel to my data career.  I’m still in data.  I’m currently a Director of Data and Analytics Engineering.  But complementing it hopefully with this other piece so that I can be more effective in my own career and as I’m leading teams and as we’re trying to help influence the direction that companies go. BILL YATES:  So you’re really engaging the right and left sides of your brain with what you do day to day. JEFF BAIRD:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  That’s intriguing. JEFF BAIRD:  At least trying.  I’m still a work in progress, but trying to find that balance in my life.  Balance is important; right? Our Ability to Influence People WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.  I like that it complements with your career.  So you’re still in this IT data world.  You’re still working in that environment.  But you’re complementing it, so you’re able to speak from both sides.  So this leads us to understanding people.  It’s an important life skill.  A lot of us are not as good at it as we think we should be or as we could  be.  We’re just not taught how to influence people, how to get people to listen to ideas.  What traits affect our ability to do that?  How can we best approach people? JEFF BAIRD:  I like to think of what my goal is with the interaction.  There’s not good or bad body language.  There’s just how it’s going to be perceived in the eyes of the other person.  And as a side note, there’s two sides to this coin, too.  There’s what we’re doing with our body language and how people are perceiving us and how willing they are to listen to us.  And then there’s all the nonverbal signals that they’re sending back to us, too, that can give us clues as to how they feel.  And so there’s not good or bad body language.  I just want to help people to be congruent so that when they say something their body language is going to match that because oftentimes what happens is if those are not congruent, we’ll tend to believe what we see in body language over what they’re telling us with their words. So if I come home from work and my wife’s having a bad day, she may verbally tell me everything’s fine.  But if I’m seeing that it’s not, if the nonverbals are sitting there telling a different story,

“A Value Management Office is a cross-functional, cross-hierarchy and cross-silo team of teams.” These are the words of author and industry-leading agile and lean expert, Sanjiv Augustine. Our guest, Sanjiv, presents powerful ideas and strategies for transforming the Project Management Office into an Agile Value Management Office. In this episode, Sanjiv describes successes and challenges he is seeing with recent enterprise agile transformations.

How can you become a leader that people want to follow? Author Scott J. Miller, author of Management Mess to Leadership Success, has a spirited conversation with us about how to change the way you manage yourself, lead others, and achieve a high level of engagement with your project team. It’s never too late to fix our mess and develop leadership success.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. Mastering written communication and focusing on the hidden science behind how our reading and writing influences our thoughts and actions. Hear some best practices when it comes to writing winning bids, pitfalls we should avoid, as well as common workplace communication errors. Table of Contents 02:02 … Rob’s Background Story03:17 … Misfired Messages07:23 … Knowing When to Call a Time-out10:53 … Recognizing the Warning Signs12:56 … Effective Writing in Project Management15:45 … Fluency Heuristic17:01 … Overloading the Decision-Maker22:46 … An Attention-Grabbing Introduction26:57 … “Garden-Pathing”27:49 … Email Salutations29:18 … Compelling Subject Lines30:54 … Words of Advice34:01 … Contact Rob35:01 … Closing ROB ASHTON:  ...write as if you are writing for a human because you are.  You know, not for the position.  You don’t look at someone’s job title.  Think of them as a human being.  They are as human as you are, and they’re subject to the same mental shortcuts and the same irritations and the same cognitive biases. 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.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me is Bill Yates.  Today we’re very excited about our guest.  We’ve never really talked about written communication.  Rob Ashton has a very interesting background.  He’s actually been in science and research.  And because of that he got into the process of reading and writing because of writing scientific reports and research papers.  But he has a very unique perspective on why so much of our written communication just doesn’t work. BILL YATES:  That’s true.  Now we’re in a remote workforce more so than ever.  So many of us are working virtually.  So what do you do?  You pop open Slack.  You pop open Skype.  And you pop open Teams.  And you just instant message with your team back and forth, back and forth.  Which many times that’s totally appropriate.  I think as Rob will get into, we have a number of different tools at our disposal.  You’ve got to pick the right tool for the right message, or you’re going to get into trouble. WENDY GROUNDS:  Right, right.  I’m excited to talk to Rob.  A little bit about him before we get there is he’s the founder of a global learning company called Emphasis, which specializes in written communication.  Some of his high-profile clients have been Big 4 accounting firms, big tech, big pharma.  He’s also done some work with the U.K. Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street, and even the royal household at Buckingham Palace.  So we’re in good company. BILL YATES:  Yes.  WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, Rob.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for joining us today. ROB ASHTON:  Hey, it’s great to be here.  Thanks for inviting me. Rob’s Background Story WENDY GROUNDS:  Rob, before we get into our conversation on written communication, can you tell us how you got into this field and what your background is? ROB ASHTON:  I started off as a research scientist before a love of words led me into publishing.  So originally trained as an editor.  And I did that for a while, and I found that I guess I just got a little tired of applying the same techniques again and again to the words I was trying to knock into shape.  And I decided that instead of doing that, I would go and teach people to do it.  So I set up a training company to do that, and that was called Emphasis.  And that was 23 years ago. And then six years ago I decided that I would go back to my roots, and I would start to look at the science of this because there’s very little out there on the science of written communication, or at least in the business world.  There’s a ton of stuff out there in the academic world, but virtually none of it makes its way into the business world.  And I wanted to see why.  First of all I wanted to see if I was right.  It seemed to work in practice, but I didn’t know why, and maybe there’s better ways to do it.  In fact, I thought that would take a few months.  I gave myself six months, and I thought I’d write a book on it.  And of course that was incredibly naive.  And here I am six years later, finally working on the book.  So it’s been a six-year odyssey to look into the science of written communication. Misfired Messages WENDY GROUNDS:  We are very excited about this topic.  We’ve had many podcasts on communication, leadership, those types of things.  But never before have we spoken on communication and the written word.  And I think it’s definitely a very relevant topic to discuss. BILL YATES:  I think everybody’s going to have to read the transcript closely. WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  We will have it all written down there for you folk.  You know, we’ve all had that scenario when you’re having an innocent chat with someone on messaging.  You get that text that comes in.  And you take it the wrong way.  Or it’s what you call misfired messages are going back and forth all of a sudden, and you don’t really get clarity as to what’s going on, and we end up getting in hot water.  Rob, what happens there?  Why do we so often misinterpret these messages that we’re receiving? ROB ASHTON:  Great question.  It’s something that happens an awful lot.  It’s funny, what you’re talking about there is written communication.  And yet we don’t think of it as written communication.  We’re thinking of it as talking.  You know, we’re chatting.  And in fact you even see it on customer help desks.  It’s called “live chat.”  It’s chat, talking; and yet it’s not talking, it’s writing.  And I think right at the heart of that problem is something that most people don’t realize, and that’s that we didn’t evolve to read and write. Now, when I say that, I’ve actually taken a lot of flak on social media for this recently by saying that.  People say, what are you talking about?  It doesn’t matter.  We didn’t evolve to drive motor cars, you know.  Why does that even matter?  Or they’ll say, yes, we did.  We’ve been reading and writing for a long time.  And we’ve evolved to do it.  Some people even think we’ve evolved to do it since we started using the web to communicate.  But the fact is that as a species, we’ve been reading and writing for about 5,000 years, which sounds like a very long time; right?  But it’s not.  It’s only a heartbeat in evolutionary terms.  When you are reading and writing, you are using circuitry that you have developed since you were born.  This is why takes us so long to learn to read and write.  We can understand our parents’ voices, or at least we can react to our parents’ voices, and we can make our presence felt to our parents by crying when we’re babies.  You know, we use our voices to communicate.  We use our hearing to communicate straight out of the womb.  But when it comes to reading and writing, this is something we have to learn to do, it takes years, and we are rewiring the brain.  And what we’re doing is we’re joining up parts of the brain that we evolved for other purposes, such as for hearing, for example. If you’ve ever thought about reading, reading is a miracle, really, because you see dots and squiggles on a screen or on a page, and you hear voices in your head.  You know, that’s just miraculous, I think.  So it’s very easy to take that for granted and to think that it’s just something we can just do, and we do it naturally, and we do it easily.  But it’s really, it’s like the ultimate brain hack, reading and writing.  We are operating, though we may not realize it, on the edge of our cognitive abilities when we’re doing that. So to your question, it doesn’t leave much room for things like emotional control.  I think this emotional control thing is one of the keys for why we so often end up in hot water when we’re communicating in that way, when we’re messaging.  It’s why we so often misinterpret things, although there are other things we can dig into there.  But, you know, if you are irritated already, then we often check these things in situations that we would never have been reading in before.  Normally, reading was something we did, you know, you go back a long time, you go back even a couple of decades, you would be reading a book; you would be reading a magazine.  You wouldn’t be doing it while you sat in a traffic jam getting really wound up about traffic. But when we are already irritated, and a message lands, we look.  That just confirms that we’re right to be irritated, and we start to think that it’s that message that has irritated us, that has made us angry.  So there are all sorts of reasons.  But I think the key to it all is that we didn’t evolve to read and write. Knowing When to Call a Time-out BILL YATES:  One of the things that really cracked me up was reading through one of the blog posts that you had about a very innocent question that you asked a teammate that was on a project.  You simply asked for a project status.  Talk us through that interaction. ROB ASHTON:  But you know, I still remember it like it was yesterday because it had such a profound effect on me.  I sat there in my office.  We were just looking at the screen full of Gantt charts and Trello boards.  And we’d had a standup, one of our regular weekly project meetings on the Monday.  And I think it was Wednesday by this point.  It was the middle of the week.  And that the standup everybody had said, “Yeah, everything’s going fine.”  They’d been really positive about what they were working on.  But as I was looking at those things, I just thought just something doesn’t feel right. So I just turned to Slack.  And I said to my colleague, “Can you just give me an update?”  You know, just how’s it going?  How is that project going?  And, now,