Play Now: Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam: PMP Exam prep : Douglas Knutzen and Cornelius Fichtner What if you had to do your project in (near) half the time as previous projects, or be fired? What if your customer required you to do their project in (near) half the time to which you are accustomed or lose the business? Hear about the techniques (that can be applied to almost any type of project) that helped to meet these challenges and got the products successfully to market in record time. This interview with Douglas Knutzen was recorded at the inspirational Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Conference 2018 in Los Angeles, California. You'll hear about how to leverage scheduling, execution and team techniques to significantly increase speed on your projects, and (almost more importantly) how to lead project teams in high-pressure situations. Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Douglas Knutzen: Hi, This is Doug Knutzen from Plexus Corporation. In this episode of The Project Management Podcast™, we will lever the scheduling, execution and team techniques to significantly increase speed on future projects. Cornelius Fichtner: Hello and welcome to The Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com. I am Cornelius Fichtner. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: We are coming to you live from the inspirational 2018 PMI Global Conference in Los Angeles. And I’m currently sitting here in Room 411A together with Doug Knutzen. Hello, Doug! Good afternoon! Douglas Knutzen: Good afternoon, Cornelius. Thanks for having me. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah! So the audience has just left. This is a beautiful, beautiful venue that they have given you. How was the presentation? Douglas Knutzen: It was really fun; it is a wonderful venue. I was really happy to be in the theater. The audience was great. I think we had about 200 people or so and I think it was well received. I think it went very well. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah, I came in at the tail end and lots of questions. Lots of questions came. Douglas Knutzen: Yeah, there were a lot of questions, very insightful questions. Cornelius Fichtner: Always a good sign. Douglas Knutzen: Yeah, I think so. Cornelius Fichtner: In the opening, I said: “We’re coming to you live from the inspirational 2018 PMI Global Conference.” You chose the adjective ‘inspirational’. Why is it inspirational? Douglas Knutzen: I think for two reasons. I think the two keynoters that we had this week particularly the gentlemen from the NFL, I’m sorry I can’t pronounce his last name. Cornelius Fichtner: Neither can I, yup! Douglas Knutzen: Who’s the magician, and had a great inspirational story there. He was just nothing short of fantastic and I think today’s speaker about the five generations and working through that, I thought he was very inspirational too. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah, I saw myself in those slides definitely. Douglas Knutzen: Yeah and they both did tremendously well. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah. Your presentation is called “Taking Your projects to Breathtaking Speed.” How did this presentation develop? Why are you talking on this topic? Douglas Knutzen: Yeah, that’s a great question. Overtime, there were two projects that went really well that were both under significant duress and both went really, really quickly, really crazy speeds and they had to do that because of the duress they were under. And when I went back and looked at it, they were from two different companies and I thought there must be some correlations here. It’s like doing a lessons learned if you will. There must be some correlations that allow us to kind of see what were the correlations between these two projects and that’s what led to sort of the development of this specific talk. Cornelius Fichtner: Yeah, you said those two projects were under duress. What are some other more general reasons why we projec