ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● NEAL WHITTEN

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s a great opportunity to talk about what matters most to you, whether you’re a professional project manager, or maybe you’re working toward one of your certifications.  We want to help spark your imagination, light a fire under you, and encourage you along the way.  And we do that by talking about issues and trends in the field and hearing from those in the trenches who are doing the job of project management.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two guys who have been in the trenches.  They know what it takes to succeed.  They are here to help you succeed.  Athey are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, here we are again.  And we’re going to be joined by another expert in just a moment.  But I’ve got to confess to you I’m a little antsy to be outside right now.  We’ve turned the corner into spring.  There’s just something about the freshness of everything in this season, something in the air that...

BILL YATES:  Nick, it’s called pollen.

NICK WALKER:  I wondered what that was.  Yeah.  Yeah, the tree pollen, it gets me.  But the brightness, the newness of the season kind of makes up for the sneezing almost.  So spring is here.  It’s nice to have that.  But I’m really looking forward to hearing from our guest today.  Neal Whitten is a project management professional.  He’s a speaker.  He’s a trainer, a consultant, and a mentor to those who are up-and-coming in the field of project management.  His newest book is called “The Gift of Wisdom:  Lessons for a Lifetime.”  Neal, welcome to Manage This.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, thank you.  I’m honored to be here.

NICK WALKER:  It’s always good to kind of hear a little bit about folks’ backgrounds before we kind of delve into everything.  Tell us a little bit about kind of where you’ve been.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Okay.  So we’re going to start by putting the audience to sleep.  I have a degree in electrical engineering.  Hired on at IBM as a software engineer and took early retirement there, and have been on my own for over 20 years, doing my own thing, but all related to project management.

NICK WALKER:  A lot of our listeners may already be familiar with you, your work on Velociteach.com.  You’ve created a lot of content for us.  You’re kind of another resident expert, really.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, this is absolutely true.  You know what, we all are legends in our own mind, let’s just put it that way.

BILL YATES:  Well, I’ve got to jump in on that.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, Bill.

BILL YATES:  This is Bill.  It’s interesting, the studio that we’re in, Neal has been in this studio to produce about close to a dozen eLearning courses for us now.  And one of the things I love about the perspective of Neal, I mean, you hear it.  He was with IBM for 25 years.  He’s an electrical engineer.  Yet so many of the topics that are passion points for him have to do with soft skill, their leadership, their how to be strategic and think big picture.  And so we’re privileged and honored to be partnering with Neal.

NICK WALKER:  And you trained, Neal, in a lot of environments, a lot of different various organizations.  What common thread do you find in all of these organizations?

NEAL WHITTEN:  I’ve trained in every environment that I can imagine, frankly.  Let me give you an example of something that happened not long ago which is indicative of what a lot of us trainers face.  So I get a phone call from a potential client.  Client had been referenced to the training that I do and said, “Neal, I’m interested in you coming out and giving us some training, and it’s typically in leadership types of things.  But I have a problem, and I need your help on it, and this is the problem.  We’ve had a lot of trainers come out, trainers just like you.  And when they’re through training, they get good evaluations.  People like it.  They feel like they’ve learned a lot.  And when the trainer has left, the information has stuck for all of a week, maybe a month, and there’s a few pockets that may have lasted for a while.”

But, the client says, “What are we doing wrong?  Or what are you, as a trainer, doing wrong?  Or is project management overhyped?”  And the answer is, first of all, project management is not overhyped.  It may not be being used very well.  And then I proceed to talk about how you can actually institutionalize project management in an organization and get it to stick.

NICK WALKER:  So what are some of the steps that organizations can take to make it stick?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, actually, in my view, there’s five steps.  And I will tell you I had written an article not long ago for PM Network magazine, and it describes these five steps.  But the first step is to identify a project management champion and set a plan.  Now, that sounds like a pretty easy thing to do, but you’ve got to have one person, not a department, not a sideline thought, but someone who’s actually dedicated to project management, owns it and is held accountable for it, and puts a plan in place.  And when I say a plan, think about where you are today.  Think about where you want to be, I would say two years from now.  Look at the gap in between and lay out a plan that is measurable from quarter to quarter.  And if you find that you’re falling behind some quarters, then – this is run like a project – then go ahead and put some actions in place to get yourself back on track.  But somebody’s got to be held accountable.

ANDY CROWE:  Neal, from a leadership standpoint, that makes so much sense.  I love the phrase “One head to pat and one butt to kick.”  And so it kind of ties to that, in a sense, of having one person who’s a champion, but then one person that you can hold accountable, as well.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah.  And what’s interesting, when you do identify that champion, I expect the champion to not be a senior manager.  It needs to be someone who’s an expert in project management.  But you do need a senior manager who also champions you.  So those are the two people.  But the non-senior management is the one held accountable.

BILL YATES:  Now, Neal, one thing that I’ve heard you say before related to this role is “No wimps need apply.”  What do you mean by that?

ANDY CROWE:  Bill, I think he’s talking about the two of us.  We’d be out.

BILL YATES:  Sorry, this is not applicable to you.

NEAL WHITTEN:  I’ll tell you what I run into everywhere I go, guys.  Again, I’m an old guy.  I’ve been around a lot.  And I believe in people.  And I know what they’re capable of doing.  I find that most people have so much more talent than they actually exercise.  And when I say “No wimps apply,” if you want to be the best, if you want to work in the best organization, produce the best products, that’s not an accident.  And you don’t need to apologize for being the best.  Sso when I say “No wimps apply,” I’m talking about if you want to be a project manager, forget about running the entire organization from a project management perspective.  Just being a project manager, it’s important that when you come to work every day you understand you own the business of that project.  You are a businessperson first and a project manager second.  And when you think that way, that leadership starts oozing out.

BILL YATES:  Perfect.  And I love, you know, you pointed out the great combination is to have that senior leader who supports that project manager.  Then, as a project manager, I feel like this person, she’s got my back.  She’s going to give me the resources that I need.  The door will be open when I have an emergency, a risk has occurred, we need to respond to it.  So there’s a relationship there that’s very healthy for an organization.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah, let me say something about that senior leader that the project manager has as his sponsor.  What a lot of us do is, when we have a senior leader around, we expect to get direction from that senior leader.  I’m not talking about that at all.  I want this person who’s a project management expert giving direction to the senior leader, telling that person what is needed in the organization in terms of funding, in terms of training, in terms of the sequence of steps we’re going to go through to get from where we are today to where we need to go.

NICK WALKER:  All right.  So we’ve got our project management champion.  Where do we go from there?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, the second of the five steps is define a project management methodology.  And I don’t expect the methodology to be foolproof because that’s impossible.  It’s going to need to evolve over time.  It may include Agile.  There’s opportunity for Agile, there’s opportunity for non-Agile, and there’s opportunity for hybrid.  What’s key is this:   Define something.  You have to have a baseline from which to start.  And even though you document it, don’t assume that by people reading that document, they’re going to understand it.  They won’t.  You need to have a class, whether it’s a half-a-day class or a day class.  You figure it out in your organization.

But you also need to figure out, when you put the methodology down, how are you going to teach the hard skills?  Because people, you don’t just say in your project management plan “We need to gather requirements.”  How are you going to do that?  How are you going to perform risk assessments?  And How are you going to control change control, that sort of thing.  So those things have to be taught in addition.  But that’s all part of the second step.

BILL YATES:  When I hear “project management methodology,” of course we have to tip our hat to the PMBOK Guide.  But I think you’re talking about something even more practical, perhaps, than the PMBOK Guide, when we’re defining a methodology and what’s really going to work for an organization.  So my question, Neal:  Who should own that?