As the COVID pandemic began to unfold, staff at an Israeli hospital knew that clinical teams were going to be at high-risk and critically over-burdened.  The COVOD-19 Sprint project united doctors and developers to find creative technological solutions to the medical challenges of the pandemic.

The podcast by project managers for project managers. An episode about detecting imminent failure and dealing with project issues that could lead to failure. The project manager’s approach to supporting the team, addressing issues, and communicating resolutions is crucial for any project facing adversity.

Table of Contents

01:56 … Meet Susan03:54 … Susan’s Project Story08:30 … When Nobody Speaks Up10:59 … Warning Signs15:55 … When is the Project Manager at Fault19:38 … Sequestering the Team22:25 … Maintaining Communication Channels26:40 … Root Cause Analysis28:30 … Documenting Lessons Learned31:06 … The Resolution of Susan’s Project34:05 … Get in Touch with Susan35:03 … Closing

SUSAN IRWIN:  It’s not about ego.  It is about furthering the practice of project management, it is about making everybody great.  It is about working together as a unified team. Not just a project team, but a project manager team, to make each one of us great.

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is Bill Yates.  So an interesting thing happened to us the other day. As we were preparing to record this podcast, two days ago, we had some equipment failure.

BILL YATES:  Yes, we did.

WENDY GROUNDS:  And that amounts to a project failure.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Have you ever had a project fail, Bill?

BILL YATES:  Yes, I certainly have.  I think most who are listening to this can relate.  I think it was quite ironic that we would have a project failure, even with our episode as we were going to record this. First time.  That’s too funny.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Fortunately, Danny got us fixed up, and we’re ready to go today.

BILL YATES:  You know, Wendy, it occurs to me this topic is one that is really rich.  And we offer an online course by Neal  Whitten on this topic of project failure.  It’s called “17 Top Reasons Why Projects Fail.”  Neal goes through those.  He introduces those 17, and then of course talks about how we can avoid them.  So another way we can go deeper in this topic.

WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re actually talking with someone who has experience in project failure.  Our guest is Susan Irwin, and she’s an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama, Collat School of Business.

BILL YATES:  Wendy, this is going to be a pertinent conversation for our listeners.  And I’m excited to have Susan with us.  She has great information about both how to detect when failure is imminent with a project, and then advice.  So she gives four areas of advice for those that are dealing with project issues that could lead to failure.  So let’s get into it with Susan.

Meet Susan

WENDY GROUNDS:  Susan, welcome to Manage This.  Thank you so much for being our guest.

SUSAN IRWIN:  Yes, thank you.  I’m so excited to be able to share my ideas.

WENDY GROUNDS:  We’re looking forward to hearing your story.  But I want to ask you about your career background.  Can you tell me how you got into project management?

SUSAN IRWIN:  So I’ve been doing this for about 15 years.  And so like most project managers that have been doing it for this long, I actually stumbled into it by happenstance. I was a developer by trade.  I was really content on spending my life in the development side of the house.  A manager at the time saw something in me, and this was back when project management was first starting to come into industry.  You didn’t really see it much outside of the government sector. 

He asked me if I wanted to step into this role as a project manager. I really was apprehensive about it because I didn’t really see at that time the value in project management.  I felt that project managers were more of the gatekeeper and less of the facilitator of getting work done. And so I begrudgingly did it, and I fell in love with it.

So I went in, I did my PMP certification, and fell in love with it. And where I originally thought it was more of a gatekeeper or wasn’t allowing you to move projects forward. I actually found that, no, project managers do open up that gate and do facilitate and do shield the team and make sure things get accomplished.  So I went and did an MBA with an emphasis in project management, and then went on ahead and did my Ph.D. in information technology with an emphasis on project management.  So I teach classes and I often tell my students, as you can tell by all my certifications and my degrees, my love of project management now that has grown over the years.  And I love the fact that now you can get those degrees in project management that didn’t exist before.

BILL YATES:  That’s true.

Susan’s Project Story

WENDY GROUNDS:  You had written an article on project failure. And I want to just lead into that with you telling us the story about this project.  Could you introduce what happened?

SUSAN IRWIN:  Yes.  So I was actually the portfolio manager, or the program manager, on this project, and I had 13 lanes.  Our project was at a local bank here in town. We were to move our third-party processing from one vendor to another.  So we interfaced with our new third-party vendor. And then we had outside components that also interfaced in with our third-party processors.  So they obviously had to move, as well.  This particular article stemmed out of an issue where, at the time, we had received a go from all parties involved. So from the original organization, from the new third-party processor, and from the third-party vendor that was interfacing in.  And so we had received a go that we were ready to move this into production.

Now, this was a two-year project, multimillion-dollar project.  So we were about two weeks away from our targeted go-live date.  About a week later, we had a meeting with our new third-party processor, and one lone individual threw his hand up and said, “I really don’t think we’re ready,” and explained the reason why.  And so really what he was expecting to see from test cases he had not seen come across. So that spurred into a bunch of discussions with different individuals.  And so we had, just to kind of give you our leadership perspective, I had a business sponsor, I had an executive business sponsor, I had a technology sponsor and executive technology sponsor.

So as you can tell, frustrations are high, people are concerned. People are going, well, how am I culpable in this situation?  How did we get here?  And so I had one individual who went and gave the story to the chief technology officer, the CTO at the time, that this was a failure of project management, without any background or anything.  I was extremely upset because the narrative of this was we had no facts to base this on. And so this article was my response to that, as opposed to sending the scathing email that I wanted to do.

But as I started looking at this, I started thinking, well, if I’m going through this, maybe other people are going through this, as well.  So fast-forwarding into the situation we had, at that point in time we were a week out.  We had already done a go here.  And we needed to figure out how are we going to get from where we’re at to where we need to be. And figure out how we can get some semblance of a go-live date in very short form because, every single time we move this date out, there’s a cost implication to it. 

So pulled the team together, had daily meetings with everybody.  Pulled this list of all the things that the third-party processing vendor was expecting to see, and worked with this third-party processor to get those in place. Make sure we have those tested, and then get those signed off.

And then, as we started digging deep into this, I had an opportunity to speak with my portfolio manager about this. And I said, you know, we typically put safety gates in to ensure that we don’t have these project failures.  So you have risk and issue management.  Well, we actually had a risk associated to this vendor as not being prepared as we originally thought. So we had that safety gate in that we were tracking.  Then we had a go/no-go decision point that we were tracking.  Then we had a meeting with the bank, the third-party processor, and the outside vendor. And so we had another safety gate where we had between the third-party processor and us. And we had another safety gate between us and the third party. 

So as you can tell, we had safety gates in place.  But we blew through all of them. Because in reality the root cause of this was no one felt like they had the authority to be able to stand up and say, hey, we’re not ready.  Here’s a problem, and this is what’s happening.

When Nobody Speaks Up

BILL YATES:  This is so, so interesting.  And so relatable, unfortunately, I think, to most of our listeners. We’ve all been in situations where the wheels fall off of a project.  I’ve got to ask you, so when you say you blew through the safety gates, by that do you mean the indications were there that, okay, we’re not really passing the quality checkpoints that we had in place, but nobody’s wanting to raise their hand and bring attention to it?  So is that what’s going on?

SUSAN IRWIN:  Well, yeah, we’re blowing through these, so we’re getting a go.  We’re getting through each of these meetings.  Nobody’s raising their hand.  And it’s not until post-go, when we’re having one of these meetings, we’re up against the go-live date, that a single individual raises his hand and says, “We’re not in a position where we can go, and here’s the reason why.”

BILL YATES:  Wow.  So nobody was brave enough, if you will, to say, hey, the emperor has no clothes kind of a thing.  Looks like nobody wanted to do that.

SUSAN IRWIN:  Yeah.  That’s 100 percent correct.  And again, I had been doing this for 15 years, you know, and several years before that in the technology management side, just without the title.

The podcast for project managers by project managers. The sales team and the project manager - how to improve that complex relationship.  Advice for the project teams who have to deliver what sales has sold and why sales professionals should be kept engaged in the project from start to finish.

Table of Contents

01:56 … Meet James

03:06 … BrandMuscle

04:17 … The Sales Guy’s Perspective

08:56 … The Pressure on the Sales Team

11:37 … How to Deliver what Sales has Sold

15:17 … Project Handoff

17:20 … Scrutinize the Contract

18:48 … Advice for the Sales Team

21:33 … The Project Kickoff

23:57 … Sales and Identifying Risks

25:13 … The Project Handoff

26:56 … Leadership Influencers

28:07 … Career Advice

29:42 … Connect with James

30:23 … Closing

JAMES MORSE:  ...as

you balance that relationship with sales, you naturally develop a trusting

relationship between the project team and the sales team.  And that’s so helpful because then I trust

the salesperson to deliver something correctly, and they trust me to actually

deliver on that and make sure that that project gets in time, is in budget, is

in scope, and it delivers a happy customer.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our opportunity to meet with you and

talk about issues that project managers are facing today.  We hope you’ll continue to tell us what you

like and offer your suggestions.  You can

leave a comment on Google, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or whatever

podcast listening app you use.  You can

also leave comments on the Velociteach.com website or on our social media

pages.  I am Wendy Grounds, and with me

in the studio is Bill Yates.

BILL YATES:  Wendy, we’re going to have a fun conversation

today.  We’ve got a great topic.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes, we have.  And we have a great guest, too.  So his name is James Morse, and he serves as the Vice President and Head of Product for BrandMuscle.  He’ll tell us a little bit more about BrandMuscle coming up.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And James is unique in that he served the project manager role and also the sales role, project manager first in his career and then later in sales, and so really what we’re going to talk about is the hatred between project managers and sales.

WENDY GROUNDS:  I’d

say a particularly strong dislike.

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

there’s so many project managers who have discovered that their sales team has

made some promises or overcommitments that now the project manager and the team

have to deliver.  So we’re going to talk

about that.

WENDY GROUNDS:  I think so, we’re going to boil it down to communication.

BILL YATES:  Yes, we

are.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s

talk with James.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

WENDY GROUNDS:  James,

welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for

being our guest today.

JAMES MORSE:  Thanks

for having me.

Meet James

WENDY GROUNDS:  Can

you tell us how you started your career, and how you ended up in the role that

you’re in today?

JAMES MORSE:  Yeah, absolutely. So I think I’m very lucky to, right out of school, have gotten an opportunity within project management, which I think a lot of my peers didn’t necessarily do.  They started with other careers and kind of paced into that, so I really hit the ground running.  I was doing new client onboardings and implementations, which has really just been a lot of the breadth of my career when it comes to project management.  And then I’ve slowly just transitioned into different opportunities, typically in SaaS and software, which has taken me to where I am currently with BrandMuscle.

So I’ve been with BrandMuscle for a little over seven years, similar background even within the organization.  I started with new client onboardings and implementations in the project lead role and just slowly grew within that to project manager, to senior project manager, leading our team of project managers within implementation, and then transitioning to more of that pre-sales role, the sales engineer, solutions consultant, however we want to think about that.  And then ultimately I actually just moved into our product team, leading up our entire product strategy space.

BrandMuscle

WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell

us about BrandMuscle, the company that you work for.

JAMES MORSE:  So we fall into the – we call it “Through-Channel Marketing Automation.”  So if you look at the analyst space, that’s the title and terminology they’ll use.  But really what it is, is technology that empowers channel partners of all types.  And when I think of channel partners, ultimately these are people who sell products and services through a channel on behalf of our clients.  So it could be a nationwide insurance agent.  It could be a Pandora jewelry retailer, a franchisee, an alcohol and beverage distributor.  Ultimately they take corporate brand assets, their messaging, the advertising, co-op funds, really demand generation activities to drive local sales and market locally to reach their customers, and so that’s where BrandMuscle steps in.  So we offer both software and services to act on behalf of corporate at that national or global level to enable local marketing.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Where

are your offices based?

JAMES MORSE:  So we

have four offices in the U.S. – Cleveland, Ohio; our headquarters is in

Chicago; Kansas City; Austin, Texas.  And

then we have two offices in India, in Bangalore and Noida.

The Sales Guy’s

Perspective

BILL YATES:  James, the experience that you’ve had with BrandMuscle I think is going to help you relate to so many of our listeners, and the fact that you’ve done project management.  So you’ve also been the liaison between a project manager and the sales team, and you’ve done the sales role, as well.  Which brings me to the elephant in the room, which is many times project managers dislike, despise, want to torture the sales team.  Do you agree with me that that can be the case in many instances?

JAMES MORSE:  I

completely agree.  I wouldn’t even limit

it to just project managers; right?  The

entire organization can sometimes loathe the sales team.

BILL YATES:  Yup.  Yeah, it’s a love/hate.  I mean, if you don’t have sales, you’ve got

nothing.  You’ve got to sell something

before any other business will happen. 

So it is the catalyst.  But all

kidding aside, I mean, there are times when we can look back on our careers as

project managers and go, wow, that project was especially difficult because

there was a miscommunication between sales and the customer and us, you know,

the team that actually had to implement it. 

So that’s the elephant in the room that we thought, this is the perfect

opportunity for us to discuss this issue and share some advice.  There are some reasons that sales and project

managers, sometimes they don’t get along.

And one of those, I think back, because a lot of my background is software, many times we would go in as a team to implement a solution, and we had a very clear understanding of how this was going to work.  We’d done these types of projects before.  And then we realized the salesperson has sold vaporware to our customer.  There’s a capability that doesn’t exist, and we’ve got to figure it out, and so many times, you know, we’re finding that out in front of the customer.  The customer says, “Okay, well, Bill, I’m excited about you and your team doing XYZ.  So this is going to completely change how we do our business, and we’re excited about it.”  And I’m looking at him going, “Whoa, it doesn’t work that way.”

JAMES MORSE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  So that’s

one of them.  Wendy, we were talking

through this.  Sometimes it’s a

scheduling issue, too.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yes.  Sometimes there’s a bit of unrealistic timing.  The salesperson could have said, oh, yes, we’re going to have that done.  We’ll have it done before Christmas, or before the holidays or something like that, and this isn’t going to happen.  Timing is off.

BILL YATES:  As a project manager, you are meeting with the customer, and you realize, okay, there’s a disconnect here. So James, maybe bring us some fresh ideas, help us look at it from both perspectives since you’ve served in both roles.  Share the perspective of the sales guy.

JAMES MORSE:  You know, I don’t think it’s very different in the grand scheme of things from us as project managers; right?  Ultimately, the salesperson wants to do right by the buyer, the client, the stakeholder, however we want to think about them.  It’s just in a different term, and so I think that a lot of times the salesperson might not be ingrained into the everyday activity.  So we talk about software; right?  They may not know every little bell and whistle the software can do, and oftentimes they may hear something and think something else, and so there’s just a disconnect there.

So at the end of the day I think that their intent is

pure.  I think sometimes that the

execution could be off.  And you know,

oftentimes I think that even as project managers, whoever we deliver to, the

client or even internally, who our stakeholders are, might think the same thing

about us at times.  I was given this

project.  What do I do with it, whatever

it may be.  It’s just where do we look at

that in the overall stream.  So I think

that moving to the sales role really helped put that into perspective for me,

having done project management.  And

honestly, that’s how it was sold to me within BrandMuscle.  Because that elephant in the room is how I

felt about sales, is I had been delivering projects and being handed things

that, when I think of that iron triangle, right, its scope, its cost, its

timing, I thought all the sales team cared about was the cost.  They wanted to look at it from a top line

revenue perspective.  And I cared about all

three.

And so I think moving into the sales role helped me

understand where they were coming from because that still is a lot of it.

The podcast for project managers by project managers. Dr.

Kaitlyn Bunker, Ph.D., P.E. is a Principal with Rocky Mountain Institute’s

Islands Energy Program. Kaitlyn leads a diverse team that partners with islands

in the Caribbean to support and accelerate their clean energy transitions.

Their projects result in many benefits, including the use of more local,

renewable energy sources and less imported fuel.

Table of

Contents

01:33 … Meet Kaitlyn 02:56 … The Rocky Mountain Institute 05:31 … Projects in the Caribbean Islands 08:20 … Program Partners 09:10 … Local Island Energy Resources 10:15 … Aligning Stakeholders, Local Communities and Project Priorities 13:11 … Project funding 14:28 … Compliance and Regulatory Guidelines and Knowledge Sharing 17:59 … Project Risks 20:10 … Leading a Very Diverse Team 22:27 … Leading Remotely 23:25 … The Resilience of Clean Energy 27:05 … Impact of Battery Technology 28:51 … Cultural and Communication Challenges 31:18 … Kaitlyn’s Lessons Learned and a Success Story 34:27 … Hear More about RMI 35:04 … Closing

KAITLYN BUNKER:  So we

really come in and do a lot of listening, meet with as many people as we can,

understand different perspectives and try to bring that all together, and then

pair that with our experience.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Please make sure to visit our website, Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to the show so you’ll never miss an episode, or you can join us on Velociteach Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.  And if you know a friend who would like to hear our show, please tell them about Manage This.

I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me today is Bill Yates.  Bill, so you know I’m always trying to find interesting projects.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Projects that are all over the world, not necessarily in one spot, and so this one is all over the islands, the Caribbean islands.  Our guest is Kaitlyn Bunker, and she’s a principal with the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Island Energy Program, where she leads a team that partners with islands in the Caribbean to support their clean energy transitions.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, and just to be clear, this is Ph.D. Kaitlyn Bunker, so Dr. Bunker, I just wanted to say that, Dr. Bunker.  She also leads modeling efforts related to small island microgrid opportunities.  So a microgrid, she’ll explain that further.  But it’s a new strategy for having power distributed across an island, especially in the cases of places like the islands in the Caribbean that are prone to hurricanes and other types of storms.  So a microgrid strategy is a very interesting strategy, and we’ll talk about her projects.

Meet Kaitlyn

WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s

meet Kaitlyn.  Kaitlyn, welcome to

Manage This.

KAITLYN BUNKER:  Thank

you for having me.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell

us about your career path, how you got to where you are today.

KAITLYN BUNKER:  Sure, so I’m now a principal with the Islands Energy Program at Rocky Mountain Institute.  But my background is that I studied electrical engineering,  I went to school at Michigan Technological University and got really excited in the field of power and energy, and also control systems.  And so bringing those two topics together led me to the concept of microgrids, which are small electricity systems that have their own sources of electricity.  So they’re able to use that to serve local electricity needs in a small confined system.  But they also typically can connect to the larger electricity grid. So they’re able to operate in kind of those two modes.  And so that was really exciting for me, especially the concept of incorporating more renewable energy into microgrids and combining those concepts together.

So I got really excited about that in school and decided I

wanted to dig into that further.  So I

stayed right at Michigan Tech for graduate school, completed my Ph.D. in electrical

engineering.  Really enjoyed that and

then was ready to kind of zoom back out from a very specific research topic on

control of microgrids with renewable energy, and so that brought me to Rocky

Mountain Institute.  That’s where I’ve

been the last six years or so, working on broader opportunities to really

transform our energy systems.

The Rocky Mountain

Institute

BILL YATES:  Kaitlyn, so tell us more about the Rocky Mountain Institute, what’s the mission of that organization?

KAITLYN BUNKER:   So Rocky Mountain Institute is a global nonprofit organization, and our mission is to transform global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.  So we were founded back in 1982 by Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, who are really leading thinkers and implementers when it comes to energy efficiency and renewable energy.  And Amory is still with RMI as a chairman emeritus, so coming up on 40 years here of some great work in the fields of efficiency and renewable energy.

WENDY GROUNDS:  What

are some of the impacts that RMI has had in communities worldwide?

KAITLYN BUNKER:  So because we are a nonprofit organization, we’re often in a very unique position to work with all kinds of different partners and bring them together in ways that they might not otherwise connect.  We also have a very strong analytical foundation for doing modeling and technical analysis, and we use that to identify opportunities for all sorts of benefits that renewable energy can bring.  So things like cost savings, increased resilience, job creation, all sorts of different opportunities for benefits that are out there that might be important to different people or groups. And so we often partner to try some of these solutions out.

So we consider ourselves more than a think tank.  We’re really a “think and do” tank.  Some recent specific examples include a prize

program that we’ve been facilitating called the Global Cooling Prize.  It’s focused on designing efficient cooling

options.  So as our world keeps getting

warmer and warmer, how do we keep people cool without just adding to the

warming problem with more emissions from traditional air conditioning?  So that’s been an exciting effort really

recently.

We’ve supported a lot of cities in identifying and pursuing

clean energy options, as well as moving towards electrifying their public

transportation systems.  So we often take

a very whole systems view of energy, not just electricity or transportation or

buildings or industry, but how do those pieces fit together?  And then in my particular program we have

supported resilience, redesign, and rebuilding of electricity systems that were

damaged in recent hurricanes.  So those

are just a few examples of the broad type of work that we do at RMI.

Projects in the Caribbean

BILL YATES:  Tell us

more about these projects that you’ve been working on in the Caribbean.

KAITLYN BUNKER: So our Islands Energy Program is focused in the Caribbean, as you mentioned, and we do really three main types of work with the islands that we partner with.  We complete analysis to identify optimal pathways for clean energy transition, so what’s the long-term pathway that’s going to be the best fit for a particular island.  Then we help to prepare and de-risk specific clean energy and resilient projects to help get them actually in the ground and operating, get these first projects going with our island partners.  And then the third thing is we work to connect island stakeholders so that they can share their expertise with each other and build even more expertise through communities of practice.  So that’s broadly what we do with our island partners.

And so some specific examples of things that we’re working on right now are looking at an integrated process for planning for the future of energy and resilience, to find optimal pathways for Belize’s electricity system. So in the Bahamas we’re working on redesigning and rebuilding the electricity system in specific islands within the Bahamas that were really devastated by Hurricane Dorian last year.  We’re working in Bermuda, supporting Bermuda in accelerating their transition to use more local renewable energy sources, while making a switch to electric transportation options at the same time.  And then one other example is in Puerto Rico, we’re working to increase opportunities for communities in Puerto Rico to build resilient and clean microgrids.

BILL YATES:  I was doing some reading on some of the things that you wrote about the project with the islands,  I was surprised that they import so much fossil fuel for consumption to create energy.  What are some of those statistics?  Because that’s one of the things the microgrid and your initiative is trying to change.

KAITLYN BUNKER:  So most islands in the Caribbean today get their electricity from burning diesel fuel which, just as you said, they have to import.  We are seeing islands move towards clean energy and start to make a dent in that, but still the majority of islands’ electricity today comes from that imported diesel fuel. So that makes it very expensive, Islands in the Caribbean might pay about three times what we would pay on average in the United States per kilowatt hour of electricity. 

So it’s quite expensive, and it can also fluctuate month to month based on global oil prices. If you’re a resident or a business owner in an island, it’s expensive to start with, and then it can change over time.  So lots of opportunities to use more local options that also happen to be cleaner, but are often much lower cost than importing the fuel as it’s done today.

Program Partners

WENDY GROUNDS:  Who

are you partnering with in these programs?

KAITLYN BUNKER: So we do a lot of partnering, it’s really important to our strategy and being able to be successful in what we’re trying to do.  Our main partners are often the governments of the islands where we’re working,

Hear about human and robotic space exploration with Belgian nuclear physicist Philippe Schoonejans. He is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) team leader for the Sample Transfer Arm, one of the European contributions to the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return program. This mission will use robotic systems to return samples from the surface of Mars to Earth. ESA is composed of 28 member countries, and Philippe has cooperated extensively with NASA, Japan, Canada and Russia in his projects. He shares his complex projects and the many constraints facing international cooperation.

Table of Contents

03:03 … Meet Philippe 05:03 … NASA and ESA 05:50 … Philippe’s Role at ESA 08:06 … Favorite Projects 09:36 … The European Robotic Arm 11:40 … Prototype Testing 14:30 … Current Projects 16:03 … Getting to Mars 19:43 … COVID-19 Impact 22:30 … Keeping Teams Motivated 26:28 … Collaboration with Other Agencies 28:52 … Vendor and Stakeholder Communication 34:54 … International Cooperation 38:34 … Communicating Complex Projects 40:26 … Words of Advice and Lessons Learned 44:06 … Closing

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS:  ...we cherish the international cooperation.  We think it’s needed, and we know that we cannot do everything on our own, not even in Europe with our 28 countries, we cannot do everything.  So we do want to work together with everybody else, and with that also learn from what the others are doing.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio

today is Bill Yates.

BILL YATES:  Wendy, we’re

going to go to space today.  Let’s

do it.

WENDY GROUNDS:  I

know.  I am so excited about today’s

guest.  We get to sit down with a project

manager in human and robotic exploration at the European

Space Agency.  And this is Philippe

Schoonejans.  Philippe is in the

Amsterdam area of the Netherlands.  And

we’re very excited to have him with us today. 

We’re particularly going to talk about the politically complex

international environment that he works in with many stakeholders and many

countries.  The European Space Agency I

think he said has 28 member states.

BILL YATES:  Yup.

WENDY GROUNDS:  And

they also work with other countries around the world, including NASA. 

He’ll tell us a little bit more about that.  But some of the projects that Philippe has

worked on, he’s been the project manager for the European

Robotic Arm for the International

Space Station, as well as working on a sample transfer arm.  He’s the project manager and team lead for

that.  It’s for a Mars

Sample Return Mission.

BILL YATES:  Isn’t

that fascinating?  And for our listeners,

you’re going to hear a lot of abbreviations or acronyms, so ISS, ESA,

International Space Station, European Space Agency, different things like

that.  NASA.  But Mars, I mean, we have been trying to get

to that red planet.  Since 1960 we’ve

been attempting to put satellites orbiting around that planet.  And there’s been some success.  But the one thing that we’ve never done is

bring anything back.  We’ve had

pictures.  We’ve had digital data.  But we don’t have any actual rocks or

samples.  And so this mission’s going on

now.

We do have, I think since 2003, the ESA has successfully put

Rovers on Mars, and so they’re slowly moving across that little red planet and

collecting data.  But one of the

fascinating things is Philippe and his team, they’re working at bringing the

rocks and the other things that they can collect back to Earth.  We haven’t done that yet.

WENDY GROUNDS:  It’s

easy to get overwhelmed just by the vast scope of this project and the

incredible things they’re doing.  But we’re

going to find that Philippe has some really good information and really

practical advice for project managers, particularly those who are working in an

international community.  So let’s get

right on and talk to Philippe.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

WENDY GROUNDS: 

Philippe, welcome to Manage This. 

Thank you so much for being with us today.

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: 

My pleasure entirely.

Meet Philippe

WENDY GROUNDS:  I want

to ask you about your career path, how you got to where you are today.  Could you tell us, have you always been

interested in space, and how you got to where you are today.

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: 

Well, I think I maybe was not the little kid who was always already

toying around with rockets in the garden. 

But I did have a board game which I liked very much.  It was called Space Race.  It was about space mining, and you had to

throw a dice and get your rockets to various orbits and get it into the Moon.  And I loved it, but there was also a bit of

frustration because my brother convinced me to buy this game together, and I

had to empty all my savings, and then we played it, and he only played it just

once, and then he got fed up with it. 

And later he went into languages. 

So I emptied all of my little kid savings to buy this game, and then I

had to find new friends to play it with. 

But maybe it’s out of that frustration that I ended up in space

technology.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, you

had an early investment in space as a small child; you had to just commit to

it.

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: 

And that was 100 percent investment, so there was in fact a very large,

relatively very large investment.  But I

did my studies in nuclear physics.  Some

people say that the parallel is that I worked with the large particle

accelerators.  So there was already some

fascination for things which have a little bit of grandiose elements in there, I

loved that, absolutely.

But when I’d finished, I applied for a space company, it was

Fokker, it

was an aircraft company.  They make

airplanes, but they also had a space division. 

But I also, to be honest, I applied at Shell,

and I applied at Siemens,

and at Philips Electronics to be a

chip designer.  So that I had, indeed, I

had choice in the end of three or four jobs. 

But I think the space fascination won, and when I was doing that for

five years, our colleagues of the European Space Agency were at the time our

customer.  They asked me whether I would

not want come and join them.  And I

absolutely loved that, and I’ve loved it ever since.  It’s such a fascinating and inspiring

international environment.

NASA and ESA

BILL YATES:  Let me

ask a follow-up question, just to help those that are in the United States or

maybe in North America that are listening. 

Compare NASA with the ESA.

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: 

Yeah, it’s quite different.  I

think their biggest difference is that ESA has about 28 member states.  So we are representing the interest of all of

these member states, not just one like in NASA. 

So it’s very democratic, so very, very political.  And it’s political to the sense that each

participating country wants to get back what they put in, so that also means

that the bigger countries make bigger contributions.  They have a more important vote in most cases

than the smaller countries, so that that is for sure a complication in ESA, but

it’s also very inspirational.

Philippe’s Role at ESA

WENDY GROUNDS:  What

is your role at ESA?

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: So today I am a project manager in the

Mars Sample Return Mission, and that’s particularly interesting, I think, for

the Americans because it is a joint mission between NASA and ESA.  And it requires eight space systems to work

together in concert to get Mars material back to Earth, which is something

which has never been done before.  And so

ESA has three contributions to this mission, and I’m the project manager of one

of them.  But with that I’m also very

much involved in the discussions on the overall missions and the discussions

between ESA and NASA.

In addition to that, I’ve been doing a lot of technology

stuff in ESA.  For a long time I was the

chair of the forum that decides which technologies get the budget to be

developed.  And so it comes from the

needs of the missions that we are planning, 

to where do we have a gap in technology, what is it that we still cannot

do and would be very risky, and let’s focus our research money on those.  So sometimes it’s a short-term thing; but

usually it’s a long-term thing, like we are not yet good enough in rocket

engine of such and such type, which maybe we need for future missions.  Let’s initiate a five- to 10-year development

to get that going, and then of course that was a tricky job because there were

always way more proposals than we could afford. 

So that was very, very interesting.

Also worked on standardization of space technology.  So we have lots of space standards that are

used for all our developments, and we had to decide, okay, which direction

should they evolve?  Which ones are we

still missing?  How do they relate to the

standards that other agencies have.  And

yet it’s very important because in all the international cooperation we

typically want to work according to our own standards, and the others too.  Like the Russians

would work to Russian standards, and the Americans to the NASA standards, the Japanese to the Japanese standards, we to the

European standards.  And we have to

declare that they’re all equivalent.

But also sometimes you have to convince the partnering agencies

that they are actually equivalent. 

Otherwise they would end up asking us can you please work to the NASA

standards.  And then all of our industry

has to change the way they do business. 

So this is an important subject which I enjoyed very much.  But I think where my heart is, is in the

operational part, like really run a project.

Favorite Projects

BILL YATES:  Philippe,

looking back on your long career with the European Space Agency, what are some

of your favorite projects, or those that you’re most proud of?

PHILIPPE SCHOONEJANS: 

Well, I think the Moon one that I just got out of was very, very

difficult because it was about defining a Moon space station that is going to

fly in ‘24.

In his new book, How Design Makes the World, Scott Berkun

explores how good and bad design impact our daily lives. In this episode we

examine the big questions Scott asks in the book: What are you trying to

improve? Who are you trying to improve it for? How do you ensure you are

successful? And how do you avoid unintended harm?

Table of

Contents

01:09 … Meet Scott 04:23 … Scott’s New Book: How Design Makes the World 07:04 … Q1: What Are You Trying to Improve? 11:12 … Ideas Generation Rule: Yes, And 13:57 … Ideas Generation Rule: No Half-Assing 16:43 … Ideas Generation Rule: No Blocking Questions 18:42 … Ideas Generation Rule: Make the Other Guy Look Good 20:28 … Q2: Who Are You Trying to Improve It For? 25:21 … Q3: How Do You Ensure You Are Successful? 30:15 … How Do We Overcome Bias? 34:17 … Q4: How Do You Avoid Unintended Harm? 41:20 … Advice to Project Managers 43:07 … Get in Contact With Scott 44:00 … Closing

SCOTT BERKUN:  So something as simple as idea generation, if you’re not in a roomful of people you trust, none of these methods or techniques are going to help you because no one’s going to feel safe enough to offer what they really think.  And often the problem is that these brainstorming meetings are done with 20 people, 15 people.  There’s no way, even in a healthy organization, the likelihood there’s that much trust among that many people, that someone’s going to feel confident raising their hand against something they know is probably really weird.  And that’s why often brainstorming and idea generation happens the best in smaller groups.

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

mm-hmm.

SCOTT BERKUN:  Four

people, five people.

BILL YATES:  That’s a

great point.

SCOTT BERKUN:  Because

even if they don’t know each other, in 10 minutes they can get a sense of each

other and develop some trust.  And that’s

often a problem with project management is that it’s done at this large scale,

and the stakeholders and committee members, and we’re going to brainstorm.  But there’s 50 people in the room.  It’s like, no.  That’s a dog-and-pony show.  That’s not where the real brainstorm is going

to happen.

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me in the studio is Bill Yates. So in today’s episode we get to sit down with a special guest, Scott Berkun.

Meet Scott

BILL YATES:  Scott Berkun is an author, and he has had a big influence on me.  He wrote a book called “Making Things Happen” that I got a hold of early in my project management career, and just loved it.  Just ate it up.  Since then he wrote a book that I really enjoyed also called “Confessions of a Public Speaker,” which I recommend to all our instructors when we bring them onboard. It’s so good, so funny, great advice, and the book that we’re going to focus on today he just wrote this year, in 2020, and it’s called “How Design Makes the World.”

WENDY GROUNDS:  I actually had a look at one of his other books that’s called “The Year Without Pants.”  The topic, it intrigued me, the title should I say, and then I saw it was written about working remotely.  So if anybody has questions about that, I’d recommend that book.

BILL YATES:  Okay,

good.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Scott, welcome to Manage This, thank you so much for being our guest.

SCOTT BERKUN:  It is a

pleasure to be here.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Before we get into the nitty-gritty of your books and what Bill wants to talk about, I have a question. So you transitioned from project manager into becoming an author and a speaker.  Why and how?  How has it worked out, and why?

SCOTT BERKUN:  Well, the how has worked out well, so I quit my job as a tech project manager guy in 2003, and it’s now 2020, and I’ve been doing this for 17 years.  I’ve written eight books.  And this is the only way I make a living.  So I’ve been very fortunate and lucky, it’s worked out great.  I mean, I’ve been successful enough, I’ve finally made it onto your show.  So this is like a great day.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Yeah.

SCOTT BERKUN: So the why, the primary reason was a selfish one, I had a good career, I was very lucky, I worked at Microsoft, worked on some very important projects, had a good career there.  But I turned 31, 32, and I started to ask myself the question, is this all I’m ever going to do?  And I have always been a curious person, an ambitious person about the world and trying to figure out – there’s so many things I’m interested in.  I don’t want to spend my whole life working as a project manager if maybe there’s something else I should at least try.

So my goal was to quit and to force myself to do something else.  And I buffered myself for the prospect of failure by saying, well, if I go out in the world and do something else, and I fail, I like managing projects, so the worst thing could possible happen is I’ll come back and do what I was doing.  But not to try something else seemed like a terrible strategic mistake.  So I quit, and I’d always been interested in writing, I was not a journalist or anything, I’d written a few articles here and there. It was always a thing in the back of my mind, someday I’ll write a book, and so I was like, today is that day.  I’m becoming middle-aged.  I quit.

So I tried to become a writer, I worked on a book that was a total failure, and I couldn’t find a publisher for it, but I learned through that book, the seven months I spent working on that book, I like this, so if I can make this work, I want to do it.  And then I wrote a book that Bill knows of that was originally titled “The Art of Project Management.”  It’s now called “Making Things Happen.”  And so that book was all about how to be a good project manager, and that book did well enough to support me to do a second book, and then the third book, and then now I’m here.  So that’s the how and the why.

Scott’s New Book: How

Design Makes The World

BILL YATES:  Scott, I’ve got to tell you, I was really inspired by your first book.  “Making Things Happen” hit me at a perfect time in my career.  It kind of opened my eyes up to some challenges that project managers face.  As a result, many of the things that you have in your book are concepts that we talk about in our classes here at Velociteach. So you’ve had an impact on me and on much of the content that I’ve helped write, I’ve been recommending that book for years.  I’ve also recommended your book for speaking, which is “Confessions of a Public Speaker.”  This is a hilarious book, I can’t believe how transparent you are in this book.

But the book that we want to focus on today is “How Design Makes the World.”  Some of the concepts really register with me because between a designer and a project manager there are so many similarities.  Project managers, their job is to solve problems, designers are doing the same thing, and many times there are so many common links and traits between the two.  So I thought it’d be a great conversation for us to have today.

SCOTT BERKUN: 

Absolutely.  I totally agree.  I mean, I’ve always felt like everything is a

project.  As a project manager, you meet

someone at a party, although no one goes to parties anymore these days, but you

meet someone on Facebook or somewhere and say you’re a project manager, most

people go, oh, like it’s a boring thing.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

SCOTT BERKUN:  And then I go, well, wait a second, you know, how did you build your house? How did you rearrange your office?  How did you deliver – whatever the thing you deliver at work is, how did you do that?  And so they explain, like, that’s project management, if it’s a movie you saw that you liked, somebody managed that project, if your city or your state had provided you a sufficient number of masks to keep you safe, someone managed that project.  Everything is a project, so a project manager means it’s central to everything.

And so design is the same thing, that if you like the layout of your house, or you have public transportation in your city that works well and is safe and reliable, somebody designed those things. And that it comes with a plan where it overlaps the project manager.  What’s a plan?  Well, you have a set of goals, a set of constraints, a set of budget restraints, and you’re trying to match the goals you have with the constraints that you have, and that’s what project managers do, but designers do it from a different angle.  Designers are focused more on the ideas, and project managers are focused more on delivery, but to make anything happen in the world, you need both.

BILL YATES:  That’s

right.

SCOTT BERKUN:  And the division between them has always bothered me.  Although this new book is focused more on looking through the world from the designer’s point of view, I’m still a project manager. So a lot of that sensibility is infused in the book, that you could have a great idea, but if you don’t have an organization that is managed well enough to deliver on that idea, then the idea doesn’t...

BILL YATES:  It’s not

going to happen.

SCOTT BERKUN:  Is not

going to matter much, yeah.

Q1. What Are You

Trying To Improve?

BILL YATES:  Right, right.  I enjoy talking about this with my friends who are innovators.  You do need both, and the disciplines are very similar, but there are some unique characteristics or strengths for the really true designer versus the true project manager.  If you can find somebody who’s got a little bit of both, then you’ve really got a gem there.

Now, I want to get into the book.  So the book really tackles four big questions, and the first question is what are you trying to improve for the designer, which I would argue that’s the same question for the project manager, too.  The first question needs to be what are you trying to improve?  I really got pulled right into your book because you talk about some funny examples,

Telling stories is a powerful means to teach, lead, and inspire. The best storytellers often employ their own life experiences. Sara Amiri MBA, PMP, shares her story working at Uber and Volkswagen and she explains how her passion to build unity, increase empathy, and raise awareness led to the Healthcare Heroes Project.

Hear about the role of the project manager in successful innovation from John Carter, an inventor of the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones who shares the original patent with Dr. Amar Bose. John shares the surprising discovery they made by talking to customers about critical features. Topics include the differences between a program manager and a project manager, career progression for a PM, how to assess PM talent, managing project risk, establishing boundary conditions, small “a” Agile, and the characteristics of a successful PM.

Table of Contents

00:32 … Meet John

03:43 … The Bose Headphone Project

06:14 … Listening to the Customer

10:00 … Taking Risks in Innovation Projects

13:45 … Courage to Bring Bad News

15:30 … Effect of COVID-19 on Innovation and Work

19:46 … Program Management vs. Project Management

22:21 … Career Progression from PM to Program Management

26:19 … Characteristics of a Successful PM

28:11 … Why is it Difficult to Hire a Successful PM?

30:38 … Small “a” Agile

35:55 … Establishing Boundary Conditions

40:48 … John’s Success Tips

43:31 … Get in Touch with John

44:14 … Closing

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome

to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.   A word

to our listeners.  If you have an

interesting COVID-19 story, how your project has been impacted by the pandemic,

we’d love to hear from you.  You can

email me at [email protected]. I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me is

project manager Bill Yates.

BILL YATES:  Hi, Wendy.

WENDY GROUNDS: We’re going to talk to someone today who is a

true innovation veteran.

Meet John

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

Wendy, I’m so excited to have John Carter join us.  He is very respected in the area of

innovation and product development.  He

is actually the co-inventor of the Bose

Noise Cancelling Headphones . We’ll certainly jump into this Bose topic

with him.  That’ll be a lot of fun to

discuss.

WENDY GROUNDS:  John

is also the founder of TCGen, and he’s

also been advisor to companies like Apple and Amazon with their  product development and innovation

processes.  So I think he comes with a

lot of experience and a lot of knowledge that he’ll be able to impart to us.

BILL YATES:  Yes.  John has been a project manager.  He’s been a product manager, he’s been a manager of managers, he’s led his own company, and so I cannot wait for the advice he’s going to share with us.

WENDY GROUNDS:  John,

welcome to Manage This.  We’re so

grateful to you for being with us today and being our guest.

JOHN CARTER:  Well,

thanks for having me.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Well,

we want to start off by asking you about your career path, and particularly to

do with the Bose headphones.  I think

most people are really going to be interested in hearing about that.  So tell me a little bit about yourself.

JOHN CARTER:  Well,

thanks for asking.  And it’s really part

of my passion.  It was true since I was a

kid.  I’ve always been kind of a boy

scientist and had a chemistry set and microscope,  telescope, I mean, whatever I could get my

hands on.  I really, really enjoyed

technology.  As I grew up, though, I

found the importance of sound.  I really thought

that that was something I wanted to know about. 

It’s invisible.  It conveys

meaning and emotion.  And as I learned

more, it has incredible range as far as what it can be used for.  Obviously speech versus music is something

that’s happening today.  With mobile

phones and speech recognition it’s just the Wild West.  So I’ve always been interested in sound.  In college I designed a music synthesizer

from scratch before its time.

BILL YATES:  Of course

you did.

JOHN CARTER:  Yeah,

right.  It kind of worked.  And when I was looking at graduate school, I

looked at places that had audio programs. 

And one of them was Stanford;

the other was MIT.  And I knew that Dr. Bose taught at MIT, and I

decided to go there.  I didn’t have a

scholarship at the time.  I just packed

up my car and drove across the country. 

It was half filled with record albums and my stereo and a few textbooks.  And I arrived in Cambridge without

support.  But I was determined to get it.

And I had amazing luck because I was taking Dr. Bose’s

course in acoustics, and he had just lost his teaching assistant.  And so he asked the class if anyone would

like to do it, and I raised my hand.  And

it was incredible.  It was a 20-minute

interview.  And he said, “Okay.  Let’s give it a go here.”  And it just so turned out what I studied as

an undergraduate was what’s called “signals and systems.”  But it’s kind of the big pieces of how the

parts work together to get a better system. 

And that was Dr. Bose’s approach and actually went into the headphones.

The Bose Headphones

Project

BILL YATES:  John, to

me the Bose noise cancelling headphones are iconic.  They were, like, revolutionary when they came

out.  How in the world did you get to

work on that project?

JOHN CARTER:  So when

I graduated, I was in the research department, and Dr. Bose was a mentor for

me.  And this was amazing.  We talk about luck and fate in what happens

here.  He invests a lot of time in his

former students who join the company. 

And so he and I had two ideas we were working on when I first

started.  One idea was how to improve a

loudspeaker, and the other idea was this new concept around headphones.  And so I started working on them both.

What I realized, and I went to Dr. Bose two months later,

and I said, “You know, we’re making a lot of progress on these headphones and

not so much on this other project.”  He

said, “Let’s just drop the other one.” 

And I think there’s a lot of innovation that comes about being lucky and

making the right choice.  I think we made

the right choice.  So it really came as a

natural outcome of collaboration, working on two research ideas.

And I could tell you when I first popped the prototype it

was all metal parts and everything on my head. 

It was like you were transported into another universe.  And you can turn the switch on and off, and

the change was mind-blowing.  I knew we

were onto something.  And what was really

interesting is that we thought as inventors we’d know exactly why customers

would really clamor for this.  And we

thought it was improved bass response. 

This headphone would give you better bass.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

JOHN CARTER:  And it

does.  Well, we started offering this,

trying it out, getting feedback from various customers.  Turned out military was the biggest

interest.  And we went to

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, as well as Army Proving Ground in Aberdeen.  And the feedback we got was not bass or the

performance.  This is noise reduction.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

JOHN CARTER:  The

benefit was noise reduction.  Now, we

knew about noise reduction, but we didn’t think that consumers would really

find that the most appealing.  That

discovery, an innovation that I think is really important, which is you have no

idea, really, even the inventor has no idea about what consumers will

ultimately value your invention for.  And

you would think you would know that, and you’re completely wrong.

Listening to

Stakeholder Recommendations

BILL YATES:  That is

huge.  And for project managers it is so

good to hear that from you.  Just to the

listeners, so John and Dr. Bose have the co-patents on these Bose noise

cancelling headphones that we’re talking about. 

So this was the guy that was right there from the start.  And John, as you’ve said, at first you guys

thought you were building it for X, when it turns out the customer said, no, Y

is much more important.

And from a standpoint of someone who’s charging ahead as a

project, I’m a project manager, and I’ve got goals, and I’ve been told by the

sponsor this is what we have to accomplish. 

And then you start to get feedback from customers, and you’re thinking,

you know what, this sponsor may be slightly off.  There could be greater value in this other

area.  This is a challenge to us, I

think, to be bold and go to those sponsors, share the information that we’re

getting from customers and the ultimate users to say, okay, maybe we need to

slightly change our path.

JOHN CARTER: 

Yeah.  This, I think, is a real

challenge for project managers.  And I

think there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a sudden right turn on a

project.  And I think the right way is to

say these are the stakeholders.  This is

what they’re telling us.  We think it’s

important and a direction that we ought to consider.

What a good project manager will do, in my estimation, is

they describe the benefit, and they also describe the tradeoffs, and then they

indicate a recommendation.  Because when

there’s a sudden change, I think project managers tend to be little myopic.  And they don’t step back and say, all right,

someone’s moved our cheese.  Here are the

new boundaries.  So if we can renegotiate

this contract and come clean on it, then we’re going to go in the right

direction, and you’re not going to be surprised in a couple months from now

when you forgot that we made this decision, Mr. Executive.

BILL YATES:  Right.

JOHN CARTER:  You

agreed to it, but somehow you remembered the old schedule or whatever.

BILL YATES:  Yes, the

old budget.

JOHN CARTER:  Exactly.  And so I think renegotiation of the project boundaries is really important as a project manager.  And also flexibility.  So there’s one other risk that I’m sure you’ve seen in your work with project managers is they’re given direction, and come hell or high waters, they go after it.  And sometimes when there’s a real indication from stakeholders that there’s a need to change, their heads are down, and they’re not going to make that change.  And that’s another quality of, I think, advanced program managers and project managers, to step back and say, wait a minute, you know, it doesn’t matter how quickly we climb that mountain if it’s the wrong mountain.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

In times of uncertainty, project managers can be the pacesetters that keep organizations on the right path and bring balance into their projects. June Mustari discusses real-life issues in project management. Hear practical tips and advice to find the right balance of discipline and flexibility for successful project delivery.    

Table of Contents

01:05 … Meet June 02:36 … Telecom Career and TruNorth Consulting 05:47 … COVID-19 Impact and Bringing Balance 08:39 … Emotional Engagement 10:52 … Collaboration Tools 12:31 … Knowing the Technical Aspects of the Industry as a PM 14:20 … Past Project Story: Virtual Desktop Interface Migration 18:16 … Breakthrough Moments and Resistance on the Project 21:54 … Breaking the Rules 25:54 … Words of Advice and Encouragement 31:22 … Get in Touch with June 31:58 … Closing

JUNE MUSTARI:  It’s

all about trust.  And I think more than

ever trust is our cornerstone in our business. 

And when you can show up in a way that makes people feel secure, it’s

our purpose. 

WENDY GROUNDS:  You’re

listening to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project

managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me

is Bill Yates.  This is the show where we

sometimes like to delve into the project stories of project managers who are in

the trenches.  In today’s episode, we get

to sit down with June Mustari.  Why don’t

you tell us how you met June, Bill.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, it

was such a chance meeting.  June and I

were sitting at the same round table at a breakout session, I think Steve

Townsend was speaking, at PMI Global Conference 2019 in Philadelphia.  So I don’t know, there were just a handful of

us sitting at a round table, and June had really good questions for

Stephen.  And some of the things that

June shared, I’m like, this is my kind of person.  So we talked during the session and just

stayed connected after.

JUNE MUSTARI:  Yeah.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Well,

June, thank you so much for being here today.

JUNE MUSTARI:  Oh, it’s

my pleasure.  I’m very happy to be here.

Meet June

WENDY GROUNDS:  I want

to find out a little bit about your career background.  How did you get into project management?

JUNE MUSTARI:  Yeah,

when people ask me this, I like to say I didn’t get into project management; it

got into me.  I really started my career

just taking things on that took shape as projects – you know, the beginning,

middle, and with an end goal, an outcome that was very clear.  I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was

managing projects.  So then when I

actually started to see that there were other people in my network who were formal

project managers, I was like, oh, this is a thing, and I really like this

thing.

And so I decided to get a little educated in it, and I said

I was going to take the PMP exam 10 years before I actually took it.  So people say, “I’m going to take the PMP

exam.”  And I said that for so long.  But you don’t actually take it until you

schedule it.  Like, that’s when it’s

real.  So I did eventually get the PMP,

and I appreciated the discipline of that. 

I’m a rule follower, so like that was a dream for me.  And I passed on my 37th birthday.  So it was like, I got into my car, and I was

like, yes.  That’s a little side note

about me being a PM and getting started with that.

So it just kind of took off from there.  Once I had that credential, I felt

confidence.  I don’t think it’s about the

credential.  I just think it’s about the

confidence.  I took formal project

management roles right after that, where it was like my title was Project

Manager.

TruNorth Consulting

and Telecom

BILL YATES:  And June,

you’ve been in telecom for a long time; right? 

Like I’ve done a lot of work with Verizon, and you were actually

employed by Verizon for a long time, and you continue to kind of go down that

industry path.

JUNE MUSTARI:  Yeah,

my M.O. is parachuting into situations, trying to solve problems, and then

getting out; right?  So I had like four

different roles at Verizon.  When I

started, I was a temp, and it just progressed from there.  So, yeah, I’ve spent most of my life in

telecom.  I did a quick stint in the

financial risk industry, and I learned a lot. 

Like I felt like I got 10 years of experience from the leadership there

and the projects I worked there.  So

other than that, it’s all been telecom, yeah.

BILL YATES:  And tell

us about your current position.  You work

with TruNorth now.  And if I remember right, this is your second

time with this company?

JUNE MUSTARI: 

Yeah.  That’s actually where I

started more formal project management back in 2013.  And I stayed there for a few years, really

loved it.  And I left to do my own thing

in the bigger project management world, larger enterprises.  So right now what I do at TruNorth

Consulting, we’re veterans in telecom, so we understand all the lingo and how

bills look, how records look and all of that. 

And so we deliver visibility to millions of dollars in telecom spend in

one pane of glass.  So we give CFOs

confidence and control of the money that they’re spending in their

telecom.  We also help onboard people to

our enterprise platform so that they can manage their digital transformation

from old copper telecom to fiber or other, VoIP, that kind of thing.  I am their Director of Operations.

BILL YATES: Just give everybody a sense for what’s a typical

customer engagement like for TruNorth. 

So you guys are going in and approaching a business and saying, hey, let

us make sure that you’re getting the best deal that you can with your telecom

solution.  Let us take a look at the

service and the bill and make recommendations. 

Is that kind of what you guys do?

JUNE MUSTARI: 

Yeah.  Typically they actually

approach us.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

JUNE MUSTARI:  Because

they are so frustrated that they’re seeking to solve their problem, which is a

headache around that very problematic industry. 

So when we are going to take on a new client, we first evaluate their

spend.  How much are you actually

spending in telecom?  So we get a good

view of that, and typically our clients are 10 million plus in annual

spend.  And then we ask them for all of

their information – accounts, copies of invoices, anything like that.  And then our engagement really starts when we

start putting that stuff in our tool, our solution where you get full

visibility to your inventory and spend. 

So the project there is onboarding. 

Then the end goal is ongoing telecom expense management after that,

which is a monthly review of all of your services so you can control your costs.

COVID-19 Impact and Bringing Balance

WENDY GROUNDS:  June,

one of the themes that we’re having with our podcasts at the moment is we’re

asking our guests what their COVID-19 story is. 

How has this impacted your work? 

What have you been seeing?

JUNE MUSTARI:  Yeah,

that’s a really good question.  And I

feel like this is a really good way to get different perspectives, by asking

these questions.  I ask these questions

to people in my network.  For us,

personally, True North is remote anyway. 

We’re distributed all over the country. 

So we’re constantly meeting on Zoom. 

We live on the phone.  So we had

really no adjustment internally, other than how it affected us on a personal

level, each of us responding to this crisis new normal.  So that was the adjustment we had to go

through, which was little in comparison to those who had to do both – maneuver

going remote in their professional life and dealing with it personally.

BILL YATES:  What

about your customers, June?  What have

you seen with some of the adjustments that they’ve had to make?

JUNE MUSTARI: 

Navigating change is never easy in any organization or enterprise.  So if you’re forced into it, that’s usually

where you get the best results, because you have to actually take action;

right?  So for them I think, because it

is mostly multilocation businesses that have either gone through mergers and

acquisitions, which is already problematic in itself, there are many locations.

So being able to get skeleton crews in those locations for

broadcasting, for example, you still need to be on the air.  Getting skeleton crews in the studio, going

virtual as much as you can, all of that brought light, I think, to our clients

that they need better bandwidth, and disaster recovery plans, if they didn’t

have them.  It put things into

perspective, I think, for them more than anything else.  And so for us, our reaction to that was, hey,

get on a meeting with us, we’re going to bring humanity and humor to this

situation and make you feel like things are normal, at least for that hour.

BILL YATES:  Nice.

JUNE MUSTARI:  Because

we were normal.  So it was actually

really cool to be in that position at that time.

BILL YATES:  Yeah,

telecom and ISP and connections are vital to business.  And to have someone who can approach it from

a baseline of great experience, broad understanding of telecom, and also that

humanity, you know, that humor and, okay, I know life has been turned upside

down for you guys at work.  So let us

help you figure out this piece.  That’s a

trusted partner.

JUNE MUSTARI:  It’s

all about trust.  And I think more than

ever trust is our cornerstone in our business. 

And when you can show up in a way that makes people feel secure, it’s

our purpose.  It’s great.

Emotional Engagement

BILL YATES:  Nice.  So give us some practicals on that, what are some of the things that you’re doing, like on a daily or a weekly basis, with your either team members or with your customers, to help engage just their sense for where they’re at emotionally?

JUNE MUSTARI:  Yeah, so it’s just as simple as asking sincerely and with real concern, how are you doing, and letting them talk about it and listen.  That’s really all that’s required is listening, and, then you know, we do a lot, we are already, because we’re remote, doing silly things all the time as a team.

In our current environment, many project managers are being forced to pivot, shift, change plans, and start over. In this episode, John Houser walks us through what happened with his company, Spectrum Healthcare, as they were wrapping up an adoption of a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) just as COVID-19 started to impact their operations. John begins by briefly describing what SAFe is and what led Spectrum to implement SAFe.