ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● ROGER DUKE
NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. Every other week we get together to discuss the topics that matter to you, whether you’re in charge of a large team in an international company or leading a small group in a local business. The guiding principles are the same, and we want to share them with you through the eyes of others who are doing the stuff of project management.
I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. And Andy, talk about experts, we have someone in the studio today who is not only in the thick of managing projects himself, but he teaches others and is involved in numerous community projects.
ANDY CROWE: And a really smart guest, as well. This is going to be a good one. And I think his passion is going to connect with a lot of our listeners’ passions.
NICK WALKER: Well, let’s meet him. Roger Duke is the engineering project manager at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River site, where he has been for the past 40 years. He’s also currently assigned as the Agile coach for the first Agile project there. He holds mechanical engineering degrees from Auburn University and the University of South Carolina. He is an adjunct professor at Augusta University Hull School of Business, teaching project management. He is a newspaper columnist, a conference speaker, and has served as director and officer of more than 10 nonprofit organizations. Roger, welcome to Manage This.
ROGER DUKE: Thank you, Nick. Glad to be here.
NICK WALKER: Now, I know one thing that you are involved in is the community. It’s important to be involved in the community. How can project managers be involved, and why is that important to you?
ROGER DUKE: Well, one thing that I discovered in some of my organizations I worked in is that, when you build a board for a nonprofit, they typically look at things like legal, marketing, businesses that can be sponsors. And when I got in there, I found out that these organizations are great at coming up with ideas and dreams, but they don’t know how to implement them. And there was a niche for somebody on the board to actually follow through and do something; okay? And that’s where the project management approach or significance came in is that they can come up with the ideas, but you need somebody on the board to actually execute them.
ANDY CROWE: And you know, Roger, I’ve experienced that, as well. I’ve been on fewer than you have, but quite a few boards. And what you have is a lot of passion, and then sometimes they struggle with process. And sometimes they downright resist process, I’ve found, because it gets in the way of the passion. You know, there’s all this energy, all this passion, and project managers can maybe help channel that.
ROGER DUKE: There were a couple of big projects that were sitting out there, ready to do, but the sponsors that were supporting them were going to take their money away because nothing was happening, you know. And so I just stepped up for one in particular to put a marquee on an historic theater, and it was just a great project, very exciting, big difference, big impact on the community because of its visibility.
And that’s when I realized project managers need to be on the boards. You’ve got to have somebody with that perspective on how you’re going to actually execute and make something happen. And it just grew from there. And so as I got more involved in the community and different organizations, I would just take on projects at each of those and really could make a difference.
BILL YATES: One of the things that we talk about in the role of project manager is project managers get things done. You know, we’ve had PMs sit in here and talk about, well, my CEO had a vision, but I had to come alongside and get that vision and break it down and then recruit a team and get it done. So that really – that’s a great point. And it also ties into one of our core values here at Velociteach, and that is community service. So I applaud your efforts in your local community to get things done.
ROGER DUKE: Yeah. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s made a lot of difference. That’s how I think about community service. It’s a great balance for work and life; okay? You’ve spent all day working and making a difference at your company. But you can use community service to address passions and purposes that you can’t get at work. And that’s where I’ve really discovered the beauty of community service.
ANDY CROWE: You know what, Roger, Bill mentioned that one of our core values is community service. And so the way we implement that at Velociteach is we ask every employee to give 5 percent of his or her work time to a nonprofit. And they can do that without approval from a manager. So you want to take one day a month and go volunteer somewhere, you can do that. And ideally it’s a local not-for-profit, although we don’t impose that. And ideally we use our project management skills in some way.
Now, sometimes we just pack lunches for at-need people in the community; but, if we can, get involved and do use our project management. So Bill and I are involved right now with a not-for-profit in the area and trying to help them organize a big project that they’re doing as a fundraiser, things like that. But I’ve got a question for you.
ROGER DUKE: Okay.
ANDY CROWE: My question’s this. When you’re working with not-for-profits, you’ve been on 10 boards, you’re working with volunteers a lot of times, and you’re in the situation where you’re leading volunteers, that’s a different situation than being at the Department of Energy and having a staff. Talk about that difference a little bit and how you’ve found success there.
ROGER DUKE: Well, first of all, nonprofits are not going to be successful without a strong volunteer support, so you need to treat them special.
BILL YATES: Right.
ROGER DUKE: And I like your approach about asking employees to give time, not money, okay, because time, that’s one of the things I think is the most important resource. It’s much more important than money because everybody has it. But the bad news is you only have so much of it. So you’ve got to use it and apply it appropriately to get the most out of it.
So volunteers, like I said, they’re critical. And the way that I approach the volunteers, first of all, is I make sure that I don’t ask them to do something unless they are good at it and enjoy it and can contribute. So we want to make sure that when we give them an assignment or ask for volunteers, that they want to do it. And I’m a real believer in strengths-based management, and so understanding what people are good at and what they like to do is real important. So we’ll talk to them and ask them, “What do you like to do? What are you good at?” And that at least gets them volunteering on activities that they like. And that’s the first thing.
But we hope they recognize a purpose for what they’re doing. So whether it’s associated with the mission of the organization or with the task at hand, we want them to feel like they have a purpose, and we’ll ask those questions. If they’re passionate about it, that’s just a plus; okay? All right? But finding that perfect volunteer who has that combination of purpose and passion. And we really try to do that.
NICK WALKER: I want to ask you.
ROGER DUKE: Okay.
NICK WALKER: You said you take your project manager hat into the community service arena. I was just wondering if it works both ways. Are you able to glean things from your experience with the nonprofits, the passion, and sort of take that back into your project management world?
ROGER DUKE: I have gotten to the point now where I look for opportunities in everything I do. So whenever I get an assignment, regardless of what it is, there’s probably an opportunity associated with it. And so I really just think about that. And so if there’s a way to find an opportunity that supports one of my passions or my purpose, then I’ll take that opportunity and bring it into my project management world and say, okay, what initiative, what activity, what project can I create that allows me to achieve that opportunity? And it just kind of all connects.
But staying focused, for me personally, staying focused on making opportunities into reality, that’s a project. It’s my own product, service, and result, if you will, that I go out and try to do. And I just call them opportunities or moments or memories or whatever. And that’s how I have taken what I get associated with and then weaving it into project management. I love project management. It’s what I like to do. So I’m going to take that strength, that talent, that skill that I love, and I’m going to apply it to something that can make a difference.
BILL YATES: I like the points you made about let me figure out for these volunteers what’s their skill set. Can they relate to this purpose, the purpose of this organization and what we’re trying to accomplish? And then it’s gravy if they have passion, as well. Those are great elements. And I think about once I was teaching a class, and I had a guy in the class named Edgar. And it was a project management fundamentals course. And we were talking about this, you know, how do you lead people that you’re not paying? And one of the elements that really worked well for Edgar he shared in class. And he had transitioned from the military, so he’d had a long military career and had retired.
And then he went to work for the VA Hospital. And he was down in Florida, and he was responsible for a group of volunteers. And some of these are kids who’ve gotten in trouble with the law, and now they’re having to put in community service hours.
