ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● HEIDI FOGELL

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our conversation about what matters most to you, whether you are a seasoned professional or just trying to get started with your project management certifications.  It’s our goal to help you improve, challenge you, motivate you, and, if possible, encourage you with stories from others in the profession.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at all this, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, today we get a chance to draw on the experience of someone who has really an incredible diverse background.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, that’s the beauty of project management, Nick.  You pull from so many different disciplines.  It applies in so many different ways.  And it’s kind of fascinating when you get people from different disciplines together to look at how they can manage projects more effectively.

NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s introduce our guest.  Heidi Fogell is a Project Manager and Natural Resources Practice Leader for Amec Foster Wheeler in Kennesaw, Georgia.  She’s a biologist and has been an adviser on ecological issues and habitat assessments and has negotiated with regulatory agencies.  She performs wetland delineations, biological assessments, as well as hazardous waste investigations and remediation projects.  Heidi, welcome to Manage This.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Good morning.  Thank you for having me.

NICK WALKER:  Now you have a fascinating background.  You’ve dealt with fish population studies, surface water issues, sediment and soil projects, and other environmental tasks.  Since our audience can’t see you, I should probably tell them, no, she is not wearing a lab coat.  But how does a scientist get into project management?

HEIDI FOGELL:  Well, at the risk of sounding trite, it was about a boy.  I actually, when I was in grad school for marine biology at Florida Tech – the route that most people go is to work for a state or federal agency.  And I actually had the opportunity to work for an environmental consulting firm.  And that opportunity allowed me to stay where my boyfriend at the time was.  And so I took that opportunity and actually, through that, got lots of experience working in remediation projects in addition to the biological projects, and eventually moved up through the ranks and became a project manager.

NICK WALKER: You know, I always tell young people, life takes you places that you never expected, so sometimes it’s just good to go with the flow.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Yes.

NICK WALKER:  But that’s really taken you into a lot of places that maybe you hadn’t planned on, but allows you to bring kind of a unique set of skills to it.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Right, right.  You know, nobody expected a marine biologist to wind up in Kennesaw, Georgia.  It’s not as far away from the ocean as you can get, but not as close as you probably should be.

BILL YATES:  You could be in Oklahoma or Nebraska.

HEIDI FOGELL:  I could be.  I could be, but I’m not.

BILL YATES:  Heidi, give us a sense for what are some of the typical projects that you’re working on.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Typically right now I manage environmental remediation projects under the Superfund process, which is a federal regulation that cleans up old hazardous waste sites, usually where there is a known responsible party involved.  So that’s the bulk of my work right now.  But I also manage several smaller projects that support municipal and industrial clients for getting wetland impacts permitted or addressing impacts to protected species, basically addressing their environmental issues so that they can develop their projects responsibly, yet comply with regulations.

BILL YATES:  Got you.  There’s something unique that you bring to the table that I want to get into because when I was reading over your bio, just getting a sense for the type of work that you do, I’m getting this image of you with two hats.  One hat is one that I can totally relate to.  It’s the project manager, and the PM has to get things done.  The project manager commits the team to milestones and deadlines and due dates and deliveries and all these things, budgets.  And then there’s another hat that you wear which is this environmental consultant that kind of goes back to your roots of, whoa, slow down, you know, don’t hurry up, but slow down.  We need to assess and test and survey and run all the right – get all the right approvals and go through the right agencies.  So how do you wear those two hats?  How do you juggle that?

HEIDI FOGELL:  I dance a lot.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

HEIDI FOGELL:  But it’s actually part of – that’s the biggest part of being in the environmental consulting business.  It’s a very competitive business.  The companies that are in it range from small to large, but it’s a small community.  And, you know, we compete against the same people over and over again in different arenas.  So it’s important to stay on the top of your game.  So you have to be able to jump from one thing to the next.  And that was the hardest thing for me to learn when I came into environmental consulting because I was very much a start a project, work it through to the end, finish it, move on to the next thing.

BILL YATES:  Right.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Yeah.  I can’t do that anymore.  I have to touch 10 to 20 different things every day.  And that’s difficult to feel like you’re making progress.  But by taking small chunks, you actually make probably more progress than you would just sitting and focusing on something for a long time.

ANDY CROWE:  So, Heidi, I’m interested in this part, something you just said.  My wife is very much the same way that you are kind of wired, that she wants to start a project, just really grind on that particular project, and then put it in a binder, finish it, put it away, go to the next.  I am somebody, I enjoy the variety of skipping around.

BILL YATES:  Oh, yes, you do.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, no, I do.  And I have a lot of irons in the fire.  But I’m able, I guess I’m able to stop something and pick it back up the next day pretty well.  So that’s something I do well.  So how do you manage that, having to do that, but not being wired that way?  Do you have systems in place?  Is your world full of Post-it notes?  What does Heidi’s life look like?

HEIDI FOGELL:  I have a list.  I have a list, but that list has to be flexible, too.  I make my list at the end of the day before, what I think that I need to accomplish the next day.  And I do check my email pretty regularly to add and subtract from that list, and then adjust it in the morning.  And then at the end of the day I look back, and I say, oh well, I got two things done on the list, but I also accomplished eight other things.  So I think, to me, being organized is the best way to manage that; and then also making myself be flexible and realize that it doesn’t have to get done right away.

ANDY CROWE:  Out of all the technology and all the apps that have come out, I still have not beaten a paper list in terms of its effectiveness and just getting things done.

BILL YATES:  Right.

HEIDI FOGELL:  I can’t.  I need a paper list and a paper calendar.  I need to be able to see the month in front of me still.  Yeah.

BILL YATES:  There’s a pleasure that I get in taking that little item on a paper list and scratching it off and saying it’s done.

HEIDI FOGELL:  It’s absolutely thrilling to do that.

ANDY CROWE:  So let me find something out about you two because I’m to the point now where, if I do something that is not on my list, I write it down on the list for the sheer joy of getting to strike it off.

BILL YATES:  Oh yes.  That’s me.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Yeah.  I just raised my hand to that one, too.

ANDY CROWE:  I think they make medications that’ll treat the three of us.  But you know what?  We get things done, so good.

BILL YATES:  Let’s buy it in bulk.

HEIDI FOGELL:  That’s right.

NICK WALKER:  My problem is that I lose my list, and I have to make a brand new one, and it’s usually different from the original.

ANDY CROWE:  Heidi, tell me, as you approach a project, and this is something I’m always interested in, how do you sort of organize and approach it?  When you get assigned a new project, where do you begin?  How do you start?  How do you even begin to think about the overall deliverables and how you’re going to do it?

HEIDI FOGELL:  Oh.  Well, it really depends on the size of the project.  The larger projects we work really as big cohesive teams on.  So there’s a group of people planning these things.  And generally what happens, if it’s something that’s completely new, we get a Request For Proposal from a client.  And usually we’re competing against people.

So we actually – a bunch of people get in a room and sit down and plan it out.  And we go through the scope of work.  We itemize the lists that they’re asking for.  We plan out the amount of time we think those things will cost, the personnel that get loaded into that.  And then from that we build up the budgets.  So it’s basically, it’s looking at what the deliverables are going to be and then building up the tasks underneath those deliverables.  And it’s a similar effort for a smaller project, but obviously the number of people involved is much smaller.

BILL YATES:  That’s good.  I can think back to RFPs where our team did a great job of estimating, and we won the business, and we actually made money off of it.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Wow.  Impressive.

BILL YATES:  And then others that were not so good.

HEIDI FOGELL:  Right, right.

BILL YATES:  You know, there were some rocks that we didn’t turn over and look under.  And those are tough.  Are there some things that you can think back in that RFP process where you guys have found, okay,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● KEITH WILLIAMS

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our informal discourse about what matters most to you as a professional project manager, or if you’re working toward that position.  We want to keep you motivated, keep you improving, and encourage you with some real-life stories from others who are doing the stuff of project management.

I’m your host Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at all this, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And one of the subjects we like to keep coming back to, it seems, in this podcast, Andy, is what we call “best practices.”  And our guest today can definitely speak to that.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, I’m looking forward to that.  We have Keith Williams in the studio with us today.  And, you know, the whole idea with best practices, we get to learn from other people.  We get to figure out what they’ve learned by trial and error and through some pain so that maybe we don’t have to go through that ourselves each time.

NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about Keith before we introduce him.  He’s a project control supervisor at Georgia Power Company.  He’s been serving in various areas of project management there since 2005, and as the operational performance supervisor for Southern Company.  Before that he held several project management/project controls positions at Parsons Company, Georgia Transmission, Enron Energy Services, Chemical & Industrial Engineering, the City of Louisville, and Earth Science Technologies.  Keith, it is a privilege to have you here on Manage This.  Welcome.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Thank you, and I look forward to it.  It’s a great opportunity.

NICK WALKER:  Let’s start of by – just tell us a little bit about your current role in project controls at Georgia Power.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  The project controls group at Georgia Power, first of all, I’m segmented in the transmission organization.  Those are your large power lines and substations.  The biggest thing we always like to describe, we’re the extension cord between the plant and the customer, so we’re the big orange cord.

BILL YATES:  That’s a good picture.  Got it.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so my group is mainly responsible for scheduling and budget controls.  It’s segmented into several different fields within project controls, which also includes cost engineering.  And also we’re responsible for the tools that manage all of that.  In that role, as far as my leadership within my group, our goal is I always like to say we’re the mortar between the bricks.  We’re the ones that are trying to make the connection between the organization and give them information so that, first of all, our project managers can make good decisions, offer real information; and then also to see how we can improve processes as far as that constant improvement that you see in Six Sigma.

NICK WALKER:  You’re a project management nerd.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Yes, I would agree.

NICK WALKER:  That’s what Bill and Andy are calling you.  And we love project management nerds.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Oh, most definitely.  I get told that a lot.  But then I look at the other guy and say, “Hey, you all are engineers.  It’s not like you all are cool.”

ANDY CROWE:  Keith, you mentioned Six Sigma.  Now, do you guys actually practice Six Sigma in your group, or is that something that you look at from your own standpoint?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  It’s something more I look at from my own standpoint, really got exposed to it as the operational performance supervisor.  And especially with looking at DMAIC and looking at those aspects there.

BILL YATES:  Sure.  Now, Nick, you called me out, so I need to go ahead and explain.

NICK WALKER:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  So here’s how I came to that conclusion.  There are many data points here.  But as Keith and I were talking, he is a card-carrying member of the AACE, which is the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering.  And now, for those who have studied earned value management, you know what this is.

ANDY CROWE:  Earned value management is your entry card to get into this group.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, it’s like your password to get into that speakeasy.

BILL YATES:  So when he talks about scheduling and budgeting, yeah, this is exactly – this is part of our wheel...

ANDY CROWE:  This is the deep end of the pool, isn’t it.

BILL YATES:  Yup, yup.

NICK WALKER:  But when I look back at your résumé, you started out in biology.  That seems like a long way from where we are now.  Or is it, really?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  From a project management standpoint it’s really not.  Project management is sort of a model you can apply to any industry.  Now, when I got into biology, I did not know I would fall into environmental.  But there I was a projects person.  And we did a lot of, back during the early ‘90s, underground storage tank removals due to federal regulations.  And then just doing those jobs at retail sites as far as the law was you had to change all those out.  And then if there were any long-term issues there, as far as what type of remediation work we would need to do.  But that was sort of my informal introduction to it.

NICK WALKER:  So tell us a little bit about how that has transformed into what you’re doing now, and where are you headed with all this?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  I would say the biggest thing you learn as far as when you start doing project management or get introduced to it is you want a systematic way of approaching your work.  You want a methodology that is going to help you be more proactive and not just reactive to the things that you need to do.  And so what I found is that, even though it was informal, I didn’t know what it was called at the time, but that was really the approach that I could apply this and consistently use this over and over again.

And when I say “proactive” is how do I understand the risks that we have because there’s always environmental things.  And when I say “environmental,” not just from the field, but there are some external impacts that you’re going to have to try to anticipate and then mediate.  And so to me that’s just an awesome part of it.  And when I say you can apply it to anything, look at my résumé.  I’ve been in environmental.  I’ve been in chem, petrochem.  I’ve been in energy, utility, water, wastewater, but still using that same concept to do those jobs.

BILL YATES:  One of the things that I think Keith has a unique voice in is within your industry, because I was a part of this industry for 18 years myself, in the utility industry, one thing that’s unique with utilities is they share data across the industry.  Because of the regulatory bodies, they’re encouraged to do so.  But you’ve been a part of committees and are serving on some subcommittees now where you have the opportunity to look at, not just the project’s performance within your own organization, but looking across many different utilities, as well.  Tell us a little bit about some of those committees, and then let’s get into some of the takeaways that you have from those.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Okay.  With the committees that I’ve served on, one that I’m doing right now is AEIC.

BILL YATES:  And, yeah, what does that stand for?

KEITH WILLIAMS:  I’ll butcher this real quick.

BILL YATES:  I think – I jotted it down just in case.  It’s the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  Yes.  And they have different working committees.  And one of them is a subcommittee on project management.  We try to get like for like.  So in our area that I’m a part of, most of these utilities are part of it.  They’re in the transmission or distribution organization.  Other committees involved with, Southern Company used to do a Southern Company transmission benchmarking effort where we would share technical data as far as cost to maintain, whether it would be substation lines in other areas.

But I’m going to back up a little bit to tell you a unique story when we first started doing that.  My role as operations supervisor was I ran that consortium.  But when we were doing feedback and trying to retool that organization, a lot of people started saying we love the data, it’s great.  But I tell you, the best part of the conference is the conversations out in the hallway when we start talking best practices.

ANDY CROWE:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  Right.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so we started making that a focus.  And really what we’re saying, even though it’s a formal setting, a lot of those conversations are very informal because they’re trying to figure out what do their organizations value and how can they move the needle.  A lot of times moving the needle is cost and schedule.  When I say “cost and schedule,” how can we maximize the work we’re getting done for the minimal cost?  And so the example I always give, if you have a capital budget for your organization, let’s say $500 million, at the beginning of the year you say I’m going to do 300 projects for $500 million.  At the end of the year, you might have only done 175 projects, but you spent the $500 million.

BILL YATES:  Right.

KEITH WILLIAMS:  And so I always ask that question:  Were you successful?  And that’s usually the high point where we start in saying, okay, let’s talk about a little bit more what it means.  For organizations today are under tremendous cost constraints.  We’re seeing that, not just in our industry, but across the board.  So they want to maximize and get more done with less.  And so when we start looking at stuff at our companies and in our industries, we’re now paying attention.  You saw on my résumé I used to work with Enron.  The Enron days are over with, where you just throw money at a problem.  We just don’t have that luxury.

Tune in to understand why Bill Gates chose The Box as one of his top picks in 2013. 

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● MARC LEVINSON

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our roundtable discussion about what matters most to you, whether you’re a professional project manager or working toward being certified.  We want to be a spark to light your imaginative fire and give you some perspective and encouragement.  And we do that by drawing on the experience of others who are knee deep, and sometimes deeper, in the world of project management.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the experts at this table, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, we’re going to hear from a very special guest today.

ANDY CROWE:  We’ve got a great guest this morning.  Marc Levinson’s joining us.  He’s the author of several books, and a really well-known person in the nonfiction world.

NICK WALKER:  Dr. Marc Levinson is an economist.  He’s an expert in international trade and globalization, international finance and finance regulation.  He’s written for, among others, Time magazine, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, the Daily Journal of Commerce in New York, and The Economist in London.  And he’s advised Congress on transportation and industry issues.  He’s a consultant and an author of six books.  Marc, welcome to Manage This.

MARC LEVINSON:  Well, thank you very much.  I’m delighted to be with you.

NICK WALKER:  Now, Marc, we’re here in Georgia.  And you have a little bit of a Georgia connection, as well.

MARC LEVINSON:  I lived in Atlanta for a number of years in the 1970s and early ’80s.  I am a proud alumnus of Georgia State University’s Graduate School.  And so, yes, I do have fond memories of Georgia.

ANDY CROWE:  Marc, I’ve got to ask – this is Andy.  What part of town did you live in?

MARC LEVINSON:  I lived for a while in Druid Hills and then in Grant Park.

ANDY CROWE:  Excellent, excellent.  And my wife also joins you as having done her graduate work at Georgia State.  So got a connection there.

NICK WALKER:  All right.

MARC LEVINSON:  Very good.

NICK WALKER:  One of your most fascinating books is titled “The Box:  How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.”  Now, Marc, I have to admit that for years when I lived in Seattle I would drive by the port and see the loading and the unloading of the container ships.  But not once did I ever think, how does this method of transporting goods affect me?  I think maybe we take for granted something that’s really changed the life of every person who’s bought something manufactured outside this country.

MARC LEVINSON:  The shipping container seems like a very mundane product.  It doesn’t seem like anything that particularly needed to be invented or developed.  But in fact, up until the 1950s, it didn’t exist.  And there was a prolonged period of developing containerization, developing standards so that a container could be sent around the world, and then of businesses changing their practices so that they could take advantage of the container.  So the container had very substantial effects on international trade.  It made globalization possible.  And my book is really the story of how this happened.

ANDY CROWE:  Marc, this is interesting for me.  This is Andy.  And as I look at this and think about it, I’ve worked in the supply chain world, supply chain logistics.  I’ve done projects, I’ve managed projects for companies that provide this service for large shipping companies.  And it is something we take for granted.  So project managers have to interface with this kind of world a lot, with cartons and containers, cases – cases in, cartons out, all of it going on shipping containers.  Tell us what the world was like before that.

MARC LEVINSON:  Sure.  Before the shipping container was developed, most goods were shipped internationally in a form that was referred to as “break bulk.”  And break bulk is exactly what it sounds like, small pieces of things.  If you would go to a dock, would have gone to a dock in the 1950s, you would have seen bags of products, and you would have seen barrels of products, and you would have seen wooden crates, and you would have seen drums, and all kinds of different things.

And each of these items separately would have come in on a truck or a train.  It would have been put into a warehouse alongside the dock; would have been taken out of the warehouse, brought onto the dock; would have been put with two or three other items onto a pallet.  The pallet would have been lifted into the hold of a ship.  Each of the items would have been taken off the pallet and stored in the hold of the ship.  And then at the other end of the voyage this process would have been repeated.

A typical ship in those days, and those were pretty small ships by modern standards, but a typical ship sailing the Atlantic in those days might have carried 200,000 separate items.  And each of those items had to be handled repeatedly.  So shipping was a very labor-intensive process.  It could take a week or two to unload and reload a ship.  A ship spent as much time in port being loaded and unloaded as they did at sea, and a lot of cargo was delayed.  So because of this, it was actually impossible to have what we think of as a modern supply chain.  You shipped your cargo, and it got to the destination when it got there.  You couldn’t plan on it.  And you couldn’t organize your production around it.  And that’s what the container changed.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, Marc, when you look at this, and when you think about some of the innovations in supply chain management, Japanese management, which really was coming into fruition around the same time, it’d be interesting to know how they influenced each other.  I don’t know if we have a lot of insight into that.  But Japanese management came up with this idea of just-in-time, or JIT.  And just-in-time management, of course, means the inventory arrives at the last responsible moment.

So you keep very low inventories.  They get there right at the last minute.  And then it puts a focus on quality because there’s not a lot of parts to waste.  There’s not a lot of inventory.  If you mess up this particular part, you’re going to have to wait for another one.  And it builds, it really focuses on building these close relationships with suppliers.  So the interesting thing about this, I feel like just-in-time management really couldn’t have evolved properly without this innovation.  Do you agree with that?

MARC LEVINSON:  Yes.  Now, just-in-time management began in Japan.  And it could begin without the container because it involved local shipping, from one nearby plant to another nearby plant.  But if you go back to the 1980s, you recall that the Japanese manufacturers, auto manufacturers, extended just-in-time shipping across the Pacific; okay?  They were producing parts, engines, transmissions and other components in Japan.  And they were delivering them to assembly plants here in the United States on a predictable schedule.  That could not have happened without the shipping container.

So the container made what we think of as the modern global supply chains possible.  It made it possible to ship in very large volume at low cost.  And it made it possible to have a reasonable assurance that what you were shipping would get where it was supposed to be at a particular time.  That really was not possible before the container.

BILL YATES:  Marc, this is Bill.  There are so many concepts that are just intriguing to me as you tell this story in “The Box.”  And certainly probably the key character is Malcom McLean.  And when I look at – when I’m reading this story about this character and this entrepreneur, one word just keeps popping up to me, and that word is “disruptive.”  This, you know, as you describe from the beginning, the box is simple; right?  It’s a 40-foot container.  It’s a box.

But taking that technology, that simple technology into this industry was so disruptive, you know, I think of the impacts that you talk about in the book to the longshoremen, the governments, the industry and what their expectations were, and even fast-forwarding to the ICC.  And I look at this idea of being disruptive, and it’s something that we as project managers have to deal with, with every project that we do.  The project creates something new.  It’s maybe a new technology or new service.  And it’s disruptive.

So I’m just curious what, you know, when you reflect back on the story and the research that you did regarding “The Box,” what advice do you have from either actions that McLean and his team took that we can parlay over to project management as to, you know, how do we handle the disruptive nature of this technology and what we do with it?

MARC LEVINSON:  Well, the first thing I would say is that people have attributed a lot of foresight to Malcom McLean retrospectively.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MARC LEVINSON:  And this is mostly misplaced; okay?  Malcom McLean did not set out to create a globalized economy.

BILL YATES:  Right.

MARC LEVINSON:  Malcom McLean ran a trucking company.  And he set out to increase his profits.  His concern was that he was running trucks up and down the East Coast, and the highways were getting increasingly congested.  This was in the days before interstate highways.  And so his original idea was to buy a ship and send trucks up and down the coast on the ship, rather than over the road, in order to avoid highway congestion; okay?  That doesn’t sound very dramatic.  And then, as this concept developed, he took one action after another, each of them intended to make money in the transportation business.  And so the modern intermodal freight transportation industry developed out of this.

But Malcom McLean wasn’t sitting there with a master plan of how he was going to reshape the world economy.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● NEAL WHITTEN

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s our opportunity to talk about what matters most to you, whether you’re a professional project manager or working toward one of your certifications.  Our purpose is to light up your imagination, encourage you, and give you some perspective.  We talk about trends in the field, and we draw on the experience of others who are doing the stuff of project management.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the two guys who make this podcast happen, our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, we’re also going to hear from one of our favorite guests today.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, the guy that I refer to as my “sensei,” absolutely.  Neal Whitten’s in-studio with us, and we’re always excited to have him.

NICK WALKER:  Neal Whitten is an author, a mentor, a trainer, a sought-after speaker, and a project management professional.  Neal Whitten, welcome once again to Manage This.

NEAL WHITTEN:  I am honored to be here, guys.  Thank you very much.

NICK WALKER:  Now, Neal, you speak a lot on project management topics.  You get feedback from your seminars which, I understand, is always positive.  We’re going to talk today about one of the subjects that always gets a reaction from your audiences because it’s real.  It hits home with a lot of project managers.  That’s because you force us to answer the question, am I too much of a softie?  All right, Neal.  You’re a nice guy.  This room is full of nice people.  But there must be a difference between “nice” and “too soft.”  What is that?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Well, let me just say that I have found that most people in our profession are too soft, and probably most people in general are too soft.  But when I’m in front of a group, and it’s relevant, I’ll often ask this very simple question.  Do you believe that you tend to be too soft at work?  And what I mean by “too soft” is demonstrating behavior that results in being consistently less effective than what is otherwise possible and needed in performing responsibilities.

Anyway, when I ask this at conferences, webinars, and so forth, most people say yes, they are too soft.  And from experience I’ve found most project managers, most business analysts indeed to be too soft.  They’re not willing to make the tough and unpopular project- or business analyst-related decisions, even though their instincts warn them that they’re not taking the most effective action.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  So how can we know if we are approaching that “too soft” category?

NEAL WHITTEN:  I can give you some examples.  And you can decide for yourself if you fall into these examples.  One that comes to mind is, if you behave as if you have the responsibility, but without the authority, then in my view you’re too soft.  I do face time with thousands of people each year.  I frequently  hear project managers and business analysts say that they have the responsibility, but not the authority.  This just is not true.  You almost always have the authority.  The problem is that you don’t take it.

BILL YATES:  So, Neal, I can agree with this.  I mean, I’ve heard this complaint from project managers when doing face-to-face classes with them.  That’s one of the most common complaints is just what you’re pointing out here, that I don’t really have the authority that I need in order to get my job done.  So you’re saying they do have it, they just need to reach in and grab it?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Yeah, that’s the neat thing about it.  It’s already there.  Here’s an example.  And I say this to everyone listening.  When was the last time you were called on the carpet, challenged, for exceeding your authority?  Was it within the last week, or the last month, or even the last year?  Was it ever?  My experience is that less than 15 percent of people in a large group, and by that I mean a statistically valid size group, have ever experienced being confronted exceeding their authority.  And this is sad to me.  But what is sadder is that statistically most people listening will never experience being called out on exceeding their authority across their entire career.  We’re talking about your entire career.  My assertion is that you almost always have the authority, you just don’t seize it.  You’re too soft.

BILL YATES:  So I’m hearing Neal Whitten call us all out, that we need to misbehave.

NICK WALKER:  It sounds like it, yeah.

BILL YATES:  We need to overstep our bounds.  We need to go beyond what we perhaps think our authority is.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  You know something I’ve found with this, Neal, is you get into trouble for the authority you don’t assume, not for over-assuming your authority.  You get in trouble, you get smacked around for not taking enough ownership, not taking enough authority.  And one of the things that we did in the alpha study of project managers, we surveyed 860 PMs and asked them, “Do you believe you have adequate authority for the projects for which you’re held responsible?”  And what was really interesting is the high performers said yes.  They agreed with that statement to a degree of 90 percent agreement.

The lower performers, and really when I say the “lower performers,” I mean the 98 percent of everybody, so not just the low performers, but 98 percent of all of us came in below 50 percent agreement with that statement.  So there’s this huge dramatic gap right there of saying whether or not they even believed they had adequate authority.  And it’s largely – then when you turn around and ask senior management, senior management said, “Of course, they all have authority.”

BILL YATES:  They’re in charge of the project; right?

NEAL WHITTEN:  Those results parrot my experiences totally.  I really believe that, when you go to work every day, you know, put your meekness at the doorstep before you walk in.  Become who you choose to be, and don’t be fearful of doing that.  I was in management for a number of years in a large company.  And I will tell you that I would rather my employees did something that exceeded their authority.  I’d rather they beg for forgiveness than ask permission.

ANDY CROWE:  Yes.

BILL YATES:  Yup.

NICK WALKER:  Interesting.  All right.  So take the authority.  Even if you don’t think you’ve got it, you do.

ANDY CROWE:  And let me say, Neal, just as one caution, that that “take the authority rather than ask for permission” does not extend to raising teenagers. We’ll caution that.

NEAL WHITTEN:  Oh, I love it.

ANDY CROWE:  I’m working through that right now, as a matter of fact.

BILL YATES:  I love it.

NEAL WHITTEN:  All right.  Let me give you a sidebar that you might find interesting.  So I worked for a major corporation for 23 years.  And in that period of time I exceeded my authority and called down on the carpet about a half a dozen times.  And, now, I never came close to being fired that I’m aware of.  At least nobody ever told me that.  And when I exceeded my authority, it wasn’t for personal reasons.  It was for the business.  It was for the project sponsor.  It was for the customer.  It was for the team.  It was for what I would call the right reasons.  But here’s a sideline that I never would have thought about when I was doing that.  In each case, I either got promoted, or a large award, or both.  Now, it didn’t happen on the same day that I got my hand slapped.

BILL YATES:  Right.

NEAL WHITTEN:  But it happened on the same project because of the style of taking charge and making things happen.  So being too soft is actually not a good thing, it is a bad thing.  And you will lose respect.  People won’t want to work for you from a leadership point of view.  Let me give you another example, by the way, of being too soft.  If you fail to perform your assignment as if you own the business, to me that is indicative of being too soft.  When you look around you for the people who you respect the most, they’re likely folks who come to work each day with the mindset that they perform their duties as if they own the business.  And that business is defined by their domain of responsibility.

If you’ve ever owned your own company, and we’ve got people around the table that have, you’ll know exactly what I mean because you can’t put food in your belly or pay your bills unless you’re successful.  It’s this passion that helps people achieve their best.  These are people who make things happen.  They believe, and their actions demonstrate, that the buck stops here, and that they are fully accountable for the project or their assigned domain.  Your boss and your senior management want you to take charge over your domain of responsibility with a passion that comes about when you behave as if you own the business.  And if you hesitate or routinely pull back, then again you’re demonstrating too-soft behavior.

ANDY CROWE:  Neal, I love this.  This is such a good point.  It has some tie-ins with your previous point, as well.  But to me every employee ought to have an entrepreneurial mindset.  And you go into an organization – and an entrepreneur, the mindset, that used to be a bad word when I would tell people back in the ‘80s I was an “entrepreneur.”  That means stay away from this person.  Now it’s got kind of a cool edginess to it.  But back then people didn’t want to be around an entrepreneur.  And I remember my mom asking me, “When are you going to get a real job?”

NICK WALKER:  Right, yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  “But, Mom, I’ve got a real job.”  So in this case, though, every employee needs to take ownership of their job.  They own their own position.  And that means making it successful; applying the resources, every resource you have control over; probably asking forgiveness rather than permission, within limits, obviously.  You don’t want somebody endangering the business.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  We get together every two weeks to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager, whether it’s certification issues or creating and implementing successful projects.  We draw on the expertise of experts in the field and share their challenges and successes.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and beside me are the two in-house experts who guide our discussion, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, you know, folks go online, they look at your bio, and they see all these letters behind your name.  And probably most of our listeners are familiar with most of those letters, those acronyms.  But there’s one, a Black Belt Six Sigma.  Should I be dodging blows here?  What is the Black Belt Six Sigma?

ANDY CROWE:  It’s funny, Nick.  It’s a Six Sigma Black Belt.  What it is, Six Sigma has different levels of credentialing.  And there’s Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt, Master Black Belt, and Master Black Belt Trainer.  So I’m somewhere in the middle there in terms of that.

What it is, it’s funny, there’s a lot of project management certifications out there.  We’ve talked about the PMP before.  We’ve talked about the PMI-ACP.  And we’ve probably touched on the Program Management Professional and Portfolio, the PgMP and the PfMP, and certainly the Certified Associate in Project Management, the CAPM.  A lot of alphabet soup there.

And it’s really funny because, even when I go do project management conferences, and people introduce me as a Six Sigma Black Belt, a lot of people in the room don’t know what that is.  They think it’s some martial art.  It’s not.  It’s related to quality.  And it’s a quality certification.  And it’s really the topic of today’s podcast is about Six Sigma, about Lean Six Sigma – which is something a little bit different – and how those work and how they can benefit.

NICK WALKER:  Is this a certification that’s been around a long time?  Or is this something that’s fairly new?

ANDY CROWE:  It’s been around a while.  Now, what happened with that, when it first came out, there wasn’t a lot of structure as to who owned the certification.  It was one of those things that a lot of different organizations were able to give that.  And then that’s changed.  We’ll talk about that later in the podcast a little bit, about how that’s evolved, who’s vying for kind of control of that certification, what that looks like, as well.

BILL YATES:  There are a couple of key components here that I want Andy to explain to the audience, Nick, because if there’s a Lean component, then there’s a Six Sigma component.  And I like where we’re headed with some background here, where this thing, where this movement began because it is all related to quality.  And so Andy, what about Lean?  When did that really come into play?

ANDY CROWE:  Lean is an amazing philosophy by itself.  So it’s a series of practices.  And what Lean is trying to do is get rid of waste.  Now, this is useful in a bunch of organizations.  But it’s really, really useful in manufacturing projects.  So if you have a project that has manufacturing, this is where it comes in.  Lean really came into vogue at Toyota.  And so it started after World War II.  It really picked up steam in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  And this is when Toyota started surpassing, and Honda and some of these organizations started really surpassing U.S. manufacturing.

And I’ve lived through it.  I watched it firsthand, that it absolutely did.  You know, there were times when, if you got 80,000 miles out of some U.S. cars, that was good.  And then, you know, some of the Toyotas were getting 200,000 miles.  And it was just astonishing what they were able to do.  Well, they got there through a number of things.  Lean was part of it.  So Lean really talks about – the acronym we use in Lean is TIMWOOD, T-I-M-W-O-O-D.  And what it is, is it’s where you look for, where the Toyota production system started looking for waste.  So they started looking at waste in transportation.

Now, one of the famous examples of that is Walmart.  Walmart started looking at their transportation.  They said we’re delivering these goods, okay, we’re sending trucks out all over the place, full of goods, and we’re bringing them back empty.  And so they started saying, how can we fix that?  That is a big problem right there is waste.  Waste in transportation.  So they looked at ways that they could contract, as a transportation provider, they could send a truck out full and then maybe load it with another company’s production goods and bring it back full.  It was kind of fascinating how they dealt with that.  So that’s the “T” is Transportation.

Inventory.  You have too much inventory?  That’s a problem.  And so the Japanese philosophy everybody’s familiar with is just-in-time management, JIT.  JIT says we’re going to reduce inventory levels down to almost zero.  And the goal behind that is twofold.  Number one, you don’t have your money tied up in inventory.  But number two, and this is a really powerful secondary effect, and in fact it’s probably the most powerful secondary effect of low inventory, just in time, is that the scarcity increases people’s attention and value on these parts. So that now you don’t have a whole stack of this part lying around that you can be careless with.  Each one is kind of treated much more precious, in a way, and they’re more careful.

BILL YATES:  There’s that awareness.  Yeah, it’s funny.  I think about, like when I’m traveling, if I’ve got plenty of time to make it to the gate before I catch a flight, then I’m not very worried about it.  I may stop and do a little browsing and shop or do whatever.  There’s plenty of waste.  But if, man, if my time is sharp, if I’m looking at my watch going, okay, I’ve got to get to the gate now, so I’ve got to beeline, and nothing distracts me.  I stay really focused.  So I see how this applies.

ANDY CROWE:  Bill, you and I have traveled a lot.  Have you ever missed a flight?

BILL YATES:  No, I haven’t.

ANDY CROWE:  I’ve missed one in my career.  One flight.  And you know what the stunning thing about it is I had more than enough time in this particular one.  Yeah.  I could go on.  We’ll spare the listeners for that.  But some people are probably cringing right now, feeling the pain.  So that’s the “I” in TIMWOOD.

The “M” is motion.  And this is trying to reduce the amount of unnecessary motion in an action.  So you saw this.  This is what happened with the assembly lines.  This goes all the way back to Frederick Taylor at Ford, back in the early 1900s, timing people, coming up with more efficient movements, trying to reduce waste in motion.

Then waiting.  Ideally, and this is really the, oh, what is the book, the goal?  The “Theory of Constraints” looks at this and tries to say, okay, we want to reduce waiting.  We want to make everything go smoothly so that there’s no wasted time in waiting.  My doctor could certainly benefit from that one.  Goodness.

Overprocessing.  And so this is an interesting one.  You know, you want to get it right.  You want to get it just enough.  In project management we talk about gold plating.  And gold plating is adding over and above the documented scope.  And so overprocessing is a form of waste, doing more than is needed to a particular item.  Overproduction is the second “O.”  And overproduction is just making too many of something.  And then the “D” is a big one everybody will be familiar with is defects.  That causes rework, and that causes a lot of pain rippling through the system.

So they look at Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overprocessing, Overproduction, and Defects.  And they try and reduce these forms of waste.  These are the enemies of Lean.  So what happens when you get there is that ideally you have a really lean, mean system that’s very efficient.

NICK WALKER:  So that’s the Lean portion.  What about Six Sigma?  What does that even mean?

ANDY CROWE:  All right.  So this is where we get into the weeds a little bit.  We won’t go too far into it.  But basically, when you look at quality, you can plot quality out on a – and it’s oftentimes in the form of a bell curve; okay?  It’s always going to form some kind of a distribution.  So we’ll call it a bell curve, even though it might be a little more erratic than that in some cases.

So now you’ve got a bell curve, you can look at what we call a standard deviation.  Now, standard deviation tells us, a high standard deviation means there’s a lot of diversity in data.  And you may value diversity in your workplace and in a lot of other areas, but you don’t value diversity in manufacturing outcomes.  You want them to be very similar.  There’s a wonderful movie called “Sergeant York,” back from – you’ve seen it?

NICK WALKER:  You’re dating us.

ANDY CROWE:  I know, I know.  And you need to watch it regardless.  It’s about the most decorated World War II hero, Alvin York.  And he was the most decorated World War II hero.  No, no, wait, it’s World War I.  I was getting that confused with Audie Murphy.  And he was an amazing sharpshooter.  And so when you look at that movie, and you see – they were testing him early on in boot camp, and they thought he had missed the target because his groupings were so tight; okay?  So that would be a really low standard deviation.  His shots didn’t deviate from each other.  Really high standard deviation would be like most of us would do, and they would be kind of scattered around all over the place.

The idea behind standard deviations, each one of those is called a “sigma.”  So here’s what Six Sigma is.  Six Sigma says, okay, all of your results within six standard deviations of the mean fall into quality.  So that’s good when you get to that level.  What it really means is that there’s only 3.4 defects per million items produced.  That’s powerful.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we meet to have a conversation about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We may talk about certification.  We share stories of success and how we can improve.  And we draw on the experience of leaders in the field.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are a couple of those leaders, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, we are ringing in the New Year and, at the same time, celebrating our one-year anniversary here at Manage This.

ANDY CROWE:  There’s a lot to celebrate, Nick.  So Happy New Year to you.

BILL YATES:  Happy Birthday, Manage This.

NICK WALKER:  That’s right, that’s right.  And what better way to celebrate the New Year and our anniversary than to sort of step back, maybe take stock in ourselves, make some resolutions, set some goals, and talk about what makes a top-tier project manager.  And Bill, we are fortunate to have the guy who literally wrote the book on that.

BILL YATES:  That’s right.

NICK WALKER:  Our own Andy Crowe has a book titled “Alpha Project Managers:  What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not.”  And Bill, this book has made kind of a pretty big splash in the world of project management.

BILL YATES:  It really has.  I remember our delight when we saw that, in the exposure draft for the Sixth Edition PMBOK Guide, we actually have – the book is cited; the study is cited.  And it’s early on, even.  It’s in Chapter 3, when they’re describing the role of the project manager.  And it’s very exciting to see that they’re referring to the research that Andy did in the Alpha Study to describe what makes a project manager successful.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, sometimes ideas and concepts take a little while to work and wind and wend their way into the PMBOK Guide.  And so we were really happy to see this show up, and gives it a little bit of gravitas, perhaps.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And, you know, to add to that, I know it’s been referenced many times.  I think it was two summers ago Chip and Dan Heath actually mentioned it as a must-read.  They have – they’re prolific writers and well-respected authors, and I was really impressed by that.

NICK WALKER:  So tell us a little bit, Andy, about the Alpha Study.  Give us an overview of how this came about.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, the Alpha Study was a look at 860 project  managers.  And we looked at who the high performers were.  And the way we did that, Nick – so in order to go through this study you had to do a few things.  You had to participate in a couple of very lengthy surveys.  That was part one of what they had to do.  But then also the project managers had to provide access to at least five stakeholders.  These stakeholders were team members, senior manager, customer, and they were all current people.  So these stakeholders, these five or more stakeholders, five to eight stakeholders, would take part two of the survey, as well.  But they weren’t taking it for themselves.  They were taking it for the project manager.

Then what we started to look at is, okay, here’s the way the PM answered questions about his or her performance.  But here’s the way the stakeholders viewed that same person’s performance.  And what we found was there are some interesting gaps.  And it’s the gaps that make this interesting.  What everybody agrees on is only mildly interesting.  But where there’s a big departure, and where they view the same thing very differently, becomes a lot more interesting.

BILL YATES:  There’s a book by Malcolm Gladwell, it’s called “Outliers.”  And what I love is he states clearly the purpose of the book, and it relates so on point with the Alpha Study.  Gladwell says, “This book is about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary.  Over the course of the chapters ahead I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another – geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars and software programmers.  We’re going to uncover their secrets.”  Well, that’s what Andy did in the Alpha book and in the study.  But it’s for project managers.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, yeah.  Is that how the idea got started?

ANDY CROWE:  Well, not exactly.

BILL YATES:  I think Gladwell got the idea from Andy.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, probably so.

ANDY CROWE:  I would be happy if that were the case.  The reality of it is, you know what, Nick, this started off in the very, very early days, before it ever formed into an idea of a real survey of project management practices, was to do a marketing survey and to start looking at project management preferences, what they prefer, what they’re looking for out of their careers, what they’re looking for out of their organization, what they’re looking for in training, rating, things like that.  And so round one of that was more marketing related.

Then we started looking at it, saying, you know, there’s some really interesting questions about project management in general.  And so that came out as really part one of the Alpha Survey.  It was a very exhaustive, well, not exhaustive, but very lengthy, probably exhausting and lengthy survey, asking a lot of questions that we were just trying to understand.  And then taking that data back, we collated it, and now we were really on target to understand better for part two of the survey and ask some really pointed questions that were helpful.

BILL YATES:  And that gets to the gaps and answers the question of why, which that’s so fascinating.  And that’s really the beauty of the study in the book is looking at why are these 18 out of 860 identified as top performers?  What is it about the way they managed those projects that set them apart?  And I need to just put in a quick word.  Some people don’t know Andy quite as well as I do.  This guy’s very metric driven.  He’s a Black Belt Six Sigma.  He is all about measuring in order to determine if something is improving in terms of performance.  If you cut him, he bleeds data.

ANDY CROWE:  Nothing speaks louder than data.

BILL YATES:  There you go.  So when he went about this study, it was very rigorous in terms of treating the data with integrity, making sure that we had a diverse group.  Even if you look at the profile of the 18 top performers, they’re from all different industries, all different ages, male, female.  So truly the data has a lot of integrity.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  The thing that jumps out at me initially is just the amount of research and the time it must have taken to put all this together.

ANDY CROWE:  Yup.  It really was.  It took a long time to do the survey.  And there were parts of it we had to do more than once because perhaps we didn’t ask the question correctly, or we didn’t get back what looked like a statically valid response.  And I got very acquainted with theories and statistics like the  central limit theorem and other fun stuff.

BILL YATES:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  Understanding standard deviation and distribution and all of this good stuff.  But it was a lot of fun.  And honestly, Nick, it was a labor of love.

NICK WALKER:  So what did you find?  What did you discover?

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  You know, what we discovered early on is there’s sort of eight high-level groupings that we found that made sense to organize the data around.  And so those were really attitude and belief.  That’s one of those soft skill things that – do successful PMs view the world differently?  I think the answer is yes, they do.  They do view the world differently.  But how?  How do they approach their job?  What’s their attitude?  What are their beliefs about their profession?  About themselves?  So that was one of those eight.

Another one was focus and prioritization.  And this was really based on the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote this amazing book called “Flow.”  And I would encourage any of our podcast readers, especially the ambitious ones, those of you who like to read, read this book.  It is absolutely amazing.  It’s not a quick read, not an easy read, but it’s a wonderful book that talks about the psychology of optimal performance.  And it’s how to get into this zone of flow, how to get – now, the research that we did was really based on his theory of distractions.

And Csikszentmihalyi claims that we’re really being bombarded with bits of information all the time that are competing for your attention.  If you’re driving right now while you’re listening to this, then you have distractions there, and hopefully we’re not going to be a distraction; if you are sitting down at home or at your office.  You know, you may have your phone buzzing.  You may have people competing for your attention, or things worrying you about your job.  And those types of things can compete for your attention.

How do the top 2 percent focus and prioritize on the things that matter?  Because we all know, you know, you remember the Covey “Urgent & Important” quadrant that he made.  And it’s so easy to get dragged into the urgent, the things like the ringing phone, and to miss the important things that are going to really move the needle in our job and our profession.  Communication looks at how do the top 2 percent, what strategies do they use, what techniques, and how do they communicate more effectively than everybody else?  That turned out to be a really important dimension.

BILL YATES:  That was fascinating.  One of the gaps in there I thought was the most significant gap in the entire study.

ANDY CROWE:  You know what, it was one of the most interesting.  We’ll get to the one that I found the most significant.  But it was a huge gap there, and that is how the top 2 percent – not how the top 2 percent – how the 98 percent view their communication effectiveness and how their stakeholders view it.  And it’s shocking.  It’s just a shocking gap there between the two.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to discuss what matters to you as a professional project manager.  Whether it’s how to get certified or how to create successful projects, we get input from leaders in the field and draw on their experience and accomplishments.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, it is holiday time.  It seems like every time I turn on the TV or the radio, I hear somebody talking about finding the perfect gift for that person on your list.

ANDY CROWE:  And all the sleigh bells in the air that you can hear.  Let me ask you a question.  Has anybody else had an issue with really well-targeted ads coming at them over the Internet?

NICK WALKER:  Oh, oh.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s been alarming this year how well they’ve figured out what’s going on in my head.

BILL YATES:  They know Andy.  They know what Andy wants.

ANDY CROWE:  They know.  That’s correct.

NICK WALKER:  They know it before I know it.  All right.  So we’ve got gifts that we want to talk about for that perfect project manager on your list.  I guess we want to answer the question:  What’s in your stocking?

ANDY CROWE:  You know what, Nick, one of the things we’re thinking about here, some of the project managers get to give a gift to themselves through some of this.  So it’s not so much that maybe you’re buying these for somebody else, but maybe you’re buying it for yourself.  And Bill and I were talking about this as we were preparing for the podcast.  You know, it’s funny, as we look at tools, as we look at technology, one of the things that really always resonates with me is the fact that it’s the process underneath it that really matters.  The technology just facilitates that process.

When I started my career in project management, somebody handed me a copy of Microsoft Project and said, “Go and make a project plan.”  Nobody ever taught me how up to that point.  Nobody taught me how to estimate, how to schedule, how to even think about decomposing the work and putting the fences around the scope.  And suddenly I was expected to make a project plan.  So the idea is we’re going to cover some tools.  We’re excited about this episode because this is a lot of fun.  But at the same time, if you give somebody a better word processor, it doesn’t make them a better writer or a better communicator.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  If you give somebody a better tool, it doesn’t make them a better PM automatically.  And these things will just facilitate getting them there once the process is in place.

BILL YATES:  And we get mesmerized by these new tools.  Sometimes they’re...

NICK WALKER:  Oh, yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  They’re shiny.

BILL YATES:  They are shiny, and they come in nice boxes.

NICK WALKER:  You can geek out.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, we get geeked out.  We think, this is the coolest thing ever.  This is going to change how I do my job and make my life that much better.  And, dang, I just like every feature in it.  I’m going to go deep and figure all this stuff out.  And we lose, to Andy’s point, we lose the big picture.  What are we doing?  How much time am I spending on the tool, just for the sake of me enjoying the tool?  Or is the tool really – am I serving the tool, or is the tool serving me?

ANDY CROWE:  Mm-hmm.

NICK WALKER:  So with that in mind, do you have any applications that are must-haves, some that you have to have, that you really can’t do without?

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  We had fun reaching out to the community and asking other PMs, “What resonates with you?  If you were alone on an island, and you had a project you had to manage, what tool would you want to have on your last two hours of computer life, you know, before the battery dies?”  And so we got some nice feedback from people, from practitioners.  We thought about our own experiences, as well, and did some research, just to see what’s out there in the community.  And we have different categories that we’ll go through.  I think we’ll start with the big stuff, kind of the scheduling and planning tools that most people are going to use on a daily basis as a project manager.  Andy, what’s the one that you’ve used most in your experience?

ANDY CROWE:  You know, it has to be Microsoft Project.  That’s kind of the gold standard out there.  It’s something that a lot of people are familiar with.  It runs in different platforms on the cloud.  You can have it installed on your desktop.  It’s a Windows-based application that just does heavy lifting for schedule development.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I know for back early in my career here at Velociteach we would talk about integrating a work breakdown structure with Microsoft Project.  And at first that capability was kind of clunky, and it wasn’t there.  And through the different versions through the years they’ve made that very seamless, as well.  So that’s an aspect that we like about that, too.  With Microsoft Project you can integrate work breakdown structure.  We talk a lot about, in our classes, when we’re teaching, we talk about the ability to assign work to individuals or team members and then be able to track that back to the work breakdown structure, integrate that with Microsoft Project, and be able to really see if our estimates are accurate and if the resources are doing what they said they would do.

ANDY CROWE:  So I have a trip scheduled to Redmond in the first quarter of next year.  And one of the things I’m trying to do is get with some of the people in the Project team.  I want to discuss a little philosophical issue I have with the way they do the WBS to schedule transition.

BILL YATES:  Okay.

ANDY CROWE:  And just talk through a little bit about, hey, are there better ways to make that turn because they make it in a rather unusual way.  We won’t get into the details of that, but maybe we’ll have something fun to report in Q1.

BILL YATES:  Excellent, yeah.  You know, another, with Microsoft Project, many are probably going, “What about Primavera, you know, that’s what we use.”  So I think we should mention those are really – we probably have two 900-pound gorillas in the room.  And I had a suggestion for Andy.  Nick, I know you’re probably a big fan of the Epic Rap Battles that are on the Internet.

NICK WALKER:  Epic Rap Battles of History.

BILL YATES:  So I think when Andy returns from Redmond we need to have an Epic Rap Battle with Primavera and Microsoft Project.

ANDY CROWE:  There you go.  We’ll do that.  You know, Primavera has a really good customer base.  A lot of people would argue that Primavera does better ERP integration.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  And so, if you have a large ERP system – SAP, some of those, Oracle – that Primavera ties in really nicely.  I don’t know if that’s the case.  I haven’t dealt with it on that level.  But that’s one of the arguments people will make for it.

BILL YATES:  You know, that’s something that I’ve heard those complaints over and over and over, which is, “I have to maintain things in two or three different systems.  I have to track time over here.  I have to track my project in Microsoft Project or Primavera.  And then I have to interface with the financials with ERP.”  And, yeah, so that’s a constant complaint that I hear.  Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy answer to that.  I’d love to hear if somebody has opinions on that.

NICK WALKER:  There’s one on your list that I have used a lot for communication, and that’s Basecamp.  But there’s a whole lot of things that Basecamp can do, specifically for the project manager.

BILL YATES:  Basecamp started right here in Atlanta.  It was incubated here in Atlanta.  So they’ve got quite a history here.

NICK WALKER:  How about that.

BILL YATES:  And that is, when you look at what is being used most, what’s the most common, Basecamp is right up there near the top.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s a jack of all trades.

BILL YATES:  It really is.  And it’s a simplified version.  You know, you’re not – if you can live without the complexity or the features and functionality of Microsoft Project or Primavera, Basecamp is one that bubbles towards the top.  We see a lot of our partners using Basecamp.  Matter of fact, this morning before recording the podcast I was on Basecamp, tracking some of the issues that were up.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, and I might suggest that Basecamp is a collaboration tool.

BILL YATES:  Exactly.

ANDY CROWE:  More than just a scheduling-type tool.

BILL YATES:  Right, right.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s something that you can share files.  It’s something you can start discussion threads.  It’s something you can assign tasks, things like that, which is a little bit different than Microsoft Project, which is a sort of a top-down view of the schedule and all the resources on it.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, that’s a great distinction.  And it brings up to me a strength and a weakness with Basecamp, just from my own experience and from others, which is the threads.  The thread capability is excellent.  It’s great if you have an issue that’s been assigned or a task that’s been assigned to someone, and they need some input from other team members.  So they can ask a question and easily collaborate and let people know to notify them of the need for their input.  However, here’s one of my complaints.  If you create a project in Microsoft or, sorry, in Basecamp, and then you have several activities or tasks that are in there, how do you prioritize or rank those?

ANDY CROWE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  And that’s – you can do it.  You can actually drag and drop to the top of the list, that kind of thing.  But as soon as you start to have multiple projects within Basecamp and trying to prioritize resources across those, it gets very difficult.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, it gets difficult because it’s not terribly actionable.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● DR. RUTH MIDDLETON HOUSE

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our every-other-week visit to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We like to talk about doing the stuff of project management:  how to get certified; how to create success and sustain it.  We talk with leaders in the industry and see what they’ve been doing and draw on their experience.

I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Andy, there’s a theme that comes up in our conversations from time to time, and that seems to be managing the unexpected.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s a fun thing.  And you know what, Nick, there are so many examples of things not going to plan.  As Eisenhower said, “The plan is nothing, but planning is everything.”  You’ve got to be waiting for who-knows-what to come your way.  So we’re excited about our guest today.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, let’s talk about our guest.  She is Dr. Ruth Middleton House.  She’s president and lead consultant of Middleton-House & Company.  She specializes in troubleshooting high-risk, high-visibility projects in multibillion-dollar partnerships and joint ventures, on down to small business ventures.  She’s an educator, an author; and, Ruth, we consider ourselves privileged to have you here.  Welcome to Manage This.

RUTH HOUSE:  Thank you.  I’m just delighted to be here.  You’re right, Andy, so often so much depends on how we manage that instantaneous thing that we did not see coming.  And as an example, I’d like to go back about 700 years.

ANDY CROWE:  You’ve been at this a while, but that’s a surprise.

RUTH HOUSE:  When he said “experienced,” he meant what he said.  It was at about that time that a fictional character emerged named Mullah Nasruddin.

NICK WALKER:  Whoa, whoa, whoa.  Mullah Nas...

RUTH HOUSE:  Mullah Nasruddin.  Mullah’s a title.  Like in the rural South he would be called Reverend Smith or Pastor Jones, probably.

NICK WALKER:  Can we call him “Moe”?

BILL YATES:  Moe, I like that.

RUTH HOUSE:  That’ll throw me off, so I’ll call him Mullah; but you can call him Moe if you want to.  And the story, this story, about Mullah illustrates some truths about culture which changes as circumstances change that are very important for us to remember today.  Now, Mullah was out working in his field when a messenger from a nearby town came and handed him a written invitation to come to the great hall and dine with the prince.

Well, Mullah was so excited, he dropped his tools right where he was, headed straight for the hall.  But when he arrived there with his threadbare turban and his dirty tunic on from working in the fields, the guards said, “No way.  Not only are you not going into the hall, I don’t even want you hanging around here on the outside.  You just go back home where you belong.”

Well, Mullah was insulted that he had not been treated like the very important person he knew himself to be.  But he went home.  He bathed in perfumed oil.  He wrapped his head in his finest silk turban.  And he dressed in his finest tunic and went right back to the great hall.  This time he received a warm welcome and was even ushered inside and seated right next to the prince.  Well, in those days he would have been seated around a beautiful Persian rug, right next to the prince.  That rug was just covered with huge bowls of beautifully prepared food.

Mullah ate and ate and ate until he had had his fill.  Then he reached a hand into one bowl, grabbed some food, and rubbed it into his tunic.  He reached to another bowl, grabbed some food, and rubbed it into his tunic.  Reached for a third bowl, grabbed some food, and rubbed it in his tunic.  Everyone fell silent around him, and all eyes were on him.

Finally the prince couldn’t stand it anymore.  And he said, “Mullah Nasruddin, you must have strange eating habits where you come from.  Why are you rubbing your food into your clothes?”  Mullah looked straight into the prince’s eye and said, in good Dilbert form, “Well, actually, when you think about it, it’s my clothes that were allowed into the hall.  It only seems right to give them their fair share of the food.”

Now, and there’s some truth to that.  The measures that are placed on us may not be the ones we expect, may be something very different.  But there are three real truths about culture that this story illustrates.  First, there are rules for everything – what you know, what you do, how you feel.  That gets into what reports you get to read, who you get to talk to, who you make eye contact with, what you eat, how you eat.  There are ground rules for everything.

The second truth is many of these rules are not written or spoken.  And an even scarier corollary to that is that sometimes the rules that are written and spoken are in direct conflict with the ones that are actually practiced in the organization.

BILL YATES:  Right, right.

RUTH HOUSE:  Now, the third truth about culture is that, if you don’t follow the ground rules, you don’t get invited to the party.  And it doesn’t matter – ignorance is no excuse.  It doesn’t matter if you didn’t know the ground rules.  If you don’t follow them, you don’t get invited to the party.  Now, notice that, in this case, Mullah learned one ground rule, and that was the dress code.  So he got into the party.  But after he broke the dining ground rules, he was probably not going to be invited back.  I don’t think I would have invited him back.  But that’s not enough for you.  When you are in a situation where all of the old rules have changed, then it’s important that you get invited again and again unless you choose to turn the invitation down yourself.

ANDY CROWE:  I really liked his response when he got turned away, as he went back, and he put on everything just exactly the right way.  It kind of goes with my philosophy:  Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

RUTH HOUSE:  There you go.  And he did, yes, he did overdo that.

ANDY CROWE:  And it worked.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

RUTH HOUSE:  And it worked.  It got him, yeah, it got him in, yeah.

BILL YATES:  And I’m thinking of a company I worked for for a number of years was EDS.  And EDS was headquartered in Plano, Texas.  And the headquarters was quite elaborate.  It was like going to the prince’s quarters, if you will.

RUTH HOUSE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  And there was an executive suite called the “God Pod.”  And you had to be dressed a certain way if you were going to go to the God Pod.

ANDY CROWE:  Wow.

RUTH HOUSE:  That’s very interesting.  And the tricky thing is, when we’re going through a merger or an acquisition or a reorg, or if there’s new leadership above us, we may not know that this other space is now the God Pod and may inadvertently show disrespect for it or not be wearing the right clothes or the right attitude when we go into it.  That was the case – let’s fast-forward 700 years.  And that was the case in an organization that I belonged to.  I was a project manager in a small but very, very financially successful organization.  And we actually bought out an organization that was in financial trouble.  But it had a huge number of people.  Probably they were three times as large as us, employee-wise.

Now, we project managers were in the acquiring company.  We were the ones that came to the table with money.  So we thought, this is all right.  They haven’t been successful, but we can show them how to be successful.  They’ll adopt our ground rules.  They’ll do as we do.  Everything will be great.  Well, we were mistaken.  We did not realize that, for our ownership, this acquisition was an exit strategy.  Eighteen months later, all of our old leadership sold out and either retired or resigned.  The leadership we were left with was the leadership of the company that was in financial trouble, and they did what they knew how to do.  They got us all into...

ANDY CROWE:  Into financial trouble.

RUTH HOUSE:  ...financial trouble, yeah.  And it was very frustrating for those of us who had come from the acquiring company to be in this situation.  We kept doing what we knew how to do to provide good service to our clients.  But it got to be harder and harder and harder.  And finally it just seemed impossible.  So most of us either retired or resigned.  We got out somehow so we could live up to our own standards.

Now, that wasn’t the outcome we wanted.  But, you know, it actually wasn’t all bad for us because we did a couple of things right.  And these are things I want to call to your attention.  Number one, we couldn’t control that situation.  But we could control the way we responded to it.  And we did a good job of that.  We accepted responsibility for our own behavior.  You wouldn’t have heard any of us saying, “Well, they made me do that,” even though it was the wrong thing to do.  You wouldn’t have heard any of us saying, “Well, I had no choice.”  We knew we had a choice.  We were breathing.  And we had choices.  And over and over again we chose to do what we believed to be the right thing.

In fact, in that situation, I kind of saw myself – my image of myself was an image of a lightning rod.  So rather than strike with the anger or the frustration that I felt towards other people, I saw my job as taking the heat and then grounding it so that I was not burned, and neither were the people around me.  Now, being straight meant we told the truth.  But we did that without being accusatory.  For example, I could say, “I’m confused.  I thought we agreed yesterday that this was going to happen.  But today it looks like this other thing’s happening instead.”  Or I might say, “I don’t understand why we’re approaching the problem in this way.”

BILL YATES:  Ruth, one of the things that I’m thinking of in this scenario, how did you interact with your customers?

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every couple of weeks we get together to address the topics that matter most to you as a professional project manager.  Our conversations touch on getting certified, avoiding pitfalls in the business, and creating ongoing successes.

I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, not to be outdone by the politicians, we have an October or November surprise of our own:  Papergate.  Does this rise to the level of scandal?

ANDY CROWE:  I would not go that far, Nick.  I don’t think so.  This was a clarification of a policy from the Project Management Institute that you’re referring to.  But I don’t think it goes so far as a scandal.  It’s turned a lot of people upside down, perhaps.

NICK WALKER:  All right.  So let’s get into this.  What is Papergate?  Did you come up with this, Bill, this term?

BILL YATES:  I can neither confirm nor deny that I came up with that term.  Yeah, what we had was there is a practice, when you go in to take an exam; you have a 15-minute tutorial that takes place before the clock starts ticking down on your actual exam time.

ANDY CROWE:  A tutorial of what?  Explain that.

BILL YATES:  A tutorial is really – it’s showing you how to navigate.  As you’re taking the exam, it’s administered on a computer, and you have to know how to use a mouse.  You have to know it’s A, B, C, or D.  How do I click on it?

NICK WALKER:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  When I click on the next button, what happens?

NICK WALKER:  So the logistics of taking the test itself.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  And it is fairly intuitive.  One of the things that we have encouraged our students to do in the past is to take advantage of the 15 minutes and do a brain dump.  And by that we have formulas that are very important for the exam.  We have keywords, mnemonics, trigger words, different things.

ANDY CROWE:  Acronyms.

BILL YATES:  Acronyms.  The practice is to dump that information on the scratch sheet of paper that is provided at the exam center during that tutorial time.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.

ANDY CROWE:  And the reason we do that is so, for instance, if you have a formula down in front of you, you may have three, four, five questions on the exam that ultimately reference that formula.  You don’t have to recall it each time.  You don’t have to start second-guessing yourself.  AnYou do it at the beginning.  Your mind’s fresh.  Because by the end your mind’s going to be kind of pulpy anyway, and so you do it when your mind is fresh.  You get that information down.  And then it’s there.  And then you can refer back to it with some confidence and some ease and some quickness of recall.

BILL YATES:  And speaking of confidence, I like to encourage students to do the brain dump because it puts you in a confident mood or attitude towards the exam.  You’re able to walk out of the car, come in and be frisked at the Prometric Center, and provide all the right check-in protocol.  And then you sit down, and your anxiety level is really high.  By doing the brain dump, you’re able to produce something on paper.  So you’re getting, kinesthetically, you’re getting involved in it; and you’re relieving some of the stress; and you’re building some of that data that you can refer back to during the exam.

NICK WALKER:  And does the feedback from people who’ve taken the test show that this has been effective?

ANDY CROWE:  Very.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, it’s a good practice.  So we had a curveball.

NICK WALKER:  Uh-oh.

BILL YATES:  So PMI came back and said we’ve had a change in policy.  And now at all Prometric Centers, when you go to take the exam, during the 15-minute tutorial you’re not allowed to take paper and pencil that’s provided at the exam center.  You’re not allowed to do that brain dump.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  So that kind of changes a lot of the way that people have thought about doing this in the past.

BILL YATES:  Right.

NICK WALKER:  And maybe we have to kind of rethink this?

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And to tease this out a little bit further, you are allowed to do the brain dump, just not during that 15-minute tutorial.

NICK WALKER:  Oh, okay.

BILL YATES:  For example, the PMP exam is a four-hour exam.  When you finish the tutorial, the four-hour clock starts to tick down.  When that first question appears on the screen, you’re able to then make any notes you want to on the scratch paper.

ANDY CROWE:  But the clock is ticking at that point.

NICK WALKER:  Yes, yes.

BILL YATES:  Right, right.

ANDY CROWE:  Your four hours are going for the PMP.

NICK WALKER:  And is there time to do the brain dump?

BILL YATES:  That’s the question.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  And we definitely want to get into that a little bit.  I want to point out that Prometric Centers, at least some, if not all of them, are franchised.  And so the quality of your experience is going to vary from center to center.  Years ago, I went and took the PgMP, which is the Program Management Professional Exam.  And I think I was No. 99 or No. 100 to get that credential at the time.  So I went through it.  And when I was in the waiting room, the proctor came out to me and was talking to me about the exam.  And she said, “Hey, if you want to, take this scratch paper right now, and you can make your brain dump out here in the waiting room.

BILL YATES:  Really.  Wow.

ANDY CROWE:  And I said, “Yeah, thanks, I’ll wait.”  I don’t know why that bothered me, you know.

BILL YATES:  Did you feel like you were being set up?

ANDY CROWE:  I did.  I was afraid the PMI police were going to storm the room.

NICK WALKER:  Where’s the video camera?

ANDY CROWE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  Right.  The yellow suits drop out of the ceiling.

ANDY CROWE:  So I passed.  I said, “Yeah, I’ll just do it when I get in there.”  But so you have this 15-minute window at the beginning.  A lot of it, Nick, is a chance for people to calm their nerves and that type of thing.  The tutorial itself, I guess if you’ve never taken an online exam before, it might be worthwhile.  We simulate the exam experience really, really well in our online in Velociteach’s InSite platform.  So we give people, by the time they’ve gone through and taken one or two practice exams online with us, they know what it’s going to feel like.

So you’re not going to get a lot out of the tutorial.  It’s just really, really basic and pointless.  So we use that time for other things.  PMI’s clarifying that they don’t want that.  So now you’re left with the magic question you just asked:  Do people still do the brain dump?

BILL YATES:  Right.  And, you know, you started this podcast with the word “Papergate,” I think it was?

NICK WALKER:  Papergate.

BILL YATES:  That’s interesting you made that up, Nick.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, right.  That was not my – but, hey, does it fit?  I mean, that’s the thing, if it fits.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, but let’s get off of that for a second.  So about October 25th is when we were notified through a LinkedIn group thread that this policy had changed.  Now, we were hearing this from several points around the same time.  We had students saying, hey, I just went to take my exam.  I passed, but I had a weird thing happen to me while I was starting the exam.

ANDY CROWE:  A funny thing happened to me on the way to take my exam.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, funny, funny.  Right, a funny thing happened.  Yeah, yeah.  And so we had different individuals taking the exam across the globe and giving us feedback in some cases that, “Hey, I was still able to do the brain dump during the tutorial.”  Others saying, “I was told upfront I could not do it.”  Others started the brain dump and had the proctor come and take the paper from their hands.

NICK WALKER:  Interesting.

ANDY CROWE:  And let’s...

NICK WALKER:  So rules vary, like you said.

BILL YATES:  Yes.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, let’s touch on that for a moment because the role of the proctor is going to – is an interesting one.  The proctor is the person who sits – in some of the Prometric Centers it’s behind a one-way mirror so they can see – a two-way mirror, I’m not sure which.  But they can see out, and you can’t see back in.  Some of them sit behind a piece of glass.  Some of them will go walking up and down the testing center aisles, clicking their shoes or their heels.

BILL YATES:  Tapping the ruler.

NICK WALKER:  Oh, great, yes, thanks a lot.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  So here’s the thing.  Some proctors, just like any other job, some people are kind of laid back.  They are there to ensure the integrity of the testing experience.  Some of them are anything but laid back, and they care about every little thing.  And so it would give them great joy to come and rip your paper up, hand you fresh sheets of paper.  So you’re not sacrificing your scratch paper forever.  You can get new scratch paper.  And that’s true in general.  If you run out of scratch paper in the exam, you can go turn it in and get new scratch paper.  But the idea is some proctors really care about rules and maybe have control issues and things like that.  So it just depends on what you’re going to see.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And Nick, I think, you know, you touched on the important question:  Is it worthwhile to still perform the brain dump?  And the advice that we’ve given to our students since this declaration came down is that you need to evaluate that.  There’s great value in doing it.

NICK WALKER:  Sure.

BILL YATES:  You know, we talked about the confidence that brings and also, to Andy’s point, you may refer to that.  Why not go ahead and produce this on the frontend of the exam, while your brain is fresh.  You may refer to those formulae or to some of the notes that you’ve made throughout a four-hour exam.  So there’s a lot of value in that.  But then there’s that tradeoff, when it gets to managing time.

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● ERIC NORMAN

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our chance to meet with you and talk about the nuts and bolts of project management and what matters most to you as a professional project manager, whether it’s getting certified or simply doing the job of project management.  We hear from some of the leaders in the industry and draw on their experience.  I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And talk about experts, Andy, we certainly have one with us in the studio today.

ANDY CROWE:  This is an exciting podcast for me, Nick, and I’m not sure I’ve ever looked forward to one more than this.  So this is a real treat.

NICK WALKER:  Wow.  That is saying a lot.  Eric Norman has consulted and led projects and business process improvement efforts at AT&T, at Sprint, Delta Airlines, Cox Communications, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just to name a few.  He’s a frequent presenter at national and international trade conferences and is a recognized authority on program management practice.  Eric, welcome to Manage This.

ERIC NORMAN:  Thank you, Nick.  Thank you, Bill and Andy.  I’m thrilled to be here.

NICK WALKER:  Eric, you sort of have a unique role in all of this.  A lot of your work has been in the area of developing standards for the industry, but also in performance of a particular role.  Given your extensive background, give us a little brief overview of your current role in project management.

ERIC NORMAN:  I actually have two roles.  One is an employment-type role; the other is volunteer.  So from an employment perspective, when I’m working with clients and working with leaders, I’m focused on alignment of strategy in the organization with the delivery of the initiatives that they have.  On the volunteer side, I’ve had a lot of experience with standards, as you mentioned.

But most recently I’m working on the Certification Governance Council.  The Governance Council is a subcommittee of PMI’s Board of Directors, and it oversees the strategy and governance of PMI certifications, the eight certifications.  So we look historically at what has happened with the development of certifications over the course of PMI’s history.  And we look out into the future five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years; and we talk about how to manage what we have currently as a family of certifications, and what does the marketplace demand coming forward.  And that’s a fairly active interaction between PMI’s Global Operations Center, the staff, CEO and all the vice presidents and staff at PMI, but also the Board of Directors who oversee that staff.

So it’s a very active and interesting role; and I get to see the relationship between certifications, the performance of the role, and the standards that kind of guide that performance.

ANDY CROWE:  Eric, just to clarify, earlier you used the word “performance.”  So you’re not looking at the performance of the certification, you’re looking at the performance of the role?  Is that correct?

ERIC NORMAN:  We actually are looking – both.

ANDY CROWE:  So what does that mean?  What does the performance of the certification mean from your standpoint?  What do you track?

ERIC NORMAN:  PMI – you could think of the certifications for PMI as products.  PMI has three major components of their product set.  They have knowledgeware, which are standards and things of that nature.

ANDY CROWE:  The PMBOK Guide...

ERIC NORMAN:  PMBOK Guide.

ANDY CROWE:  ...being a prime example flagship.

ERIC NORMAN:  Absolutely.  And it is the flagship.  The other standards, the practice standards and the guides – so the knowledgeware and the publications that PMI is also involved in.  The second big component is membership.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ERIC NORMAN:  So there is a large effort to always manage the members and their experience and those things.  And the performance of how the revenue and just like another product...

ANDY CROWE:  An adoption, sure.

ERIC NORMAN:  ...of the ideas behind project management are working throughout the world.  The third are certifications.  The certifications that PMI issues and maintains are roughly, well, they’re a major component of PMI’s revenue stream.  So we look at the performance of each of the credentials as individuals, but also as a group.

ANDY CROWE:  Okay.

ERIC NORMAN:  So that’s at the macro level.  We also look at how the standards and the credentials match the actual performance of the work...

BILL YATES:  Okay.

ERIC NORMAN:  ...people actually do.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ERIC NORMAN:  So when there’s a question about how a particular role is evolving, the Certification Governance Council gets involved in that and starts to work with the staff and the board about where is the standard and where is the actual performance of the role going.

ANDY CROWE:  It would almost be a relevance factor, how relevant is the credential that we’re issuing to the work actually being done, how do those two match.

ERIC NORMAN:  Exactly.  And are there some that aren’t relevant, or maybe are there some that there’s a major demand in the marketplace that PMI doesn’t have an offering.

BILL YATES:  Right, right.  The VA, for instance.

ERIC NORMAN:  Right.  That didn’t come by accident.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, right.  And Eric, the other – I’m thinking about the role that you see and that you’ve played in delineating where does project management stop and where does program management begin?  You know, that’s...

NICK WALKER:  That’s a great question.

BILL YATES:  That’s a difficult – so it sounds as if that’s part of the call, as well, is to help guide and define what is a project manager, what is a program manager, what is a portfolio manager.

ERIC NORMAN:  That is true.  We get involved in the business case and the definition of the role that’s behind the various credentials that PMI maintains.  But to answer your question, Bill, it’s an interesting thing that more and more people are coming to realize that project management doesn’t stop where program management begins.  These two roles are parallel and partnered.  And they represent different functions within an organization, but critically important functions.  And they are really needed to be working together.  It’s a rewarding career to follow project management to its ultimate end and have a very – I’ve seen projects that make other programs seem small.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ERIC NORMAN:  And I’ve seen programs that make projects seem small.  So the idea is that there’s no one style that is you work on project management for so long in your career, and then you stop doing that and become a program manager someday.  That’s really not the way it works.  There are many people who come to program management straight from a finance background.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ERIC NORMAN:  Or from a military officer candidacy school background.  And they’ve been running programs in government for 10 years, and suddenly they’re a program manager.

ANDY CROWE:  And the skill sets, you know, they’re Venn diagrams.  They overlap.

ERIC NORMAN:  They overlap.

ANDY CROWE:  But they’re not identical.

ERIC NORMAN:  They are not identical.  And I think people are starting to realize that there’s extreme value in both.  There are program managers who just do not understand how to do projects well.  But they need with them people who can do operational things and do tactical precise things extremely well.  And by the same token, project managers really need to understand how what they’re doing fits into a larger picture.  So it’s the program manager and portfolio manager’s business connection at the leadership level that helps draw everything together and makes it work as one.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, just a thought along that.  If you spend any time around me – and that’s not always a good thing.  But if you spend time around me, I’ve started seeing the world in this two-factor sense.  And the two-factor sense, there’s a couple of ways to look at it.  But the way that I talk about it is, yes, project managers need this intense ability to focus, and focus and work on their project, and prioritize and those types of things.  They also need to ability to zoom out and look at the big picture, talk about benefits realization, figure out how this fits into the context for their organization and operations.  You know, projects don’t include operations, but yet we’ve got to be aware of them, or else we’ll get in a lot of trouble.

ERIC NORMAN:  That’s critical.

ANDY CROWE:  And so Fiedler did all this work back in the ’60s in contingency theory.  And basically I’m butchering his theory kind of intentionally for my own purposes here.  But Fiedler said, look, what made you successful over here, your success is contingent upon your ability to switch skill sets, to activate different skill sets.  And whether that be task-oriented and relationship-oriented, whether it be something else, you need to be able to make those transitions.  And you’re exactly right.  There are times when the project manager needs to close the door, hunker down, focus, prioritize, and knock all this out.  There are times when absolutely it takes just almost a 180-degree different skill set.

ERIC NORMAN:  And you rarely find – and Andy, I think that’s really a wonderful point.  You rarely find all those skill sets in a single individual.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  But don’t you find that, as you get older, you get better at doing these things?

ERIC NORMAN:  No.

ANDY CROWE:  Okay.

ERIC NORMAN:  I don’t.  I think you get better at some things.

ANDY CROWE:  Right, right.

ERIC NORMAN:  But not all.

ANDY CROWE:  Correct.

ERIC NORMAN:  And I think it would serve us well if we became comfortable with the fact that we can’t do everything, and start to refine the things that we do well,