From wolf rats to sleeping monsters, scary project stories you won't believe. All project managers face risks. Listen if you dare

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we meet to talk about the things that matter most to you as a professional project manager.  These include the ins and outs of just doing the job of project management; how to get certified and stay certified.  And we hear from some of the leaders in the industry.

I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are the in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  You’ve got questions?  They’ve got answers.  Hey, guys.  It’s been a couple of weeks since we were all together.  It’s good to be back with you.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

ANDY CROWE: It’s good to be reunited.

NICK WALKER:  I hope you both look forward to this time as much as I do.  This is a great time to get together.  And I mentioned that we like to deal with questions.  One of the questions we’ve been hearing about is earning PDUs.  As most of us know, we need 60 PDUs, those are Professional Development Units...

BILL YATES:  Correct.

NICK WALKER:  ...every three years to keep the PMP credential current.  And when somebody works that hard to get that credential, they don’t want to lose it.

BILL YATES:  That is true.

NICK WALKER:  Simply because they don’t get enough PDUs.

BILL YATES:  Right.

NICK WALKER:  So we’ve mentioned it before, but it’s probably a good idea to go into more detail.  We actually offer PDUs, free PDUs to our listeners.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  This podcast is good for PDUs.  And Nick, just one thing to add a little color to that is it’s not just the PMP.  You’ve got to have them for all the PMI credentials.  So PgMP, CAPM, PMI-ACP.

BILL YATES:  ACP, yup.

ANDY CROWE:  All of them.  PfMP.  So this is the currency of our people.

NICK WALKER:  Let’s talk a little bit about how to get some of those PDUs from this podcast.  Each Manage This Episode, I understand, is registered with PMI as a “Category A PDU.”

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  That means it’s top of the line, top-shelf platinum level.

NICK WALKER:  Oh, yeah.  And, you know, we’ve aligned each episode to the appropriate areas of PMI’s Talent Triangle.  Tell us a little bit about that.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  You’ve got to have – so there’s three legs of a Talent Triangle, hence the word “triangle.”  There’s technical skills, there’s leadership, and there’s business savvy.  And you have to have at least eight PDUs from each of those legs.  So now the days are gone when you can read a book and claim all of your PDUs from reading a book or from giving back to the profession, which used to be a lot of people would get involved in their chapter, and they would give back, and they would get their PDUs that way.  Now you have to have a certain number from training.  And so this really comes in handy here.

NICK WALKER:  And the great thing is we make it simple here.  All you have to do is go to Velociteach.com and select “Manage This Podcast,” Manage This Podcast from the top of the page, and you’ll see a big button right there.  It says “Claim PDUs.”  And that spells out the steps.  You can find the PMI Activity ID by selecting the episode from the list.  You’ll see that near the top of the page, as well.

BILL YATES:  Correct, right, you’ll see it right there.  And that’s the data that you need to submit that PDU claim.  And like you said, the Claim PDUs button, that spells out all the nitty-gritty details for those PMs.  And they can follow along and check off the list and see it right there on PMI.org.

NICK WALKER:  So this is an easy way of getting the PDUs.  I hope lots of folks will take advantage of that.  So let’s give them some information so they can...

BILL YATES:  Earn the PDU, yeah.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, let’s do it.  You know, sometimes it’s good to kind of take a step back.  You know, we’ve talked about a lot of things over the last several weeks with all these podcasts.  But a lot of people are interested in a career in project management.  But maybe it’s a good idea to talk about where to begin.  Can I get a little background from you guys, just to help us know how you got started?

ANDY CROWE:  You know what, Nick, there are – I get this question so many times that somebody comes along, and they say, “My son or my granddaughter is graduating from college, and he or she wants to be a project manager.  How do they get started?”  And it’s a really interesting thing because there are a lot of paths into project management.  I’ll tell you this.  My own opinion is it’s easier, and doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s easier if you’re coming from a domain where you have some expertise.  And this is one of those things that not everybody agrees on this.  This is my opinion.  I think it works better for a project manager to kind of stick within some domain, like construction, like information technology.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  I mean, you think about so much of what you have to do as a project manager is either come up with estimates or figure out resources or lead your team in doing that.  So if you know something about the industry and about the types of projects – you’ve been involved in them, you’ve had your sleeves rolled up, you’ve had your hands in the dirt – you’re going to do them better.  And you’ll be able to assess and see if something is reasonable and have some expertise in that.

ANDY CROWE:  So the argument on the other side of that, and it is a fiercely debated topic in our world, but the argument on the other side of that is that, if you have good business analysts, and the business analysts are doing the job that a BA is supposed to do, then the project manager can basically outsource all of that and keep the project finely tuned and moving.  Trouble is, my experience doesn’t line up with that so well.  The one project where I got really burned, I was out of my domain.  I was trusting BAs, and I did not get good data.  And if I had only had some particular expertise to know that, I would have done better.

Now, that said, there’s merit on both sides of it.  But I believe it’s easier to become a project manager if you know something about what you’re doing.  It’s certainly a lot lower risk.  You don’t want to go in and become a construction project manager and not understand construction.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  You’re going to get into trouble.  So that’s my thing.  You know, my path, Nick, I came up, I started out my career as a C++ developer.  So I was a coder.  And I got promoted up to team lead, which was interesting because I was not the most tech, and I probably wasn’t the most talented developer on my team.  And suddenly they said, “Hey, you’re going to be team lead.”  Wasn’t asked what, whatever.  But it was a promotion.  And a promotion’s a promotion; you know?  So I said, “Great.”

BILL YATES:  So you said, “Yes, sir.”

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, okay, this is good news.

BILL YATES:  That’s me.

ANDY CROWE:  So I was excited about that.  Suddenly I was the leader of a team.  And I’m getting to define coding standards, and I’m getting to approve designs and architecture and all this stuff.  And I was able to do those things.  And after about two years of that, maybe 18 months, I was recruited to become a project manager in an organization.  And I had no idea what I was doing.  But here’s the problem.  It always looks easy.  And you know the Peter Principle.  The Peter Principle says you’re promoted to your level of incompetency.  You’re promoted up until the point when you can no longer do the job.  And Scott Adams came along later – was it Scott Adams who does “Dilbert”?

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  Scott Adams came along later.  He wrote a book called “The Dilbert Principle.”  And “The Dilbert Principle” said, look, the Peter Principle there was some good there because in the Peter Principle you had – your boss, even though he or she was incompetent, they could probably do your job better than you could.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, they’ve done it, and they got promoted.  Said, but with the Dilbert Principle, the Dilbert Principle says they look around, and they find the poor sap who can do the least amount of damage and make him or her the project manager.  Okay?  That’s the Dilbert Principle.  So the PM is going to be somebody who is just, you know, hopefully they’re not going to screw things up.  That can often be the case.  And I’m worried sometimes that I started my career dangerously close to that because I was recruited as a PM because of my technical knowledge, because I understood the way the coding worked and things like that, the way software architecture worked.

And suddenly I was asked to do a project plan.  Nick, I had no idea what I was doing.  To me, that meant a Gantt chart.  That meant a schedule.  And so I put together a great schedule.  And my boss looked at it and just had this moment, you know, it was a face-plant moment.  And he said, “Look, this is not going to work.  This is not a project plan.”  To me it looked great.  I thought, of course it is.  If it’s not, what is it?  And he took me back, and he said, “I want to show you what one of your colleagues gives me when I ask for a project plan.”  And he opened up a binder.  And I was floored.

Bill, I had never seen anything like this.  This was all the stuff that’s supposed to be in a project plan.  A schedule, yes; but a schedule management plan, and a communication management plan, and a change management plan, and on and on and on.  Risks identified.  Lists.  Stakeholders.  Contact info.  Everything this guy needed to manage a project was in that binder.  And I was totally blown away.  And when I saw this – the thing is, I may be slow, but I can be taught.  And so when I saw this, the light bulb started coming on.  I said, “I’ve got to learn to do this.”  He said, “Here.  You can have this copy.”

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● JOEL “THOR” NEEB

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to discuss the things that matter to you as a professional project manager.  We talk about project management certification and doing the job of a project manager, and we hear from some of the leaders in the industry.  I’m your host Nick Walker, and with me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And by the way, on the day we’re recording this, Andy, you’re getting ready to deliver the keynote address at PMI Honolulu.

ANDY CROWE:  I am heading out to Honolulu to be at that chapter.  I’ve been there before, and I’m really excited.  I’m talking about the Talent Triangle, which is getting a lot of buzz within PMI:  the technical, the leadership, and the strategy triangle and how that applies to our own career.

NICK WALKER:  And, by the way, our guest today is delivering the opening keynote in a few days at the Project Management Institute’s Global Congress for North America in San Diego.  And this is a guy who probably has enough fascinating stories that we could probably sit here for hours and never exhaust them all.  It’s amazing how you find these guys.  I’m really looking forward to this today.  Our guest is Joel Neeb.  His friends call him Thor.  Are we friends enough to call you Thor?

JOEL NEEB:  I definitely think so, yeah, absolutely.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Okay.  Well, Thor, welcome to Manage This.  We are fortunate to have you here with us.

JOEL NEEB:  Thanks, Nick.  It’s a real pleasure to be here.

NICK WALKER:  Now, before we begin, let me give just a quick rundown of your background for our listeners.  Thor was an F-15 pilot.  He escorted the U.S. President through the sky.  He flew missions to ensure the safety of our country after the attacks of 9/11.  He was a technical leader of 300 of the most senior combat pilots in the Air Force.  He’s a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.  He’s now the president of Afterburner, leading a team of more than 70 elite military professionals, and with them has trained almost two million business professionals and fostered elite teams for Fortune 100 companies, companies in the tech industry, finance, medical devices, and several NFL teams.  We could keep going.  But we want to stop there and give you time to talk to us.  Thor, first of all, why Thor?  I’ve got to know that.

JOEL NEEB:  So, you know what, for every call sign there’s two versions of the story.  The version one is safe for public consumption, and we could tell that right now, which is Thor and the Thor’s Hammer.  I was an instructor, and so I was known as “The Hammer” as the instructor.  And then there also is a two-beverage minimum version of the story which is a little less flattering for me and probably pretty embarrassing and sounds a lot less cool than the first version of the story.  But it’s a lot of fun.

NICK WALKER:  Does it have anything to do with your chiseled Greek god looks?

JOEL NEEB:  It definitely does not, at that point.  There’s an embarrassing story associated with it, like every good call sign should have.

NICK WALKER:  Okay, okay.  Well, we’ll just have to go into that one after the mics are off.

JOEL NEEB:  There you go.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Well, first of all, tell us the concept of Afterburner.  How do fighter pilots speak into the world of project management?

JOEL NEEB:  Well, you know, in my world, Nick, I was flying Mach 2.  I had 350 instruments in front of me.  I was going in and out of the clouds.  I had four, sometimes seven wingmen flying with me at any given point in time.  And I have to manage this complex universe and figure out, as I’m going inside and in and out of the clouds, how to keep these wingmen from running into each other, how to keep them from running into the mountain up ahead, and then also how to achieve at our mission.  And so we had to be able to distill this incredibly complex universe down into just a few key components that we can manipulate at any given point in time, right, the critical things within my cockpit, because I can’t look at 350 instruments and dials.  I can’t watch all seven wingmen at one time.  What are the two or three things that we should be focusing on paying attention to, to stay safe and to stay successful?

And so that’s the same type of business concepts we approach to organizations.  We help them as they navigate, how do I wade through this complex universe as the business cycle shifted from seven to three years, and I’ve got to go faster than I ever have in the past, and I have less time to enjoy the profits from my current product before I need to find the next one.  And so my project needs to take place faster than it did last year.  And this is an accelerated universe.  How do we manage all of that and figure out what key components are to manipulate?

ANDY CROWE:  So, Thor, I want to wade in on this a little bit.  And by the way, I’ve soloed in a Cessna 172.

JOEL NEEB:  Well done.

ANDY CROWE:  Does that put me close to your level?

NICK WALKER:  Oh, wow.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah; right?

NICK WALKER:  We’ll get you a call sign.

BILL YATES:  You guys, you’re peers, absolutely.

ANDY CROWE:  I’ll skip the call sign, but thanks.  So I sat in a meeting very recently, and I’m going to strip out some of the details here.  But I sat in a meeting very recently with a very complicated dashboard in front of me.  It was not in this organization.  It was in a different organization, a very complicated dashboard, a lot of components and a lot of eye candy.  And when you’re talking about 350 dials and instruments, this is sort of resonating with me.  So people were overwhelmed with this dashboard.

JOEL NEEB:  Sure.

ANDY CROWE:  But they were also enamored by it.

BILL YATES:  Hmm.

ANDY CROWE:  They were oohing and aahing and talking about how great this was.  And in my mind I’m thinking, okay, how is this actionable at all?  So, okay.  You walk into an organization, and they have a complicated dashboard, a complicated set of metrics.  How do you trim that down?  How do you know what to focus on?  How do you decide?

JOEL NEEB:  Well, if you don’t know what your ultimate end goal or your intended effect is, then you probably don’t want to trim down that dashboard right now; right?  So if I don’t have the end in mind, then maybe I need 350 instruments.  I don’t know yet.  So what we have to do first is build out that future.  Let’s all land on what does success look like in two to three years?  And I know you’re going to push back and say, well, you know, the market’s changing so fast.  How is that question even relevant?  Not really.  You’ll still have a solid North Star.  If we can determine where you’re going in two to three years, I’m telling you, over the next year or two, things will change, and your path will change to get there.  But your ultimate destination won’t.

Once we know that destination, we call it the “high-definition destination” in our world, then we can retrace our steps and figure out what are the critical tactical steps to take right now.  And then it becomes a lot easier to say, well, I don’t need these 200 instruments over here, then.  If all I’m doing is this to pursue this type of destination, then I probably don’t need to look over at this side of the cockpit.

ANDY CROWE:  Or I don’t need to look every week or every month, certainly.

JOEL NEEB:  Yup, yeah.  There’s nothing wrong with having that scorecard that allows you to have access to it.  It’s just knowing which ones are the most relevant.

ANDY CROWE:  And you know the interesting thing here is you start to connect back to what are those dials and levers that are going to move those things, that are going to govern and change.

JOEL NEEB:  Exactly.

ANDY CROWE:  So it’s not just an act of monitoring.  It’s an act of figuring out, okay, what do I do to move the needle?

NICK WALKER:  I see the parallels between the F-15 piloting and project management.  We’re talking about focus.  We’re talking about knowing what the mission is, really.

JOEL NEEB:  Knowing what the mission is, and then what are the leading indicators, what are the instruments that are leading indicators that’ll help me affect those lagging indicators for success down the road.

NICK WALKER:  So let’s talk a little bit more about focus.  How can project managers get better at locking in on the most important tasks?

JOEL NEEB:  So going back to the concept of beginning with the end in mind, first of all, let’s determine what that mission objective is going to be.  What is the line in the sand that defines success?  And we don’t need to do this, once we determine what the two-year North Star looks like, we can back that into a two-month mission objective.  And this is where people generally push back and say, well, timeout, you know, I don’t have a flight like you do.  I don’t take off and land, and I get to have a nice clear start and finish to my mission.  And I say, sure, I’ll give you that.  But I bet you have an idea of what success would look like on September 30th.  I bet you have some semblance in your mind of where you’d like to be.  Why not align your team on that right now so that you can work backwards into the instruments you should be looking at.

ANDY CROWE:  Outstanding.

BILL YATES: I’ve got a question along those lines.  I know, not only did you fly, but you also were an instructor.  So you had to step back into the experience that you had when you were overwhelmed with too much information.

JOEL NEEB:  Right.

BILL YATES:  And think, okay, this is how I was trained and how I learned how to focus on the big, you know, the top two, top three.  And then, thinking about our project managers,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● ELLEN SMITH

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our every other week chance to meet and talk about the things that matter most to you as a professional project manager.  What does it take to get started in the field?  To get certified?  And how do you survive?

I’m your host, Nick Walker.  And with me are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  They’ve experienced the challenges, they’ve tasted the victories of project management, and they want to share their experience with you.

And, guys, we are fortunate once again to have a special guest in the studio today.  Ellen Smith is an attorney with Holt Ney in Atlanta.  She deals with commercial real estate, wireless telecommunications, and land use; and her clients range from single individual member limited liability companies to nonprofit hospitals to Fortune 500 companies.  Varied in her talents, for sure.  Ellen, thanks so much for being with us on Manage This.

ELLEN SMITH:  Thanks for having me.

NICK WALKER:  We are so looking forward to talking with you about our topic today, and that is negotiation.  But before we get there, Andy and Bill, let’s talk a little bit about the need for negotiation when it comes to project management.  Andy?

ANDY CROWE:  And Nick, I want to back up.  You said we’ve “tasted the victories of project management”?

NICK WALKER:  That’s my impression.

ANDY CROWE:  Bill, is that your experience of your work in project management?

BILL YATES:  What I conjure up is more of a bitterness, you know, like the most bitter coffee.

ANDY CROWE:  Thinking the bitter dregs?

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  That coffee that’s been sitting there all day.

NICK WALKER:  So it’s more the agony of defeat than the thrill of victory.

BILL YATES:  Maybe.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, it’s one of those – you remember the old saying that you have to have a strong stomach to see how the sausage is made?

NICK WALKER:  Yes, yes.

ANDY CROWE:  And when you go back and sometimes see how a project gets done, and see what it takes to get there, you’d better have a strong stomach and a strong sense of yourself.  But no, I’m excited about this topic because it’s this whole idea of negotiation.  And the project manager is in such a difficult position.  And this is what nobody really stops to think about.  So you’ve got the organization.  You’ve got this whole group of stakeholders.  You’ve got senior management.  And you’ve got sponsors, users, customers, all of these people.

And the way I think about it is sort of picture them in an inverted pyramid.  So that’s on the top side of the pyramid, this triangle pointing down, with the tip pointing down.  And then below you, you’ve got the team.  And that can include a lot of different people.  It can include virtual relationships.  It can include dedicated straight-line reporting relationships.  And the PM is stuck in the middle between those two points.  So there’s a...

BILL YATES:  Two very sharp points.

ANDY CROWE:  They can get very sharp.

BILL YATES:  Yes, very pointy.

ANDY CROWE:  And so there’s this idea that the project manager is constantly negotiating everything, all day every day.  That’s really a lot of the job, at the heart of the job.  You could call the person a “project negotiator” as opposed to a project manager.  I mean, there are people who just tick off boxes and say yes, complete, check, check.  And we think about those as maybe a coordinator.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  But in this case a project manager has to go back in the kitchen and make the sausage.  And it is tricky, and sometimes it’s very ugly, and it’s a lot of work.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  There are third parties that they’re having to rely on to provide valuable deliverables for this project.  So they’ve got contracts, perhaps, with third parties.  They’re having to negotiate internally to get the resources they need to get it done.  They’re having to negotiate with the team, to get those resources on the team.  And people have their own expectations; right?  I’ve got, “This is where I want to go in my career,” or “I don’t want to do this on this project.”

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  Not just expectations, but their own agenda.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, absolutely.

NICK WALKER:  So, Ellen, that’s why we’re so glad you’re here.  Because we’re going to draw on your expertise.  Give us just a little overview of some of the situations that you have encountered that require the skill of negotiation.

ELLEN SMITH:  Sure.  So commercial real estate; right?  You think it’s just dirt, but it’s not.  I mean, I’m working on a project now where the project team – there’s a project manager.  They’re managing the client, which is a Fortune 500 company which has its own expectations.  They had to negotiate their own contract with that client.  But then they have to put together the project to get something built on a piece of property.  They had to negotiate to get the dirt bought.  They had to get all the equipment. And they have to go through right now the permitting process, so negotiating with government officials, which is miserable in and of itself.

But they also have a team of experts; right?  They have their engineers.  They have their architects.  And they have to deal with lawyers on the outside.  They don’t just have to deal with the client’s lawyer.  They have to deal with the city’s lawyer. And they have to deal with the architect’s lawyer and the engineer’s lawyer and everyone else.

BILL YATES:  Those dang lawyers.

ELLEN SMITH:  And they really are stuck in the middle because at the end of the day they have to get that deliverable to their client.  But they have to keep everybody on the same page and make them happy.  And whether you call it a negotiation, whether you think about the start of your day as a negotiation, that really is what they’re doing from start to finish all day.

NICK WALKER:  So obviously a project manager needs negotiating skills.  But that’s not necessarily something, perhaps, that most project managers are going to be trained in.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, Nick, that’s a great point.  We, Andy and I, just – we’re constantly surprising ourselves as we look at those that we train and those that use our materials, and just how closely we can relate to them in that this is a skill that we had to learn on the job.  We didn’t really have training on negotiation in school.  You know, we may have learned some tools along the way.  But this is really an on-the-job kind of thing.

So we are – we can definitely connect with our tribe in this area.  We may have a lot of technical expertise.  We may be great at coding, at testing.  Or we may be a strong engineer.  But suddenly I’ve moved into this position where I’ve got to manage and negotiate with those people on the team.  Plus, to Andy’s point, that pyramid above me that’s very sharp and pointy and right on the top of my head, I’ve got to negotiate the expectations of sponsors, of customers, of my senior management.  And I don’t have training in it.

ANDY CROWE:  And Bill, I want to suggest for a minute that we almost need to think about it a little bit differently as project managers because traditionally we’re trained to think about negotiation as the art of getting the best deal for your organization or for your side.  And it’s the idea of engineering the best deal you can for your group that you’re representing.  And some people do approach it that way.  Project managers are going to get in trouble when they approach it that way.

BILL YATES:  Right, that’s right.  If you burn bridges along the way, you’re going to be in big trouble.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  You don’t squeeze people down necessarily.

BILL YATES:  No.

ANDY CROWE:  I worked with a guy early in my career who was from Philadelphia.  And he was just a Philly guy who’s classic in every sense of the word.  And we love you listeners in Philadelphia.  But his idea was “I’m not winning if you’re not losing.”  And he really seemed to believe that.  That was his overarching goal for negotiating was to squeeze people to make sure everybody knew who won, and it was him, you know; and who lost, and that was you.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Yeah, Ellen, one of the things that’s unique for us with negotiations is we have to live in the mess that we create.

ELLEN SMITH:  For sure.

BILL YATES:  So we, you know, as project managers, the things that we negotiate, whether we’re a part of scoping out a project on the front end or we’re in the middle of it, I mean, we don’t want to tick off our client.  We don’t want to tick off those that are on the team.

ANDY CROWE:  Or the vendor.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  Not just the client.  You don’t want to tick off anybody.

BILL YATES:  Right.  You’ve got to...

ANDY CROWE:  You want everybody to be able to live with the outcome.

BILL YATES:  Right.  That’s right.

NICK WALKER:  And it occurs to me this is probably not necessarily intuitive, either.  So, Ellen, returning to you, how do we...

ELLEN SMITH:  Sure.

NICK WALKER:  ...become master negotiators?

ELLEN SMITH:  Well, and I’ll say this, too.  I think that that top end of the pyramid is probably the ones that have gone to Harvard Business School or some other business school.  They have their MBA.  And they did take classes on negotiation.  So as a project manager, some of the ones underneath, you’ve gone to school, you’ve had the technical expertise, whether you’re an engineer or what have you.  You can put together the things that client, customer, sponsor needs from a technical side.  They are using their negotiating skills against you, always.  It’s not because they can help themselves, it’s because that’s what they went to school for nine times out of 10.  Right?

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 talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager. We cover what it takes to get certified, what it takes to do the job of project management.

I’m your host, Nick Walker. And beside me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. They are project managers for project managers. They instruct other project managers and those working to become one. So, guys, last time we talked about projects that are in trouble. And we want to catch the trouble before they go up in flames. We talked about a lot of ways to do that. So let’s recap just a little bit and then go forward and talk about how we get to the end and really make this project a success.

ANDY CROWE: You know what, Nick, this is something we need to be talking about in the project management community. So the approach that most companies take is they say, well, we’re going to look at ways to never get in this situation. But the truth is over two thirds of projects come in over time and over budget, and they don’t meet the critical success factors. They don’t hit that target, that elusive butterfly of success. They never capture it in their net. And so what do you do if you’re in that situation? And to be honest, I’ve taught and mentored PMs before who live in that situation, so it’s not an unusual thing. It’s just difficult to talk about.

NICK WALKER: Two thirds of projects. That’s an amazing statistic.

ANDY CROWE: Yeah, the actual numbers are worse than that. But we’re going to be happy and say two thirds.

BILL YATES: And it’s a reality. So why not get tooled up in learning how to do this part of my job as a project manager? And we, you know, the first session we talked about the first step is identifying that, identifying when I’m in a project that is in serious trouble, so how to detect it. We talked about smelling the smoke and looking at the canary.

ANDY CROWE: Yeah, Bill liked the more intuitive approach, and I advocated for the data-driven approach. But those two meet, absolutely. Those two intersect.

BILL YATES: Absolutely.

NICK WALKER: And then we have to come up with just the correct approach. And there are a couple of different ways to go there, too.

BILL YATES: Yeah. Some companies, they go with the tiger team, the parachute in the expert that’s me to come fix everything. And then what we really focused on more was the do-it-yourself, the you are leading a project. You’ve determined that it is in serious trouble. So what are you going to do about it?

NICK WALKER: And I loved how you emphasized so much the need to try to keep calm because intuitively this is the time that you’re going to be the least calm, perhaps.

BILL YATES: Yeah. You’ve gone to that “in case of emergency” box. You’ve busted it open, and you’re trying to calm yourself down so that you can actually lead the team with competency and professionalism.

ANDY CROWE: Right. We talked about last time nobody’s at their best leading out of fear.

NICK WALKER: And then there was that aha moment for me where we talked about trying to move forward, but in order to do that you’ve got to move backward before you do.

BILL YATES: Right. Yeah, you have to do root cause analysis. You have to fully understand what is the problem. Maybe, to Andy’s point before, we’ve got some reports that have shown some troubling trends. We have the data in front of us. Now we’ve got to roll our sleeves up, get into it, and figure out what is causing us to miss our milestones. Why are our budgets suddenly blowing up? Why are all the errors and defects suddenly cropping up where they weren’t before?

ANDY CROWE: So Bill, let me ask you a question in starting us off in the next step here. You’re dealing with a lot of different dynamics. Some of those may, we talked about the last time, when those relate to scope and how to simplify and refocus on critical success factors.

BILL YATES: Right.

ANDY CROWE: What happens when all of that’s okay, and the real problem is in the team? What do you do?

BILL YATES: Yeah. Now, if you identify the problem as being related to team members, what do you do with that? That’s tricky. That’s tricky.

ANDY CROWE: It can be tricky. I think the first thing you’ve got to do is, again, even some root cause analysis there. But I’m going to confess something here at the risk of smearing my reputation myself a little bit. I have – I used to be on a tiger team that was sent in to troubled projects for customers. I worked with a consulting company. And we went around, and when a project was in trouble, we came in and tried to help right that project.

One of the first things that I think you need to do a lot of times is get rid of the bad actors on the team. I think you need to let people go, if you remotely have that authority or influence in order to do so. So I’m a big fan of that. I feel like – I think, ultimately, every failure is a leadership failure at some level. And so a lot of times what would happen is they would have let the project manager go, and they brought in our team to kind of help figure out what was going on.

So that had already been taken care of. The PM had already been let go. Sometimes it hadn’t. Sometimes it was a technical lead. Sometimes it was a business analyst. Sometimes it was a programmer, et cetera. And I’m a believer that, you know what, be decisive. Take decisive resource action.

BILL YATES: It’s tough. For a leader to lead, you’ve got to have followers. And those followers, they’re looking very closely at the leader and how does she respond in a situation? How does he lead in a situation? It’s one thing when you’re partying, having fun because you’re hitting the milestones, the customer’s happy, the budget’s – you’re finding more money. You know, we want more scope. We want more of everything.

ANDY CROWE: Everybody should have one project like that in their life. I have. I’ve had one.

BILL YATES: But for the rest of us, the reality is, so we’re dealing with this troubled project. People are looking to see how the leader is leading. And in many cases that is the project manager. Is that person decisive? Are they able to, again, completely get their hands around that root cause, that trouble? And if that is an individual, if I look in my hands, and I’ve got a person in my hands, then what am I going to do about it?

ANDY CROWE: Well, I can answer that. So you act decisively.

BILL YATES: Yup.

ANDY CROWE: You let the person go on the project. You move them on to someplace they can be more successful. So there’s some of that is for the sake of the project in general, sort of at a high-level holistic sense. But there’s science behind this. So Virginia Satir came up years ago with something called Family Systems Theory. And it really translates beyond the family. Family Systems Theory says that you may not be able by yourself to change the whole dynamic. You may not be responsible for the whole dynamic. But you can change the way you’re behaving in a system, and that will change the whole system.

Letting somebody go who’s perhaps not performing at peak performance, who hasn’t been doing what they’ve been doing, just changing that one ingredient will change the whole thing. And think about it this way, too. Think about it in the sense of ingredients. You’ve probably cooked before. I love to cook. And when you do, sometimes you can no longer taste the individual ingredients. But it’s the way they’re combining. It’s the chemistry and the interaction of those ingredients that’s actually producing something that sort of transcends the individual pieces.

BILL YATES: Right.

ANDY CROWE: That’s what happens with teams. Teams – and it can happen in a good way. And we’ve all seen that. And it can happen in a very toxic bad way. And so sometimes, even if it’s not the person’s individual fault, moving them off the project will change the whole chemistry, the whole interaction, and the whole dynamic. And it sends a good message.

NICK WALKER: So it’s not always the project manager that needs to leave.

ANDY CROWE: Right, correct. Now, that’s our tribe. So we’re kind of dealing with our own dirty laundry here. But, no, it oftentimes is not. But if the PM has any authority to reshape the team, just rebooting the team and refactoring it can oftentimes be a good thing.

BILL YATES: And I want to go back to that notion that the team’s watching. I’ll confess, the older I get, the more I’m convinced that a strong leader assesses the team and determines, is there a weaker person on this team, or people on the team that need to be let go? Because those top performers, let’s say – let’s just use a rating. We’ll say I have eights, nines, and tens on my team. If there’s a six on the team, or a five on the team, the eights and nines and tens are watching me as the leader to see do I put up with that, do I tolerate it.

ANDY CROWE: Correct.

BILL YATES: What do I do with that individual? Do I try to train them? Do I try to improve their performance? At what point do I make the decision I need to move them off the team? Because the eights, nines, and tens are saying, I want to be on the best team, and I want the strong leader who will make my team stronger.

NICK WALKER: And you know, Andy, something you said just really underlines something that was in a conversation I was having just yesterday with a friend of mine. We were talking about a team that I’m on. And he says there are three C’s with teamwork. One is competence, character, and the third one is chemistry. And it seems to me that chemistry is so incredibly vital and maybe even the hardest one to achieve.

ANDY CROWE: It is the hardest one because you can’t always anticipate how different team personalities,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  This is our every week chance to meet and talk about what matters most to you as a professional project manager.  We talk about getting started, getting certified, getting the stuff of project management done.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and beside me are our in-house experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  They are project managers themselves.  They mentor other project managers and those working to become one.  And guys, today’s topic addresses what might be to some teams sort of an elephant in the room, the fact that many projects don’t move along as we originally envision.  In fact, Andy, sometimes, as a friend of mine once put it, you know, when the manure hits the combine blades...

ANDY CROWE:  Right, the fertilizer hits the ventilation system, sure.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, right.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, and you know what, a lot of times figuring out what to do with a troubled project, with a project that’s in distress, and where do you start?  And a lot of PMs spend time in this space.  This isn’t an unfamiliar territory for a lot of people.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, people should not be surprised by this.  This happens.  This is a part of project management.  There’s a quote by William A. Cohen.  He says:  “All successful projects are simply a long series of adversities that must be overcome.  Adversity is normal.”

NICK WALKER:  So we just need to look reality in the face and say, okay, this is just going to happen.  Adversity is going to happen.  But is there a difference between just simple adversity, you know, little roadblocks that come in the way, or something that is really in flames?

ANDY CROWE:  Well, there certainly can be.  A lot of times project managers start a project.  They don’t have any input into the finish date.  They don’t have input into the schedule, necessarily, or the budget.  And now they kind of have to find some way to meet the goals of the project.  By the time that they get added, they’re already in trouble.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  So sometimes it’s even almost too late.  So what do you do at that point?  How do you sort of regroup and pick up?

BILL YATES:  Yeah, and that’s what we’ll focus on today is looking at those troubled projects, those that are in recovery mode, those that need turnaround.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  And so Bill, maybe not just the ones in recovery mode, but the ones that need to be in recovery mode.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  Maybe they’re going along, business as usual.  They haven’t detected trouble yet.  So let me ask you, if you’re thinking about a project, what’s the canary in the coal mine to you to know if there are problems on the project, to know if it’s time to kind of circle the wagons and start thinking about it differently, put it in recovery mode?  When do you – what are some of the triggers?

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  There are – that’s the perfect place to start.  There are many triggers to me, many signs to look at to detect trouble.  And some of those are real soft skill type things.  You’ve got to read people.  Others are hardcore metrics.  So you start, if I think about soft skill stuff, Andy, I think about some of the past projects that I’ve worked on where things, the train came off the rails.  And many times you could pick up on it in your interaction with a customer.  The customer’s attitude towards you or towards the project or towards the team changed.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  In some cases, the customer disappeared.  They no longer had an interest in the project.  And that was scary.  That’s scary.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, as long as the money’s still flowing, I guess it’s not all that scary.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, right.  Yeah, you may think, you know, well, there are times when I wish my customer would go away so we could get something done.  But what I’m talking about here is the sudden neglect.  It’s like you’re dating someone, and they’re not returning your phone call.

ANDY CROWE:  The new term for that is “ghosting.”  You’re being ghosted.

BILL YATES:  Right.  So your customer starts ghosting you.  There’s no longer an interest.  Or they seem – maybe they’re not showing up for the status meetings the way they used to.  They’re not being responsive when you’re asking for decisions to be made.  So customer or senior management, you know, could be that my customer is still engaged, but maybe this is a project I’m doing for external purposes, and my internal manager is kind of giving me the cold shoulder.  They don’t have that availability or interest anymore.  That to me, too, is something I need to investigate that could be trouble.

ANDY CROWE:  So that requires some intuition, though, on the PM’s part, you know, because you can drive yourself crazy trying to read into every non-returned phone call or every missed meeting or things like that.  I’m a data guy.  And to me, I like to see information.  So one of the things I love to look at, I love earned value metrics.  And I’m a believer in the saying – there’s an old saying that two points make a line, and three points make a trend.  And I pay attention to that because when I see, for instance, if I see a performance metric, your schedule performance index or your variances trending down over two or three reporting periods, then I’m going to start paying a lot of attention to that, if I see things consistently coming in.

I also watch – and I’m a big believer in holding people accountable to individual estimates.  And when I say “accountable,” I’m not saying you would necessarily let somebody go because they missed several estimates, but you loop back with them.  You help them kind of steep in that.  You show them, hey, you estimated here, and you came in here.  And in fact I’m working on a chart right now that tracks people’s accuracy to their own estimates over time.

BILL YATES:  Excellent.

ANDY CROWE:  Because I’m fascinated with that metric.  It helps.  The more accurate you can get your team to estimate, the better off you are.

BILL YATES:  Oh, yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  So I pay a lot of attention to that.

BILL YATES:  That’s good over the life of the project, too.  So that makes sense to do that, to really jump in and hold them accountable right upfront with that.

ANDY CROWE:  How about rework?

BILL YATES:  Oh, yeah.  Yeah, yeah.  Rework is a big one to me.  That’s a key metric.  If I’m tracking rework, and to your point about trends, if rework is trending up suddenly?  Or change requests.  Let’s say there’s a sudden spike in change requests.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.

BILL YATES:  Those are warning signs to me.  That canary is starting to show signs.

ANDY CROWE:  Those are kind of evil twins, rework and change requests.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  They sort of go together.  There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  And so you’re forced to relook at something.  People just didn’t get it right at some point.

BILL YATES:  There’s another for me, too, Andy, where if I think about, let’s say we’re tracking expenses, and we look back over the past month, and maybe we paid a lot more overtime, or paid higher consulting fees than normal.  That tends to raise an eyebrow for me, too.

ANDY CROWE:  This is getting a lot more attention at a federal level, too.  This whole idea of overtime is starting to – people are paying more attention to it.  So businesses definitely care about it.  Now the government’s starting to care about it in a very different kind of way and forcing people to track it and account for it a little bit differently.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  So it’s going to get more attention.  There’s no question.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  In a larger project, sometimes if you’re the project manager, and you have a larger project team, and a certain area starts to have higher consulting fees or more overtime, that could be an indication to me that, okay, they’ve got an issue they’re dealing with.  They don’t really want to tell me about it yet.

ANDY CROWE:  Right.  So my wife had a professor in college, and she went to Furman University, that you perhaps know well.

BILL YATES:  Go Paladins.

ANDY CROWE:  And her professor’s quote that we still use many years after we’ve graduated was “Things take longer than they do.”

BILL YATES:  Nice.

ANDY CROWE:  So I think every project manager can relate to that, absolutely.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

ANDY CROWE:  So we have a problem.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah.  And it seems like a little delicate balancing act here sometimes to determine just how big of a problem.

BILL YATES:  And let me – one other symptom that I don’t want to overlook, too.  Nick, sometimes as a project manager you’ll pick up on things within the team.  There could be some conflict on the team that you don’t understand.  Is this personal, or is this because they know there’s a bigger issue that, again, I don’t have full exposure to yet?  Or do I just have, like, warring parties on the team?  What’s going on here?  Is this something that’s going to upend the cart?  Is this going to throw us off?  Because suddenly I’ve got like a team funk going on here.  I can’t explain it.

ANDY CROWE:  So this is the thing.  The PM, the project manager’s at a point, and you’ve got sort of senior manager of the organization and sponsors above you.  And you can picture that as a triangle with the top pointing down.  And if that makes sense, the tip, the sharp point of the triangle is down. Then on the other side is the team.  And the PM is right in between those two and is sort of at this friction point.  It is a challenging job.

And so the PM a lot of times will pick up on team distress and distress within the senior management of the organization, sponsors, et cetera,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER ● TIM KELLY

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

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are two guys who know the score when it comes to project management.  They’ve been there, done that.  They know what it takes to succeed.  And they are here to help you succeed.  They are our resident experts, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And guys, as we look back over our previous podcasts, we’ve had some amazing guests on our show.  And Andy, it looks like we’ve got another heavy-hitter today.

ANDY CROWE:  We do.  We’ve got a great guest.  Tim Kelly with McKesson is in the house today.  So welcome, Tim.

TIM KELLY:  Thank you.

NICK WALKER:  Let’s meet you, Tim; okay?  Tim Kelly, an executive director of technology for McKesson.  He’s with the company’s Business Performance Services business unit.  He has more than 20 years of experience in information technology, information systems management, software and product development, program and project management, as well as wearing many other hats.  Tim, welcome to Manage This.

TIM KELLY:  Thanks.  Awesome to be here.

NICK WALKER:  Tell us a little bit more about you.  We want to get to know you a little bit better.

TIM KELLY:  I have a kind of a unique background.  I grew up managing McDonald’s restaurants, and that was an opportunity to shape the foundation of how I understand people and how to manage profit principles.  So it was a unique opportunity.

NICK WALKER:  You know, a lot of people might laugh at that:  “I started at McDonald’s.”  But that is a perfect example of putting what you’ve learned into practice in bigger arenas.

TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.  I was studying economics at the University of Utah and had an opportunity to practice what I was studying at the same time.  I learned management principles and clearly a number of key projects.  An example would be trying to put a new HVAC on the roof.  So it had to happen, and you had to figure that out as a manager of a restaurant.  So absolutely had an opportunity to apply the principles.  I wasn’t yet certified at the time, to be clear.  This was many years ago.  But I did recently have a chance to hook up with Velociteach and become certified.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, so 2009, Nick.  I had the pleasure of standing in front of a class and looking at the eager eyes of Tim Kelly as he was mastering the Project Management Institute’s framework on project management.  And Tim and I are friends.  We go back further than that.  But it was a rare treat for me to have a buddy in the classroom.

TIM KELLY:  Yeah.

BILL YATES:  And it was a lot of fun helping you reach that goal.

TIM KELLY:  It was awesome.  I tell you what, I also trained for a number of years.  So I opened a training business with Packard Bell NEC in my past.  And just a quick plug for the work that you guys do, the approach, the mnemonic approach about how to retain and learn information, absolutely awesome.  Scored very highly on both the pretest at the end of Bill’s session and then of course did really well on the exam.  So not only did it prove useful from an exam perspective, but I think the approach allowed me to retain the content and then leverage that in business.  So that’s just true-to-life real stuff from someone who’s gone through it and then had to leverage it.

ANDY CROWE:  Outstanding.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, bring us up to date now.  What are some of the hats you’re wearing right now?

TIM KELLY:  Let me walk you from, if I could, from when I became certified.  I had an opportunity to do some new things for the first time.  And again, the certification was the foundation of that.  I led product development and essentially grew a team of five engineers in building a new product for Hughes Telematics at the time, which then became Verizon Telematics.  We grew that five individual team members into 120 people across 12 delivery teams and built a product that gets plugged into a vehicle, transmits data to a cloud-based communication platform, and then shares that data with both, in this case, State Farm, who was a consumer of the content, and with the consumer so you could see the data.

So it started kind of my product development software engineering experience, after I was certified.  Then went on to work for McKesson and an opportunity to lead customer and technical support, which were my foundations and my roots because I began doing that with McDonald’s.  You see a thousand people a day, and you learn how to be nice to people.  It’s important.

BILL YATES:  It’s funny.  Nick, I want to jump in.  I remember talking shop with Tim when he was working with Hughes and developing this technology.  Well, later in life, and I may have told you this, Tim, later in life I plugged one of those devices into my vehicles.

TIM KELLY:  Oh, did you.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, to try to get a reduced insurance rate.  So thank you, my friend.  I think.  The jury’s still out.  Hopefully it will be a decrease and not an increase.

TIM KELLY:  Yeah.  It was a complex exercise, a lot of patents for the business.  Again, lots of learning, though, the foundation and the work you guys did for me.

NICK WALKER:  Tim, one of the things we’ve talked about on this podcast again and again is the Agile world.  Tell us a little bit about how you’ve applied all of that to the project you’re working on.

TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.  A quick bridge from that huge telematics experience.  We started with Agile for the first time.  I had not been an Agile practitioner before that.  And I was not certified in Agile at the time.  But we leveraged it, and I learned a great deal.  We scaled the teams.

Joining McKesson later on, four years later, began in customer service, moved into engineering, began applying Agile principles again, and had several teams, five different product teams with McKesson at the time, responsible for electronic medical records and practice management applications.  And it became very clear that these five different product teams could operate independently, and they could do reasonable well with Agile.

But if you have a large product that comprises many teams, then Agile in and of itself, even lean Agile, tends to not break down, but become challenging when you want to scale large teams and have them understand the product vision, how they interact together.  And that was a challenge we faced and one we had to wrestle with.  And that’s when we began to look at the Scaled Agile Framework.

BILL YATES:  SAFe.

TIM KELLY:  SAFe, exactly.  And SAFe is a freely available framework for scaling Agile.  There are others out there.  We chose the Scaled Agile Framework because we thought it had the most experience.  We studied the case studies that go with it, and we found it to apply best to our scenario.  And in my world we have 23 delivery teams, 160 resources across a broad spectrum of the technology framework.  So not just product development or Agile teams, which is a little bit unusual because we are a business performance services, a service-based company.

So we have IT back office, which is unusual to think, am I going to apply Agile to IT back office?  We did that.  We have 60 people in that space across various IT functions, and we have a business intelligence team, both managing, developing, managing their infrastructure.  And we applied SAFe to that group, as well.  We have classic product development in engineering, and we applied it to that group.  And then, last but not least, probably the most exciting part of the puzzle is that we have portfolio and program management, which is the core of driving SAFe successfully.

NICK WALKER:  Can we back up for just a second and tell me, what is SAFe?  How does that fit into this scenario?

TIM KELLY:  Yeah, SAFe is a model where you can take Agile teams, and kind of the secret sauce or the value proposition in SAFe behind just lean Agile...

NICK WALKER:  Secret sauce.  Did you see what he did just there?

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TIM KELLY:  Little McDonald’s trade secret – is that you can, when teams get very large, how they interact to be the most efficient for both either a large-scale business or just a product, it tends to break down when you have all those teams together.  Bringing people together, a classic thing, is that we’re all over the U.S.  So we have 160 resources that are not in a single location.  So they’re all over.  But finding ways for them to communicate successfully together and partner together to understand the vision, scale and schedule the work, and prioritize it with the business is what SAFe does.

NICK WALKER:  So SAFe is a new approach overall and is probably new to a lot of people that you’ve been working with.  It was new to you.

TIM KELLY:  Absolutely.

NICK WALKER:  What are the challenges that come with applying a new approach?

TIM KELLY:  Yeah, thank you for asking.  It is – you have to both educate – I had to educate myself.  We have to educate our business partners.  And as I think about the transformation we were trying to effect, and the transformation – it’s a big program.  Maybe for all the listeners, that’s the way I would frame it is there is an enormous number of things to do.  They are linked together in smaller projects.  And the biggest challenges, of course,

ANDY CROWE ● BILL YATES ● NICK WALKER

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we meet to talk about what matters to you as a professional project manager.  We’re into project management certification, doing the job of project management, and we get inside the brains of some of the leaders in the industry.

I’m your host, Nick Walker; and beside me are the resident experts Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  Now, in a perfect world you could look up “project manager” in the dictionary, and you’d find their pictures right beside the definition.  They are the epitome of project management.  They’re project managers themselves.  They instruct other project managers and those working to become one.

Now, guys, we decided that this topic deserved a double header.  So we’re going to pick up where we left off last time.  The subject, Andy, performance reviews.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, Nick.  In the podcast number 12, the last time, we dealt with this topic kind of generally.  And this time we’re going to get a little bit more specific.  We’re going to get into some best practices, some practical tools and techniques.

But to me, one of the things that we can do here is look at other organizations who are doing it right.  Last time we talked about a couple of ways that were outmoded, maybe that didn’t work so well anymore.  Now we want to look at the ones who are doing it right.  What are they doing?  How are they approaching it?  You know, because things change.  The same techniques that worked in the 1940s maybe don’t translate so well today.  A lot of organizations are doing some of the things the same way we did them in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it’s time to take a fresh look at it.  So we’re going to try and update that.

But the bigger point here, this is one of those areas that causes project managers a lot of anxiety in giving performance reviews.  They don’t want to do it.  They get torqued up about it.  And a lot of times it’s even worse when you’re on the receiving end.  You know, you sit there, and you and I both know, everybody, everybody who’s listening to this podcast has probably had the experience where your manager gives you a performance review.  You hear several things you’re doing right, and then maybe one thing that you’re not doing so well.  And what do we walk away and focus on and obsess about the rest of the week is that one thing.  So we’re going to look at all of this today, but we’re going to get a lot more practical.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Before we get into some of those best practices, let’s rewind just a second, talk about maybe what sets a good performance review apart from a bad one.  Last time we talked about the old school we’re all familiar with, the annual review, the bell curve.  Now we’re talking about a new way, less formal, more frequent reviews.  We talked about some of the companies that have been involved in this new way, Bill.

BILL YATES:  Right, companies such as Accenture, Adobe, Deloitte, and GE.  Those are some places where we can take a peek and see what’s working for them and distill some best practices from that and share that.

NICK WALKER:  So some of the things we want to get into today are how to give a performance review; when to give a performance review; how to receive a performance review.  So let’s talk a little bit about some of these.  Let’s spend some time talking about when.  When is the best time to do this?

BILL YATES:  Yeah, and this was interesting.  So we talked about the breakaway from the annual review and how, like the companies I just mentioned, they’re ditching the annual review and saying this doesn’t make sense.  There’s too long of a gap between the performance and the review, the feedback.  Let’s make it more frequent, and let’s make it less formal.  Quarterly seems to be the rhythm that is coming out in most cases.

However, we talked about in our first episode some of the Agile practices and some of the things that we saw with that.  Andy mentioned some of the rhythms that are built into Agile, and the retrospectives that are done there, and even the daily stand-ups.  So I think the challenge for the project manager is to look at their business, to look at their projects and think about, all right, what makes sense?  When is a logical place for me to stop and have a review, have a conversation with team members?  That can vary; right?  Kind of depends on the projects, the length of the projects that we have.

And even, you know, I think about our own experiences, Andy.  The reporting cycle that we run into, some organizations have a reporting cycle that lends itself really well to a quarterly review.  Financially, for instance, we may do a review then.  So depending on the type of project setup that you have, or the key metrics for your organization, you may find an ideal time to hit the pause button and have that performance review.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, Bill, I had an interesting interaction with a company that’s deep into Agile.  And it was at a project management event I went to recently, and we were discussing the podcast in general and discussing the fact that we were talking about this.  They said, you know, we do Agile.  And so really with the level of Agile transparency that we embrace, everything’s on the wall.  All the performance metrics are on the wall.  We don’t really do reviews because it’s all publicly reviewed all the time.

And that sounds good at first, but really you don’t assume that people are going to get it that way.  You don’t assume, A, that people are necessarily going to take away – some people have blind spots.  And even though they can see that they’re lagging behind, they may not understand completely the impact on the organization and some of the reasons why.  So that needs to be discussed.  But then there’s another reason for compliance.  So you have to do reviews.

BILL YATES:  Right.

ANDY CROWE:  You have to do them for HR purposes.  Big organizations, small organizations should do reviews.  And I agree with you.  I think quarterly, making them smaller, making them more frequent, little bit more manageable is a better way to go.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.

NICK WALKER:  And I love the NFL illustration that you gave last time about how the coach gets in there, gets into the player’s face right away.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, right.

NICK WALKER:  Makes an impact.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  And, you know, in Atlanta, sometimes the owner gets in the NFL player’s face right away, too.

BILL YATES:  Dallas fans can relate to that, as well.  Yeah, but Andy, to build on your point, you think about that in an Agile world, maybe the team sees.  They can look at the kanban.  They can look at the burn up, the burn down charts and see how the team is doing.  But they may not have a good sense for how they – they may not know the personal impact they’ve had.  So again, back to that sports analogy.  Hey, the team won.  We came back in the fourth quarter and won the game, so everybody’s excited about that.  But the coach is still going to have that review for each position player as to how – what was your performance?  What was your contribution to that?

ANDY CROWE:  You have to because people do not always construct the same narrative for their performance or lack thereof than the team or the coach does.

BILL YATES:  Right.  That’s true, yup.

NICK WALKER:  There’s probably some managers listening to this, though, who are saying, okay, this sounds great.  Sure, that’s ideal to do these reviews immediately.  But isn’t that going to cost me a lot in terms of time and money and productivity?

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  Great question.  Sure.  Yeah.  I think about a colleague I ran into recently, and he had a team of 25 or 30 under him that he had to review.  And he had been – “Hey, I haven’t seen you for a while.  Where you been?”  “I’ve been on the road doing performance reviews.  It’s that time of the year.”  And, “Oh, wow, how many you reviewing?”  “Twenty-five, 30.”  “Really.”  And so he was telling me the hours and hours he put into this.

ANDY CROWE:  There’s a flag on the field right there.  That is absolutely too many people to have to manage and review.

BILL YATES:  Yeah, yeah.  So it was interesting.  But because this is less formal, this should be less costly.  And I think, again, doing the research, I think Accenture had a great example.  The CEO of Accenture had a quote.  They determined that they would disband rankings, their old system, in 2016 and go with a more fluid system of ongoing feedback.  And in doing that, there’s a great quote.  Nick, you’re the professional.  You can actually handle these tough names.  You can pronounce them correctly.  So I’m going to toss this to you.

NICK WALKER:  Sometimes I can.  But this is a French guy.  And my French is so bad that even my French professor in college made fun of my accent.  But CEO Pierre Nanterme.

BILL YATES:  There you go.

ANDY CROWE:  We’ll live with that.  And Mr. Nanterme, if that’s incorrect, you’re welcome to contact the podcast, and we will issue a correction.

NICK WALKER:  Might even get a mug out of it.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, he might even get a mug.

NICK WALKER:  But CEO Pierre Nanterme said, “Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process.  It’s huge.”  He says, “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.”  Yikes.

BILL YATES:  Ninety percent.  That, see, to a manager, to someone who’s – again, I think of that guy that I ran into, the colleague who had been on the road.  I think if you said, hey, guess what, next year you’re going to spend 10 percent of the time on this.  Really.  Well, huge savings; right?  It frees him up to do – and project managers, you can relate to this.  It frees you up so you can actually do your real job.

BILL YATES:  Right?

Giving and receiving performance reviews is an anxiety-producing event. We’re talking through that from a project manager’s perspective.

The inclusion of Agile into the PMBOK Guide, gives us an indication of how Agile is changing the world of project management.