In this episode, hosts Merv Jersak and Tim Jerome discuss how serendipitous innovation, hands-on creativity, and practical application of design thinking can transform projects and organizations. From solving technology and business problems to fostering flexibility and efficiency in teams, the hosts showcase how embracing unconventional approaches can lead to extraordinary results in project management.

Main Take-Aways

Stories are powerful teachers. Today’s story lessons help your understanding of the importance of becoming creative and innovative in the solutions you are providing to your clients:

• being open to leveraging serendipitous results of your creativity to new opportunities
• innovatively enhancing requirements gathering through observing end users at work
• rotating staff through various project roles to help round out their experience
• solving complex problems by collaboratively using creative thinking
• using change management in design thinking to deliver more innovative solutions
• creatively leveraging one solution to solve another problem, even if completely unrelated

Show Notes

Today’s Project Managers Coffee Chat: Leadership Lessons from the Trenches – On Being Creative and Innovative

00:50 Tim kicks off this episode with a story of leveraging a technology line of business into a previously untried business solutioning line of business, an innovative and serendipitous opportunity.

03:18 Merv tells of a real-life situation of witnessing an altercation during a field visit to understand how his client’s end-users functioned that completely changed the design of the system his team was implementing to help avoid such situations in the future. He then creatively took the concept of field office visits to future projects.

06:32 Tim describes an aha moment that resulted from his manager’s innovative method of training his staff by having them rotate through various project responsibilities.

08:58 Merv provides an example of creative collaboration to develop an innovative approach to secure funding for the project he was advising, one that dealt with cross-agency complexities, but was necessary for the project to be funded.

11:10 Tim takes you into the field of telecommunications to describe a situation where his team creatively worked with their client to not just solve the problem at hand, but to set his client’s organization up for future technological advances.

13:29 Merv describes how a project he was advising tried a different approach (a creative approach) to requirements gathering on a project by sending the Organizational Change Management team into the field to bring back to the design team the nuances of how the client worked its business. These nuances when applied to the functional rules and processes of the automated solution greatly enhanced the final product that was implemented.

15:51 Tim provides another innovative solution where the technical solution for one process was re-imagined to provide an analogous solution to a completely different and unrelated process, saving 50% in energy costs.

18:46 Merv concludes the episode by challenging you our listeners to think through your own experiences to leverage them creatively and innovatively for solving your own project challenges.