The Basics of Good Project Management: Greta Blash (Transcript)

Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was myself, and sometimes it was I. There was nobody else there at the time to be able to do this, and I wanted to play a few different roles, so I did that.

We really need to have multiple individuals. Now how much time those different individuals are involved in this depends on what their role is, what the project is, and what we’re going to need to do. We can also have people from different organizational units. They could be all within one organization, one family, one community, or they could be scattered over a bunch of different areas. Obviously, the more that grows, the more difficult you may have in trying to manage that project.

We can also have multiple organizations from multiple units from different organizations, especially when we get into contracted work, where we end up having people from different companies or organizations working together. Even though we’re in Orange County, we spent the last few years in Las Vegas. We were there while they were building City Center. Now if any of you have been over there or have heard about it, it was a major effort with a lot of different hotels and casinos and restaurants and retail, etcetera.

There were over 200 project managers on that particular task from 200 different companies. Now talk about trying to manage just project managers, much less manage the work effort. Huge effort there. But that’s a case where a project can go from a very simple thing, and we always use the basic example of planning a Christmas party or planning the Thanksgiving meal to cleaning the garage to building a new room on the house, those are all projects. They’re just things that we do, not necessarily part of the business.

So if we look at everything that has to be accomplished that we have to say, okay, we’re going to start this now and we hope to have it finished by a certain time, we’re going to use some basic project management skills as we go through that, we can consider that a project.

Project Management and PMI

When we talk about projects and project management and I talk about PMI, PMI is a global organization that supports project managers worldwide. We have what’s called a guide to the project management body of knowledge. We all call it the PMBOK guide. And this is a guide that helps us understand best practices of ways to do project management.

It’s a guide. It was written by a lot a number of volunteers. I start to say a lot. It is a lot. It continually is updated as new ideas are come about, as new people come up with new ideas, best practices to be able to use.

It identifies best practices, skills, tools and techniques, not vendor specific, but more generic type of things. And as a project manager, our role is to understand kind of what those tools and techniques bring to the table and whether they’re going to be applicable to what we’re trying to do. The other part of it is it provides a common terminology among project managers. I’m not going to necessarily use a lot of that terminology today, but we have things like a risk register and a project charter and all these different things that, as project managers, when we talk about these tools and techniques and types of documents, we have an idea of what we’re talking about. We have a common base of communication.

This is absolutely no different from what happens when you are in accounting or HR or marketing. We use terminology that is specific and people that are in those functional organizations or within those disciplines know what that terminology means and they can talk back and forth. Now the key is on this, we have a lot of information. This book has gone from probably out of less than a quarter of an inch to now where it’s a couple of inches thick. And in fact, when we did the latest release, I did a presentation and I had copies of all the older versions because I’ve been working with it that long.

And I brought them and showed, okay, so we started here and we keep growing because we keep adding more and more to that. But the key becomes that is not what we must do. That is recommended good practices. And the first thing that a project manager and the team need to do is figure out how much is appropriate for this particular project. So part of what I’m going to do today is talk about some of the concepts that you need to think through and say, do I just need to think about this or should I actually do it?

And if I do it, how much do I need to do? When we create a document, do we have a one page document or do we have three three ring binders full of information? You do what is appropriate for the task that you’re doing.

What is Project Management?

So what is project management itself? Project management is addressing the needs, concerns of stakeholder expectations.

Now let me go back and explain what a stakeholder is from our standpoint. A stakeholder is anybody, anybody who cares about what we’re doing, who may be impacted by the work we’re doing. It could be the people that could impact us. For instance, I have a project. I want to go redo my lawn and my whole landscaping in the front yard.

Do I have stakeholders? Of course. I have neighbors. I have a group of people within the community that say you can do this and you can do this. We have problem in Southern California with water.

I’m not going to plant a whole bunch of grass if I have to be able to water. And in fact, in Vegas, there is no much there is no longer grass. We don’t have the water. And, therefore, the stakeholder is the water association. Do I need to know about who those people are? Yes. Do I need to know what their concerns are? Do I need to know when to involve them? Absolutely. Those are the types of things that we talk about when we’re talking about stakeholders and their concerns.

It’s not just me and my project team, but it’s the people that are going to be impacted by what I’m doing as well as the people that I will impact as I’m working on this, noise, cleaning up, all the things that are going to impact the rest of the community. We talk about constraints on a project. Now, regardless what project you’re doing, you have constraints. You either have money or you have time. And in some projects, we have to figure out what is the most important constraint.

Is it that I have to get this done on a certain date, or I have to do it within a certain amount of cost? Those are different constraints. There could also be some quality that says I have to be able to have a quality level. For instance, I’m doing my landscaping again. I have to be able to know how much water I’m going to have to use for that project.

That’s a constraint. Therefore, I have to see how I’m going to water. I’m going to have to see what kind of plants I’m going to grow. All of these type of things become constraints. Now it’s interesting because most people talk about the constraint of cost and money being the most important.

Project Constraints and Priorities

Unfortunately, when I was working in the casinos in Vegas, I never ever even saw a budget, much less had a concern about the cost. Everything was scheduled. You must get it done on a certain date because of certain things that were happening. If I needed more people, if I needed more equipment, so be it. What it cost, I never saw, and they didn’t care.

The constraint was get it done. Now what you have to understand when you start out is which one of those are your constraints, which is the most important, which is the second most because you’re going to have to make trade offs as you go through. So what we do with the projects then is we understand what do we need to do and who do we need to use in order to help get this accomplished.

Now, we also have this thing of, okay, we have projects, but we have work that’s going on within an organization. And we usually refer to that as being an operation. It’s the day by day work that’s done. Whether it’s in a business where you’re registering students, whether you’re presenting courses, those are all operations. They continually happen. Now let’s take presenting a course. If we decide we want a brand new course, we usually initiate a project to do that.

We figure out, okay, when do I need to have it done? Who needs to be involved in it? When we talk about the two of these, they both are performed by people. They both are still constrained by limited resources, and they obviously are planned, executed, and controlled as we go through this.

Project Management Phases

So we talk about project management. As I alluded to before, there’s basically 4 different phases or 4 different chunks of work that need to be done, we need to start out. And the key on the starting out is figure out why are we doing this project, who is the one that is asking for this, and what do we expect to be able to get out of it. Now sometimes this doesn’t happen. Sometimes we’re not told, which obviously means that we could go down a different path if we’re not understanding why.

Once we figure out why we’re doing the project, now we have to be more specific as to what do we need to do, who needs to be involved, when do those individuals or resources as we call them, which could be equipment, money, people, when do those people or those resources need to be involved? And how are we going to do this? Now, some of that planning is going to be at a very high level and as we get closer and get more in tune with what’s happening, we’ll get more into, oops, I didn’t know I had to do that or oops as I’m digging up my garden to put in my plants all of a sudden, I’m hitting something. Ended up being a great big concrete piece that who knows why it was there, when it got there, but obviously we had to get rid of it. So part of that was a workaround that we had to do. We have to be able to build in the flexibility to say that we’re there.

Once we get it finished, we need to celebrate. We need to say, hey, we did it. Good work. We need that feedback, that positive reinforcement because sometimes that work we’re doing, it’s hard. It’s a lot of hours. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of time. We opened a casino down in Mississippi for the Indian tribe. By the time we were assigned to do it, we had seven months to do the entire thing. We worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day.

We actually finished all the IT stuff a month before opening because we had to have it in place to train people with. My staff was sitting there going, okay. So now what do we do? We have a month before opening. I said, you sit back and you watch.

And at the time when that actually opens, we’re going to celebrate because we did it. So part of it is being able to recognize the accomplishments.

The Starting Phase

So let’s go back to the starting phase. I use the term why, and I think most project managers will realize this is probably the area we spend the least amount of time on. And it’s also the area though that bites us later on.

Because if we don’t understand why we’re doing this project, we may not understand really what we need to accomplish. By definition when within PMI, what we say is that we need to officially authorize the project. We end up developing what’s called a project charter. And it is a way that we authorize the project. We authorize the project manager to spend the money.

I have seen it very, very seldomly done even though I force it now because I want to promote this and tell everybody, guess what, guys? We’re starting this project. Be aware of it. You’re a stakeholder. Either you can join us and give us feedback and participate in this or you may have some concerns. Voice them now. That’s what we need, but we need to understand that.

Now in most organizations, there is something that happened prior to this project starting. There may have had to be a business case, which could be very detailed as to the return on investment, the objectives, how this fits in with the strategic plan, go back and talk about if I’m going to add a new course to the curriculum. I’m going to obviously have to have some preliminary discussions and approval before this gets started.

I want to be able to get information from that process and figure out what was the thinking, especially who were the people that were really excited about this and who were the people that kind of were fighting it? Because those are going to be stakeholders I’m going to have to work with. So I want to see how we got to the point where we’ve been given approval to do this project.

Now let’s go back to my landscaping. Do I have to have certain approvals? Obviously, if I’m going to dig and put some things in, I’d have to have approvals. Do I have the money for it? Where is it going to come from? What how is it going to be done versus something else? These are all projects.

We don’t formally think of them that way, but when we do work, when we do and try to produce something or a result, it is a project. And we need to understand why did we choose this one. Was it a compliance issue that came down and there was all of a sudden everybody had to stop doing what they were because we had a new regulation we had to meet? In that case, does it make sense to go try and get a copy of the regulation to read it? Absolutely.

Figure out why we’re doing this. What does it mean? What impact is it going to have? At this point in the starting phase, usually about the only person that’s on the project is the project manager and maybe a few experts that understand the work we’re doing. Obviously, if I’m planning my garden or my landscaping, I’m not an expert in this.

I need to go at least to maybe the nursery and talk about what kind of plants I need, what kind of work, those type of things. So those are what we will end up having as we start to build our team. They’re not there every day shoveling and doing work, but they’re part of the team. They’re giving me the information. I as the project manager don’t know everything.

I am not expected to know everything and unless this is a project of one, which doesn’t really work real well, I’m not the person that has all that detailed knowledge. I have a team that I’m working with and that’s where this whole starting phase says who do you need to work on this? And especially if you have to pay somebody, whether you have to lease equipment or rent equipment or get people, you need to have the approval to be able to do that. So we always say it identifies and formally authorizes the project, and it authorizes the project manager to spend resources. Resources meaning money.

So should I start a project without having people know that I’m doing this project? Probably not a good idea unless it’s something that we don’t really want to get out there yet. And we work with a lot of Department of Defense and Department of Energy projects in this part of the country where we do have certain projects like that. They’re classified projects, so we do not let everybody know what we’re doing. Sometimes that’s not a good situation either.

The Project Charter

So we have this thing called a project charter. There’s a lot of examples of this. First of all, we always say when you do a project charter, you need to do it immediately. You need to write this within the first week minimum of when the project starts. Otherwise, you’re going to get into way too much detail because all you’re really trying to say is why am I doing this project?

What will make it successful? Do I have certain requirements that have to be met, especially if it’s a compliance? I know already there are certain things I have to do, so put those in here to start out with. If it has a constraint of a schedule, put the schedule dates in there. If it has a constraint on money, put the money in there.

Even though we’re going to have to figure out the disconnect between what needs to be done and how much time we have to do it and how much money we have to get that work done. But we can at least go through there. The other thing is, does it need to be approved when we get finished? And if so, who approves it? What do they have to be approving?

So that we know that when we do this, it just isn’t hanging out there. And part of the problem with these projects that never get closed, they never receive final approval. And therefore, they are kind of there but they’re not. So the key here is stating right up front, who’s going to approve this and what are they going to use at a very, very, very high level to say, yes, you did what we wanted to have done.

We say that we know who the project manager is, what their responsibility, what their authority level is. This is a whole area that I’m not going to really talk about here because it’s more involved if you’re in an organization as to who kind of has the power and control of things. If I’m in an organization like in finance and I’m doing a finance project, the people that are within finance have a very, very strong control over what’s being done. Part of that is being able to see, do I have the ability to change the budget? Do they have the ability? Do I have to get approval from them?

Those are the types of things that depending on what kind of project and what kind of organization it ends makes a huge difference. The other thing is, who’s the sponsor? Who’s the one that actually has approved the funding of this? Who is the group? And it could be a group, not just an individual, but who is that person that is going to be responsible for paying for this?

In what a number of projects I’ve done in the past, the reason why we actually wrote this project charter was to make sure that the individual or the department who was paying for this project knew they were paying for this project because it had been approved six months ahead of time as part of strategic plan, and they kind of forgot that, oh, I have committed to this. So part of this was to actually get that sponsoring organization, and it’s really supposed to come from them, supposed to be written by them, but we know good and well most of us as project managers, we write it. We let them distribute it. But we want to make sure that people understand what we’re going to be doing, who’s going to be involved, kind of at a very high level, which is why we say write it within the first couple of days or first week.

Now, once again, we know when we do any sort of writings or any sort of documents for executive, shorter is better, right? One page. If you can’t put this basic information on a one page document, you’ve gotten into too much detail. This is not the place to go into a huge dissertation about what the project is and everything about it. High level, introduce a project, focus on the most important things as we go through that.

Now, when we get into the planning phase, this is where we start to identify in more detail. This starts almost immediately. That’s why we want to get that charter out of the way to be able to say, this is the objectives, this is the milestones, high level. Now we can drop down into the more detail. What needs to be done? Who needs to be involved?

Planning Phase: Assumptions and Constraints

When will things be done? And then all these assumptions and constraints. An assumption is basically saying I assume that the following is going to be there, and therefore, I can do my work. When I worked for IBM, I was told for every assumption, there is a corresponding constraint. So if I assume that I’m going to have key individuals to work on my project, that’s an assumption.

And I’ve done all the planning based on that assumption. But then at the point in time, I also have a constraint because if those key individuals are not available, what impacts are going to have on my project? Maybe delayed, I may have to cut a portion of it out, things like that. So an assumption is what we’re basing all of these requirements and all of our planning on. The constraint is what do we know that could go wrong that could cause us to have a problem when we get in here.

Then the last thing is determining how we’re going to do this. Now the how could be how long it’s going to take, what different roles the different individuals are going to play, and there’s a lot of techniques that we can use for this entire planning phase. And I put the Cheshire cat up there because this is still my most favorite quote. When you get into planning, as Alice said, “Which road do I take?” The Cheshire cat says, “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know,” said Alice. “Then it really doesn’t matter.” And that’s unfortunately what happens when we don’t plan things. We have no idea what we’re going to end up with. We have no idea what we’re doing.

Now granted, when we’re planning something, we don’t necessarily want to spend months planning something that’s only going to be a two month effort. So you do the planning in proportion to the amount of time you have, the complexity of the project. And we have some ways where what we’ll also talk about is that we do some high level planning to start out with and then as we get closer in, we’ll do more detailed planning as we go. I don’t know everything when I start and I don’t need to, but at least need to know what roads I’m going to take and that’s the key. Just as an aside, I think everybody should go back and read Alice in Wonderland.

You will be surprised how many quotes are in that book that we use every day and especially that are applicable to business. Just as an aside, it’s just fascinating to read it as an adult.

Requirements and Facilitated Sessions

So we talk about requirements. We talk about what? Somebody said, well, what’s the difference between a requirement and a specification? There really isn’t anything. It’s just a term we use. Most often today, we use this in what we call facilitated sessions. And the facilitated session is where we get additional people involved. We get everybody in the room together so they can talk to each other, so they can discuss.

The picture we have here actually was a session we did at PMI a few weeks ago, as part of one of our group efforts. And we were facilitating different outreach type of, requirements and how we might do them. You’re building on information from everybody involved. You’re facilitating it only to make sure that the information is captured, that it stays on track. We keep going through them.

Now it says that this requirement should be specific and detailed enough to allow verification and validation. Okay. Here I’m dropping into the words verification validation. Verification is making sure we’re doing the right thing. Validation is approving. It’s making sure that what you asked me to do, I’ve done and you could not the verification would have been done I’ve done it correctly, but the validation is I approve it and we can move on.

When we get into these requirements, we get into a lot of different things that obviously could take much more time than we have available. So we may need to be able to prioritize this. I put this cartoon in here. I’ve had it in most of my slides for a number of years because I think it kind of says if we don’t talk about these requirements, if we don’t discuss them, everybody has a different idea of what’s going to be produced, what’s going to be the result.

And we need to be able to have this so that we can all discuss and make sure we’re saying the right thing, we’re saying the same thing, we’re all agreeing on it.

Work Breakdown Structure

We have this thing called a work breakdown structure. And it’s kind of everything you need to do. And I’m going to digress just a second. I mentioned this earlier. One of the areas of, PMI talks about teaching project management as a life skill and teaching it to young kids, elementary. The Northern Italy chapter actually has put together a program on project management where they basically do this by means of post-its. They have a project for the kids to do. They give them all post-its and they say write down the different things that need to be done and then go stick them up on the wall. And then they turn around and draw a tree where they can kind of see the different types of groupings that need to be done and everybody goes up and moves their post-its onto the right branch of the tree.

I actually did this with my graduate students and I do it when I’m working with a team of customers who’ve never worked on a project before Because they have the ability to say these are the things we think need to be done and this is how they group. But it’s a physical activity and obviously, I don’t recognize the new term, but, this is part of a new way of learning too, being able to do this. But we work off of this to be able to understand what needs to be done. We actually use this because we were trying both my husband and I being project managers, decided we better teach our daughters. We did this for both of their weddings.

And we have the post-its that were on the wall for the different areas that had to be done on the wedding. It was kind of a kind of an overkill in some areas, but it did point out a lot of things that we had left out. So part of it is being able to understand what’s there.

Stakeholders and Project Team

Once we start to understand what we’re trying to do, now we have to figure out who is going to be there. Talked previously a little bit about stakeholders, talk the project team.

As we said, stakeholders are anybody who could be impacted by the project or could impact the project. We need to understand those people. We need to understand where they’re coming from. Why there would be involved in the project? What interest they might have? What influence they could have on us? Are there interdependencies between those various stakeholders that, well, if this one says this, this one automatically is going to say the opposite. Or if I can sell the concept to one, they can help me sell it to the second one. And what kind of potential impact?

Once again, working with some of the DOD type of projects that I have or my students have in the past, one of my students said, you know who my biggest stakeholder and the one that causes me the most problems? That’s lobbyists. Because if I’m working on a government project, there are lobbyists back in the background that could affect what we’re going to be doing. They could stop it. They could increase it. I don’t even know who they are. I don’t know what they’re doing. They’re those blind stakeholders that we have to understand they’re out there. How am I going to figure out what they’re doing? I’m still not sure how we do that, but at least recognizing that they exist is one of the key.

Now, the project team as we talk about it are the people who are actually going to help us do the work. And I said, this could be the fact that I have a supporting expert. I have the nursery down the street that I can go ask questions of. I actually have people that I can contract out to. We call those the sellers. They’re selling their services to us.

I could have business partners. In this case, you have a partnership here between the university and the PMI chapter. That means on this project, this effort that had a beginning and an end, which will be after today, the there these are different people that are on the team. They have to be able to communicate. They have to have different roles.

Now the customer and who represents them because obviously most cases we can’t go to every customer or everybody who’s going to be involved in this, we have certain representatives who represent those customers as we go through. They’re all part of the team. They may be part of a core team that works directly on this or they may be an extended team where we continue to move out and get certain people involved when and if needed. Very definitely in today’s world, it varies on the culture, the scope, and the location of these members. Erica is working virtually from here.

Doesn’t stop anything. She’s in New Mexico. We’re in Southern California. That is today’s world. We have to understand that we will have people on our team in different locations.

Virtual Teams

We could have full time people that are all co-located in one location and it used to be this was the preferred way. We’re realizing that is not happening, not available, not able to happen anymore. So we have to be able to move into either part time teams where we bring people in whether when they’re needed or we actually go into a virtual world where we have the team virtually connected. Now virtual teams have little or no none of the face to face, the actual people being able to talk to each other. They’re enabled through technology.

And we all know kind of some of the drawbacks to that. Not being able to figure out what people are really saying when they’re writing an email because of the wording they use or there’s no emotion in it unless somebody forgets to turn off the cap locks and you think they’re screaming and they’re not. But those are the things that can really add to a team. They can also cause a lot of challenges. The positive is you’re able to pick up on expertise from people all over. You’re not constrained to what you have in that local area.

I can even say that in my case with the let’s go back to my landscaping thing. I have a virtual team. It’s called the Internet. I can go out there and get advice from experts that don’t even know they’re part of the team that I’m working on unless I actually communicate directly with them.

Those employees that are working remotely and more and more this is happening, different shifts, different hours, different days, sometimes a challenge. Obviously, if you’re working with a team member who’s over on the other side of the world, we have hour differences. But you can look at it as positive because when I was working in that situation, we would work all day. We would do testing. We’d figure out what it needed, what was working, what wasn’t.

We sent a message at the end of the day. They would work while we were sleeping. We would have a meeting first thing in the morning to say this is what we did. This is what we were able to do. So we, in effect, were able to work a twenty-four hour shift by having different members of the team working.

Now did we have to have some meetings early in the morning and late at night? Absolutely. But the benefit outweighed those basic constraints that we came up with. The other thing is just the whole cost of getting everybody together. It is huge.

That’s one of the reasons why so much of the training that we’re doing now is going into a virtual online world because people don’t have the luxury or the ability cost wise to be able to go to a location to take a course anymore. It just makes it unable to be done. Some of the challenges though, obviously, misunderstanding, especially when we have words that are used that people don’t understand. We talk about a communication model where there’s noise between what somebody says and what somebody hears. Being able to feel isolated.

Virtual Teams: Challenges and Considerations

There are certain individuals who cannot work in this type of a role. And as a project manager, we need to recognize this. They need that face to face contact. They need the people connection. If you put them out by themselves, pretty soon you’ll see them leave.

And they’ll go to another organization or another job where they can be connected. The technology has a cost to it. So, obviously, if we have one project who wants to have a virtual team and the rest of the projects are all being done in a co-located manner, we probably can’t do that because the cost of technology, as you all have seen here, is very, very high. But you trade off the benefits of the cost and you look at what additional information can you provide, how can you connect people through this technology at that point. I mentioned briefly the time zone differences.

You also have a lot of personal skills that are going to have to come into play. And especially when you start talking about how you’re going to communicate and how you’re going to resolve any sort of conflict. And especially even understanding if there is a conflict because if you don’t see 2 people together that walk by each other and will not look each other in the eye because they’re in remote locations but they will never speak to each other in however way we have to speak. You may not even know there’s a conflict there. So that’s another challenge that we have to look at.

Now let’s go one step further. Virtual teams that are within a particular geographic area as opposed to globally spread. We end up having a lot of cultural diversity, which in Southern California is not as great a thing to handle because of all the multi-cultural areas and people that we have in this part of the country. That isn’t the same if you go back into certain other parts of The United States. They do not have the extra cultures, the multi-cultural environment.

People that are in the Midwest and sometimes in the Southeast, they’ve been there for five and six generations and they do things their way. It’s a very difficult culture to work into. We could have a lot of different industries that we don’t have, especially here in Southern California that we’re working with in some of these other countries. Different languages. I actually taught a class a number of years ago for Dow Chemical and I was teaching in Holland.

And I’m speaking in English, and then I give them an exercise to do. And I walk from table to table, and I’m listening to these people. And I walk by and they’re talking French. And then I walk around, I come back. Now they’re talking Dutch. And I come back a little bit later and they may be talking German. And I’m going, okay. Hold on, guys. How do you know what language you’re speaking in? Well, we all know all of these languages enough to be able to communicate and whoever starts speaking chooses the language they’re more comfortable with and the rest of us understand that.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the way in The United States. I think we force everybody to use English even if it is not their first language. And as a result, we have the problem. Now when I was over there, I spoke Spanish. I didn’t speak any of these other ones. Well, there was one guy who spoke Italian. So we kind of could communicate because it was close enough, but I felt very inadequate when I’m working with these people understanding, you know, all these various languages enough to be able to communicate and understand. And if for instance, something came up and the person that’s speaking German got kind of far off and was using terms words that the rest didn’t understand, they would tell them to switch back. And English became the common language, but still, when they’re doing an exercise, when they’re working like that, the different language makes a difference.

Effective Communication in Virtual Teams

So part of what we have to do when we’re working in this virtual and especially global, this is even more important to look at the effective communication because that communication has to be timely. It has to be clear. And how do we know if it’s clear? We need the feedback to be able to say, did you understand what I just said? Because a lot of times what we think we’ve said obviously doesn’t happen. We also need to be able to have this mutual trust of each other. We need to be able to work together and yet interdependently so that we can get the task accomplished.

Project Scheduling

Okay. So once we identify what we’re trying to do and who’s going to help us do it, then we have to start figuring out when. Unfortunately, I think this is all that people think project management is. It’s a Microsoft project schedule. And it’s not. It is not at all. You can do a schedule without using a software tool. And in fact, those third graders, after they took a picture of their tree, then they asked them to take the post-its off and go to a different wall and put them in the order in which they needed to be done. Guess what? That was their schedule. They were able without saying anything about dependencies or any sort of relationships or anything else. I need to do this before I can do something else. They knew that. We all know that.

You know, you don’t plant bulbs until you dug up the ground and put some good dirt in. Well, you can, but you might not have anything grow. So part of that you have to understand. Yes. A lot of times we do use a scheduling tool to help us do this because it allows us when we make a little change to be able to figure out what the impact of that is.

So what happens if it rains? And it actually does rain in Southern California, and there’s certain things that get delayed as a result. Did we put anything into our schedule to say, okay, if it rains on next Tuesday, what am I going to do? Well, next Tuesday, we might have an idea it might rain even though it doesn’t mean it will. But next month, is it going to rain next month? Don’t know. Is it going to snow in Las Vegas? It did a week ago. It did a couple of years ago to the point where it closed down the airport. Do they now start putting things into their project to say during the wintertime it might snow? And if it does, it’s a major stoppage.

So what we have to identify is what do we need to do to be able to figure out taking what we have to do, who’s going to do it, we have to figure out now when. When does the task need to be done? When are the resources going to be available to do that? The one thing we always laugh about is the fact that if something has to be inspected, that’s probably going to throw your project schedule off more than anything else because you have to be completed with what they’re going to inspect before they come to inspect it.

And if they don’t come when you’ve scheduled them to come, who knows when that inspection is going to get done and go back to city center. They’re taking apart one of those buildings brick by brick or wall by wall because it wasn’t inspected at the right time and the inspection wasn’t correct, they can’t implode the building, but they have to take it down because the inspection was not done at the proper time and they continue to work. So once again, we have to understand when things have to be done.

Critical Path and Critical Chain

We have a couple of methods we talk about, critical path, critical chain. You’ve all heard about the critical path. It’s the longest path. It’s the path. These are the things that have to be done. And if anything’s delayed, your whole project’s going to get delayed. And we try to make sure we manage that that that path.

There’s also this thing called critical chain. And if you’re not familiar with it, I highly recommend that you read “The Goal,” g-o-a-l, by Goldratt. He talks about this as being a it’s a theory of constraints, but he writes it as a novel, as a story. And you can visualize what has to be done. But the idea is that there are certain critical resources, and if they are not available and if they’re not working and not there when they need to be done, they impact the whole thing.

And he talks about what you need to do to be able to keep the project moving. Now, do we have critical resources on our projects? Absolutely. We have somebody that has to come do something and if they’re not here, this thing could have a problem. I think in some cases, I’m one of those critical resources because if I hadn’t been here on time this morning, this might have had a problem.

Could I do it virtually over my phone as we’re driving up the freeway? Probably not the same quality. Part of what we have to look at is do we need to put some buffers in? Do we fancy word to say. We need some wiggle room. We need some things put in there so that we make sure. So I come early to make sure I’m here on time. Don’t want to get into that portion.

Project Approaches and Phases

So once we figured out what, actually, I have to figure out the why, then the what, the who, the when. We start to talk about how we’re going to do this and there’s a number of different approaches that we talk about and then there’s a lot of detail that we can choose.

I don’t want to go into a whole lot on this, but just there’s terminology and there’s concepts here that we probably need to understand. That’s what we call phase to phase relationships where we have certain things that have to be done and until we are completely sure of that, we don’t go to the next step. Obviously, you don’t start building a house until you have blueprints and you have certain blueprints approved. Now how much Do I go into where my closet is on that blueprint if I’m building a house? Probably. Do I understand how the closet’s going to be laid out where the rungs? No. I’m not going to get to that point yet. But I do have to have certain things that must be completed in order for me to go to the next step. That’s what the sequential is talking about.

When I get into the overlapping, it may be that I say, okay, well, we have the blueprint for this portion of the house, but we don’t have the upstairs blueprint yet. We know the basic. We know where the load bearing walls have to be, so we can put those in. But we’re not going to do the rest. So we start to overlap some of these in order to shorten the lake that schedule.

Adaptive Life Cycles and Agile

We have a new one that we talk about when we talk about adaptive life cycles, and this is usually applied to agile. And I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time on agile, but I do want to talk a little bit about it because in our world today, everything has to be shortened. Everything has to be smaller, has to be faster. We’ve got to get this out. Well, the problem is is when we do something like this, if we wait let’s go back to the course itself.

If we wait until the course is totally developed before we start doing the marketing for it, we’re going to have some problems because we’re going to have it out there and then we have the marketing for it. It could also be that what we do is let’s say it’s a 3 session program. What we may want to do is say, let’s get the first session and then we can determine what worked, what didn’t work and then we can reprioritize what the second session is because maybe what we learned is that what we thought originally was going to be part of the second session is really not as important as a few other things.

So we basically chunk the work into smaller groups and say, this is what needs to go first. We’ll try it. We’ll see what works. We’ll prioritize that. When we get to the next one, we kind of know what we’re going to do, but we figure out that, well, maybe we reprioritized a little bit. We change some things of the way we did it so it works better. These are what we call iterations.

We usually have a fixed time that says we will do what we can in this amount of time or within this amount of money. And then we’ll when we get to that point, we’ll decide, okay. What do I do next? So rather than re-landscaping my entire house, I may say, okay. I’m going to concentrate on the front yard. I have this amount of time. I have this amount of money. I’ll do what I can, and then I’ll decide, okay. Now in the next iteration, do I do more in the backyard or do I move to the backyard? Where’s my priority?

So I’m able to change and adapt. This especially has to be done if you’re working in any sort of marketing effort because the world changes. So as we said, we take this information. We pre-reprioritize it. We figure out how much we can do within that period of time.

Retrospective Review and Continuous Improvement

And then we incorporate some things that are probably some of the best practices for project management and that is what they call a retrospective review. At the end of each one of these time periods, the whole team sits back and says, what did we do right that we need to continue doing? What could we do better? And let’s immediately implement it on the next time, not wait till the entire project that takes couple of years to be able to make that, but to be able to go through and do that. So once we’ve done the planning, now we can start performing.

Wrong. Once we’ve started the planning, then we can start to perform because we’re always going to overlap. Actually, I want to go back here a second because I had another couple of words in here, and I realized I don’t have the slides for them. And that has to do with rolling wave and progressive elaboration. They’re really fancy ways to say how am I going to figure out what I’m going to do.

Rolling Wave Planning

And I mentioned this that I don’t always know exactly what I need to do at the beginning. So what I do is I put almost like a timeline together and I say, okay, I think and I’m going to continue to use my gardening exercise. You can tell where I’ve been the last month or so. It’s spring. I actually had my first daffodil this morning, so spring is officially here.

But we’ll lay out this and say this is where I’m going to start, the front yard, then I think I’m going to go the back, then I think I’m going to come back to the front, etcetera. So I have that line out there. I know that there are certain things that I do on the front yard that are going to also be done on the back because I’m doing kind of the same thing. So I will put information at a little bit less detail for the backyard. Now what I do third, maybe I know what it is and maybe I don’t even know.

Maybe it’s just a placeholder to say, okay, that’s phase 3. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll figure out when I get there. That’s rolling wave. Rolling wave says you concentrate on what you’re doing now. You kind of know what’s going to come next, and you may have an idea of the out time. You don’t try to figure out everything right now because things change regardless which methodology you’re using.

Progressive Elaboration

Now progressive elaboration rather than going across goes down. So I’m now doing my front yard. I know that’s what I’m doing. I need to very detail go into exactly what needs to be done. When I get to the backyard, I will do the same. I will drill down terminology we use in business intelligence, but I will get more and more detail when I get to that point in time.

So when I’m doing the planning, regardless what kind of project you’re doing, you need to figure out what do you know, what do you think you know, kind of what’s out there in a vision of the future. But don’t waste the time trying to drill these other two down at this point in time because I don’t know enough. Concentrate on what you’re doing right now. Allow yourself the ability to make that modification.

Planning and Performing

So that’s why when we talk about moving from planning into performing or doing, we actually don’t completely finish planning and then move on to actually starting to perform. We start the planning. We start the activities that need to be done. And then we look at how that, as we’re doing the work, how does that apply back to what I said was going to be done?

Now go back to my Cheshire cat. If I don’t know where I’m going, then I guess I don’t need to figure out I can go any place. Well, I also don’t know whether I’ve accomplished anything either. So part of what we do in the performing phase is we look at what we said we were going to do, and we look at what we’ve actually accomplished.

And when it rains, we look at and say, oh, shoot. I was supposed to be here by this Saturday. I’m not. So what do I have to do? I have to make some minor adjustments. Now if I had enough wiggle room in there to say, okay. What I was going to do next Saturday, I could either do next Saturday or the following Saturday, that’s fine. Based on resource, do I need to contact them? What do I need to do? So what I’m looking at is what I thought I was going to get accomplished and what I’ve actually been able to do and what adjustments I need to make.

Change Management

Now sometimes, we have to be a little hard-nosed and we have to say that was not in the original plan. Now that’s a project manager’s job. In my case, I have a sub project manager who’s the one that tells me that wasn’t what you originally wanted to do. That’s a change request. You have to get it approved, you know, because he’s a project manager too. We talk this type of language at home, unfortunately. But it’s a case of saying, this is what you said you were going to do. Don’t change your mind midstream without figuring out what impact it has on what you said you were going to do.

Now, once again, go back to that agile approach. Agile approach says I only need to be able to concentrate on a short period of time, like two weeks. And therefore, if I do that, I know that during that time, this is what I’m going to work on. When I get to the end of that, I will reprioritize now what I’m going to do in the next set of time. That way I allow change to happen, but not when I’m midstream and doing something.

Now granted, this can happen. You may have to. I mean, when we get that piece of concrete, that was not in the schedule. I had to do something about it. So we had to look at it and say, okay, what impact is this going to have on us? How much time is it going to take away from what we had planned? Do we need to go get some other piece of equipment to get this thing out of the dirt?

Those are all the types of things that you do when you manage change. We talked about very strong management of change to be able to work through this. But the key during this time is communicate. Communicate with everybody. Communicate with the people on the team. Communicate with the sponsor. Communicate with the stakeholders. If I’m working with things, I’m talking. I’m communicating. Now communicating can be written, can be verbal, can be different ways depending on what I need to do.

Project Variances and Corrections

One of the tools we use and this is a little detailed, but we need to figure out when we put this plan together, we will never ever do it exactly the way we said we were going to do. It just is impossible. Even if you’ve done this type of project twenty, thirty times. Think about a pilot taking off. A pilot takes off. He’s done it millions of times. He has a checklist to tell him what to do. He also keeps track of when things are not exactly the way they’re supposed to be. But he also understands that there’s some wiggle room between what it’s supposed to be and what is still allowed.

Obviously, with the crash that we had a couple of days ago up in Santa Monica, there was a case where the pilot understood the problem was farther than the allowable variance, And he started saying, I have a problem. I need to go down. I need to go back. So part of that is understanding where I thought I was going to be, where I am, and is that within that wiggle room, or do I need to correct something to get it back on track? Or am I seeing a problem that’s starting to occur? And therefore, I’m going to have to put some preventative things in to make sure this doesn’t continue to occur.

And that’s part of what we’re doing in here. Once again, we talked about those change requests. When I’m on a project within an organization, there’s always going to be change that’s going to have to happen. And we talk about there being 3 types of changes:

1. Corrective action: That’s where I need to fix something that I’m doing today that’s not really being done correctly. It may be I have the wrong resource. It may be that I need to reschedule some things. That’s a corrective action.
2. Preventative action: Being able to make a change so that things don’t continue to go south, so that they get better as we’re working through. Preventative measures that we can put in place to make sure we stay on course.
3. Defect repair: Obviously there’s a problem. We need to fix it. And that fix may take time, may take resources, may take money, whatever is happening, we need to be able to fix that.

Well, if we’re not monitoring what we’re doing, we may not realize that we have defects out there. We have just gone through and seen a lot of situations where companies are in really bad trouble right now because they weren’t on top of things that were happening or they knew about it and didn’t communicate about it. And therefore, being able to fix those defects because they waited so long to do it, it made a huge impact just to the company itself and the brand.

Proactive Project Management

Now, one of the things that we talk about as far as a project manager, two key things. One is they want you we should be preventative and proactive. Preventative in trying to make sure we prevent problems from occurring either because we put things in place, we put time in our schedules so there’s some slippage there in case we need it. But we also need to be proactive. We have to be looking for things and trying to stay on top of it rather than sitting back and saying, okay, well, the project’s going fine. I’ll wait and see if somebody comes into my office and tells me there’s a problem and then I’ll figure out what to do. It doesn’t work. We’ve got to be able to stay on top of things and see that something is happening.

Now obviously I fly a lot when I’m doing a lot of my teaching. Because I fly a lot, I realize certain things happen. I know when a flight is going to be canceled before anybody ever says it because I’m proactive as far as listening to what’s being said. I was traveling with a team member a few months ago, and I said to them I said, look. We’re going to have a problem. I can tell. You call the rental car company and get us a rental car. I will call the hotel and get a hotel just in case. We were ahead of everybody because of that, because I was able to be proactive. I also knew that on the rental car, I could cancel at no cost. The hotel, we waited a little bit longer because we knew we would incur a cancellation cost.

Effective Communication

So when we talk about one of the other pieces that I mentioned, the effective communication, I guess the most important thing to say is that, first of all, you need to be as concise as possible, especially in communications that are telling people what to do, what you expect to have done, etcetera. So it’s right there. You need to put it in the right format, whether it needs to be verbal or written. If it’s within a contract, it’s usually specified how things have to be communicated. Making sure it’s done at the right time, not waiting until later on and saying, oh, I should have told you that, but you know what? I was busy and things were going on.

Making sure it’s the right impact. Let’s not scream wolf when it doesn’t need to be. If you start doing that screaming wolf, what’s going to end up happening is after you’ve done that 2 or 3 times, nobody’s going to listen to you anymore. So you need to understand how important this communication is, who it needs to go to, etcetera, as we go through that.

And then the appropriate context depending on who we’re communicating to. Obviously, most of us in business have been told do not send anything out to the general public. Let somebody from public relations or whatever determine how it’s going to be worded, who’s going to say it, not you. So once again, that’s the appropriate contact we need to have.

Because communication is so important, this is probably the one plan that I do on a real project within a business. And what I’m understanding here is 2 things. Who do I have to communicate to and what communications am I going to deliver to those people? How am I going to deliver it? What method I’m going to use? The amount of detail?

Communication Planning and Management

Because obviously, if I do a status report, the status I give to one individual may be very different from the amount of detail that I give to a higher manager. What is the time frame? How often do I deliver this information? We all get these emails that are blasted out to us telling us about meetings or whatever. And sometimes they are way too frequent and to the point where we get so many, we start to ignore them.

So we have to once again look at when we send it out, how often we send it out, who are the people they’re going to provide the information to you so you can communicate it out? And what information do they need to provide? When do they need to provide it to you so you have time to compile it to put it out? I put this constraint in here before things that were happening right now, within the government because it’s very important to understand. What are the rules and regulations regarding communications?

What can you say? How do you say it? Where is it kept? What are all those various things that you need to know? Every organization and greater, within the type of business have regulations regarding communications now. As a project manager, we all need to be familiar with those.

Now, also, we talked about timing of people that are coming in to inspect. If you have to have approval of a document before it can be sent out, you need to figure out how long it’s going to take to get that approval. Because if you say I’m going to get the information on Thursday, send it out on Friday, and I’m going to assume that 3 people are going to be able to sign off on this so I can get it out by end of day Friday, And one of those people are out of town. What do I do?

So I need to be able to figure out what is the workflow? What is the steps that have to be done to get that thing approved before I put it out? So I have the work. It’s progressing. We’re going to assume at this point in time we did what we said we were going to do, at least for the first phase.

Project Closure and Documentation

So we’re going to celebrate. But before we celebrate, there’s a few things. Remember the old cartoon that nothing is done until the paperwork is done? That’s what we’re talking about here. We need to be able to say, what did we do? What worked, what didn’t work, taking all of the documents, all the information that we need to, putting it away. Why? Because we hope that when we do the next project, we can find it.

I’m a hoard on paper. I’m a hoard on things that I’ve done. I probably have a copy of every presentation and every course I’ve ever taught because there are times when I’m looking for that one picture or that one sentence on something that I want to reuse. And that’s what we’re talking about here. Taking what you’ve done and putting it aside so that you can learn from it or other people can learn from it.

Also, we talk about if we have people that are working on a project, it’s really important for us to give feedback back to their management as to how they did, what their involvement was, doing recommendations. I mean, even as much as LinkedIn, how important is it if somebody is looking to potentially hire a person, they go to LinkedIn, they look at the recommendations that that person has received.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about. Doing an assessment, an appraisal of whoever’s been doing that to be able to give them some information that they can use future. They did a hard they did a really great job. Maybe they didn’t do as great a job, but you can always find something positive. Now if you can’t say something nice, figure out how to say something nice. You know, you have to do that. And then we celebrate the project success. We have a time. Now granted more and more organizations are cutting the budget for that. There’s ways to celebrate without spending a lot of money.

So part of this also is to be able to, as I say, validate. I need to have what I said in the beginning I was going to do. Need to make sure that that actually has been completed and approved, and I’m going to do a comparison between what I said I was going to do versus what I have. Okay. Some of these are some of the deliverables.

I want to keep track of things that were not approved because I want to be able to go back and say, why were they not approved? What do I need to do to not have that happen again? So as I’m going through this validation process, I’m trying to make sure that everything we said we were going to do has been done and accepted. There’s also this last piece that has to do with what we call administrative closure. That’s the paperwork.

And I know we all hate it and I know we all try not to do it but it is so critical for us to be able to take the time to put this together both for our own standpoint of understanding what we did but also to be able to say if we want to do this again in the future and maybe it’s not do this exact thing but it’s something similar, What can we learn from it? So being able to put that all together.

Project Manager Competencies

Now that the project’s finished, we need to sit back and look at ourselves as project manager. And what are the types of competencies that we need to have as a project manager? First of all, if we are truly a project manager and managing a team and an effort, we probably need to have some idea of what we should be doing.

Even if it’s just to that high level of understanding why, what, who, when, how, and then actually monitoring what’s going on. But we also need to be able to perform. We need to be able to figure out how we’re going to accomplish what we’re doing. Now once again, unless you’re a project of 1 person, you are talking about working with other people. You’re talking about being able to motivate those people, to be able to communicate with those people as to what needs to be done effectively so they know exactly what you want done as opposed to a picture of here’s what I want and here’s what you think, being able to go through there.

There’s also some behaviors that are really critical and they are becoming more critical in today’s world. And that has to do with some of the attitudes we have towards each other as a team between our stakeholders and ourselves. Some core personality characteristics that we need to be able to realize When we’re managing or leading, it’s a diff it’s very different than doing everything on my own when I’m only trying to tell myself what to do.

I have an almost 2 year old granddaughter, and watching how she’s learning and how she’s picking up characteristics from the people as she comes into contact are shaping her personality. Now she is exposed to a lot of different people, and as a result, you can see she has a very broad spectrum of how she communicates with different people on how she reacts to situation.

The other thing is as a project manager, we know this project has those constraints or at least we should have figured out what those constraints were. And we need to be able to figure out how we’re going to get from the why are we doing this and what are we doing to actually accomplishing it and yet staying within those constraints. Now as we said, when we start looking at the constraints of cost and time, maybe we have to make some trade offs there. And those are things that we have to know.

When I was working on a casino in Mississippi after hurricane Katrina, the executives decided we will reopen one year to the day of hurricane Katrina. And I’m looking at what needed to be done going, there is no way we can get all of this accomplished. I mean, this is a major casino. And so I started saying, okay. So what are some of the things that I might be able to delay? And how am I going to put together a story to sell this?

One of the things that if you remember, hurricane Katrina hit the end of the summer. Well, if you look at a retail operation, especially in a casino, the end of the summer, they’re doing a sale to get rid of all their merchandise between before they bring in their Thanksgiving Christmas stuff. Right? So I thought, why don’t I delay that opening of that retail from Aug. 30 until at least Oct. 30? That way I have a don’t have to concentrate on it right now and I can put it in here. So I knew even though I had a constraint, when when the CEO said we will open 1 day as to the day that the hurricane hit, he didn’t say what was going to open.

So I use that as my opening to say, okay. So can you tell me, do we need all 13 restaurants open on that day, Or can I open just the buffet and the steakhouse and the coffee shop? And then maybe open the next one a month or so later so I can do this rolling wave, progressive elaboration thing, without using those terms for him. But the idea of being able to look at the constraint and figure out what do I do to work within that constraint.

Interpersonal Skills and Soft Skills

So what PMI has done is they have started to move from that technical, these are the things that the project manager must do, put together a charter and a schedule and a scope and all of these variances and start to look at these things called interpersonal skills. They’re also known as soft skills. They are competencies to help project managers and leaders and people in those type of situations be able to better handle some of the ways that we need to work.

Some of them have to do with emotional intelligence. And I’m not going to go into this here, but this is an area that every should have at least a basic understanding of what emotional intelligence means and how to apply it when you’re working with a group and especially as a leader of that group. The group facilitation, we mentioned that earlier. This is an area where learning how to be a facilitator, learning how to get people to interact and communicate and and put ideas together. Huge skill that needs to be done.

It it it could be looked upon as a technical skill, I don’t. I look at it as more of a way to get things accomplished. The last one talks about the balance of ethical, interpersonal, and conceptual skills that you need to use as you look at things that are occurring and how are you going to react to it. Obviously, you can look at it and say, well, if I ignore it, it’s going to go away. Now what’s the impact? What do I need to do ethically as well as for the better of the entire group?

In the PMBOK that I mentioned earlier, there’s an entire appendix now that has to do with these different skills. Skills on leadership, skills on team building. How do you build teams? How do you motivate teams? How do you communicate? What are the different ways of communicating? Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. How do you influence people without being a dictator, but still being able to get the job accomplished? How do you make decisions?

Are they going to be group decisions? Are they going to be, okay, I have a majority that rules or am I going to have a plurality and let people that have different things go? Understanding political and cultural awareness. Depending on the project you’re in, depending on the organization, depending on where you live, this is all something that we need to be able to understand. Understanding a little bit about negotiation, Give and take.

That win win situation versus a win lose situation. I read recently where they said something about on a team, don’t do a competition. Because when you do a competition, somebody loses. And as a result, do something so everybody wins as opposed to this person winning and this person losing. Sometimes we kind of do that without thinking. We need to look at that. How do I build trust? What are the different ways?

How am I looked upon as a project manager? Am I looked upon somebody who’s an expert in project management or an expert in CRM? I obviously wasn’t expert in putting in a phone system. But by the time I had to do that, I had another skill that I had because of my other work, I had the expertise associated with me to say we can handle this. How do we handle conflict management? Huge term, huge concept and something that we can talk about at later time. How do we coach?

How do we mentor other people? Because regardless, even when I was trying to teach my daughters, I was helping them do their wedding but I was also trying to coach them and mentor them and trying to break down what need to be done. Reduce the stress level as to different areas as we went into that.

Kind of one last thing I want to talk about. PMI has this code of ethics, which is a code of conduct that is meant to be applied to all project managers who either apply, who have a certification, who volunteer with PMI.

PMI Code of Ethics

And it’s mainly to be able to make sure that if an organization has a project manager, that they can understand they follow certain rules. It also helps us as individuals look at that ethical decision. When should I do something? Should I not? Especially conflict of interest.

And then being able to look at it profession wide. Project management is a profession. There’s a lot of people. The PMP, which is the project management certification, is thirty years old this year. There are thousands of people that are certified. There’s thousands of project managers. There’s also a need for even more in the future. We know we don’t have that. But we need to understand how we should act.

Our code of ethics basically has 4 aspects to it:

1. It has the aspect that you must be responsible. Must take on the responsibility to do what you say you’re going to do.
2. You need to respect the people that you’re working with. Your team members, your stakeholders, everybody. You have to have that respect for them.
3. You need to be fair. You can’t take and have some people do things that you don’t have others, making that fairness.
4. And last, being honest, telling the truth, not lying, not covering up as we go through.

So as we say, you know, we have both aspirational and mandatory standards. The mandatory are things that we must do, like we must not cheat, we must not lie. If we have a contract, we have to meet the needs of the contract. You don’t have the conflict of interest, things like that. In fact, well, most of us have to sign an additional conflict of interest statement every time we do anything, which is fine.

I found this quote by Roy Disney and I thought it was really critical, really appropriate. “It’s not hard to make decisions once you know what your values are.” And that’s basically what this is. It’s being able to understand where you should be going and therefore where do you want to go.

Okay. I’m going to skip this because of time. Just one last kind of plug. PMI has an academic program that they present. That’s part of why I’m here because that’s what I represent is the outreach to the academic community. We have a number of different things that we are doing as far as, material, etcetera. But trying to work with both the practitioners that are becoming project managers, students, especially people that are like MBAs that will become a project manager when they get a job whether they hold that title or not because they will have work that has to be done.

Anyway, I hope that I’ve at least been able to expose some of the concepts of project management, to you and be able to have you understand some of the basic good practices that we have that we try to do. I thank you.

Q&A Session

GRETA BLASH: Great. Savannah, thank you so much. We’ll take some questions now. I’ll start with some questions from our, virtual attendees and give our in person audience here a chance to gather their thoughts.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] The first question comes from, someone who’s interested in the field and had a question about, the best, path to take, best career path. And the question is if if project management requires both project management skills and knowledge in addition to knowledge of the particular field, whether it’s manufacturing or logistics or IT or whatever it might be. What what typically is the path? Do do do project the project managers that are out there, do they normally develop the project management skills first and then add the, substantive skills, or does it tend to be vice versa? Were there people in the field that then add project management expertise on on top of their expertise in manufacturing or IT or whatever the case may be.

GRETA BLASH: Well, I’m looking at some of the people here that are project managers saying, okay. I hope I say this right. Let me tell you where I came from. K? I started out working on a project. I started out as a programmer years ago, became an analyst, designer, and then moved into more of a team leader type of thing. So in my thing is, I think you either have a direction that you want to go that incorporates people and teamwork to get things accomplished as opposed to being that person that sits and is kind of a loner by themselves. As a result, I mean, somebody who’s a technical person who just is really happy sitting in a corner doing code or laying concrete or whatever may not have the the desire to become a project manager. Whereas if they get to the point where they want to start maybe moving up and managing the team, that’s where it kind of goes. So there are certain skills, there are certain events. I mean, we see a lot of project managers who know the tasks, but they don’t have the people skills. It has to be a mix of the two.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Great. This this question gets into some of the softer skills you were alluding to towards the end of your presentation. This this one outlines a particular situation. As a project manager, what do you do in a situation where you have, say, an eager team member who wants to take responsibility for an area where he or she doesn’t really have the appropriate skills? And, the project manager might prefer to bring on someone who, is a little more experienced in in this area. Is the project manager’s responsibility solely to make the call that gets the project done most efficient efficiently? Or in that scenario, might there be some room for, softer considerations like the morale of that eager team member or helping that team member build additional skills?

GRETA BLASH: Yeah. I mean, I look at it and say, very seldom was I actually able to determine who was going to be on my team. I usually walk into a contract situation especially where the team is there and I have to work with those people. Some of them being overly qualified and therefore thinking they can do this stuff by themselves. So I let them teach me. If they if they think they’re over I mean, if they think they really know what they’re doing, they’re eager. Hey. Give you know, participate with me. Now on the other hand, you know, can I map or match them up with somebody that doesn’t have those skills? Or for instance, let’s say they have the technical skills in an area but they may not have some of the soft skills that are needed by pairing them up with somebody that they can work together to kind of rub off on each other. But I think the key is when we work with team members, we have to get the job done, yes. But we also have to make sure that the team that is working on here, actually can can accomplish it. And very seldom, do we have the ability to choose who that who that team member is as well as being able to release a team member? That’s the sticky part. Is it at point what point in time? And I’ve had to do that in a couple of situations where I’ve had to figure out how how to move that person off the project while still allowing them to save face. So a lot of times, it’s a matter of finding another project that I can say is more critical. Here you go type of thing. But I think it’s the project manager depends on, once again, that organizational structure I didn’t talk about That depends on a lot on how much responsibility and authority the project manager has for that team.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Another question about the, the field more broadly. How, how do business leaders today, in your opinion, value kind of formal project management skills? In other words, are they increasingly likely to hire or engage a trained project manager? Or are they, or as opposed to being apt to just make the assignment to someone in that, in the the the relevant department. Does that make any sense?

GRETA BLASH: Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of it has to do, once again, the organization structure you’re working in. Because in a functional organization, we talk about the fact that most often the projects are done within that functional organization. They’re managed by the functional manager, not really a PM, and they’re met they’re staffed by the people within that function. They don’t really, a lot of times, have those skills. Now, also, there’s a cost associated and we see that a lot of times. And I think one of the reasons why, unless you have an organization that does a lot of projects, you will not necessarily see a full time project manager or project managers in that organization. They will be brought in to be able to help manage that project. And when the project is completed, they’re let go, which is what you expect. I mean, it’s a start and an end, which is personally why I like being a project manager. I don’t like the day to day operation. I like the idea of I have a project, I have something I have to do, I get it done. And I think that’s something that some of us feel the same way.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Any questions from our audience? So, I just wanted to ask, what is the best possible way of answering the question on what are your weaknesses? So I’m a project manager. I go in for an interview, and I know, you know, I I may be having a lot of weaknesses, which, of course, I have. But how should I best possible answer this question on what exactly are my weakness? Because right now, I’m there to sell myself and not tell them my weaknesses. Right? But if I am asked this question, how do I handle this?

GRETA BLASH: I’m probably not the right person to answer that because I would be struggling with the same thing. Part of it, you know, when I talked about why, the more research I can do on why they might be hiring me, what kind of organization it is, what kind of skills they would expect, and therefore being able to figure out that, okay, these are the things they expect and I know I can do those. Maybe something that’s not that critical. You know, one of my weak skills is I’m a procrastinator. I know that, but I get things done. But I also realize that’s really not the best way to do things because the more we wait till the last minute that whole student syndrome idea and we get under stress, we don’t do as good a job as we might. But, you know, that’s probably a question that other people here could help answer even more. But you’re right. You’re trying to sell them your positives and the only thing might be to to say, okay, let me think. If these are my positives so that I restate them, then let me see if I can figure out something as I’m restating my positives to be able to state what my weakness is. I mean, that that would be the thinking process I might go through.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Hi, Greta. Thank you so much for the presentation. I have took several pages of notes. So my question to you is you mentioned that, there’s a greater need for project managers. What do you think is fueling that need?

GRETA BLASH: Just the fact that I think there are projects that need to be organized to be done. I think what happens is I because of things that have to be done especially in a very tight time frame, that whole idea of being able to get somebody who knows how to organize it and get it accomplished as opposed to and it goes back to the the previous question about can we just use somebody that’s there. If they have knowledge of what has to be done, probably those skills of managing and keeping things on track could be supplemented by somebody else. And a lot of times they are through kind of a project management assistant or some sort of coordinator type of person to do some of that, hard skills, the hard tasks that need to be done. But I think a lot of it is just a matter of everything is done in a shorter time frame now. We have those constraints of time and cost and so therefore being able to have somebody that can organize it and make sure that that they stay on top of it, and not just expect everything to happen. And I think that’s part of where I I guess the organizations and I look to you two to say, you know, do you kind of agree with that as to why we have projects?

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Oh, yeah. I got a follow-up question. Just a follow-up question on what Amber just asked. Do you, see a greater acceptance within industry of the value of bringing in a project manager?

GRETA BLASH: Oh, absolutely. I think that once again, most organize organizations realize that when they take upon a project, I mean, even that phone system, being able to have somebody that could stay on top of it, they’re looking at how much money they’re putting out, and they want to make sure that it gets done and that it doesn’t get out of budget and out of control. So, once again, the types of things now in my case, I tend to be able to see that, well, in order to do this project, you need to do these other pieces of it.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] So it’s what we call a program, but that’s neither here nor there. But the idea that, yeah, having a project manager to not have to worry about that day to day operation, they’re assigned, they’re put in charge of this, and you can assume that it’s going to get completed then. Hi. I I have a question. It’s, kind of along the lines of the time constraints. If you’re dealing with a project that has a strict time constraint and one of the tasks, maybe a task along the critical path, for example, is you feel running behind, do you have any tips for a project manager to try and light a fire, so to speak, to make sure that that task, completes on time so your project’s not delayed?

GRETA BLASH: Well, there’s there’s two activities that we use in that case. We call it schedule compression. We talk about the idea that sometimes being proactive and preventative, if I know that’s going to be happening, which I should, I should be able to see ahead of time we’re going to have a problem here.

I can either maybe start it a little bit ahead of time. I run some risk that we have to do some rework, but maybe I can get pieces of it done ahead of time. That’s one thing. The other thing is what we call crashing, and that’s where we throw more people onto it. Now, obviously, at some point in time, you reach this case where you have too many people and the communication and everything that needs to be done starts to go south.

But those are some of the things. I I think the in my mind though, it’s being able to understand there is a potential that this is going to happen. So I have time to think out the different alternatives that I need to do rather than waiting until all of a sudden I see, oh my god, not going to make that. And, you know, working backwards from that time of when it’s there, like I said when I opened the casino I ended up actually telling my team I know what the date of the opening is but that’s not your date. Your date is a month before and actually in some cases even earlier because we have people that need to train on the system, we need to have people that can do this.

So I worked those different dates. I knew I had wiggle room in there and that’s the other thing I I always have. That’s my official term is wiggle room. I always put those type of buffers in there so that I can handle. But staying on top of it, realizing it may happen, I’d rather be able to be proactive and try and figure out that it may happen or what might I have to do.

Perfect example. You’re driving up here. You have a time. You’re supposed to be here at a certain time. K? Do I listen to the radio to listen to the traffic? Yes. So I know if there’s a potential problem. Coming early. There’s all sorts of things you can do to be able to be that proactive and those that just has to be kind of in your nature.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] Greta, thank you for a wonderful presentation and, you brought to bear so many points that are so important for project management. And I I like the comment that you made about how project management, you know, is so much more than the schedule, and you really need to look at look at all the phases. And then on top of that, talking about the the softer skills. And my question for you is, you know, looking at all of the, you know, the softer skills that are so important and having worked with so many different types of project managers, you know, what would you say are really the most important, you know, soft skills that a strong project manager really needs to have?

GRETA BLASH: I think the first is being able to communicate. And the other is being able to work with the team, being able to understand the team members, being able to encourage them, motivate them, etcetera as we go through. But I think you have to be able to communicate. And to me, communicate is by walking around, not sitting in my office. I never ever was in my office. Now once we ended up getting the cell phones, you know, they could still get me all the time.

But I need to be able to communicate with people. I need to understand what they’re saying, what they’re doing, where they’re feeling, things like that, understanding that. And then being able to figure out you’re behind schedule, what do we need to do to get to motivate you to get this done? Do we need to add more people? Do we need to figure out what’s going wrong? What do we have to do? So I would say those are the two main ones that I would see. Do you agree?

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] I think we can squeeze in two more. Okay. Can students benefit from joining PMI? He’s a PMI member. And since we’re doing it jointly a hard talk, but I will I’ll mention PMI has a couple of different memberships.

GRETA BLASH: One is for those of us in the profession. It also has a student membership and the student membership for a full time student is very, very reasonable. And through that, not only do you have attendance and and capability to be part of these groups, be mentored, being able to volunteer and work with with experienced project managers, the PMBOK guide that you saw up there is free in an online version to anybody that’s a member of PMI, which means if you’re in a project management class, it probably makes sense for you to download it free of charge rather than paying the, whatever, 80, a hundred dollars that it costs.

There’s another website that PMI just acquired. It’s called projectmanagement.com. Now it’s a fantastic resource. If you’re not a member, a lot of free information out there. You’re a member of PMI, even a student member. You have access to webinars. You have access to templates. You have access to thousands of things that can help you. And as a student, if I have to put together a project, a lot of resources out there that are available to me.

So one of the things that that we look at is is the ability to get students a little bit more, involved because students are our future project managers. When we were in Las Vegas, our students were our volunteers for all of our organizations. As a result, they were seen by the people in the chapter. And almost every one of them got a job after graduation because of that contact that they had made, the references that they were able to receive for that volunteer work that they did. So, yeah, I we push very hard, as far as being able to be involved.

It’s a great group of people. We just spent four days on a cruise, which unfortunately is not my favorite way to do presentations, and the pictures came back with me hanging on to the podium as we were rocking back and forth. But being able to work with other people, other key people that have gone through similar situations, it’s a great networking opportunity and for students as well as for people who are looking, as we say, in transition between jobs.

[AUDIENCE QUESTION:] I just have a quick question, and that is basically when you’re working on a project and you’re working with your team, what incentives or motivational tools do you utilize?

GRETA BLASH: Well, one of the things that I used to do, and I don’t know if it’s still appropriate, but whenever I had my staff meetings once a week, I would always have some sort of little candy bar, whether it’s a payday or dollar bar or something, and I would recognize somebody who did something well. Or somebody who had made a mistake but admitted to it so that we could make an adjustment to it. But just that little recognition.

Now, obviously there’s other things that we can do to motivate but there’s a whole theory of motivational that we we study because you have to understand where a person is to be able to understand what motivates them. So for instance, if I were to say to Robin for instance, guess what? You can work from home virtually. But she’s the type of person that doesn’t feel comfortable unless she’s in an environment with other people. That motivation which I thought would have been a motivation and a benefit or reward ends up being a penalty because that’s not where she is.

So we have to understand where people are, what motivates them. You know, sometimes, you know, a $25 gift card motivates people and sometimes that’s not what they need. So, you have to under this goes back to that emotional intelligence. I need to understand my people. I need to understand where they are, what’s important to them, the sympathy, the emotion that I have to have in order to to, I guess, not as much motivate them as to make sure I don’t demotivate them.

If you notice on the slide, those of us that are project managers as part of our certification have to have so many hours of continuing education, and we have the PDU numbers that you would have to have to record this just like you have your students as a project managers, certified project managers.

SPEAKER: So the the event number is up there on the date and the number of PDUs. So And on behalf of the entire institute, I’d like to thank both our partners at, the Project Management Institute and Greta for a fantastic and informative presentation. Thank you so much.

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