Project Management - 2 of X — Transcript
[00:00:00.00] Jim: So we’re going to talk about, we’re going to, our next topic is part two of project management team formation, and if you remember, our part one of project management was a discussion about sponsorship and getting a project going. So for team formation, I think we’ll probably be discussing both client team formation and team formation on the consulting side. I’ll start off with the client team formation, and these were by any measure, extremely large. projects for most of our clients. They involve large outlays of both federal and state money. They were multi-year projects for the most part, although we did plenty of single-year projects in various areas, and they also involved a large team. of people who may have to rotate in and out of the project, given their other duties for the state, and as I as I go through my first observation on the formation of state teams, I just need to put the disclaimer in that none of this is to disparage. you know, state employees or state government or bureaucracy. I mean, that’s such a cliche. I didn’t spend 30 years working with state clients because I thought ill will towards them. It was, I thoroughly enjoyed the people I worked with and got to work with lots of very bright. people, but as far as team formation goes, one of my observations is that, and this will sound stupid on the face of it, but states always put together their initial team based on who’s available, which is kind of a duh moment, like how could they put together a team with people who weren’t? who weren’t available. But it goes deeper than that. By putting together a team of who was available, I would find out later on that some of those people, in fact, were opposed to the project and had stated such to their.., and we were forced to go on the team because they were the only one available with X skills, and so I think on these multi-year projects, our clients got the chance to revisit and staffing over time, which usually helped, and the flip side of that is maybe a larger project would come along and the director of the agency would remove people who were proven to be good and put them on something else, which was always a bit discouraging. So team formation is. super important, and we’ll go into some of the reasons why. So Ken, any observations?
[00:03:30.99] Ken: - Well, one quick one. I did more work in the private sector than you did. This is no different in the private sector for the most part, where, you know, project and Larry’s qualified to do it but he’s pretty busy so we’re going to take Larry’s assistant Ted and he’ll work for Sheila because she’s a manager and is available. She hasn’t done anything like this and that’s how teams are formed in the private sector as well. generalizes beyond just team formation in a government agency. I think this is team formation in general was the first observation. The other thing you said that I thought worth commenting on was very often the staff put on projects had other responsibilities. So, you know, Jane may be working on three projects and have a regular kind of operational role in an organization as well. So, you know, Jane’s our sysadmin, and oh, by the way, she’s also going to design procedures. for this, for the project, which maybe would have been part of her responsibility in her operational role. But the point is she wasn’t relieved of her operational responsibilities while doing the project responsibilities. I guess maybe one other thing before I’ll interrupt you, I just want to point out that This, there are. complete parallels to our staffing of a project as well as the client’s staffing of a project where we’d win an engagement with certain qualifications and we’d certainly provide those people in the qualifications, but often we’d need additional help and independent qualification to do that. If somebody was available or our project managers really liked somebody, they’d bring them on to the project. Not, I want to say not in a way that was detrimental to the client, but it was so this individual could learn the client and help us. generally in some trivial administrative tasks for the project, you know, record keeping or something like that. So it’s not just, um, um, I guess my, my point is, it’s not just the client that fell into these traps. It’s us as well. Um, so with that, I will let you go on.
[00:06:22.61] Jim: So to extend that as part of team formation, that just brings to mind that the whole availability and not available thing means that as a smaller consulting firm, we had to be constantly on the lookout for talent and good people. it is a reality that the work, you know, it ebbs and flows and you have to have a ready supply of people who can come in and help when the work is more at a peak than in a valley.
[00:07:05.28] Ken: Even if they’re not necessarily subject matter experts for, we found for things like interviewing and things like that. You know, as long as they were, had the base skills to be able to interview an individual, get reasonable insights out of that and document it well, you know, we could bring in people who were just good interviewers who may not fully understand the concept. of the engagement as long as they had the ability to contact and work with somebody who had that context.
[00:07:39.91] Jim: - Yeah, no, that’s a good point, and the interviewing in particular, we quickly went from a four to five. format where we would have one person interviewing to having two, which is tricky because you don’t want the person you’re interviewing to feel ganged up on. But for most of the things that we were trying to gather information for, they were so complex that by having two interviewers, then one… could listen while the other one talked because you had to be a very good listener to to ask the follow-up questions and it just made i don’t know we it it was uh it was one of those investments by putting two people on it you got four times the information yeah
[00:08:37.65] Ken: So this is likely a topic in and of itself, which is about data collection, but kind of back to teamwork. Something I noticed about both us and our clients, if it was a hodgepodge team put together by available people, sometimes there’d be conflict. turned into a team would never gel, and that was very problematic, and I saw that countless times.
[00:09:08.56] Jim: - Yeah, so what do you do? And I know that we had to counsel some clients to never begin a project because when you do the. numbers and let’s just say it’s a it’s a two or three-year project and these numbers are gonna sound dated but it’s a two or three three-year project and the full investment is going to be between 10 and 20 million. Why on earth would you start it if you didn’t have have the proper team to get it going.
[00:09:50.28] Ken: - So how did you counsel clients about that? Did you just come out directly and say, hey, you don’t got the dudes or you don’t got the right dudes?
[00:10:02.81] Jim: - Well, since in government, these things get initiated politically. that was rarely an option, it was to say hold off, because by that point, by the time the people we worked directly for had the project, somebody much higher up in the organization or in government had already ordained that it be so.
[00:10:29.18] Ken: The decision was made. the project was going and we showed up kind of late to the party. Yeah, so I guess
[00:10:35.39] Jim: I’d have to concede that, you know, you have to move forward even with the B team and have a plan to, you know, straighten it out as you go along, and I think that. That’s the spot most of our clients found themselves in, and some were just a joy to work with the original team because they had so much talent, and others did not have the talent and readily admitted it, and so they would go and try to find it temporarily. put in a requisition request for a more budget to be able to hire, you know, for the multi-year project. This all sounds very general, but it’s hard to be specific. Everyone had such different needs.
[00:11:35.13] Ken: Yeah. But my experience is. Even if they brought the right skills to the table, teams didn’t always gel. Again, egos and I think a lot of onus, and that’s the purpose of this whole extended topic is it has to do with management. Good managers can even make people who rub each other the wrong way just naturally for whatever reason. Good managers can, in my experience, kind of work through that most of the time. Sometimes it requires firing somebody from the team, but most of the time… they can work through it, and as I was thinking about this topic, it was sort of things like how the manager, how open the manager is with people, how quickly they deal with conflict, and I’m thinking of one of the better project managers we had who didn’t have formal training As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure she had a college degree, but she was straightforward with people. She tried to lay out a vision of how they’d get to the end of the project, what success looked like. She’d do things to make, to celebrate kind of small initial successes. She’d encourage, she’d set guidelines without being micromanaging, I guess is what I’m saying, and set expectations is a better word without micromanaging. Those things were the things that gelled the team to me, not the skills or even belief in the project. manager who simply stepped in and said, okay, you know, this is, this is our vision. This is where we want to get. These are the steps to get there. Yay. We took the first step and the person, I guess I can say Lynn, you know, she would set up small wins to begin with, and it might be something as stupid as let’s get the project plan complete or something like that, and then do, um, I don’t want to say a party, but a celebration of the win, and gradually she’d extend those wins to bigger and better things until we were actually making reasonable progress on a project, and likewise with clients, I saw that, Lynn worked with a guy named Tony who did that. He was actually the third or fourth project manager on a very large project, and he was able to set a series of, A, he was straightforward and honest, had a vision of where they wanted to get when they needed to get there, that was a reasonable time frame, and B, he’d celebrate people’s small successes. and get them believing in the project, and I think that went a long way towards team formation. You know, nothing gels a team like winning, right? You know, it’s kind of the old sports metaphor. If you’re winning, suddenly we’re all a team and we’re all doing a great job. If you’re losing, it’s everybody else’s fault. I saw that happen over and over again in our projects. Did you have any different observations about that or?
[00:15:07.35] Jim: - No, in fact, I think you’re narrowing this down to really the successful team formation probably has more to do with how you. and so I don’t know if we can You know, having a bunch of top people, you know, forming a team of, you know, all aces, which can fall apart pretty quickly, just putting the team together on who’s available, who has subject knowledge. giving them the tools they need.
[00:16:10.27] Ken: - Yeah, that’s a big part of project management, isn’t it? It’s simply, and team formation is giving the team the tools they need to be successful. Whether that’s a vision or a clear outline of expectations. are important but I’ve seen people learn in situations that they probably were not qualified. If you were to look at their resume they wouldn’t be qualified to to be on the team but because they were fast learners and well motivated they gelled with the team and became a contribute a big contributing member.
[00:16:53.66] Jim: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s the key, and, sorry, can something just escape me
[00:17:03.69] Ken: Where I was going to go next? That’s okay. I was going to just mention, also, I think the other thing I’ve seen, kind of the opposite end of that spectrum, are artificial… team-building exercises. We’ve talked about this in another podcast, but those things, you know, “Gee, we’re going to go out Saturday morning,” and I was part of a team one time, and it was the most – the woman was – the project manager was in way over her head. this at the time. But as a team member, I’ll just kind of state my reaction. She’d come in and bring us cards, you know, “Best Programmer” or, you know, “Best SysAdmin.” She had these little cards made up and pass them out in meetings and things like that, which to me was so artificial. It wasn’t celebrating success. It was her trying to boost our ego, and it came across simply as that, as a hollow gesture, which actually demoralized us more and kind of maybe even slowed the team down. Now, we were highly motivated within the team despite the project manager for various reasons, and that one worked out okay, but I’ve seen those artificial team-building exercises just be a complete disaster, and again, it really comes down to the project manager. They have to have a plan, a shared vision, celebrate successes, and you know, be honest with the team, and the team will respond to that, will respond well to that.
[00:18:38.21] Jim: Yeah, yeah, and they have to have a vision. I mean, they have to have something to bring the
[00:18:45.39] Ken: Team together. It can’t just be, go do a project. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and this is true no matter which side, whether it was on our side of the, you know, the, the consultant side or the client side, uh, did the, the woman I mentioned actually, she retired from one of our clients and we snatched her up because we knew how good a project. manager she was. Well, do you have anything you want to summarize or do you have more
[00:19:14.17] Jim: You want to go into on this conversation? No, I think that covers it. Okay. All right.
[00:19:20.73] Ken: Well, we’ll pause and move on to the next topic in a minute.