So my name's Stuart Easton.
I'm the CEO and one of the founders of Transparent
Choice.
So we're a software company if you don't know us.
We do portfolio management software, so prioritization, capacity planning, all that
kind of stuff. So this whole thing about people
is really central to that, and I've got some stats that I
can throw around later on if it's interesting.
But the core for today is actually my wonderful
guests, Heba El Shaheedi and Dawn Mahan.
So we'll kick off. Dawn, do you want to just introduce yourself
and then I'll tell people why I've invited you two to this session.
Sure. Hi, Stuart and Heba. So happy to be here with the both of you
today. I am Dawn Mahan. I am sitting in the Florida
Keys and I am the founder and CEO
of PMO Training and also Project Guru Academy.
So some of you may be coming to this from those
channels as well. And also, I'm an
author, which I'm sure we're going to talk about more today.
We've got these two here. Recognize those ones, I guess.
Yes. There they are.
There they are.
Yeah.
Fantastic. Okay. We'll probably touch on some of those.
It's the people one. Mm-hmm.
Your background blurry thing is blurring out the book, by the way, Dawn.
Just so you know.
I'll fix that. Yeah.
Fantastic. And then we've got Heba El Shaheedi.
Heba,
you want to introduce yourself?
Hello. My name is Heba El Shaheedi.
I'm a PMO expert, PMO leader and book author.
I'm also volunteering with PMI as PMOGA MENA Hub lead.
We have exciting things happening right now.
And I have the book, "Elements of Leadership," that is
being translated to Arabic as we are speaking.
Soon to be launched, Inshallah.
Yeah.
Fantastic. That's great. Now, Heba's being terribly, terribly modest.
She's the only person on the planet to have won the PMO Global Alliance's
PMO Leader of the Year
twice.
So, absolute superstar. And it's
great that we're talking. So why have I invited
Heba and Dawn? We also invited Ahmed, Ahmed Romih.
He unfortunately just couple of days ago had a medical
emergency and can't make it today, so he does send his apologies.
You'll just have to do with us three, I'm afraid, today.
But I suspect it'll be fine. I think it'll be fine.
So,
actually, the first time that I met Heba
was in, it was a PMO summit I think, or
PMO conference in Riyadh.
Yeah.
PMO Summit.
Absolutely. And
Heba was on stage on a panel, and there were
three big blokes, big men on stage.
And it was about people and there was Heba, right?
Heba's not big. She's-
Yeah
... so these great big guys and they asked a question
about
projects and performance and all this kind of stuff and
the guys gave these really textbook answers
and I was like, "Yeah, it's okay."
And then Heba just started talking about people
and the importance of leadership,
and I thought, "I need to know this person." At that time, I had no idea
who Heba was.
Mm-hmm.
I had no idea what your background was, but I just fell in love.
So Heba is now my Dubai sister.
Yeah.
And
author of this book. We'll be talking about those in a little while, I dare say.
But we're going to start off and
Dawn is here. I'm going to start with Dawn.
The first question's going to go to Dawn.
Dawn's here because about a year and a half ago, two years ago, Dawn, you
published the ...
There's the pile of gum. Here it is.
This one.
There we go.
Yeah.
"Meet the Players in Project Land."
There it is.
There it is indeed. Snap.
Yeah.
And so this is a fun
but interesting book,
talking about people in projects, right?
Mm-hmm.
They are the players in project land and I don't know if you can see on there, but
they're all different animals.
Mm-hmm.
So we'll come to the book shortly, but the premise of this webinar is
that people are important in delivering projects.
And we all know what project failure rates look like.
So really,
people? Is it really people? I thought it was all about
templates, tools, process.
So Dawn, you've got a nice little story to illustrate why people
are so important. Shall we start there, I think?
Yeah, sure.
One of the things that I had to do in writing the book is make my case,
and in making the case I did a lot of research because my
feeling was that after over 20 years
of working in what I like to call project land, which is the word I use
for the world of projects, and the world of projects is
different than the day job. It's like a different world
with different roles, rules and expectations and so forth.
And so when I was making the case,
it just so happened that inc.com said
that the book, "How Big Things Get Done," was
their favorite business book of the year.
Oh, really?
And in ... Yeah.
Bent's book.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yep, absolutely. It was January 2024 and I was actually finalizing
the manuscript then, and inc.com said, "Hey,
this is our business book of the year." And they had
analyzed 16,000 projects in that book, that's a lot,
and said that only 48% achieve the cost goal,
and only 8.5% end on budget, end on time.
So that's 16 out of 200 projectsAnd
on budget and on time. But what if you're doing the wrong project?
It doesn't really account for that.
And what about delivering the promised benefits, which is what this is
all about? So they said only half a percent,
half of 1%, end on budget on time and deliver the
promised benefits. That's one out of 200
projects end on budget on time and deliver promised benefits.
Well, that's terrible. But the question is, why?
And my theory was,
well, because people are not set up for success.
After being in project land for decades, this is what I've observed.
Well, it turns out through some of the research
that there was another study done where of
70 professional engineers,
and in that they found top reasons for
project failure, and the top three
were the project was not adequately defined at the beginning.
Who defines the project in the beginning? People.
The project manager was incompetent.
Well, the project manager is a person, but the project manager
being assigned
is the leadership's job, so assign the right project
manager who is competent for that project.
That's a people problem. And number three was there was a lack of
clearly defined project goals and objectives. And who does that?
The people.
So if those are some of the top three, and I've seen them many
times, and I'd be curious as to what our audience has
experienced, if you've seen that in your
worlds. I've seen them many times, and I thought, "Yep,
that's right." And then throughout the project,
is the sponsor engaged, or do they wave their
hand and say, "Go do it, and let me know when it's done"?
That's a people problem. And there were a number of items like that
noted in a lot of studies that I went through for the
book.
Yeah. No, that's great. And the way I think about it is that
delivering projects...
Stop. We're not going to talk about delivering projects.
We're going to talk about delivering benefits, right?
Because at the end of the day, I don't care if... Ducks.
We need ducks.
We always need ducks.
It won't surprise anyone-
We're getting old
... that I have within arm's reach ducks.
Uh-huh.
So,
we've got ducks, right? So nobody cares about the ducks. We just want the egg.
We don't care about the project. We want the value. We want the benefit, right?
So it's not about actually delivering projects, it's about delivering those
benefits. And that's a system,
right? It's a system of figuring out
what our goals are, how to align our projects, how to execute those
projects, how to make sure that we're planning for the
benefit. We're doing the change management.
We're actually realizing and measuring and being accountable for the benefit,
right? That's a system.
But the system is run by
people.
People.
Well or not well.
Well or not well. And those people can be led well or not led well.
They can be motivated or demotivated. They can be productive or not productive.
They can even be harmful, right? They can get
in there and start ripping things apart.
So,
Heba, before we sort of dive into
specifics,
what I'd love to do is actually just take a few minutes to talk about
PMOs. Most of our audience is sort of PMO type peeps.
So just super quickly, a quick heart or a thumbs up or something if you're
in the PMO, just so we have a feeling for who's
actually PMO-tastic here. Yeah, we've got a
few. Quite a few. There we go. Fantastic. Thank you.
So Heba, why don't we start off actually with a little bit about
leadership
in the PMO?
So I'm not going to guide you. I'm going to let you go where you want to go on this
one, because this is
exactly what this book is about.
One of the things, Heba is so unbelievably talented
it's not true.
So Heba is also an artist.
I'm an artist.
And so it's no surprise that her book is absolutely
gorgeous. The way it feels, just it's absolutely gorgeous.
So Heba.
Thank you, Stuart. Okay, so I agree, of course,
with Don that at the end of the day, it's not the system or
methodologies or whatever, it's
who's playing those in the background, and there
comes here the players, as Don said.
And in my book, "Elements of Leadership," I do focus a
bit about PMOs, but it's like a minor
theme in the book, because I thought about it in terms of
leadership, something more generic.
Any leader could get into it and then apply
what's there.
The human aspects of leadership
are the most important ones, and the reason why I think it
was important for me to
present it in the nice way that you're talking about,
Stuart. It was important to also link it to the nature in
a way that people would remember.
Because nature is intuitive.
These kind of human skills, human leadership
skills, and attributes, they should be intuitive.
They should be natural to all of us.
It should come from the inspiration of nature,
and currently they are not. So we just said that the leaders,
they could be harmful or toxic, and they could be also
empowering and
engaging with their teams. They could select the right people, not
because of personal gain, because of the actual benefit that they want
to give to the project.So it's a
mix of these human elements that
really at this point of time, we need them to be emphasized more.
We need to
shed light more on this kind of aspect.
Mm.
So I put them under the four
nature elements, water, fire, wind,
and earth,
so people can remember it very quickly and get to it.
And I believe also, Dawn, you have created your design with
the players so people can remember it and kind of
have their own emotional attachment to what's in the book,
right?
Yeah. I love that you did that with your book, and that you talk
about it in this way. That-
Mine is also origami, by the way.
Yes. We have so much in-
Yeah. We were just saying that in the chat.
Yeah
... in common with this.
Yeah.
So we both chose some origami, and we both chose nature, just
in different ways. And
the reason was the same, that we were both going for-
Yeah
... trying to make it easy for people to relate to and understand and apply.
Yeah.
And origami by itself, it's like a small project, so
that was my inspiration to it. You have instructions
to do something. You have a plan.
And then you can also get your creativity going and
then create your own project in the way that you want.
Yeah, I agree. There are a lot of parallels there to what we need to do-
Yeah
... in project land. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Love it.
So, Heba, just staying with you for a second, right?
So I remember a conversation with you, I'm not going to
divulge the details because it wasn't a public conversation, but a conversation
where we were talking about,
is this
concern with people just because we want to be nice and cuddly and warm and
friendly, or is it actually about performance as well?
Or is it only about performance?
Yeah.
What do you think? What's your thoughts on that?
I talk about this in the kindness chapter in the book.
So I think this was the conversation when we talked about kindness.
Kindness doesn't mean that you can be a people pleaser and
give everyone what they want. That's not kindness. Kindness is to be fair.
It's to think about the ultimate goal, but at the same time, pay
attention to people's emotions and how you're dealing with them.
And you can be kind, and then at the same time you say no
because it doesn't fit your values or it doesn't fit the
project or whatever, but you can be kind in the way that you deliver it.
So it's not about being
gentle or just going with the breeze because
you're kind of forced to. No, it's
being authentic. Kindness is very much linked to being authentic and-
Yeah
... seeing the right
elements, how you can put them in the right place, and
that would work out to the benefit of everyone, actually.
Yeah. Agreed. And it's one of
those things about being human, right?
Yeah.
We're social animals, so we like to be social,
and we like to be liked and all of those things.
But at the end of the day, as a leader,
you also are responsible and accountable for delivering
results, for to a degree, the welfare of your people.
If they're going to go and stick their hand in a blender, that's down to them,
but
in work, the welfare-
Yeah
... of your people as well.
And part of that actually is helping them achieve,
right? Most of us-
Yeah
... don't turn up to work just because we want a paycheck.
We turn up to work because we want to do a good job. We want to contribute.
Yeah.
And so, being that leader helps. A good leader will help-
Exactly
... the team do that.
And especially, Stuart, in a city like Dubai, where
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is always challenging us to be number one
in everything. So you would know that these
performances and the projects are really crucial and critical,
but how is the team still being happy and
well-maintained and have the right capabilities, and at the same time, under
pressure,
to deliver these performances? There is a balance.
There's a balance that has to be achieved by the leader.
It all comes down onto how you can manage and lead that
team.
Brilliant. So, Dawn, and I'm actually
just going to come to you, Dawn, but there's a question which you talked about a
couple of studies. There's a question about where were those studies.
I think one of them was from Bent's book-
Right
... "How to Get Things Get Done."
That's right.
So I put the title and everything earlier in the chat, if you want to look at that.
But before we go there,
Dawn,
so we've talked a little bit about leadership. We've just touched on it.
I dare say we'll come back to that topic later on, but-
Mm-hmm
... okay, so as PMO leaders, as project leaders, right, we need to be leaders.
Who are we leading? Who are the stakeholders around the
project? Who are these animals in the
book?
So I-
Just give us a quick overview of who the players are.
Yeah. So if you're the PMO leader,
then I believe, and having been one , one of
the jobs is to see who all the
creatures are in your version of project land and determine what they
need.
And some of the feedback that I've gotten on the book is that
the animals do help to clarify the types of
creatures we all have faced. Those of us
who've been around project land for a long time, we've all met these creatures.
And so, for instance,
if you're talking about a project sponsor, that's the
lion. And when I teach what I call
affectionately sponsor school, the first thing I do is I put this
beautiful photo of a lionOn the
screen. And I ask them to shout out
words that the first word they think of when they see
this gorgeous picture of this lion.
And so you'll see powerful, courage, scary,
and then I weave this story from these words,
and then I tell them, "You are the lion, so you are
viewed as powerful, that you should be courageous, and,
yeah, some people are going to think you're scary."
And then invariably, somebody had a word that they think that they say, "I wish I
wouldn't have picked that word now that I know what you did with it." But
the point is that each, and you said it earlier, Stuart,
each role and each human can be helpful
or hurtful to project land. That also includes
the executive. So if you're a PMO leader, and even if you're not, if you're a
project manager and you have a steering team,
who's on that steering team? A lot of times it's
executives. Well, are they going to help you or hurt you?
And are they going to work as a steering team?
And so I make a case in my book, "Meet the Players in Project Land,"
about how we need to have, and we need to use the
words steering team rather than committee to emphasize that
we
need to work as a team because committees
tend to just have a lot of meetings and not get anywhere.
That's what the suggestion is by the word.
And so those animal avatars are the
eagle, the whale, and the owl.
So just to get you thinking.
Yeah.
Excellent. So let's stay with that idea of a team, right?
Because one of the challenges in projects is,
if you go way back to a
decade or two, to the way that PMI talks about projects, it was
all about you've got these cross-functional
initiatives that need to get done.
And so the idea of having a project is that you can have a decision-making
structure, a governance structure that can make decisions that goes
across these different teams.
So let's stay with the idea of a team, because teams don't just happen,
especially when someone's coming from this team that has one set of
goals, someone else is from this team that has a completely different set of goals.
They don't speak the same language.
In Dubai, very often, it's literally they don't speak the same language.
Yeah.
But somehow you've got to turn that into a team.
So do you have any thoughts? I'll go to Heba and then back to you,
Dawn, on that one.
There are, I think, a few factors to keep the team
alive, and one of the first one is to introduce
psychological safety within the team.
That's really important. And then
be vulnerable with your team so they can be vulnerable with you as well to
face their failures, to
give them that empowerment. And choosing the right
team, having the right balance is very important.
So if I am not passionate about what I'm doing
in my role, I wouldn't have stayed.
I
love that field. I want to give more into it, and
I am a thinker and analyzer, so
my character fits the job that I am doing.
So it's very important for a leader to have that
clarity when they are selecting the team that
they want to put together to work on that
project. So
Belbin roles is a very important
one of the methodologies that people can use to analyze the
different characters and personalities and how to set them in the team.
The second or third thing, having clarity of
vision when the team is formed,
giving them the guidance, giving them trust to do what they think
is best, but also being there for them, supporting them,
pushing them forward to meet the goals and objectives,
and thinking about their
psychological safety, their mental health while they're doing it,
especially if it's a sensitive project or a huge
project or whatever. And then
motivating them, of course, motivating the team,
getting their creativity flowing,
teaching them how to be lifelong learners, and that's something I talk about in the
book, in the fire
section. Because they need to keep learning so they can
innovate. And even if they move to another project, that learning
is
going to be useful at the end of the day.
And the last thing regarding teams, I would say
they need to be proud of being in that team.
So they have to create, the leaders has
to create that sense of belonging within
that team, sense of pride, because
otherwise they might not work well together.
They might not be proud of what they are doing.
But that's basically the leader's job, to help them
see that, help them be proud of what they have achieved
and being proud of them as well.
And so one of the things there as well is
the pride and
sort of motivation were some of the things you touched on there.
And one of the things that can really help with that is having a really clear
sense of mission
for a project-
Yeah
... for example. So my very first
foray into project land was with a software
company20 something years ago. I'm not going to tell you exactly how
many years. Actually, it might be closer to 30. But anyway, never mind.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
And
so I was in a new industry. I knew nothing about the
industry. I knew nothing about the company.
But they
gave me
profit and loss responsibility for their two biggest customers.
And so literally a week after I joined this company, they
had a kickoff for this big project for one of the world's
biggest telephone companies, telcos.
And so our project manager
is like, "Okay, Stuart, you've got to come,
but don't say anything because you don't know anything.
You've never run projects. You
don't know anything. You don't know the industry. You don't know the customers.
You don't know the product. Just
come, shake hands, smile, drink some tea, and
that's it. That's your job." And so anyway, the customer's
project manager stood up
and he began, he's like, "Dearly beloved, we're gathered here today to replace the
billing system." My hand goes up
straight away.
My project manager's thumping my arm, like, "Just put your hand down.
Shut up."
And those who know me will know that that is a useless thing to try and do
to get me to shut up.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's just not going to happen, right?
So he's like, "Stuart, what is it?" I said, "Well, we're not here to replace a
billing system, are we?"
He said, "Well, I think so. I think we're paying you $13 million to do that." I
said, "No. You're paying us $13 million to
grow revenue and improve customer satisfaction.
So why don't we focus on that?"
Because that's a completely different kind of mission
to the mission of, oh, well, we're just going to replace a bit of software, right?
And it was really fascinating, and I knew nothing about project management,
but I understood a little bit about business and leadership even then.
Right? And so by creating that mission,
the team was able to kind of fall in behind that and go, "Okay, right.
Now we know what we're trying to achieve.
When we're making decisions, we know why we're making the decisions.
We know how to start optimizing those decisions." So I'm not just making a decision
because I'm the developer and, well, I like a screen that looks like this.
I know my goal is to make it easier for the call center people to deliver a great
service. Okay. Right. How do I do that?
And it changed the whole vibe of the project, which was a lot of fun.
So Dawn, same thing across to you about how do you
start building that team? Because in
projects you don't necessarily get to choose the team,
do you?
Well, a lot of times we have more influence than we think.
Uh-huh.
And I have a
whole chapter on
loving the ones you're with. So
if anybody recognizes the Stephen Stills lyric, love the
ones you're with,
that's what that comes from because sometimes you really don't get a choice.
You get who you get, and you need to work with who you get.
But
other times you do have a lot of influence, a lot more influence than you think,
because if your project sponsor is the lion
and the project is very important to the sponsor,
they will find a way to get the resources they need to be
successful if you make your case to them.
I had done it many times, even as a junior project manager.
It's like, "Look, we need this skill. Where is said skill?
We need to get it. Where are we going to get it from?
I heard Stuart is really good at that.
What about him?" And then suddenly, "Welcome to the team, Stuart."
And so
it happens that way.
Excellent.
Love it.
The one thing I did want to mention, if you don't mind, is I love-
Yeah
... a lot of what Heba was talking about in her
view, and what it reminded me of something that we talk
about a lot, which is creating a healthy culture that gets results.
And a lot of the things that Heba talked about are beautiful
sub-bullets to that idea of creating a healthy culture.
And I have certainly, I'm sure many of us here on the call have
certainly had to create a culture that's
healthy, that's a lot of those things that Heba talked about
inside a toxic culture.
So where the organizational culture is chaos, it's
toxic, but you create this little bubble inside of
it, that's your project and your project team, where it is
healthy to challenge, it is healthy to be curious, it is healthy to
work together and help each other, and we show up for each other every
day. Meanwhile, all this other nonsense is flying around.
It is a beautiful thing when we can create that.
But when you say that, right, and I'll throw this open to both of you.
I know that Ashok, so Ashok comes to pretty much every webinar we do, and we
love him to pieces.
And he's doing exactly the right thing.
He's kind of commenting away there.
And I know that as you say that, Ashok's sitting there and he's going,
"Yeah, but what if your lion is one of the scary ones?"
Yeah.
Right? What if they're the ones who are making it toxic?
Mm-hmm.
How do you create that bubble if the lion is trying
to burst your bubble all the time?
I
love that. That's a great question, and it happens a lot.
And so I tell stories at the beginning of each of the
chapters, and one of them is this one sponsor who was
exactly that, who was exactly the scary...
Everybody was scared of him, tried to avoid him.
In fact, in team meetings,
he was a C-suite team member, and so when we would all meet
with him as his direct reports, he'd light a fire under people and watch them
dance for pleasure. It was
horribleSo what did I do?
Well, I did create the bubble, and the bubble was more important.
It was even more important because of
his behavior and because of everybody's reaction to his behavior.
Now, so how do you do that? Well, one of the things
is you have to create a great relationship with this lion
as the project manager, and you have to say, "Don't worry.
I got them. You don't have to
interact with them individually. You're a very busy person.
You have bigger things to do. That's why you have me, so I
got this." So creating that
reason for him to not go, which he was doing, and it was
terrible going straight to the team members and
making them scared and making
them want me to do something different that I know isn't the right thing for my
job as a project manager. It was horrible.
So I had to
encourage, otherwise some people might call it manipulate, but
encourage him to just work with
me, and then I was the shield for the team,
and the team worked much better that way.
And then I was able to manage his expectations, make sure that he
was satisfied, and if he was going to bite anybody's head off, it was going to be
mine. And that was okay with me, because I felt that
was my job.
Cool. Brilliant.
Yeah.
Fantastic. I like that.
You have to take one for the team, right?
Yeah.
I want to add to that as well.
When you're dealing with
a manager or a superior who's stubborn or
argumentative or,
as you said,
they could be vicious, actually. I recommend it in my
book is to let them win.
If you think your idea is right, if you think whatever you're
doing is right,
and you walk into an argument with them, let them win that argument.
Because even if you win and let's say, yeah, you are right,
they will eventually resent you from inside.
Mm.
That type of personality, they would resent.
So what you do instead, you prove it in action, not in
words. You prove it to them, you show them.
Even if they say, "You know what? This is not going
to work," and they shut you down, you go and do a small POC
or something like this. Prove your point in a different way,
other than getting into an argument with them.
So let them win that argument, and you'll
lose a battle, but eventually you'll win a war.
Nice.
Like it. So Ashok replied to that, "You've got to be the antelope for
the lion to eat."
No.
You just have to be smarter.
Yeah.
There you go, yeah.
Because then what would the team do without you?
So you have to be strong enough, fast enough, smart enough to not get eaten.
But I love your thinking.
Yeah. Getting with the spirit. I love it.
So you'll be shielding the team from them, but at the same time,
also staying true to your values and
you have your own integrity that you need to maintain also when you're dealing
with other people, even if they are your superiors. Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's tough.
And those superiors are often...
There are lots and lots of surveys about really senior executives,
and especially in growth companies,
where-
Mm
... it's more of an entrepreneurial thing, but also big
studies about CEOs
and what percentage of them are actually psychopaths,
clinically psych. I don't mean they go around killing people, but clinically,
they're psychopathic, right?
Yeah.
And
so they tend to be rather action-oriented.
Just get it done. Get the project done.
That's true. Right.
So
now, we know that if we do that, we're setting our people up
for failure. So what are your thoughts around that topic?
Is my statement true? Do we have evidence
for that?
How do you defend against that? What's the minimum level of planning,
and what kind of planning, and how do we include the team so that they can own the
plan?
Let's see. Where should we go first? Who wants to go first?
It's so juicy.
I know.
So I'm going to go, Dawn, I'm going to go to you first on this one.
Sure. I feel like
we've all had our challenges with executives.
And for whatever, sometimes it's they're flip-floppers, and they
forget their decision. Sometimes it's they're exactly the
roaring type of why isn't this done already, get it done,
kind of executive.
Everybody, we're humans, we all have personalities, we all have
personality pluses and minuses. I'm amongst
that with many minuses. And I feel like the
key is to get to know them and what is underneath
the roar. What is underneath that?
So for the people who are like, what is happening?
Well, a lot of times the board is on their case.
They have to answer to, even if it's the CEO, they have to answer to
someone a lot of times. The private equity company, the
board, they're answering to someone. There's pressure there.
And so what we talked about in the beginning is the why behind it.
So just like your great example, Stuart, no, we're not replacing the billing
system. The why. Well, what is really happening there?
And the more we understand the why, why are they
reacting this way, the more we can be patient and
listen to themThe better we can help them, and
we can create a plan and become their trusted advisor, not just their whipping
boy. That's not what I want to be. I want to be
their trusted advisor, which you earn. Yep.
And you earn that- Exactly ... by asking questions, by listening, by coming up with
solutions, not by just saying, "Yes, sir."
Yeah.
One more thing to add, you need to keep in mind that they see the
bigger picture. You might not be able to see it.
Great point.
So they see different connections even outside the
entity that you are, and they might see
other things that connect, and then they go and ask for it
because of
pressure or that kind of connection.
So we have to be aware of that.
We are more into our project and the details within our project,
but they have a different view.
That's a great point. And they don't always tell you because they just are
dictators, so they dictate, "Get it done." And you're like, "Well, help me
understand a little bit more about why the pressure all of a sudden."
Well, the marketplace, well, the competitor, well, the board, well, the something.
There's probably a reason that they're not telling you. I love that.
That's a great point, Heba. Mm-hmm.
And that thing about relationship's great because
not only do they see the bigger picture that you might not see,
they also don't see the detailed picture.
So they will-
Yep
... miss things that you see.
And this happens all the time. I was giggling
actually,
Dom, when you talked about them flip-flopping on decisions and things.
We're a tiny company, and I do that.
Mm.
I don't do it because I'm a flake.
Right.
I do it because this person who's talking to me, I talk to him once every
three weeks for 10 minutes,
and to him, this is the important decision point for him.
For me, this is a 10-minute conversation in 100 conversations I have today.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
And
I'm not saying that to be arrogant.
I'm just sharing that so that-
That's real
... people on the session, that's reality.
Right.
And so,
be patient with your lions.
Mm-hmm.
Right? Don't
expect them to know everything and to be able to context switch
instantly, because they're human.
Yeah.
They're lions, but human.
It's such a great-
I'm confused
... it's such a great point. And I've seen a lot of junior
PMs feel that, well, you should have all the
answers. Why don't you have the answers? I have a question.
I need you to make a decision. Why can't you just make one and stick to it?
And it's just one of those things that, yes, you have to
be a bit empathetic, that there are a thousand things that they're
dealing with today,
and they might not remember two weeks ago, the conversation exactly.
Absolutely.
And so you need to remind them, "Hey, last
time I mentioned we would need a decision on blah.
Here's the information you asked for.
Would you like to talk through it?" I mean, that's different than, "Do you have a
decision for me today?" Like, on what again?
Remind me.
And
one of the other things that I feel very passionately
about, we're talking a lot about the lions because the lions matter,
right? They're not the only beasties out there, but
is that you need to be able to speak in their language.
So if you want a decision from an executive,
don't walk in with a thousand lines of technical detail.
Mm-hmm.
Right?
I don't want data, actually.
I want insight.
I want to know what's the problem we're solving,
what are the options, and what are the
pros and cons, or what is the impact
of those different options? Then I can make a decision.
Well, you've expected that the person in front of you is good at their
job, and that they've done the analysis, and they've done that detail
work. And you might dig into a little bit that to understand a
little bit about where that analysis came from so that you can be grounded a little
bit more in that.
And to test you.
And to-
And to test you. I want to make sure that you have done the homework, right?
Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. And that you just, especially today, we didn't have
that option, but that you didn't just ask AI,
and that you actually used your brain.
Don't talk to me about AI. Yeah.
I'm sorry. Yeah. It's happening now. So true.
Yeah.
I need people to think, because in project land,
part of the purpose of using that word is to remind people that
nobody in the history of the world has been here before.
Right.
In this time and this place, something makes this project unique, and therefore,
you cannot ask AI for answers and expect it to be correct.
Especially.
So this time and place, right?
True.
One of the things about this time and place is I saw a little article on
LinkedIn by forgotten who,
I really liked, that talked about
a resurgence of PMOs.
Mm.
In part because the number
of changes, so projects, and the
velocity of them, and the timescales, and the
complexity are all ramping up. So, PMOs have been
under attack,
and now they're coming back.
Yeah.
But they're coming back different.
They're coming back being much more benefit-focused, much more
portfolio and capacity, and just thinking about the stuff
that really makes a difference. Focus, right?
Mm.
So,
in this environment where change is coming faster and faster, there's more and more
demand.
What's that doing to our people?
Heba, do you want to have a crack at that one?
Well, I would think of it from a stability
point of view.
So if you have created a stable and healthy
environment to your team, then whatever comes,
they should be able to take it on with your support, with your guidance, with
the empowerment,
being able to become innovative and creative, but at
the same time, you have that base solid and ready
for anything that nobody can shake you.
So these kind of changes that are happening very quickly, these kind
of projects that are now,
as you said, the PMOs are focusing more about
benefits and about portfolio and basically the
outcomes and the benefit at the most.
So,
thinking about that means that we
have to change more in our
project to always align with the benefits.
So the constant changes also it takes a toll on the
team. So they need to
have a stable environment,
have a dependable leader, someone who they can trust and
he can trust them, or she can trust them.
That would be like a solid foundation for the team.
I like it. And Dawn, sometimes that comes across,
this rush of change is just like this
deluge of projects or just so many projects.
And so everybody's trying to do five things at once.
What does that do to the people? Just-
Yeah. It's so bad. It's
terrible. I've
done seminars at giant tech companies, and one of the first things I ask
is, "So let's see. Let's take a poll.
How many projects are you on? How many people are on one project?"
Like one person.
And so put your thumbs up if you're on one project.
On one-
Give a thumbs up
... are you on one project? And then it was like, are you on two
projects still? Are you on three or more?
And whoosh, all these hands go up. And we know about
task switching today. We know about this.
We know that every time you switch from one task to the next, from one
project context to the other, you're going, "Where was I last time I was
there?"
Yeah.
And this takes time.
Mentally exhausting.
Mm.
And it becomes, yes, mentally exhausting.
So not only do you lose time in the task switching,
it's mentally exhausting because we're human.
And so the more that people can use tools like yours,
Stuart, to make sure, and I totally believe this,
to make sure that the organization is focused on the right projects
first, that it's prioritized, that we understand the priorities, and then
that we understand and we are thoughtful and intentional
about where we put people on those projects and
when, and we, to the extent we can streamline them better so that
people are on two, not three or more, like
maybe two at the most. I don't know.
And then in addition to this,
the killer question is, and how many of you also have a day job
in addition to being on projects?
And the hands stay up many times. And we wonder
why people are stressed.
Yeah.
We wonder why people cannot do their best work.
And not just stressed, but unproductive.
And unproductive.
Yeah.
So the American Psychology Association did a study looking at this task
switching thing and for complex tasks like project, running
and delivering projects. And when people are overloaded,
you lose up to 40%, 4-0, not 1-4,
4-0, 40% of their capacity.
And so if you imagine you're on five projects, it's not just the context switching,
it's the fact that if you're a delivery resource, your head's down doing
something, you're writing code or whatever it is that you do, right?
And then the phone rings,
and it's one of the project managers on one of the projects you're on, and they're
like, "Well, what's happened to my deliverable?"
Mm-hmm.
Okay, it's going to take me five minutes to deal with that conversation, and then
it's going to take me another 10 minutes to get back into what I was doing, right?
Yeah.
By the time that's happened five times a day,
right, there's no surprise. So overloading people is monumentally
stupid.
Mm-hmm.
Yet-
It's terrible. Mm-hmm.
Yet, as an-
There's one more also.
Yeah, go ahead, Heather.
One more factor is like, not only selecting the right project, are we
selecting the right people? Do they have the basic capability
that will enable them to run a certain type of
project, for example? Do they have the
authority to get the teams, as you talked about, Dawn, get the
teams that they want with the right capabilities to be able to run
that project? So that's also a factor.
Absolutely.
Yeah, 100%. So it's right projects with the right people-
Right people
... meaning right skills,
with the right capacity at the time.
And the right time.
And the right time. Yeah, absolutely.
There's a lot of rights that have to line up to make life be
beautiful in project land, and most organizations need a lot of help with
this.
Well, and-
Yeah
... I was talking to a PMO just yesterday,
and he was saying, "Look, what our execs, they want to see the RAG report, they
want to see utilization rates, they want to see..." I said, "Why do they want to
see the utilization rates?" "Well, they want to make sure everyone's 100% utilized
or better."
Right? And this is classic, right?
Where executives are thinking that maximum
utilization is the goal. It's not.
Mm-hmm.
No, it's not.
Maximum productivity is the goal. Maximum benefits is the goal.
Right. Again, back to the goal. What are we really aiming for here?
Mm-hmm.
Absolutely. And there's aA guy
called Solberg, something like that, that did a
whole bunch of studies actually, where he looked at
what happens when you reduce the work in progress.
And his
data basically suggested what I call the rule of 50.
Mm.
So if you cut your work in progress in half,
your velocity goes up by half.
Mm.
So it's an empirical rule. There's a bunch of queuing theory that says something
slightly different, but it's potentially even a
bigger improvement than that. But empirically, he found that if you cut the
work in progress by half,
your velocity goes up by half.
Mm.
And so it's this kind of paradoxical thing that if you
reduce the workload,
you become more productive and over the whole cycle, you get more
done.
But here's the-
Yeah, there was a
whole book called "Essentialism." Have you seen this?
I haven't seen that. What's that? Tell me.
I love this.
"Essentialism."
Yeah. It's about choosing the thing
and keeping the main thing the main thing, and so really
deciding what is the main thing for me to work on, and being
sure that your day is structured so that you
afford yourself the time to work on that thing,
so that you can make progress. So there's this great image from it, it's so simple.
So imagine there's a circle, my
palm on my hand is a circle, and these are inches.
So yeah, I'm on five different projects.
I can make progress here, I can make progress here. Right?
Or I'm working on one project and I can
make progress here.
Five times the progress in the right direction on one
project versus I'm bifurcated and I'm across.
Just this one image was like, bah, yes, this is what we're trying to get people to
do, is get their people to be focused on the thing,
the top priority thing, which is why your tool is so helpful,
Stuart, because the executives can say, "These are the
priorities."
And then we can assign people with the right skills
and have the project managers negotiate for their time, so that at the
same time, we don't have five project managers outside somebody's office saying, "I
need my thing. I need my thing. I need my thing.
I need my thing." We say, "Okay, we've already negotiated,
and Jack is going to work on my thing this week and your thing next week, and our
projects are going to be fine."
So that's a great point. Because the side effect of this,
if you do it well, so it's not just which project should you do, it's
what order should you sequence them in?
Yes.
Right? So that you don't end up with that queue outside the resource
manager's office. Right? What sequence should you deliver them
in so that you can maximize the flow?
And the side benefit of this, of course, is that then your people
aren't working 80-hour weeks,
hair on fire, and they're burned out.
Getting 40 hours done. Like maybe not even.
Right.
Because, yeah, the tax. It's a
tax.
Yeah. Your team will have a life.
Yeah.
Yeah. What an idea.
Yeah.
Yeah. Doctor, take your own medicine. Never mind.
I know. Same.
It's a struggle. It's a struggle. Yeah.
It's a struggle in your personal life, too.
Absolutely,
we can use some of these principles in our personal lives.
Definitely.
And so the interesting thing there for me is that you have this
intervention around the portfolio management, so the prioritization and
sequencing and all that stuff,
that improves productivity, improves outcomes,
and I was just looking at some data actually
before this call, and there were a couple of studies that showed
that portfolio management, just doing that well
produces about
a 30% improvement in benefit outcomes
over the whole portfolio.
Sure.
So this is huge. This session's not about portfolio management, it's about
people.
Mm-hmm.
But again, I come back to the side effect is that that's because your people are
being more productive.
Yeah. And people suffer if you don't make those hard decisions up front.
Absolutely.
So we're sort of
banging up against time. I can't believe it.
These sessions always-
Go so quickly.
They do. These sessions always go so quickly.
So Heba,
two things.
First one is last thoughts and advice
on
leadership, getting your teams
empowered, looking after your team.
And the second thing is-
Yeah
... where do people get this?
Where do they get it? They can search for
Elements of Leadership and my name from Austin MacAuley publishers,
and they'll find the website easily, and it's available on Amazon as
well. Final thought is that don't forget
that
it's a balance. It's a balance of different
human-centric leadership aspects that you need to maintain.
At different times, you'll have to throw water in, or
wind or fire or earth, and sometimes you'll need them all to
keep fighting and to succeed in your project.
Excellent. Dawn, same question to you.
So we started with it's all about the people.
Processes can help, tools can help, but how are you taking care of your
people? How are you helping people be successful?
How are you creating a healthy culture for people where they can do their best
work? That's, to me, the challenge.And
I think both of us, Heba and I, are really trying to help with that
with the books that we've created and some of the work that we do.
And so thank you, Stuart, very much for having us both together.
It was a pleasure to be together with Heba here on this call.
Oh, the pleasure is absolutely mine.
Sometimes I feel in this job I'm the luckiest guy in the world because I get to
meet amazing people at all these conferences, and then for some reason they come on
webinars when I invite them, and it's just awesome.
So
again, the books, it's not really a book promotional tour or anything,
but the books are there.
By the way, Dawn
did
pull this one together as well. Dawn, do you want to talk about that really
briefly? And I'm so annoyed because I
didn't do a chapter. And I was
telling you this story the other week, Dawn.
I was about to send Dawn a really nasty message saying, "What are
you thinking, producing a book like this and not inviting me to write a chapter?
It's outrageous. I'm never going to talk to you again." And just
before I hit send, I thought, "I'd better check my inbox and see if there was
an invitation." And of course, there it was.
There it was.
Entirely my fault.
Yeah, no worries. Well, thank you.
But this is a fun book as well. And it's
a collaboration. You've got Jo Purrs in here. You've got Laura Barnard.
Lots of our friends. Yeah.
There's a whole bunch of people in there.
Lots of our PMO friends. So if it's flipped on your screen and you're not seeing
it, that one's called "Project Land Goes to the Movies:
22 Blockbuster Strategies for Project Success".
And so yes, there are 22 different chapters written by different authors from
around Project Land and the world.
And
it was a really fun one to put together because we got to talk about our
favorite movies, lessons from those favorite movies, and learn
lessons from the trenches from all these folks that have been in Project Land
and are experts. So a lot of fun. You'll see a lot of recognizable
names that have been with Stuart on this webinar in "Project Land Goes to the
Movies."
Awesome.
And you can go to
projectgurupress.com/moviesample
to get a free sample of that. You can also go to
projectgurupress.com/sample to get a sample of the
"Meet the Players in Project Land" book, which is the one that's all about the
people, and that sample includes those statistics and studies
that I mentioned in the very beginning of this.
So you can get that for free if you like. Yeah.
Brilliant.
Congratulations.
Thank you for that.
Thank you.
So it just remains to thank everybody for turning up, to thank
Dawn and Heba for sharing their time.
Heba, thank you for-
Thank you
... staying up late to do this. It's not too, too bad.
No, it's only 8:00 PM. It's okay.
Yeah, it's not too bad. You get back to the camera now.
Thank you for having us, Stuart.
But thank you for
taking time out to share your wisdom.
If you've enjoyed this one, keep your eyes open, look out for
invitations to our other webinars. We do two every month.
We do one that's like this, that's just kind of a bunch of friends having a chat
about project-y stuff because that's what we do, and then we
have one that's a little bit more about
our product.
Last
month, the month before was Laura
Barnard, and we had a really nice conversation, and the demo piece was very, very
short.
Next week, 25th? No, week after I think, we're going to have
Jo Purrs. And Jo's actually going to be in the UK, so we'll be sitting next to each
other.
Wow, nice.
Which is going to be such a hoot. It's going to be so much fun.
Both are in "Project Land Goes to the Movies." Both have chapters, yeah.
There you go.
Yeah. Amazing.
There you go. So it's going to be a lot of fun, so keep your eyes open for that.
So thank you, everybody. Great job, Heba and Dawn.
Thank you.
See you all next time.