Project Leaders Embrace New Ways of Working
Transcript
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s face it. Change can be uncomfortable. It’s natural for people to stick to what they know and what has worked for them. But new ways of working can be transformative—consider the impact of agile or design thinking, which once upon a time were radical and new.
So what’s the solution? Today, our guests talk about embracing change and share how they evaluate and implement new ways of working to ensure these changes bring value to projects and teams.
NARRATOR
The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.
Everyone has ways of working that are comfortable, familiar and effective. You get good at a particular approach or technique, and … well, there’s some appeal in the idea of just doing it that way forever.
But here’s the thing: Somebody else out there is always innovating, improving, expanding, creating new opportunities to work differently—and better. And if you want to excel, you have to pay attention—Ways of Working, after all, is one of the three pillars of the PMI Talent Triangle®, along with Power Skills and Business Acumen. Embracing new ways of working is well worth the effort, whether that’s immersive collaboration and predictive modeling or new applications and refinements of agile practices. Who knows? The next breakthrough in project management could be right around the corner.
Expanding the applications of agile techniques is a notable trend within project management thanks to the creativity of leaders such as Alexandre Mariano Vieira. He’s now a project manager at port terminal operator SSA México in México City, a subsidiary of transportation and logistics company Carrix. Before recently taking on this role, Alexandre was a project manager for business development at the pharmaceutical company Chinoin, and while there, he introduced a hybrid approach with some agile techniques that helped level up his team’s work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Alexandre, thanks for joining me. Today is all about how project leaders evaluate and incorporate new ways of working. So how do you evaluate whether something new—a novel governance framework or project management approach—might be a good fit for your projects and teams?
ALEXANDRE MARIANO VIEIRA
In order to incorporate new ways of work, we need to really have a clear assessment of our team’s capabilities regarding culture, regarding process and regarding buy-in. We are looking for simplicity, what we call high-touch, low-tech alternatives. The more simple and the more visual, the best for my contextual situation. We are trying to go for the visual management, for Kanban tools, lean concepts that could really add value without bringing complexity. So answering your question objectively, how can we evaluate a new way of work? Checking if it brings transparency, adaptability and inspection to our project process or to our project. If it fulfills these three conditions, it might be something good that we can incorporate as our way of work.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s walk through an example of this. During your time at Chinoin, you started incorporating agile techniques into your business development projects. What made you think aspects of agile would work well for you? And what struck you as potential obstacles based on the company’s established project management approach?
ALEXANDRE MARIANO VIEIRA
[In a] pharma company, you have two big players. In one side, you have the patients. And in your other side, you have the doctors, the prescribers, the scientists that are developing therapies, that are developing technology for the new diseases. Between these two players, you have the pharma company, which is converting this information that comes to the doctors in[to] something that really the patients can consume. So in this value stream, you have doctors, you have the pharma company and you have the patients. And my base idea when I came to Chinoin is that when you have this kind of value stream—that delivers value based on iterations, based on customer feedback, based on continuous integration or even continuous buildup of the product—there is an opportunity to be agile. We can accelerate the value of the operations [by] incorporating the customer’s feedback in the product that we are developing, and this accelerates our value a lot, and this generates an important competitive advantage to the company. So my first insight that it would be a good idea to bring agility to Chinoin was to give to the business the ability to quickly change or to quickly adapt for the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) market that pharmaceuticals companies are inserted [in] nowadays.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
When you suggested that, was the gist, “Hey, okay, great. Let’s do it”? Or did you have to do any convincing?
ALEXANDRE MARIANO VIEIRA
No, no, no. One of the biggest obstacles or problems that we have, Steve, when we talk about agile is people that say to you, “We always did [it] this way. It always worked. So why do I need to change?” And this is something that is really tough, Steve, because you need to streamline this concept of agility and what are the potential benefits. So quickly pivot into the changes, accelerating of delivering value, customer clearance or customer proximity service levels. You need to educate your organization from the top management until the shop floor. It’s very common that you’ll hear people say [the] same things. “I already did it. It does not work.” Or “I always do [it] like this. I don’t want to change.” When you have this kind of situation, we really need to work with empathy, communication and really separate people from the problem. Because at the end of the day, we are talking about people—people that have fears, concerns, that have behaviors, backgrounds, context—and the project manager needs to understand what is behind the people.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s a good point. It’s not just about convincing team members that have never used agile approaches before. It might be their supervisors that need to buy into this as well. And you’ve got to be empathetic and patient to work through everybody’s objections, non-ideal past experiences, expectations, all of it. Tell me about the implementation process. Especially if you’ve got some skeptics in the organization, how did you get everybody to operate in such a way that this would be a positive experience and an effective one?
ALEXANDRE MARIANO VIEIRA
One of the more important tools that we have in agility is the coaching skills. When you go to the people and start to ask a powerful question, like “Why?” and “Why not?” and “Have you ever tried?”, you can get valuable insights and really understand why people don’t want it or why people don’t believe. So one of the main strategies that we use in our company that makes people start thinking in a new way is to understand the why. I had examples that people that don’t want to work with agile because they have to get together every day for 15 minutes because we were working with scrum. I had people that don’t wanted to go to the team because they feel like they won’t be empowered enough. And the fact that they need to relearn how to work in a new way, it might seem that they are not competent enough and et cetera. The main thing here is that we need to really look for the pain points of the people. Separate people from the problems and the process. For example, the organization had, in that moment, a poor culture of change management. So people are not willing to change because they are used to [doing] the things like they did 10 years before. So you need to separate these two things and give [them an] opportunity to work. For example, empowerment is a really powerful tool for convincing people to a new way of work. For some people, we gave them the opportunity to have visibility with the organization, present the daily standups or to have the contact with the top manager regarding risk assessments.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
That’s a great example—just a good roadmap of working through honoring the skeptics by listening to them and addressing their objections. So while you incorporated these agile techniques, you didn’t go all in with two-week sprints, iterations, all that stuff. How did you figure out what agile would look like on your projects—what to incorporate, what to save for a later phase? And then how did this mix of techniques affect your work?
ALEXANDRE MARIANO VIEIRA
First things first, we need to think agile before we do agile. In that sense, what I did in my area was to implement basic concepts of agility before we talk about agility. For example, transparency. We built a scrum board. We put all the tasks [on] this board, and we shared it with all the organization in an electronic way. So all the stakeholders could see in real time how the project was being developed, what would be the next step, and what were the issues and the blockers and et cetera. And this had a great result because people understand the project concepts and the issues and [are] much more willing to help. The second thing that worked for us a lot was servant leadership—not just me as project manager of the business development but all the other project managers for market, for commercial, and et cetera. We gave autonomy to our team to work through the deliverables. We had daily standups in which we talk with the team and ask if there’s something that you need from our side. Is there something that you need for my support? We were much more interested in understand[ing] what the team is doing, how they are doing, but more important that we were interested in protect[ing] our team from the interruptions. So if I have a developer, I am really interested that my programmer uses his workload to program, to deliver value to the project and to the organization, not doing reports, answering phone calls, answering tons of mails, et cetera, et cetera. We were interested in making sure that people had all resources to execute the work first. Second, we were interested that people have clarity in what they will be executing. And the third thing, and the most important, we were making sure that these people have conditions to execute the work without interruptions. And this gave us a great improvement in our project schedule because we could guarantee that people were 100 percent dedicated to the project.
STEVE HENDERSHOT
Did this shift to a hybrid approach result in any business wins you can share? How did you measure the success of all this?
ALEXANDRE MARIANO VIEIRA
We are always looking for quantitative and qualitative measurements to really know our progress to be successful. But we could significantly reduce the time that we developed the deliverables of the project. And why? Because we were making sure that, first, people had time to work in the project. And second, we have constant interactions with the clients. So I don’t need to wait for six months to get the feedback for my client if the product that I am developing it’s good, it’s not, if it fits or if does not fit to the portfolio. He’s with me each four weeks, five weeks, and et cetera. In that way, we reduce the rework of the final product, and we can expedite the delivery because people are always involved, and they had transparency of the issues. And when we had transparency, they were much more willing to help. We reduce almost 30 percent of the delivery time of our components to the portfolio. Regarding the metrics, we defined three objective key results: one related to the customer performance, what we call product service level, which measures if the project was delivering value or not, according to the customer’s perspective; the second one was the budget; and the third one was the time. So when we looked for these three KPIs [key performance indicators], if the time was okay, and the cost was okay, but we were not fulfilling customer expectations, we knew that we need to go back to the project plan and really get actions to redirect the project to the right track.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
STEVE HENDERSHOT
in San Antonio, Texas, in the U.S.CACIOne challenging aspect of adopting a new way of working is securing the buy-in needed to make it happen. And project managers can face additional struggles if they’re joining a project that’s already in motion. Projectified®’s Hannah LaBelle spoke about that with Jessica Montgomery, a military veteran and former project leader within the U.S. government who is now an IT project manager at IT and services company.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
HANNAH LABELLE
So, Jessica, let’s talk about implementing and building buy-in for new ways of working. What has been your experience with this?
JESSICA MONTGOMERY
Based on the current projects I have been working on in the last year or so, I come into projects maybe mid-project, jumping in to replace a previous project manager, and seeing the amount of progress or lack thereof that this project manager previously had done with the team and noticing that they weren’t getting any forward movement. So I would start implementing suggestions or just listening to the team or trying to see the vibe or the tone of the environment. Now it’s time to implement and suggest different ways of doing things and see what they’ve tried in the past, and if that has not worked, let’s try something different. Always be open to suggestions and to brainstorm ways to make the project move forward again, or at least get rid of some obstacles that are standing in our way.
HANNAH LABELLE
That seems like an interesting place to be coming from—picking up where somebody else has left off or taking over for someone. What challenges does that add when it comes to trying to introduce a new way of working?
JESSICA MONTGOMERY
I have to present myself in a manner which is, [you should] be able to trust me, be able to communicate in a manner that they receive me as approachable, to be as competent and knowledgeable about project management as I can, as well as integrate myself and acclimatize myself to the new environment, to the problem, to the resources, to the team and to leadership very quickly. It’s a challenge, and there is usually a reason why the previous PM [project manager] left, and I’ll have to deal with that particular issue. You don’t know what you’re getting into until you get there, and either you have to come up with ways to go around those obstacles and navigate. Sometimes it’s sitting down with leadership. Sometimes it’s sitting down with the team and understanding what happened. And so we’re going to put that behind us, and we’re going to move forward. Because the project needs to be completed, and I have a mission [to] accomplish, and we’re going to do it.
HANNAH LABELLE
Let’s talk about a time when you came in and had to introduce a new way of working to a team. What was the project, and how did you get involved?
JESSICA MONTGOMERY
I was working with the United States Air Force as a contractor, and I got onto a project for a mobile app called Aim High. It’s a recruiting app. And I was excited because I thought I was jumping in at the very beginning. No, no. I was wrong because when I got there, I found out that the previous project manager had just up and left abruptly, so they were quickly trying to fill that slot. And when I got there, I wasn’t told a lot of information about what had happened and why this is happening. I was trying to integrate myself, [acclimatize] to the environment, get to know everybody, find out what was going on, what happened, what are we facing right now, what milestone are we at, why are we halting. All these questions that I had to find out. It’s very much of a challenge because I’m the new person. I’m the new guy. So no one really wants to talk to me. So I had a lot of conversations with my superiors about this. I’m like, “How can you suggest that I move forward as a successful project manager for this app?” Because apparently, it was already behind schedule. Speaking with a third-party vendor, speaking with the developers and the engineers, I found out that the government was strictly [using] waterfall and that the third-party vendor was using agile.
HANNAH LABELLE
Okay, so you’re coming into this environment midway through. How did you build support for the project and get everyone on the same page? What did that process look like?
JESSICA MONTGOMERY
I sat down with my contracting lead and some of the developers and engineers, and I asked them what happened. The previous PM had tried to implement the agile processes with the government. I asked these people, who’d been there much longer, what do they suggest? How did they face this in the past? What has worked and what didn’t work? They were getting to have buy-in with certain members of the government leadership team, not all of them, but certain members of them. I said, “Did you use a third-party vendor? Did they come in and talk about this?” It’s like, “No.” Let’s try that. I mean all they can say is no, right? If it doesn’t work, we try something else. So we had the CEO of that third-party vendor company talk to the government leadership people and help them understand the benefits of why they use this methodology for this particular software, and it worked. They were open to learning about agile.
HANNAH LABELLE
Once you get over this hurdle of knowledge and understanding and now it comes time for implementation, how did that benefit the entire project and that process?
JESSICA MONTGOMERY
Oh my gosh. The motivation went up [through] the roof. The velocity of the sprints [was] great. It just renewed everybody with this new energy. When they had these status meetings, they participated more. Even said “Good morning.” Something simple as saying good morning because it’s all remote. Trying to empathize with the developers and the engineers and the third-party vendors and other stakeholders was difficult because you had to remember that there was an actual person on the other side of that screen. And be very cognizant of the tones of voice because we would never turn the cameras on. So you didn’t have the added benefit of facial expression. Just had the voices. So that added challenges as well.
HANNAH LABELLE
What are some of the top skills you would say that project professionals need to help their teams adapt to and utilize new ways of working when it’s necessary?
JESSICA MONTGOMERY
It’s more important than ever to have a human-centric approach to a project because all you see sometimes, if you have the cameras on, is that person on the screen or just listening to their voices. We don’t have that benefit of the in-person reaction and feedback from that person in the same room. I think that puts us at a disadvantage. As a project manager, you’re not only just managing the project. You’re managing the team. And I think emotional intelligence is huge. I’m also a very huge advocate of continuing improvement of your personal and your professional skills. I never, ever stop trying to continuously improve my way of communicating, listening or just approaching a different idea or problem. Listen to other people’s ideas and be open to that.
NARRATOR
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