Project Professionals Making a Positive Impact

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Every successful project makes a difference. But organizations and project professionals are looking to go further, putting a greater focus on delivering positive value to whole communities and societies. Today we’re looking at a couple of those projects and speaking to the project leaders who are making sure that these initiatives deliver on their potential. 

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified^®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

On the second of November, we celebrate International Project Management Day. It’s an opportunity to mark not only the contributions of project professionals and teams around the globe but also their impact. Every year, projects transform the world around us—sometimes in specific, discrete ways, and others in ways that deliver outsized social impact. 

We’re here to celebrate every project, every team, but today we’ll do so by spotlighting a couple of those extra-impact projects. I chatted with two rising stars in the project world, members of PMI’s 2023 Future 50 cohort, about their recent work. 

Nuha Hashem is the Dubai-based co-founder and CTO of the startup Zywa, a banking platform that was created specifically for young people in the Middle East and North Africa region. And in London, Johnnie Stark is a project manager at energy giant BP. 

Here’s our conversation—and after you listen, please check out PMI.org/Future50 to read up on the rest of the 2023 Future 50 leaders. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Nuha, Johnnie, thanks for joining me. We’re excited to have two of this year’s Future 50 leaders on the show. Today is all about showing why the world needs project professionals and their passion, so let’s start there. What do you love most about leading a team and a project? Johnnie, we’ll go to you first.

JOHNNIE STARK 

I think the best thing about being a project manager is the ability to interface against kind of all the aspects of a project. You work across commercial, across contractual, across technical, and you get to have an influence on everything. I think what particularly inspired me to move into this field was starting within the technical discipline as an engineer and being very focused on one very specific task, whether it’s valves or heat exchangers or pressure vessels, and then being able to move across into a discipline where I get to see everything. So I get to see how the contracts are set up. I get to see how the deals are brokered and negotiated, and then also still have oversight to the technical department, delivering something that is safe but also drives value for money.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s great, thanks. Now Nuha, let’s go to you. What do you love about being a project leader? 

NUHA HASHEM 

So I would say that my first big role as a project leader is actually what I’m doing right now, which is managing my own startup. Zywa is the first payment platform and payment card that is tailored specifically for the youth, which is anyone between the age of 10 to 25 years old. For those of you who are not familiar with this part of the world, it’s very difficult for someone to get a bank account if they’re under 18, and even as a student in university, it’s very difficult to open a bank account because most banks here require a salary certificate. So until, technically, you start your professional life, you’re not able to have any financial tools.

This started because it was a personal problem that was faced by my co-founder with his younger brother, and since I also grew up in the Middle East as a teenager, at a time when financial products for people under 18 was not a thing at all, I could instantly relate to the problem. And since nobody taught me much about managing my finances while I was growing up, I knew this was going to be a project that would change many lives for the better. 

I was doing my PhD in the U.S., and when my co-founder talked to me about the idea, I started working on both my startup and my PhD in parallel. I realized how much more passionate I am working on this. I was asking myself, “What’s better than working on something you love and making an impact on other people’s lives?” So that was my inspiration, I would say. But another favorite thing for me about being a project leader, at least in my specific line of work, is creating jobs for people and giving them a good environment to work in.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

That’s a great segue to our next topic—diving into the projects that you’re each managing or leading. Johnnie, tell us about the low-carbon initiative that you’re working on. 

JOHNNIE STARK 

Net Zero Teesside Power is a project designed for power CCS—power carbon capture. The goal of the project is to provide enough electricity to power up to 1.3 million homes in the northeast of England with low-carbon electricity and set a path kind of globally for how we build gas power stations with a carbon capture facility on the back end of them. At a high level, the way it works is like a conventional gas power station, except normally you would just emit all the CO2 into the atmosphere, and the goal of our project is to capture that CO2. It’s then transported to offshore reservoirs, and it’s then located beneath the seabed and held there in perpetuity. 

Net Zero Teesside is key not just within BP’s portfolio, but one of the U.K. goals is to decarbonize our electricity grid by 2035. So, to that end, the U.K. is investing really heavily into offshore wind and into solar plants. But these are called intermittent technologies, which means if the wind isn’t blowing, if it’s a night or you might have higher demand in the winter for electricity, you need to be able to power that demand. Hydrocarbons are a reliable way to do that because you can turn them on and turn them off at will. The main goal is that we lay the foundation to enable other projects that follow in our footsteps to deliver further power CCS projects and build a lower-carbon, more balanced energy network that the U.K. public have access to.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

And how is your team measuring impact, not just of the project itself but also that legacy aspect that you just mentioned? 

JOHNNIE STARK

Our impact will only be measured through the output of the facility. I mean, through the project life cycle, the goal is to really drive sustainability and equity into what we do, so pushing for greater gender and racial equality on-site and helping to build a more gender-equal workforce. So, working with our construction partners to develop plans to deliver that. And then also helping to try and drive demand for things like low-carbon concrete and green steel and really be a first mover in that area within the U.K. I think everyone can see the benefit of it, but until you have a market for it, it’s very difficult for suppliers to offer [it]. If we take the first step, then hopefully the projects that come after take another step in front, and that’s how you build that supplier life cycle, and we want to be part of the first mover[s] for that.

Having the opportunity to be within a project leadership team that’s delivering what is a first-in-the-world project that will hopefully set the path for others to follow us is a phenomenally exciting experience. The impact is really limitless within projects. Projects are how we deliver those kinds of grand visions.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

That’s great. Now Nuha, let’s talk about Zywa. How is it making a positive impact on Gen Z in the Middle East and North Africa? 

NUHA HASHEM 

The main goal of Zywa is to empower every young person to be able to take ownership of their own finances and to have useful tools and skills that will allow them to manage their own money once they turn into adults and to help them avoid things like debt, loans and all these things. We feel that this is something that is essential. It should be part of education and that this will have a positive impact on their lives as they grow older. 

How we measure the impact of this, it’s an everyday thing. Since we’re a small team, we actually do not have a customer support person. Our team members, including me and my co-founder ourselves, we take shifts to have a 24/7 customer support with our users. Obviously we have our own data, but the biggest thing for us is actually feeling this impact daily and hearing it from our users.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

As leaders, how do you get the rest of your teams to buy into your vision? Johnnie, looking at your experience, when you go from engineer to project manager, you can really own the positive impact of a project. But you have team members working on very specific project components, and you still want them to attach to the overall mission. How do you make that happen? 

JOHNNIE STARK 

That can be easier or harder, depending on the project. I think where I work it’s very easy engaging the team that no matter what level they’re working at, what detail they’re working on, helping the team to understand the environment benefits, the societal benefits, reputational, the technical challenges that we’re going to overcome. I think everyone has different drivers. Bringing together the kind of full picture of the benefit of a project to the local area, to the company and to the country itself. Allowing people to engage at whatever level they feel is appropriate and build their own motivation, but sharing the kind of wider picture and helping people to buy into what is a very exciting project is all about creating that sense of mission and that sense of purpose and getting people to pull together in that same direction.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Nuha, how about you? With your team, I’m guessing that you have a fair number of Gen Z team members based in the United Arab Emirates, and they can relate to the target customer. But once you move beyond that, how do you get people to connect with what you’re trying to accomplish?

NUHA HASHEM

That’s right. So, as you mentioned, we have people from UAE who are Gen Z. These are mostly our interns. Because we’re a startup, we’re a very small team: We’re six or seven core team members, including me and my co-founder.

From early on, we defined our culture. We call it POP culture, which stands for passion, ownership and proactiveness. These are the things that are part of our DNA. Having the passion for the project, right? Having ownership. Currently, we’re working completely remote, and each of our team members has complete ownership on their tasks. The last one is proactiveness. We never say, “We’re doing this just because this is the way it’s always been done.” This is something that we hate hearing or saying. So we always have to be proactive about understanding, why are we doing this in the first place? And besides that, because we’re a startup and we’re very early on, our early team members actually have a percentage stake in the company, which also makes them feel that this is, like, their own project.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

You both face a lot of change within your day-to-day work, but there are also changes happening in the project management profession and even in strategies for project leadership. So what do you think is different now, and how best can you futureproof your leadership to ensure long-term success? 

JOHNNIE STARK 

We’re already starting to see it, but we’re going to leverage artificial intelligence to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us on data analytics and improve efficiency and allow the project team to focus on more value-adding activity. Automation is going to create and filter and analyze more data than we’ve ever had before. I think going forward, project leaders are going to have to have much more of an analytical mindset. It’s going to be more important that you understand data and you understand what to do with it. It’s really important, being able to identify the trends within that data to make informed decisions and leverage that data to make projects tomorrow better than they are today.

NUHA HASHEM

I agree with Johnnie on this one. The future of project management would be where project managers are generally empowered by technology, more so even than now. And that will allow project management to be more effective and strategic. I feel that this will allow greater efficiency, and it will also reduce risks and make us able to deliver bigger projects that have a more significant positive impact in general. This is something that will be amplified through the application of new technologies, and a big example of these new technologies is AI, as Johnnie mentioned.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

From two project leaders to those listening, what’s your top piece of advice to others looking to become project professionals? 

NUHA HASHEM 

Things are not always going to go the way you want or the way you planned, and I learned this the hard way. So it’s super important to be flexible enough to deal with this change without getting affected or having a negative impact on the project itself. Sometimes we may even have to change the direction of the whole project and even start from ground zero, and I think that’s okay, as long as we remain true to our vision and just focus on the right things to move forward. I would say being flexible and being able to adapt based on the reality.

JOHNNIE STARK 

One piece of advice I would give to anyone thinking about becoming a project professional is just to dive in. The world needs project professionals that are motivated to deliver, who want to make a difference. If you want to be the change that you want to see, just use that energy and use that positivity and really drive it. Drive the change that you want to see. So I think having the motivation and having the desire to make an impact is the biggest quality you can have as a project professional. And then I think probably for me, the other must-have skill is adaptability. Project drivers change. Stakeholders change. Everything in the world of a project changes, and inevitably, that means projects change, too. So being able to handle that change and be adaptable to it and being able to identify, to assess, to implement that change on a constant basis could be quite tiring, could be quite wearying, but it’s fundamental to [the] success of projects. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Johnnie, following up on the idea of just diving in, what’s something that project management has enabled you to do that you wouldn’t have expected at the outset of your career?

JOHNNIE STARK

This is an easy one. So, I work for what was previously an international oil company. It’s now an integrated energy company. I’ve commuted to work on a helicopter, working in a platform 100 miles from the nearest coastline on a big chunk of metal. I’ve been to incredible places around the world and met really, really different people that all have such rich depth of cultural experiences. So I’ve been based in Korea, in China, Germany, the U.S., France, the U.K., and having that experience is something that I never thought was going to be possible when I was younger. And those opportunities continue to afford themselves, and I’m excited by each and every one of them.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

I absolutely need to find a good justification to commute to work via helicopter. This has been great. Before we go, is there anything I haven’t asked that you’d like to highlight about your experiences with project leadership? 

NUHA HASHEM 

Something that is really important in managing teams is really understanding and making sure that each team member’s well-being is taken care of. I feel like this is something that we overlook a lot when we’re managing a team, where we’re very goal-focused and goal-oriented.

In startups, we have very limited time, very limited resources, so we try to optimize that as much as we can, and most of the time, it’s very easy to overlook these very important things, which is making sure everyone’s mental health is in check. It’s very stressful to be working on something nonstop like that. So just wanted to highlight that this is one of the most important things that team leaders and project managers need to be mindful of. And always keep in mind while dealing with their team. Just empathy and trying to make sure that the team’s well-being is above anything else.

JOHNNIE STARK

It’s really interesting to hear that from a startup perspective. I guess at the other end of the spectrum, kind of in the big, megaproject realm, it’s equally as applicable, right? People deliver projects, not process. And I think fundamentally, project leaders have to have that human empathy. It’s really easy to talk about well-being. It’s a lot harder to genuinely care about people, right? So it’s easy to say, like, “Oh, if you’re under pressure, just take a step back.” Until the pressure comes, right? And you have a deliverable that must go out the door, and the teams get squeezed. And being able to stop it because genuinely you’re worried about people is a lot easier to talk about than it is to actually do that in real life. Within BP, we have a huge focus on safety, and I think we’re starting to see more of a focus on well-being and that safety isn’t just physical. Safety is also about your mental well-being as well, and aligning that well-being and the importance of well-being with the importance of safety and having the two of them equally as important as each other is, I guess, a cultural shift. It takes a strong leader to help drive that through.

NUHA HASHEM 

I totally agree with that, and I think it’s even more important for the leader to be taking care of their own mental health as well. Because this is, again, something that we learn the hard way, where we were pushing ourselves too hard and pushing everyone too hard, and then we realize, “Okay, now we’re more focused on actually having that balance while still trying to be productive.” And we found that even with the hours that we take out for exercising or doing something that will positively impact our mental health, the remaining hours are much more productive than having long hours and being stressed out all the time.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

That was a great back-and-forth. There is no better question than, “What should we have asked that we didn’t ask?” It always works.

Thanks for listening to Projectified^®. If you like what you heard, you can listen to more episodes on your preferred podcast platform or visit PMI.org/podcast. And please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review—it’s always great to hear from you. Hope you can join us next episode!