Strategy Management for Project Managers (Part 2) Transcript

Segment 1: What Are Some Objective Signs That Your Department/Organization/Team are Underdelivering?

Idris Manley:

Welcome to the Future of Work 2.0. I'm your co-host Idris Manley.

Ross Martin:

And I'm Ross Martin. Thanks for joining us. So Idris, for our topics today, we're still to the theme is still strategy management. But the first question is, what are some objective signs that your department organization team are under delivering some some objective signs? How would you even know That they're under delivering.

Idris Manley:

No. Yeah. That's a good one. That's a good one. Uh, well, the first question I would ask, are we, are we discussing the operational teams or teams, you know, operating or functioning in an operational capacity or in a project capacity? Teams can be do, be do both.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, well, I feel like let's, let's, let's, let's hit both of those. But, you know, what, which way would you like to go? First, you start thinking about a team start operation. Okay, let's talk about operationally. So their, their day to day work, and all the things they have to do to operate their portion of the business, and they're under delivering how, how would you even, you know, what were some signs would be some signs that you've seen in the past?

Idris Manley:

Well, I will say that it becomes easier to measure if the team's performing in a more mature way, right? So I think it's important to understand where the team is at on a scale of maturity. And if it is a low level of maturity, then that would imply that there are very few metrics and standards that have been placed to establish this baseline to be able to determine how well they are performing. If it's a higher performing team or if the team is operating, you know, more maturely, then that would imply that there are metrics and standards that have been well-defined and teams are being proactive in being able to evaluate where they are and hitting against those benchmarks. And they're having regular ongoing discussions with how they are performing. And so there's clear transparency and measurability and accountability in regards to those standards.

Ross Martin:

I would definitely agree on the operational side, the data is everything measurements, right? I mean, the reality is, is if you're looking at sales operations, or marketing operations, or, or perhaps like distribution operations, depending on what your company is, The reality is if the leaders of that area don't have constantly produced metrics about how they're doing, how they're delivering, turnaround times, all sorts of things, the sales funnels, how those things are performing, conversions of customers. If they don't know their data, then that's a pretty objective sign that they're underperforming.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when it comes to operations, And part of the maturity is really understanding what level of documentation or how well you're defining what the operations are, what the processes are, right? And so for companies that are not necessarily as mature as you would desire, they may have very little documentation. So even though by definition, operations are repeatable processes that they're performing on a regular basis, they may have very little documentation around that. As a result, it may be more difficult to be able to even understand what the metrics should be or what the standard process actually is for producing a particular outcome or result.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Pivoting a little bit over towards, say, project-based work for teams. you know, thinking about what sort of things indicate that a team is underperforming. Again, I definitely would would fall back on on that they don't know where they are, and they don't have information at their fingertips, especially for the, maybe it's just a project manager, but if they don't know everything that's going on with their project, Or if it's a PMO leader, or if it's a business leader, and they're making a transformation project or someone in IT, if they're asked the question, how's project such and such going, and they don't know right off the top of their, you know, in a moment, generally where things are, I think that's a sign.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, I think projects is much more difficult to be able to evaluate performance because teams are working on other priorities. Uh, and there's no, and because it's a project, it implies that it's, you know, it's a one-time effort. And so you don't necessarily have benchmarks for that specific scope with those particular team members. Uh, and so there's so many variables that can come into play that could affect a team's performance. And so how do you evaluate if the impact is a result of individuals under performance, or they're actually working on other things that are also taking up their time, or the scope is just really challenging and some of the dependencies are just more difficult to resolve. And so I think when it comes to projects, you have to have a much more, as a project management perspective, oversight perspective, you have to have a lot more standardization and rigor and maturity in how you're managing it so that you can isolate when the issue is actually a team member in terms of performance or if it's the project itself.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, it actually reminds me, we had a situation at one of my companies where the scrum team for a particular product area was underperforming. But what the real reason was is that the VP of the engineering team kept pulling key people to solve production issues. And so their velocity was all over the place. They'd lose their best engineers or QA people at a moment's notice. So you'd think at first that there's something wrong with the team, but there was nothing wrong with the team. Yeah. It was just, it was just the boss.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. So it reminds me also, I, you know, I was head of PMO at a company and I was reporting to the COO and the COO had made a significant investment in resources and was under significant pressure to deliver a certain amount of product capability, you know, within a 12 month period. And there was a lot of pressure on the scrum teams to figure out how to increase their velocity. And so you have the product owners sort of blaming the engineering leads, the engineering leads are blaming the QA, and you have the scrum master in the middle of all of this trying to figure out where the issues are. It was, you know, it took some time to really get to the root cause and to understand where the issues were. And the reality was, it was a combination of all of it. You know, there was definitely across all of the functions that were delivering the product, they all played a role and it required better process definition, more clarity of role responsibility and standards, and ultimately holding people more clearly accountable for what they were responsible for in order to improve the delivering velocity.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, that that makes sense. Another example that just I thought of was, we had another situation where it was actually an executive that was underperforming. And that's hard to find sometimes. Yeah, but And in this case, they were relatively new, and of course, there's always a certain amount of latitude given as an executive gets into position and starts taking over the team and taking over the responsibilities and figuring out, in this case, this person didn't know the industry very well, they just knew their part of the business, or it was a consumer business. But what was interesting over time is what became clear and finally led to the senior executives of the company actually having this person depart was that their team around them was constantly confused and in chaos. So at first you think they're getting their feet wet and they're figuring out what's going on, but over time it becomes clear that all their direct reports and those people's direct reports are constantly confused. Yeah.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me, even the previous example that I gave you, I failed to mention that one of the obstacles was the executive as well in terms of their expectations. So, in this case, they weren't particularly familiar with Scrum and understood that part of the value of Scrum and the agility is really allowing teams to self-organize and to really learn and adapt quickly. And it requires that you're not necessarily going to have a clear commitment on when something is going to be due, but you have trust in the teams and their ability to self-organize in a way where they deliver as quickly as possible and to be able to achieve dates. when you have an executive that doesn't really, that's maybe more comfortable with waterfall and a more predictable sort of delivery methodology where you commit to a date and get the resources you need and you get it done, Agile can be very uncomfortable for executives that are accustomed to that. And in this case, I think the executive, that person had the wrong expectation on the team and didn't really give the team enough time to self-organize and to allow their performance to improve. And so it does require a certain amount of patience from executives as well to be part of the solution.

Ross Martin:

Yes, that's an interesting point. At one of the companies I was at, we had a thing called the year of four CEOs. And it's exactly what it sounds like. And what happened, interestingly enough, is it didn't really cause any major problems for ongoing operations. People did their job, sales were made, things going, all that kind of stuff. But any sort of major projects, were completely thrown on on that because they kept having these leadership changes. And so nobody knew whether their big project was going to be the next leader's, you know, favor, whether or not their budget would go away. And it paralyzed project teams for making progress because nobody knew what was going to happen next. It was too much top chaos. Yeah.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Makes sense.

Segment 2: How Do You Foster a Strategic Mindset in Your Organization?

Ross Martin:

Yep. All right. Our next topic is how do you foster a strategic mindset in your organization? Yeah. I think one of the things that I think about with that is, but what about the low level employees? It's, it's easy to say, uh, all your VPs and above should have a strategic mindset, but you know, somebody who's just a, you know, a financial analyst, like how can they have a strategic? Yeah. Yeah.

Idris Manley:

No, I think, you know, it's one, it's a very good question. And it's a very challenging one. I think it really starts with trust. You know, and what I mean by that is, you have to be able to empower your teams and your individual contributors to be able to think strategically, which means you have to be able to give them goals and objectives to achieve without necessarily giving them specific direction on how to achieve them, right? And this kind of comes back to self-organization as well. You have to give your teams the freedom to be able to make mistakes and fail and to also to be able to come up with ideas and approaches and strategies to achieve goals on their own without laying out the specific roadmap or guidelines and how they are to achieve that. And so the more that you can trust and empower your teams to think on their own on how they would achieve the objective, even if it isn't Ideal or in a way that you would necessarily do it yourself. You're actually allowing them to develop that muscle Memory and to think on their own and to figure out how to how to achieve things without you know specific direction Yeah, I I I agree but and what's interesting about it is is I I think about

Ross Martin:

What happens is that companies want to do this, right? So they tell their teams that they want them to take on an objective or a responsibility and deliver it and not have to be told what to do. And then they shoot themselves in the foot. I've seen this a couple of times by punishing somebody who makes a mistake. And so at that point, then the person from that point forward says, well, I'm not going to put myself out there like that again. I'm just going to do my job as well as I can. And if I don't know what to do, I'll ask my boss.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Yeah. No, it didn't. Again, you can't expect someone or expect your, your contributors to be strategic if you're going to penalize them when they take the risk and you don't like the outcome or you don't like the approach that was taken. The whole point, again, which is why I said earlier, it's about trust. It starts with trust. Trusting your teams that you can empower them and, you know, willing to allow them to make mistakes, safe mistakes, of course, but you're willing to give them the freedom to make mistakes, to learn and grow and to self-organize. And I think, you know, if you can, you know, ride that journey with them, you're going to find people are much more confident and able to contribute to much more higher levels in the company, in the organizations and departments are going to benefit from that.

Ross Martin:

One thing I've seen that's kind of interesting and in my mind even a little bit risky is actually calling out and praising a team for taking a risk and failing, but praising them for taking the risk. I have seen it from a few executives. I've never seen it at an entire company level. But, but it does send it sends messages down to the folks that they will be praised for for taking those risks.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, reminds me of a book that I read, Strength Finders. Yeah. And where the emphasis was, We, you know, as leaders, we tend to, uh, focus or concentrate on the strengths of our, of our direct employees, as opposed to their weaknesses. I'm sorry, the other way around and tend to focus on their weaknesses as opposed to their strengths. And so we spend a lot of time, you know, 85, 90% of our time coaching, you know, educating, teaching, mentoring around the areas of the week when we should be spending more of that time on areas of their strength, they're strong. and helping them become even stronger in those areas. And so I think it is important as a company that you really are not just sort of emphasizing what they're doing wrong, but you're really identifying the opportunities where they're performing and helping them actually get even better in those areas.

Ross Martin:

I agree. And then the other thing about fostering a strategic mindset in the organization, I think, are things like, you know, the processes around strategy cascading through your organization. We've talked about MBOs and OKRs before, and we don't need to rehash that completely. But the idea is, if you really want people to understand how what they do does impact the strategy and what they do, if they're thinking more about outcomes, you have to give them a way to translate their day to day work into the strategy organization. You can't just tell them to think more strategically.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, yeah. And you have to encourage them to and allow them to contribute at the very beginning stages. So when you're you know, at the beginning of that annual planning sort of cycle, you know, instead of just giving a team a plan and saying, okay, execute against these metrics, you actually have a mechanism in your governance to allow them to actually contribute to their portion in a way that it's collaborative, where they feel like they have a voice and they actually take ownership of the, of those particular areas in a way that they feel that they have the autonomy and the trust from you to be able to, and confidence to be able to deliver.

Segment 3: The Future of Work is Projects

Ross Martin:

I can't agree more. Our next topic is the future of work is projects. So that's kind of interesting. So if you think about the history of work, so when mass production first started, maybe in the early 1900s, operations running your business was probably 90% of work. And then projects, which is changing and improving your business, was about 10%. And gradually, as new technologies and things came through over the 1900s, that changed. And by the time we got to about now, around 2020, it's about 50-50 between operations and project-based work at work of what people are actually spending their time doing. So just so I'm clear, so

Idris Manley:

If you were to calculate all of the hours that your employees are contributing, half of their time on average would be applied to operational work, activities, and driving operationally related outcomes and project related.

Ross Martin:

Exactly. Run the business or change the business, but about half, half and half on average. Some people are pure projects, some people are pure operations, but on average. What's interesting though, and the reason we're saying the future of work is projects, is that's about to drive even further down in the amount of time people are spending on operations. And that's because of new innovations like AI. Um, which will take, uh, automate a lot of the, sort of the busy work of running a business. So by the time, uh, over the next, uh, probably over the next 10 years, it should get down to more like. 20, 25% and then continue to drive down to where operations is at most 20% of a person's time of all your people's time.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, that makes sense, especially with with, you know, automation, AI automation, you know, continuously looking for ways to automate repeatable processes, it's only a matter of time before AI is smart enough to be able to take one more and more of the traditional operational functions. But because projects are not recurring, repeatable prophecies because you're implementing change, it's much more challenging for AI to completely sort of replace those particular processes because they're unique and there's unique permutations based on exactly what you're trying to accomplish in a given project.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, the whole point is, is, is operations by its definition in a lot of ways is repeatable. Yeah. And that's, that's what you automate.

Idris Manley:

And then, so companies will actually become change management or innovation or, you know, in terms of where they're, where they're spending their human resource capital, right. Be on change while, you know, robots and AI are responsible for ongoing repeatable operations.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah. Change management. You know, I remember a number of decades ago when I first started, it was kind of a new thing. Like, Oh, when you change things in an organization, you need to think about not just communications, but, but helping bring people along that change curve so that, that, that they can adopt and use the new process or the new tool or whatever it is you're doing. You know, it's kind of wild to think that that will turn into being the dominant thing that is happening at companies.

Idris Manley:

But I think what's scary about all of that is the fact that if you look at project delivery, there are very few you know, project delivery leaders, they're in the C-suite, right? Yeah. Or even VPs for that matter. And so project delivery as a function has typically for a lot of companies been sort of managed as a tactical sort of function, right? Where maybe at most the person is a director or senior director at most, but they never really sort of break into the executive sort of sphere. And so as a result, this significant part of one's business that's becoming an increasingly larger part of the business, you're not having a real sort of delivery focused leader that's really focused and concentrated and accountable to delivery, I think is a big, is a big red flag and it's going to become a problem for organizations going forward.

Ross Martin:

That's a really interesting point. Think about a COO, right? A COO is a Chief Operational Officer. So that's a very exalted position, often the number two behind the CEO. Absolutely. And yet, it's only now beginning, I think, that people are starting to think of things like a CDO, a Chief Delivery Officer. Value delivery. Exactly. It's going to be an interesting thing where most of the time I find that at companies, the heads of business units, the heads of different functions and things are running those functions. And, and yeah, so they're going to end up needing to be huge change agents as well, where they spend most of all of their time thinking about the change. And I think, I think a lot of them do now at a certain point, but it really needs to become part and parcel to everything they do.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, I think a lot of executives, or at least the CEOs, assume that just because they're good in their particular function, that they can execute and plan and execute in an optimal way. And while I'm sure that is to a certain extent true, I think we're realizing just based on the complexity of delivery, the amount of projects that have failed to deliver successfully, clearly something isn't working when it comes to how projects are being delivered. And I think part of the challenge or the issue is that executives are being overloaded and expected to be able to not only deliver in their particular functional area, but also to be masters at planning and execution. And so I think there's a realization that having someone focus on the value delivery and the planning execution around that, and while allowing senior leaders to continue to manage their function, manage the outcomes, but to partner with a leader that is really experienced and knowledgeable on the actual execution to achieve the outcomes. I think it's a good partnership. It's a good collaboration that we're going to be seeing a lot more of in the future.

Ross Martin:

And one of the challenges as well is the way the companies are organized in the first place, right? So they're usually at the moment, uh, organized by their operational functions. So you might have the, the organization over in Europe that's based on selling work or creating products over in Europe, that sort of thing, or the product and engineering business unit. So in some ways they're organized considering how you run the business. how you operate. We all have seen that there are some companies that have process streams, value streams, people who think across the organizational boundaries. And in theory, that's what a really top-notch enterprise PMO is thinking as well, across organizational seams. But, um, but I really think everybody's going to have to level up on this and, and start to think, you know, about the way the different parts of the business work together, however it's organized in order to make projects, you know, successful.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, I think it's an interesting question. When you look at how AI is going to allow your individual contributors and your typical employees to work on less tasks, which means that it's going to free them up to be more strategic or to contribute in new ways that they hadn't before. Uh, and so it's going to really, I think it's going to shift how we think about different functions and what the responsibilities are. I know that within, within project management in PMO specifically, uh, you know, managing a project manager, just managing tasks and activities that will, you know, sooner or later become a thing of the past. And so that person will more than likely become more of a leader in delivery and sort of asking the right questions, asking the tough questions, making sure strategically the teams are, you know, are achieving and tracking to the business outcomes as opposed to tracking to the who's doing what and when a deliverable is due. And so I think across all of the functions, you're going to see this sort of this leveling up that will, that will occur because the tasks are just now being performed by AI.

Ross Martin:

One of the interesting things that I could see a number of senior leaders taking advantage of, though, is once you have automation and AI freeing up a number of these people to work on value-added work, they could also choose instead to take the cost savings. Yeah. I think that in many ways, there are times where that's just what you have to do, but I think that will be short-sighted because I could see a situation where a company takes advantage of automation to remove a number of people, save a lot of cost, but they're not going to be setting themselves up for success in the future against their competitors. They're just going to be getting some early benefits from lowering their cost structure. And then they're going to later end up having to hire a bunch of people later on who could have been trained up from their existing folks.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, no, if you think about it, if your competitor is in this very similar position as, as, as you are. And you know, your competitor decides to retain those employees that have, you know, where they're now not managing tasks. That means they're probably shifting those employees to performing more strategic activities that are actually, you know, they're out thinking you, they're outperforming, they're executing you because they have additional resources that can think about how to do just that. And so I think, yeah, I think you're right. I think teams or companies are going to have to figure out how to take advantage of the capacity that's made available to AI as opposed to just reducing headcount. Otherwise they're going to buy their competitors, have a, have a strategic advantage over them.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, I, I, I fully agree. I think it's going to be a very interesting ride over the next five to 10 years. Um, projects are going to be the dominant work, uh, very soon.

Idris Manley:

I think it's also just one other point. I think it's interesting. If operations, if everyone for the most part is able to take advantage of operations automation, it means that there's less, there will be less differentiation across companies in those particular operational, you know, capabilities, right? Because we had humans sort of performing all that operational work. There are unique things in terms of talent and experience, etc. that could allow for more differentiation in how one company performed a certain operational function versus another. But if everyone is using AI, if everyone is using similar technologies and AI is just you know, regularly optimizing, that means that everyone is sort of performing operationally at a very similar, at a similar sort of level of performance. And so the differentiation then becomes on the project side. That is where, because you still have humans involved and there's still a lot of various variables and factors that contributes to whether a project is being delivered effectively or successfully. And so I think you're going to find that projects become even more impactful to the bottom line and to competitive differentiation across companies than ever before.

Segment 4: Only 41% of Organizations Felt that Their Enterprise PMO was Aligned to Their Strategy

Ross Martin:

Yeah. The ability to execute change is really going to be the new competitive advantage. Yeah. All right, our next topic is from PMI produced a study that said that only 41% of organizations felt that their enterprise PMO was aligned to strategy to their strategy. I mean, first of all, what I find so surprising about that, and then I'll talk about why it's not completely surprising, is the whole point of an enterprise PMO is to have a PMO that is driving forward your strategy across the enterprise. So how could it be that less then a majority of them are aligned with the strategy. My first thought on that is, well, I think it partly relates to the fact that PMO traditionally, leaders of PMOs, even e-PMOs, have traditionally still not even often been at the VP level and are often not included in the strategy formation of the company. And even in one case where I was the head of the EPMO at a company and I was in the strategy group as were the rest of the EPMO, the fact is we were still seen as kind of a cross-functional execution team and not a strategic team. And so we were, I wasn't, I was sometimes, but not always in the room when these sorts of things were being discussed.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Yeah, no, I would agree. I think probably the biggest reason is the disconnect between strategy and the plans that are formed to execute on those strategies. Right. And so If you think about the hierarchy, the ideal or the optimal hierarchy, you have an initiative, then you have programs, which are in a portfolio, and then you have projects that roll up to the program. And then you may have sub-projects even, right? But you have a natural hierarchy in terms of how you roll up and you group the work that's being done and how it rolls back up to the initiative that it supports. And of course, the initiative then supports the strategic objectives that have been defined. But if you're finding that executives are defining strategic goals and then they're expecting PMO to come in and work on specific projects that they're defining for them, then you're going to find that there's a disconnect, right? Because if you're coming to a project manager or a project management organization, you're saying, hey, these are the projects that we need you to perform without allowing them to really think through what is the best way to roll up the work that's needed to achieve the outcome and allow them to sort of define the structures that supports that. Then you may find there's a disconnect between the projects that are being executed, not taking into the full context of what's needed in order to ensure that the strategies themselves are being supported.

Ross Martin:

Well, and as we're advocating for modern project delivery to think of the business outcomes at all times through initiatives and programs and projects, that connection between the original thinking around the strategy, the outcome that's desired, and the initiative that's been handed down is lost if it's handed down, right? you really have to have the ability for at least the leader of the EPMO, if not the people in, you know, and is the some of the specialists in the EPMO as well, to be part of the formation of the strategy in order to really be able to, to keep that connection in place.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, no, they have to understand that context. Yeah. So you can't just expect a team to implement a project with a specific deliverable that's expected and not understand the context of the business outcomes or the strategy behind it so that they can self-organize or they can actually contribute. Um, you know, if the project is, is not necessarily achieving that or, or it's being misguided, they can, at least they have the ability to recognize when that is happening and make recommendations and suggestions. Um, you know, inspect and adapt any way that you can adjust and pivot while you're still executing on the project versus realizing the disconnects at the end of the project, once the outcome has not been fulfilled.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I think, you know, I find it interesting, like I said, it was surprising to me, because it's supposed to be a strategic execution function. But it's not surprising to me. Yeah, yeah.

Idris Manley:

But it, you know, the back to our earlier conversation, I think that's gonna have to change very quickly. Yeah, because as delivery becomes more strategic and more critical to the business's success. Because as we said earlier, like operations is continuing to automate. Yeah. That teams, you know, companies are going to have to figure out how to address these gaps in delivery. Um, such that they can have greater confidence and ability to achieve the outcomes that they need. They're, you know, the change management function to, to achieve.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the reasons we would like to continue to try and talk about instead of PMOs, like value delivery organizations is to try and constantly reinforce the strategic nature of where project management needs to go in order to serve companies in the future. Absolutely.