00:00:00,000 [Music] Hi there everyone, it’s night here and welcome to the Saturday Brunch episode of the Sunday Lunch Project. This month I’m going into a couple of
00:00:26,720 the hours of working through, didn’t quite get there, with all things COVID that are going along. My focus on priorities have been elsewhere and as I imagine many of you are there’s other. So what I’ve got is an interview which I did, it was an interview with me, with a website
00:00:49,200 called PMTips, so thought I would share that with you guys, have a listen, my thoughts about communication, met very much in the way the conversations were coming through and I think one of the key things that I said in it was around increasing and improving communication which goes again with
00:01:09,600 what I said last, earlier in the month, interview with Gordon, is that when we are in periods of mass change, increased communication is kind of key and I think that still stands. That’s it really, I thought I’ll let you get on, enjoy your Saturday, I’m saying my garden
00:01:30,720 waiting for the day to wake and hopefully we’ll be able to better schedule next month. I’ve got a great interview coming up at the end of the month which is the previous interview, Eek Harry Thompson, just digging into her bag, I know they open, so speak to you soon, she’s not boys.
00:01:48,480 Today we are interviewing Nigel Creaser, project management professional and a senior project and program manager who has worked in the industry for 20 years. Nigel we are honored that you accepted our invitation, thank you for making the time for this interview with PM tips.
00:02:12,880 It’s a pleasure to be on, thank you very much for the invite. Considering you have many years of experience in the field of project management, what is your view of the profession, what do you think are the greatest benefits of being a project manager? It’s funny, I would say variety is the first thing
00:02:29,920 kind of pops to mind, with every piece of work you get a subtly different piece of scope, different budget, different team, different stakeholders and none of them are the same, which is a good and bad sometimes because sometimes you can feel comfortable with that team, comfortable with your
00:02:41,840 stakeholders and then when you’re moving something new it’s quite a big difference. The other is it that it feels like I said change is constant now and it’s increasing in pace and I was at a conference recently and Randy Black from PMI was talking about the fact that organisations are moving away from
00:02:57,760 the traditional siloed delivery organisations and because change is happening so much you’ve always got projects going on so that’s the great thing about being a project manager you can change the world. During the last 20 years you have had the chance to work on a large number of projects across
00:03:14,320 multiple industries and technologies. In it there was one kind of challenges you faced in your career and the experiences that shaped you as a project manager. There’s a couple of things that spring to mind, I had a project a few years back where there was a software that the company had
00:03:29,520 bought and was new to the company that I was working for and we were implementing it at one of our customers. Unfortunately during the acquisition most of the UK knowledgeable people had gone and had limited access to our US technical guys. The training had been fairly sparse for the team as well
00:03:45,200 and the customer had taken, we partially implemented the product but they had to put something life to meet the key milestone so they put it live even though process were taken over 24 hours to run and then falling over and not delivering what they needed to do. So when I arrived it was a case of
00:03:57,840 get it working and exit the project with the least cost for both sides. The problem was is that their environments did not have the same scale of
data that was in the live environment so any of the processes ran in a
minute or seconds but we couldn’t go near the live or sacrilege and they wouldn’t
00:04:11,600 let us touch the live environment. It took me several weeks maybe into months of persisting and working with the program manager on the customer side to explain what we needed to do. And we eventually did
get it and we got some of my really talented technical guys on there. We sat looking at a screen and
00:04:28,800 it was like watching something from the matrix all this data showing of how the data was flowing through the things and databases and they
tweaked them under rules and they got there and we got it working and
delivered the project and the thing was sticking to the guns I think was the key thing
00:04:41,280 there. I persistently trying to persuade our customer that we needed
access to that live which they said it was impossible but we got there.
So asking to do the things that you know is the right thing sometimes it takes time to get that decision. And the other really was around I managed to portfolio
00:04:57,280 projects which were about 100 people in the team. It was my first
department, large portfolio and the profit wasn’t great in that area at the
time and I’d been asked to turn it around and I looked through what’s
going on, instigated cascades, a result to the team and that made sure that the team
00:05:11,840 understood how we were doing from a point of view of our profits and
costs etc and what was expected of them to improve that productivity and that really really worked and the guys came to me before that certain points asking me questions that I thought would have been obvious and they weren’t
00:05:27,040 but once we’d started sharing a profitability with them they realized that
their impact had a direct effect on our productivity at the time. Although
it wasn’t all rosy in that job and I wonder I cringe when I look back that my approach to managing the team was fairly loose. Some of the team
00:05:40,880 I built really good relationships with. So I didn’t really know when I kind of looked back now and think I really should have invested more in
knowing every person in that team and understanding how they fitted in
better because I think I could have been a better manager if I’d done that.
00:05:54,160 You have helped diverse organizations across the United Kingdom with directing change, one example being the successful delivering of
change value that over 20 million pounds. How do you bring change in an organization?
00:06:08,400 I think again it’s a similar similar to the other one one is it’s around that communication elements. I think working with the stakeholders understanding that end business making sure that everyone knows what your goals and aims are. I think everyone dislikes change
00:06:27,440 and therefore if you dislike change you aren’t necessarily going to
embrace it but even if an individual is cooperately minded or socially
minded there’s still that going to be a resistance because deep down we like the norm to happen. So I think again it is all about communication
00:06:44,320 having a good understanding of what was being delivered for the project. What the benefits of the organization is from that project
because as an individual and connecting that to you as an individual.
So all of those being able to promote the fact that what the benefit of that is
00:06:59,440 I did some desktop role lights where there was actual physical hardware and one of the benefits of that was being able to take knowledge from individuals or comment from one person was that they by changing a device type of device they were using they weren’t carrying as much paperwork around
00:07:16,320 by not carrying as much paperwork around as paperwork they did used
to carry around was really sensitive and that meant it was more secure
it made them less stuff carrying around they had it more organized and
taking those stories from people and playing them back to the people who have
00:07:32,320 other people who are about to have the change imposed upon them. I
think it’s key making sure that what’s in it for me is you, Helen. In
situations when a project influences on organization and a change to the structure is required in order to implement a certain system 00:07:49,600 who do you believe should be managing the organizational change? Can it be expected of a project or a program manager to have the necessary competencies or should a change manager be entirely
responsible for it? I’ve seen the role of the change manager in program managers generally used
00:08:05,760 as two different roles in the organizations I’ve been in you will have the IT lead change but I think there’s a benefit of having that blurred because if you do have those two split and reporting up into the
sponsor that puts a large burden on the sponsor then to be much more engaged because you’ve got
00:08:24,640 two sets of changes going on one for the IT one for your business
change and someone needs to be accountable for both of that for it to make it success because you can put in say an IT system you can put
in whatever process is you’re putting in or tools you’re putting in the only successes is the
00:08:38,080 adoption of those tools the adoption of the IT system and the leverage of the IT system going forwards so whilst it makes it a much bigger
piece of work I think it’s beneficial for that blurred accountability that
doesn’t necessarily mean that you’d have the project the same person doing all
00:08:54,640 of the business change planning business change thinking but actually
having that one point of accountability so you can report all of that up into the sponsor is good because sometimes the business change and
the technical change if you like can conflict sometimes and you don’t want
00:09:08,800 that you want those two you’ve got to be handing glove with those two
groups of people how do you instill confidence within people who are expected to absorb and implement change initiatives and how do you
convince them that the changes will successfully persist I think that’s
00:09:23,600 hard I think all boils down to communication as I said I’ve mainly been involved in IT changes but where where some of those changes I’ve
done they’ve influenced the way that people work in the business a little
bit like the one I said earlier about the person being able to change by
00:09:40,880 taking their device around with them I think a lot of organizations we got
the the fly-by-night initiatives everyone gets really fired up for six
months it’s really important this is the most thing in doing and either the
key sponsor goes or the promises of what it was going to do drift away
00:09:56,640 and then people either stop using it or stop thinking about how they
could use it more and the next initiative comes along and it just it’s that
follow-ups you’ve got to keep an understanding of how you’re gonna put
that change in what benefits it’s going to do when you’re going to get those
00:10:10,880 benefits out of the organization and I think that that benefits management tends to be around right what’s our money what’s our
bang for the buck for it which some of the benefits those more ethereal
kind of benefits are harder to measure but you need to plan to do those and be able to
00:10:26,880 look at it and step in and go right okay so this is how we’re using this
tool this is the bare minimum of how people to use it and leverage it and
then here’s the next level and people aren’t always going to embrace technology I’ve done what desktop stuff and the spectrum of people using desktop
00:10:42,320 capabilities is massive from devices where you can hang right on them
and you can voice your call on to them to people who just use them to
do the email it’s part of the organization culture as well to get that
consistently over gaining the trust of the individuals to know that this isn’t
00:10:56,480 just part of a another change that’s not going to be followed up that’s not going to be supported and it comes from the topic comes from those sponsors who make sure that they’re engaged and they’re consistently empowered to drive through these initiatives to their completion and if that
00:11:11,760 person is not interested in it or swaps on to the next big initiative that’s
there the project may deliver what it’s got but that the change will fail I
think it’s driven from that top down from the sponsor and the culture of
the organization having said that you can have a fantastic sponsor you
00:11:27,200 can have a fantastic project you never know fantastic product but if the
culture of the organization isn’t one that is embracing this particular
change it’s very difficult to make an organization change its culture the two major obstacles to change are change overload change fatigue in your
00:11:45,360 experience whether the most common warning signs of them occurring and how does one recognize the signs of their presence from a
personal point of view I’ve experienced this and I’ve seen it where our organizations changed the major contracts with customers that we’ve had equipment
00:12:02,240 changing people leaving and I’ve found it’s over a period of a couple years where there was an immense amount of change overload in
fatigue you see and personally I kind of went through there’s the it’s
called the Kubla Ross model where it even initially got shock of some of these changes the
00:12:17,840 denial of the frustration and you know if you go through or we all go through those change processes of bargaining through to depression
acceptance of them eventually and I think in a leader in organizations whether you’re at the top of the organizational or part of the team leading
00:12:31,760 organization we have to support people you have to talk to people and
you have to listen to people and that has to be done by everyone and
by listening to people you will get messages from your team it might be
really subtle but you’ll get messages from your teams saying I’m not comfortable
00:12:48,160 I’m struggling with this level of change and then you address the difficulty I went through where we had some training where we had some some redundancies in that one company and we had some
training on that change and about the fact that we were told to how to deal with it and talk to
00:13:01,840 people and that is it’s can it’s communication we’d impure to mass change lots of communication is what we need to do but I think the
other point these days is that as I said before changes something that is becoming a constant not an unusual and project economy most organizations are
00:13:19,840 kind of structured from the ground up as a set of projects that deliver
assertive services and everything in our normal day to day life changes
that often as well even to the point of changing TV channel Netflix has
become available on sky and it’s kind of like well when did that happen all
00:13:35,200 right that’s changed talking to the family and they wrote we need to use
this to the watch network flex oh no we don’t need it now we got it on
sky and just the little things like that we’re all getting changed all the time and I think it is about talking listening and paying attention
00:13:48,240 how important is it for project managers to regularly check in with the members to see if any obstacles could stop them from meeting the assigned deadline being a project manager yourself how do you set
goals for your team but also how do you track these goals so there’s a difficult balance on
00:14:07,520 this I think I think it’s it’s around not sitting on your team’s shoulders I
think it’s about setting boundaries so I think those boundaries need to be agreed and clear with your team and where they are not able to make the dates that they’ve committed to or that you’re pushing
00:14:25,200 them for they need to feel comfortable to come to you and say actually
I’m not going to meet this deadline okay and you work with them to do it what you can’t be doing is going every day saying how you doing how you doing how you doing but again with the task management processes that we have
00:14:38,400 these days and the different changes and techniques where you have
things such as the agile and can ban things well there is a daily check
but it’s self-managing in there so I think it depends on the relationship
the frequency of the work that you’ve got going on and the individuals because
00:14:52,480 some team members are like the autonomy and they are comfortable
being left alone and they will deliver when they say they’re going to
deliver others need that help it isn’t one size fits all and setting goals is
more about agreeing goals rather than me setting them so talking to the team
00:15:08,640 and asking them when are they going to complete it are they sure
they’re going to complete that and if they are and they commit to it
that’s good and then the next approach is feedback it’s a feedback loop because someone missing a deadline the impact of that’s mid then missing that deadline
00:15:22,000 needs to be made clear so regular communication with your team
around when you miss this deadline that means that this piece of work
over here is not able to be completed so I think that is the key thing
there is feeding back constantly feeding back rather than constantly checking making sure it’s
00:15:37,360 clear what the impact of someone missing a deadline is. As a program manager you have been responsible for the successful concurrent
delivery of a group of projects for large public organizations with well
over 50,000 seats can you tell us how challenging it is to work on the high profile
00:15:56,640 organizations projects or generally projects that are exposed to public
scrutiny. I’d say scale is the main challenge in a positive and a negative
minute so where you have an organization that is big you’ve got a vast interconnectivity you’ve got a lot of stakeholders
00:16:14,000 and you’ve got a lot the pace of change can be slump because there
are a lot of people to get and a lot of things to consider I suppose really but to come to that because you can have an organization that has resources and has the right level of sponsorship you can get some quite difficult things
00:16:29,440 completed quickly so it’s where the bigger the organization is the more
pressure you can get and when a decision is made you get it done but I
think the other thing is you do get used to the scale after a while and
you get used to the pace sometimes as well which again it’s not good
00:16:42,720 and you kind of catch yourself saying well that’s a big number stating a big number or a cash value or a number of seats or devices or
whatever and then suddenly think well actually that’s huge and on the
scrutiny side of it I think the other thing you have to remember the bigger the
00:16:57,840 organizations are that the bigger impact a small change or small delay can be so if you’ve got 60,000 users for an example when you say 15
minutes say of each week of their work is affected by a specific project outcome well that suddenly becomes 15,000 hours a week and then 780,000 hours a year
00:17:16,400 and then 520 people a year and that’s 7,000 hours a day 200 years a
day a year and so a 15 minute interruptions someone to be able to do their job can have a massive leverage across an organization and I
think on public scrutiny I think all organizations now we’ve got that public scrutiny
00:17:34,080 the advent of GDPR the the fines that are out there now if you are an organization that even of a reasonable size you are subject to
accountability for your actions much more physically certainly in the 19th industry than I’ve ever seen. Managing a single project can be quite challenging
00:17:53,920 but there are times when project managers are called upon to manage
several projects at once which is when the real challenge comes to the fore how can managers approach such a situation and successfully
manage their own portfolio of project? The fundamental thing for me on this is
00:18:10,080 understanding relative business priority for me we’re not there to deliver
projects we’re there to deliver benefits for the organization that we’re
doing projects for so if you have three or four pieces of work at your
delivering as a project manager knowing how they fit into the strategy
00:18:25,200 overall organization and how they have an impact on your end users how they have an impact on their your customers is key because that
will allow you to say well I have a email here from this part of the
organization delivering this project I have a phone call coming in from this one
00:18:39,520 another message text message from this one have a Skype message
from this one okay which do I deal with first and using the relative
business priority is good obviously you’ve got to play in urgency in this political elements as well within an organization and you may have situations
00:18:54,000 where you’ll have two projects and two stakeholders that are conflicting
and they’re not affecting the delivery of value and they’re just once their
attention because it’s their own agenda and that’s an avoidable as part
of life really and as a project manager you need to be able to go and
00:19:08,480 negotiate with the relevant stakeholders and relevant people expecting
stuff and say look we’ve got four pieces of work I’ve got a deliver here
this one is going to deliver the organization the highest value I’m not in
real to do that for you and there’s going to be a delay but I’ll get back to you
00:19:23,040 on it and that may damage that relationship it may not but it may
damage that relationship a little bit and then you’ll have to go back and
rebuild that relationship but that’s kind of where we’re in that position where it’s not easy to be a project manager sometimes and we just have to take those
00:19:37,280 hard decisions and deal with the consequences of those hard decisions
afterwards if we’re going to deliver the value for our organizations. Even
companies that are not inclined to applying change initiative sometimes
realize that some level of change is inevitable what is the best advice you
00:19:54,880 can give to change managers that must direct change within a company
for the very first time? I think all organizations are ongoing change and
they may not think of them in a structured sort of manner the way that
we do is project management and professionals but fundamentally it’s a
00:20:09,920 simple question really I think with project management is who does what by when and in what order? And they’re fairly straightforward
when you boil it down to that now there’s masses amount of support on the nuances of those things how to do those but how to avoid risks
00:20:23,680 etc but the level of governance changed that you need to apply is dependent on the organization and if you’re a PM or a change person trying to go in there trying to maybe convince why you need to have
structure I personally think the best way to demonstrate that is use those tools use those
00:20:37,760 templates as part of your team and whatever tooling you use to get that change made and demonstrate that when you’ve done that change it
has been done in a bit away than other pieces were that aren’t following
those tools and techniques but again it spoils down to that who does what by when and what
00:20:53,120 order. I was reading a book that comes once ago now with guy called
Colin Ellis the project book and he talks about in his summary project management that what you need is a balance between leadership method and culture and you can walk into an organization have no tooling at all but if you’ve got incredible
00:21:09,680 leadership and you’ve got incredible culture that is embracing and
wanting to do the right thing actually that method isn’t necessarily going
to help it might stifle it and on the flip side you can have the best methods in the world but if the leadership or the cultures of the organization
00:21:22,960 are against you doesn’t matter what methods you bring in there they’re
not going to work and it all balls down to understanding the organization be in order to have that conversation and being able to explain the benefits of why putting in some structure recognize it as a change initiative not as a
00:21:38,080 BAU doing some different approaches to what that organization may have done previously so again it’s it’s it’s pointing down to that
communication with again it’s about talking it’s about understanding what the business needs and wants. Nigel thank you for joining us today for providing advice and
00:21:55,360 for sharing your professional experiences with our readers and listeners. My pleasure was an absolute wonderful conversation. If
you’re interested in sponsoring the show then please get in touch at sundylunchpmpod@nagelcraiser.com
00:22:22,400 well i hope you enjoyed that interview as usual if you’ve got comments
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00:23:16,800 want to bring something across there um but obviously come back next
next week and our next time and listen again and really appreciate your support ever have a great day bye well it’s goodbye from me Nigel Kreiser and it’s goodbye from him the sundylunchpm goodbye