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8b84b074a4ed54c70498a258ed47951b.m4a
00:00:00,000 [Music] So I have a number of responses, affiliate links, in the way that
it’s set up, that have kindly enabled me to share their services really. The first one is my clean,
00:00:32,880 Mike runs PM on my PM courses and it is a great resource for getting those fund amendments of project management trained, reasonably
priced, and Mike presents it in an accessible and clear manner. You can check out some of his videos on his YouTube channel,
00:01:01,360 kind of give you a view of where they are. But the code for that, if you go to nudgeocruser.com/onlinePMCourse is all, all one with no case,
that will be directed to it. There’s very different levels that you can buy
individually. Of course, he’s human by pathways as well, if you like. I get a kickback
00:01:23,360 off those, my kindly shares me that. So if you do jump on and use it, I
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and things like that as well. So there’s a third humidity risk on that. So jump on that and that again is nudgeocruser.com/onlinePMCourse
00:01:44,080 courses. And did you? Today I’d like to welcome back Jim Stewart, PMP back to the podcast. As the founder and owner of JP Stewart Consulting RLC, he offers a wide range of consulting and training services to help
00:02:03,760 organisations achieve their strategic goals, improve their performance
and deliver the right projects with the right resources. He’s managed
and sport projects in various domains such as IT, pharmaceuticals and medical device. And he’s created project management simulations and courseware
00:02:20,800 for educational purposes. His mission is to help install best practices
and foster a culture of collaboration, innovation and learning in project
management. He provides coaching and training in agile methodologies
to help better deliver outcomes for patients and stakeholders. And he’s got 20 years
00:02:40,800 experience as a project manager and a agile coach and holds several credentials, PMP, CSM, PMIACP. He’s also a call of a book and we’ll
talk about that later in the reason that Jim’s here. Great meetings build
great teams which talks about how to facilitate effective meetings in projects.
00:03:00,240 So Jim, welcome to the show. Thank you, Nigel. And that guy sounds
pretty impressive. I should update the information. It’s actually 25 years
of project management, 10 years of agile. I think about 10 certifications.
The other thing is that I was very happy with just PMP for years and years and years
00:03:18,320 and it wasn’t until agile came along. I got different ones. So I think your
introduction or your reading of my bio gave a pretty good idea. I’ve
worked like a lot of us in full time or organizations but I’m working as an
independent consultant for the past 20 years now, which gives me, you know,
00:03:35,440 all that variety of stuff to do. More so than somebody who’s working one organization, I pharmaceutical one time, IT another time, running
projects, consultants, all that stuff that you talked about. So I’ll be a
labor that too much. I’m in the Boston, a greater Boston area. And I
00:03:56,000 have been talking about this, wrote this book, previous book we’re talking about here with my colleague Rich Mossman who isn’t here
today. He teaches at Boston University. He’s doing that right now as we speak. So I’ll somewhat speaking on his behalf. And we know and share the firm number of years.
00:04:12,880 About as long as I have had my company and we work together a number of things, creating course where and whatnot. One day he had written several books and I said, well, we read a book together. He said, somebody said to me, how about this meeting, big meetings you run? So I would co-facilitate
00:04:28,720 two day planning meetings. Rich and I, long story short, wrote a book
on that, released several years ago and did okay. You know, you don’t
put books like this out to be like becoming a million every, but it doesn’t
work that way. It’s good collateral, good to do, publish your parish. And then
00:04:45,440 we decided to update it to the latest version. I was telling Nigel before the call that the first one was more based around these big two day
planning meetings. This one still has that, but based more around the
remote world, we find ourselves in post-pandemic and those tools in the science of meetings.
00:05:03,040 For me personally, I live here with my wife, my kids and moved out into
Boston. I didn’t realize it was in the picture. My wife moved things
around in here in my office, guitar in the corner. I play guitar as a hobby,
mostly rock and blues and stuff like that. The music that we invented
00:05:19,280 here in the States and at the Brits, took it perfected quite frankly. You
took the British music out of my collection. It would be very poor. So
thank you for that. So that’s me kind of in a nutshell. And currently, I’m
just to say what I’m doing now. I finished an agile transformation project
00:05:40,320 not too long ago in pharmaceutical. And I’m doing a few side projects in
coaching a woman at a university that you would know. And I’m working
on a simulation with a customer. Just finish a simulation where I’m the
subject matter expert. And I’m also writing strategy guys and writing
00:05:58,160 also right, PMP style questions for the PMP exam, not for PMI, but for
some of their resellers. So that’s sort of me in a nutshell. You can see
the rest of my LinkedIn page. It’s rather boring. I noticed and I can’t tell I’m guessing it’s rugby union. You’ve got your picture.
00:06:20,400 Or is it rugby league on your LinkedIn profile at the background? I don’t
know which one it is, but are you an agile guy? Are you an agilist? I’m a
scumbast and a product owner certified. I haven’t managed to use them in anger properly.
00:06:40,960 I have an appreciation of some agile stuff here. So you have the
training and done it? So the scrum concept, just to talk about that for a
minute, it comes from rugby. Yeah. So I don’t know where exactly I got the picture,
00:06:55,920 I borrowed it from the wrong place, but just that idea that there was an
article written in the mid 90s in Harvard Business School, it was called
the new new product development. And they come up with the idea of a
scrum. So we have scrum, scrum masters, all that’s agile terminology.
00:07:13,440 And so it seemed apt as much as I think I was to put that picture up
there. That’s the derivation of that. I was wondering whether it was that or whether it was that. Would the rugby world cup on the moment? Whether it was something to do with that book as well?
00:07:24,320 The funny thing, rugby is not unknown here in the States, but until you
just told me there was a rugby world cup, I had no idea. So we’re just,
you know, if we’re fanatical, but anything, it’s our version of football, but
we don’t follow all that. We don’t even really follow your football,
00:07:42,880 as religiously as you folks do. We do, we have it, but it’s not on the level of baseball, our football, and those are the sports. So just hasn’t recorded it, I don’t know why. Just the way it is. Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting, because obviously, we mentioned that,
00:07:59,520 you’ve been, you’re in the, Rich, we’re on the show, and we were just
looking back just before the call, and I think I put the episode out in July, I’m sure it probably in July 2021. So I’m sure it was actually the
conversation we probably had latter part of 2020. So obviously, we were in,
00:08:18,800 we were in the pandemic, deep, probably deep in the pandemic at that
time. Yeah, yeah. And still, I think, really at that point, adapting to
dealing with this temporary change in the world. That, I think, adoption of the remote working approaches were out of necessity, rather than
00:08:45,040 necessarily moving towards where we are now, which is becoming the
hybrid approach and things that is more, it’s part of business as usual
for a lot of us, right? But it brings its own, its own challenges. And I’ve for many years, even before, I’ve had teams where I haven’t been
00:09:06,640 physically located with them. I’ve had remote teams, teams abroad, teams on different times zones. And there’s always a, there was a
difficulty in managing those teams. Right. Because of that, among us. And I know that we’ve, I’ve had experience where going through
00:09:26,560 all these different things of using video, not using video. Teams seems
to be coming out when we, teams are out and all the different tools are coming out with new approaches to interact and technologies just seems to be rumbling on quite quickly, still around the most. I’ve
00:09:44,880 still not, it’s still lagging behind that face-to-face communication of
meetings. And it’s not as bad as the sort of pre, really pre-COVID where it was the conference call. No one was expected to be on video,
normally it was a conference call, and I remember the days when you’d have 30 people in the room
00:10:05,600 and you’re the one person in the car, dying again to do it, giving up day,
you know what you’re doing? And you’ve got, no one can hear you, you can’t hear the person who sat at the far end of that desk who talks really quietly and looks down at their feet. And we’re now in that situation,
00:10:21,360 the headset song, and we’re still learning that dynamic. What do you
think? That’s a really big question here, really. And it’s kind of, I suspect there are fundamentals that we can apply across remote, in-person, hybrid meetings. What are the things that, what kind of,
00:10:41,520 what did you see that wasn’t working, that triggered you to enhance the book that you’d done before with obviously the planet means? You
know, I listened to everything you said, I was really reflecting on that. I remember in 2020, I don’t know how it was there, but there was a period of time,
00:10:56,400 they told us not to leave the house at all because there was no vaccine. So we were literally stuck in the house and might have been right
around that time, or shortly before or after. I think, first of all, I want to say one thing, I agree wholeheartedly that we will never, maybe you didn’t make the statement,
00:11:12,560 maybe you kind of were making it, we won’t really replace face to face
in person. It just can’t happen because unless we get the holograms or
some technology I can’t foresee, but Project Matthew Institute and the
adulous both preach face to face is the best way in person is the best way. So we do the best
00:11:30,160 we can when we’re not that. What happened during the pandemic in
this, you know, junior sociologist mine is that everything was brought
forward many years, giving the example of that and I’ll get to you sort of getting to your question. A friend of mine, who I’ve met going to workshops,
00:11:48,800 going to round tables, I’m going to one next week, she runs one for Project Management offices and she works at a major hospital in
Boston and she built the PMO and she’s a VP, she’s been there for like
20 years and that’s her life. She told me when I last saw her that in 2020, I believe it was 2020,
00:12:07,680 maybe 2021, she had plans to roll out the technology, remote
technology to doctors, nurses, the entire staff over the course of the year because of the pandemic, they roll it out in a weekend. So of
course, then they were expecting to roll everything out a weekend and said, well, wait, that was a special case,
00:12:26,800 telehealth was rolled forward a lot. I’ve been to telehealth doctor
meetings and whatnot. So I think every time you read about something
like a break, like a pandemic, it’s a horrible situation that made other
things better. Pandemics in Europe years ago, the black plague, health got better, it’s not
00:12:42,080 throwing things like the window and whatnot, right? So health services got better. So I think in this case, we’re in the middle of a quiet
revolution and I mean that in terms of businesses, my daughter works
for a bio firm in Cambridge, and she was working with everybody else and then had to go home for
00:13:06,240 a year and came back and it was like a time capsule, calendars from a
year and a half ago on the wall, half filled cups of cup, like it had been abandoned, like a nuclear war or something. So she came back from that and now she’s at a three day in, two day home or vice versa situation. And there are companies
00:13:23,200 here that are saying, you must come back in full time where you won’t
work here anymore and a lot of the employees are saying, I will go work
someplace else. So we are in the middle of this quiet revolution of the
quiet quitting people making decisions, define that they could be more productive, my customer
00:13:42,640 who I’m also on the board of his training company, they write all
coursewear and simulations and online things whenever I go visit them
in the small office several years ago. There are 20 people always there.
When I go in now it’s a ghost town. When they, the pandemic hit, they went for home,
00:13:59,280 he and everybody else got much more productive. Even the CEO was
convinced he has a two hour commute to the office. He doesn’t have to make anymore. That’s four hours a day or whatever. So when we wrote the first book, we had one of our friends guy named Wayne Termell who’s written books on distance
00:14:16,960 learning wisdom because you write a chapter for us on remote. I
thought we didn’t know but you’re kind of the expert here and I’ve been
asking about and I’m leading up to it to the answer here. Remote tools
do stickies, post notes across there. We didn’t have much on that. A couple years later
00:14:32,160 but where was zoom then? I knew of zoom because the audience is
using zoom is a big deal now. A team is a big deal for remote. You’re
using something Riverside. So with all these things have gotten better
in quality. I could never, I could hardly find anything other than the web apps whatever to use
00:14:50,240 to do or doing here. Zoom is here. Miro has come along. So from a
technology point of view, Miro allows me to use sticky notes, post notes
across there, share things. I can do agile ceremonies. I’ve got other
tools I can do that with. So in a very short time, answer your question on two levels.
00:15:09,200 Technology-wise, we’ve vastly improved our tools. Society-wise, we’re
still adjusting because people are somewhat going in the office, not
going in the office. It’s having ramifications. A lot of the restaurants in
downtown Boston are lunch or clothes because there’s nobody there to
00:15:27,200 have lunch. So you have social ramifications. Companies are still working out. They’re very much in what we call something that will reach you to theory X mode. You must be here as well. I can see you working. Transition to theory. Y mode of you can work from home and get things done. So I think
00:15:43,360 the technology is happening. The mindset is shifting. And I think we’re
past the point where everybody got in the Zoom and said, “Oh, it looks
like the Brady bunch.” And so it’s a generation getting used to after a
while. It’s nothing. My wife is a teacher, did training that way with kids.
00:15:58,320 And I think the biggest adjustment is people, and we talk about this in
the book, adjusting the technology. So if this is the way we’re going to
work, don’t stare at yourself on the camera all day long. You don’t carry
a mirror around all day long and look at yourself and deal with things like
00:16:12,960 Zoom fatigue, which is a real thing. So I think what I’ve seen, to answer
your question, it’s a long way of answering it, is changing society, changing the technology, trying to somewhat keep up with it, the
knowledge that faces the faces still best. But this is the brave new world.
00:16:29,440 And we need to adjust to it and do what you and I are doing right here.
And I think it’s my observation on working this way for the past couple
of years. I’ve hardly gone into an office. I work great this way in the pharmaceutical. I did a project in the Middle East for four months without leaving this
00:16:46,560 office. And it worked. So it’s doable. And then there were cultural
things. Although it turns out the guys I was working with were techies in
the Middle East, well, techies are the same. It turns out. So whatever cultural difference we had were wiped away. So I’m not sure if that
00:17:03,680 addresses your question, but I hope it does. We’re in the middle of
something. We’re not, we don’t, the jury is out on how well this will all
work. Might be in it. Yeah. That’s kind of concur with that. And it’s quite
interesting actually that that culture thing is that I’m seeing it myself is that
00:17:21,760 that culture shift is hard and uncomfortable for everyone from a
leadership point of view as a CEO leadership where you’ve got as you
say some of the big, big organizations going, right, you’ve got to be in
every day, right? Because that that that that the twofold debt, the roles that some
00:17:40,240 of these people are involved in benefit from that close collaboration that
that proximity to others for part of their job, not convinced for the whole
other job, but part of it. And then the other the other side of it is is new to organization, whether that be a new completely new to an organization
00:18:01,440 or a new into the workplace. I’m an old get I’ve worked in place. I’m at
for 15 over 15, 18 years now. I have a really strong network in the area that I work. You build that up. We’ve got people who join the organization who have been there two weeks. I was talking to some who’ve just done the two
00:18:21,440 weeks. They know no one. And if they’re in the office, if they’re not in
the office, they’ll meet like this. Actually, if people don’t turn on the video, they don’t meet that person. And even then it’s which weaker
than if you’re physically meeting the person. And that culture of people feeling
00:18:41,360 what the culture of the organization is goes away. They don’t get right feeling unless they’re together. And I know, I know that a lot of
companies are struggling with how do you do that? How do you get that engagement? How do I sell it to someone like me who can pick up the phone to anyone in
00:18:56,480 in our organizational hierarchy and find someone senior enough to get down to get somewhere or someone who’s down in the weeds and can
fix something and point me in the right direction. I can find someone.
00:19:11,280 to why what’s the benefit of me driving for 40 minutes an hour, having a
wash, getting dressed, looking tidy and heading in there. Because I can
do everything here in quotes. But I’ve kind of, it’s kind of being a bit
selfish and selfless in some ways you need to be, I think, is that you can
00:19:32,800 go in and go, right? So I’m there for someone, like I was having a session with someone today, who, and I was really chatting away and
they were doing something, it was on Excel or something like whatever,
and I said, you know, you can do that or something, a little shortcut. And now,
00:19:47,680 well, no, I never knew that. Now I wouldn’t have seen the fact that they
were doing that on their keyboard, right? Unless I was stood next to
them. And right, just a little thing is saving a couple of seconds, but you
know, you know, there’s, you know, there’s keyboard shortcuts that you grew up in
00:20:02,160 the late 80s, early 90s using because most technology wasn’t amazing.
You kind of, you ended up, that’s the way you needed to do it, right?
And you kind of got those things you can gift. And I wouldn’t be able to give that and help that person speed up what they do and build that relationship with them.
00:20:16,240 So I’ve committed earlier in the year to doing being at least once a
week, sometimes twice a week, in my office, local to me, but not just for
me, but for being there for other people as well. And I definitely, and I
kind of see that as being very much a meetings day. And this is where
00:20:35,360 kind of where it comes round to of what I don’t want to be in remote
meetings. I want to be in face-to-face meetings with people, building relationships, building rapport, having a whiteboard to scribble on
together, exactly, and within my big motorway. And I think that’s the, there’s a culture,
00:20:54,320 but then we’ve got to flip it on the head and go, right, okay, if we’ve got a big meeting, and we’ve got a regular team meeting, how do we make sure that you don’t have four people in the room and the whole
conversation sticks on them and there’s six people on the tally feel unrepresented?
00:21:11,760 With those scenarios, what do you see as what are the kind of tips that
you see from there? I want to go back and skip it away the whole book with the cut- I don’t know. No, and by the way, by the way, I will because if I’m not stopped in rich right here,
00:21:26,720 you know, we would, there are people who have asked that. Okay, so
00:21:33,120 just read that chapter one for us then. Yeah, I read the whole book.
I want to do, I’ll just stick this on the Patreon page and I can sell it on
the make money off the tag. Yeah, yeah, I’ll put them very, very, very,
very, I’ll tell everything, but you know, so I do want to go back a step or not, you’re right because one,
00:21:45,920 Boston is now the biotech, we have a thousand biotech companies.
We’re the biotech capital of the world, yeah. And part of the reason about the universities and the hospitals and whatnot,
00:21:54,880 but also companies that have moved here, moved here because they had like the innovation, they can walk out the door and meet other people. So they still need to do that, no argument, and I’m not a defender of one must work at home at all times.
00:22:07,360 In my pharmaceutical case, I worked for the better part of a year, and
my boss said, I was a contractor or consultant, she said, you need to be
here to meet with XYZ people, but she didn’t say be here five days a week.
00:22:19,680 So we sort of felt it out and it became a situation of, well, who are these
people I need to, so I would do things like you’ll enjoy this. We were in a
suburb, not in Boston, and I would say, I’d go in and I said to somebody, we can have the meeting, knowing my boss
00:22:36,640 will know you’d be there, have the meeting in the office, I don’t care, no, we can do it from remote. So I would keep trying to have in person meetings with people who were remote. So I’d be going in the office and they’d all be remote. So it took a while to figure out
00:22:50,960 how I would need to be. And like you said, the guy I was working with, he was, that was my boss, but there was a guy who was the product owner of the entire transformation. I knew that when he was in, I
wanted to be in a lot of the time, we would go to a room and go to the whiteboard. He was a real good
00:23:09,520 drawer. He was from, not being facetious. He drew things out. He was very good at explaining to me how pharmaceutical worked. He would
explain the drug, think to me is that I needed to understand or certain
extent, those are, you could have done it online, but they’re a great person. But why
00:23:23,680 I guess I’m saying is before I get to your question about the other
question is, is, is there’s, you have to, the companies and individuals
have to work out. You worked out your situation. You want to be in a
day or two a week, whatever, see you can, I won’t say mentor, but be there for
00:23:39,920 those of people. I worked out, I find realized my boss is talking about
she wanted me to be there, especially for the lab people. We’re going to work with lab people. So, but that didn’t happen to the end of my
tenure. So, I worked that out. The other thing I wanted to say that came to mind
00:23:53,440 was the generational thing about this technology. And I’m not somebody
that says, my generation is great, yours is bad, but interestingly, you
know, the older generation get that harder time to have a depth in this
technology. And it isn’t just people who are older than me. I’m a baby boomer.
00:24:08,800 My daughter tells me who’s a millennial that I’m one of the relatively few baby boomers, because I have an IT background that is comfortable
with the technology. She tells me, occasionally, a lot of my peers are very know how to turn the thing on. So, but then you have, like,
00:24:25,920 my kids, millennials are comfortable with every kind of technology. Oh,
you’re down low, just, and by the time you tell them they’ve done it, so I
want to get that generational thing out of the way. Your question was about these meetings where some people remote, some are not remote.
00:24:39,040 We talk about this. And this actually came from our guy Wayne who said, to keep the people who are not in the room in the room. For example, tell them, to keep, they don’t honestly mute themselves unless they’ve got the dollas flushing or
00:24:54,960 they’re cooking something or whatever. So, they’re online. Make them
feel like they’re part of it. So, if you and I nod, you were in a room together with three or four of the people, one guy who was remote,
make sure he’s involved or she’s involved. It’s a woman. And so, it’s like,
00:25:13,120 leave your line open. We’ll chat things. We’ll make sure, we’ll refer to
you periodically. We’ll show you things. Make sure that you’re engaged in it. I think though, that has become less of a problem in my
observation than it was three or four years ago, especially with those speaker phones.
00:25:30,240 We call those spider phones. Those speaker phones and there was a
guy, everybody, everybody now, people can sit in their car. And I’ve
done it on Zoom, on their phone. So, I think it’s up to the meeting leader
because it’s always his or her ownership to make sure the other people
00:25:49,680 feel engaged and it’s up to the people who are remote to make sure
that they are engaged. But I think it’s, I personally think, and I could be a one-man data point on this, that’s become easier to involve them
because the technology is better. There’s no excuse not being able to zoom in
00:26:07,520 this and that. And by the way, I always encourage people not to, I can’t
stand when I get the meeting and say, “Oh, can everybody bring their camera up? We want to see you.” Maybe I’m having a bad hair day as we call it. Some people don’t want to be on camera. So they might come on, “Hi,
00:26:23,200 I’m Jim, I’m Mary, etc. I’m not going to be on camera. Fine, turn it off. Maybe turn it off when you’re on, when you’re speaking. Turn your
camera off, looking at yourself all the time.” So, I think a cognizance of,
on the meeting leaders front, people don’t want to be on camera all the time. Let them
00:26:40,720 not be on camera, too. Make sure that they’re engaged in the
conversation that they’re there, they’re present, feel like they’re part of
it. And three, I think, make sure that the technology is good. You’ve
tested technology. It works. You share information. I think if you do all that, I think
00:26:58,480 if you engage people and give them the reason to be there, they’re going to drop off if you’re not keeping them. I don’t use the word
entertained by almost said entertained. And so if my meeting is boring,
that’s why I’m going to hear clicking on the keyboard because they’re doing, they made me
00:27:17,040 doing something else. Anyway, but I need to engage them somehow by
bringing them in as part of the discussion. What do you think, Nigel?
What do you think, Ted? What do you think? Engage them like that. If
you don’t engage them, their mind is going to drift. That’s true of people in physical meetings
00:27:35,440 and remote meetings. And also you as a leader need to remember
about things like Zoom fatigue. Are people tired from that? And maybe
give them more frequent breaks than you might give it an impression of
that. We’re 45 minutes in. Let’s take 10 minutes, things like that. I think that helps a lot.
00:27:53,760 I think we’re at a better place than we were. Yeah. I think we’re at a
level you’d like, it’ll ever be perfect. People will drift. No. It’s funny. We were talking about… When I had this engaging people in hybrid
scenario, getting people involved is something we’re trying to improve
00:28:16,640 on. Yeah. And one of the things that was… This is a group of project
managers, this is one of the one of the things that was suggested is
that we should adopt… This isn’t a policy, but it’s kind of adopt the policy of the approach of video first as an organisation. To help, like,
00:28:38,640 there are situations where we know there are people who’ve been
involved in the organisation and they have a manager who didn’t turn
on the video and they didn’t have a tar picture of them. So the person
who is working for them, I’m not sure if it was an actual… I mean,
00:28:56,320 now here we are, somebody said, “had never met, didn’t even know what, they could walk past them industry and wouldn’t have a clue.”
Right. That was their manager. And it kind of… There’s a couple of
pennies dropped in there and it was… The challenge was put there and some people come
00:29:11,280 out with the challenge of, “Well, sort of thing is, we’ve got people
walking behind me, we’ve got different situations and it’s that people are
realizing that we use teams and teams, has it the blue facility to blur your background or your backgrounds and we’ve got corporate backgrounds
00:29:25,680 to use and things like that.” And people hadn’t actually realised they
could do that. And that was a big one, I was recently in the last couple of weeks that someone spotted that and that conversation was obviously been going on at different times and people have been resistant to put on the camera
00:29:43,280 because of that situation. But it was because they didn’t know how to use the technology. Right. And so, again, if the project manager is
listening there and struggling to get people to turn on the cameras and
be able to see them and build that before or anyone who’s listening to it,
00:30:00,320 if you’re using products like teams or you’ve not asked the people,
that’s what I took when I was did my book on remote, the bit one page
on remote working idea. The thing is the most important thing I thought
was asking and we all forget that. If someone hasn’t got the camera on, don’t assume they’re
00:30:19,840 just being, grumpy, don’t assume they’re just deciding they want to do
something else and they’re watching a cricket or they’ll be on the telly. I know you see you don’t have your camera on it. Why not? And when you ask someone, they tell them and say, “Well, I’ve got a pile of washing
00:30:40,480 going on me in a view of a really horrible building.” And it’s kind of, “Okay, and that means they don’t know how to use the blurring, they don’t use the background and green screen stuff.” No education. No education. No matter if you don’t know unless you ask.
00:30:55,760 And I do, it’s funny actually, we have a regular meeting and off the back
of this session we’re going to do it. We’ve all started doing it a bit more and I have an update meeting where the team update me might kind of gather the latest project updates for the five six seven projects.
00:31:11,440 Everyone has a video on today. I started with my knowledge, they all
really started with their own, everyone out there. One other guy said,
“I’m going to turn my video off, I can’t be doing and looking at myself.”
And that’s fine. The idea was video on first, “I am here.” Because then people
00:31:28,320 know who you are because you have a title, they seem to look like you
get a chance, it builds very strong relationships. But except the fact that
some people, I don’t know, I don’t want to on today. Yeah, I’m like you’re
saying, “I’m having a bad hair day. I’m really fatigued, I hate looking
00:31:43,600 at myself, don’t mean I’m looking at you now. I have to move my screen
around so you’re in front, just above my camera.” So I’m trying to look
down the lens of the camera instead of me doing that and looking at me
because I’m so handsome. That I’m just very successful. Yeah, exactly. But he’s
00:32:01,280 distracting, isn’t it? Because you sit there and you go, “Well, I’m putting
that face full. Are you going to out?” And then you distract you. That’s
different. Because for a topic, one is, I like the idea, ask people to come on camera. First couple of meetings, maybe they’ll stay on it.
00:32:18,160 And then they can even drop off when two of the people talking come back on. But the subject of your own camera, like I said, now I’m
looking at myself. Yeah, I’m so used to it. But you know, turn yourself
off. Do the self view off because we don’t walk around all day looking at ourselves in a mirror.
00:32:33,680 This is what’s caused people to become self conscious. So I do is I turn
myself view off. And I turn it on every ten minutes or so to make sure
I’m not slumping like this. Oh, yeah, I’m slumping. I’m very comfortable.
Yeah, obviously. So I think that etiquette of that is important. And I think it’s really incumbent upon
00:32:54,800 teams to understand, like you said, how do you use technology? And
like I’ve been saying, the existence of things like Zoom fatigue and
people, you know, there’s even one of the things in the Zoom fatigue.
We didn’t write this article. We have the link in the book somewhere about how people like to,
00:33:11,600 this restricts our mobility. I mean, we’d be sitting anyway, but perhaps they’re reading me. So these people get up and they go to the
whiteboard, the walker. I suppose I get walker, I’m like, over here to get
a soda or something. So there’s a lot of features to that that make it
00:33:24,160 difficult to do it this way. And I think if people are educated companies
have education around the tools of using, not just, here’s a tool. There
was a tool, I’m determined with the name of it now. I knew it woke up
months ago. And they were using it. We were working with France. And they were using
00:33:40,320 a particular tool. It was like, here it is. Can I learn how to use it? And
then they expect everybody to know it. Know if people need some kind
of education, get every tool. This one is probably different from Teams
from Zoom, et cetera. I don’t know where all the buttons and switches are. Right? So I think people
00:33:53,280 know how to use it. And I think sometimes, too, I just thought of
something when you’re talking about. I’ve had teams where I say, Mary,
just picking that out of the air, “Would you mind running the meeting this
week?” And it, and now, okay, it, it, it gives them a cognizance of what’s involved.
00:34:12,400 And then they might sit and say, “Is Jim listening to you?” So everybody
in a team eventually gets a chance to run it if they’re at that level of how
hard is it to do it. If that out what it’s involved in running a meeting is their cognizance of how they come across in that too. If you’re comfortable
00:34:25,920 having people run it, it’s not always the case. I think, though, everybody
should know how to run a meeting. If I have someone in my team who’s
unwilling or unable to run a meeting, I’m concerned about their growth
because it’s fundamental, again, to be able to do it. If they can’t run a meeting, I’m
00:34:43,360 not saying I’d fire them, I’m just saying, I would get them to be the point where they can run a meeting. As somebody who was trained a lot of project managers, over 1000s project managers, PMP training, and
whatnot, you’d be astonished perhaps. So by the way, Rich and I very much think of running a
00:35:00,960 class like a meeting because it is. It’s a meeting where we have to sort
of, we have, I have a four day PMP class. I’ve got to make sure that all
the techniques that I talk about I use, I’ve got to control the, what we
call the goblins, I’ve got to keep things, I’ve got to facilitate, keep things
00:35:15,440 on time, etc. So you be amazed at the number of students that I have
who are professional project managers. I might have 15 in the class.
I’ve had 30, whatever these are, these are brought to be small in that
hundreds. When they raise their hand, ask the question, they ask it like this, their voices
00:35:32,720 don’t project beyond their nose. I’m thinking, how does this person ever
get up in front of a steering committee and present? And if they don’t in
the world of project management, which is more strategic, you’ve got to
do that. I want all my project managers to have the ability to run a meeting,
00:35:51,600 to present to a board, which is a meeting, to run a status meeting, to run Azure meetings. I want them to be large and in charge, we talk
about that. So I think that’s for me, a skill I’d also always want to
cultivate in my teams is the ability to speak professionally, to run meetings and
00:36:12,800 to learn it and not to worry if they don’t, I had one guy I was coaching,
he ran a retrospective in agile in between us, he did a pretty horrible
job, but was his first one. So I coached him afterwards, and he just got
better at it. He just because people and then I’ve had the fantastic event of coaching
00:36:32,240 people on running meetings and running out of things to say, because
they were doing it so well. It took my advice, it gave me some advice of their own, one meeting, so to give you one example of the most
mundane thing, right? I think you were going to talk about this a little bit about
00:36:46,800 little games, kaisen, small change. So there were two women in the pharmaceutical one up in Canada, who was the product owner for this particular line of pharma, and then a woman in the PMO who was her scrum master running her meetings. Now why is woman to run the PMO also being a scrum master,
00:37:08,320 which is not as lofty a position because they were short on scrum masters. They were a dynamic team. They were a really good team. They were, they were our gold standard agile team, except for one problem. Their meetings always went over. They had an hour meeting once a week to discuss all the various
00:37:25,040 features of this drug they were developing, and and I would come on as
an observer. I wouldn’t typically say a word unless they addressed me,
and afterwards I would send them a note by a team, or I write them an
email, and I said it appears that all your meetings are running 10, 15 minutes over.
00:37:41,280 Yeah, what can we do about that? I said, has it occurred to you that you
start 10 minutes after the hour that you come out at eight o’clock? You talk for two minutes and you wait for everybody to show up. You’re
always starting 10 minutes late. I said, how about this as a radical idea? Start on time,
00:37:58,560 or as close to on time as you can say two minutes after the hour,
people will get that idea. They’ll catch up later. You’ve got cards on your agile board, your task board that tell what happened, or they can
update later. They start doing that and they started ending on time. There was no
00:38:15,360 genius thing in that. I was an observer that saw what they couldn’t see,
and they said, of course, so those small little things, the other party, part
about agile, we fixed one thing at a time. We do a retrospective about selling our just saying, that was the thing they fixed that week.
00:38:32,240 The guy in the retrospective, in a retrospective you say, well, what didn’t
go so well, what can we improve? He spent most of the hour, whatever
the time was, reading the things that went well, reading them from the spreadsheet. I said, next time, just say quickly, what went well,
00:38:51,120 keep a brief, and then focus on what didn’t go well, and what you can improve. You’ve done what went well, applause applause. Focus on
this, focus on what he was able to do, that small change. Don’t try to
reinvent the wheel, or as we say, boil the ocean in one thing. We’re going to fix all
00:39:06,800 our meetings in the company. Fix one thing at a time. Fix one small
thing at a time. Yeah, and I think it is a thing that I’ve seen, and I’ve
heard others recount it as well as around change fatigue. During the whole pandemic, there’s been leading up to that, we had digital
00:39:28,880 transformations going on, and things changing, and things like that. So
a lot of change on change, anyway, social change, social and economic change. And then obviously with the pandemic, everything has
happened since then, there is a continued acceleration, an increase in the amount, and when
00:39:47,920 there’s a VUCA environment, it’s funny actually, because in the November of 2019, I went to a PMI event in the UK, which was a 50th
anniversary celebration event, and it was all around volatile, uncertain,
complex, and… Sure, I forgot the A, whatever the A is. Any way to go.
00:40:09,600 Essentially, it was about the fact that everything was a bit wild, a bit
uncertain, and a bit crazy, and then suddenly in March, it made that
look like everything was bleeding organised, and then it’s continued
after, isn’t it? The rise of Genitive AI and things like that, which was
00:40:26,720 too great. AI and using a meeting tonight as well, a little bit, because
that’s something that’s obviously, again, that is changing day on day, in
fact, I saw something today, Ricardo, Vargas, his predictions for the
next six months on the day of what’s going to happen with some of the
00:40:45,280 Genitive AI, not because he knows what’s going to happen, he’s got
fear of what’s going to happen, and he’s going to, for interest, have a
look, next year, because I think the latest thing is that ChatGP2 has just
hooked, hooked it in so that it’s going to be up to date information, it’s going to
00:41:02,480 be pumping out rather than archive information, or historic information,
sort of things, so immediately, you get the challenge of more up to date
information in there, which, again, is a bit of a game-changer for that.
But it’s funny, a couple of things you see in there about people getting up in one
00:41:21,360 room around, we were the session I was talking about before we had
early today, we were playing around with backgrounds, because again, the guys were kind of experimenting with the video, we discovered something, you know, the together mode on teams that you get where you can have it, the students,
00:41:36,560 a auditorium, we were playing with that in the other session the other
day, me, mainly, because I saw it, and I thought, I wonder if this will
make it, I’ll change it, and I’ll look at everyone like that today, because
there’s quite a few people on it, and then I didn’t realise it changed for
00:41:50,320 everybody on the call, so it’s just suddenly completely changed, so just
right, there’s a apologies, and then I said, oh, there’s a button there, I
can turn it off and just do it for me, and then I saw another button that said, custom backgrounds, click that, and it took me off to a
00:42:07,280 Microsoft thing, I could create my own, so essentially, it’s got this
template, which is a like a PowerPoint slide sort of thing, but you have advertised for the number of people that you have in a meeting, and then you can create a scene and then place them where you want to, so I did the
00:42:22,240 muckets, so I created, I rolled off and statlet several, rolled off and
statlet things, and then just had that, while we were on the meeting and then popped up there, you know when you grabbed something, let’s play with that, did everybody see, was everybody able to see that?
00:42:38,000 Yeah, did you put it, so that’s fun, I mean, the other thing is like, you
know your people, icebreakers, fun things, they don’t have to be death marches these meetings, right? I mean, I talked about starting that meeting on time, I didn’t mean to say to them, don’t
00:42:52,800 how are you doing, how is your weekend, but you have to go through
that kind of quickly. Of course, cultures are different, you know, there’s
one thing we mentioned, there’s one of your fellow countrymen, Richard Lewis wrote a book called, “One Cultures Collide,” and it was recommended to me by
00:43:08,240 a student, and we quote that in there, they talk about how meetings in
Germany and I think the UK and the US start more or less on time, by
the time you get to Spain and Italy is sort of like 10 minutes of, 20 minutes of meandering and eventually we’ll get around to it, right? That’s not a joke,
00:43:23,840 it’s just the way it is, you have to act and make yourself to the culture,
so let me say for those of you who are perhaps watching this from other
cultures, here in the US, we’re going to try to start it in the years on
time, that’s neither right nor wrong, it just is, if I come to work, and you’re,
00:43:37,680 if I go to work in Japan, there’s formal ceremony, everything starts when
the senior person says we start, so I’m cognizant of that as well, so I’m
going to temper that by saying that my advice might be different in a
different culture, but in the US culture, and we were working in US and Canada,
00:43:54,160 it was pretty much the same as far as, at least as far as that was going to, I didn’t see too much between US and Canada as far as different
cultural stuff, so I just want to throw that into that, it’s not a one size fits
all statement. Yeah, I think that’s the thing is we’ve got to look at cultures,
00:44:09,680 you mentioned cultures earlier when you were working with some people in the Middle East, in the fact that they were techies, and
therefore you had that culture, so I think the thing is, there’s culture,
there’s culture in this culture, isn’t there? Organizational culture, yeah. Yeah, you’ve got
00:44:24,080 organizational culture, you’ve got nationality culture, you’ve got
community culture, you’ve got as you say, the techie culture, you might
have a marketing culture, you might have an engineering culture, and
like you say, the bio-farmist, there will be a culture in those that you can’t just sit
00:44:43,920 there and go, because that’s in Boston, that’s the culture of these
people. Right, right, sub-cultures, isn’t there? And it is, literally, it is a
sub-culture within, and they collide as well, don’t you? You’ll have, depending on what’s happening, the one person may apply a different behavior,
00:45:03,840 depending on which community/culture they’re in at that time, so if they’re in just the marketing group, or if they’re in the wider
organization, it might behave differently. If speaking of national culture,
when I was working with the Middle East, I had never worked or been,
00:45:22,880 I still haven’t been there. I read some books, talked to some people, and my number one prime director was not to offend anybody, and by
doing the wrong thing, for example, I happen to know, maybe you know
that if you show the bottom of your shoe in a Saudi culture or a Arabian culture, it’s an insult,
00:45:40,320 so not that I would have the opportunity to, but that was the idea. Now, I
got to talking to the guy who was the director of the IT there. He was sending me WhatsApp messages, look at it, sent me a WhatsApp message, and I wanted to say, “Okay,” whatever response. He eventually sent me a
00:45:57,200 thumbs up, and I said, “Okay, thumbs up is okay,” so we used that. But going back to the meeting thing, he would be on calls, and read I mentioned Techie because I came from 15 years as a network
engineer, prior to being in project management, we’d have these calls, these meetings, to discuss setting up
00:46:12,960 the project management office. That was why I was there. And he had two senior guys, a bunch of network people. He was always this two senior guys and him, and we’d be on Zoom or Teams or whatever, and while we were on it, he had on the, I don’t know what to call it, a costume, the traditional
00:46:27,600 garb that they wear to work, and he’d be on the phone talking to a vendor, arguing with a vendor, “Well, we’re having this meeting.” I
thought, “This is no different than if I was talking an American guy, other
than a different culture.” He was just like, “It didn’t matter, it’s funny how,
00:46:41,520 so our engineering culture was very similar. He was a guy with a couple
of guys, with a couple of people trying to get stuff done, networks rolled
out, telecommunications done, and I respected their culture, I’m sure
they respected mine, even when I gave the final presentation, you could hear a pin drop
00:47:03,440 because they just, what I was told was things like culturally with things like, make sure you say, and Jim recommends X because they respect
the consultant or whatever it might have been.” Another great sponsor
of the show, he comes in form of M-annual. M-annual is a, well, it’s a tool for
00:47:27,680 documenting process which, and best practices, it’s, really, it’s a company formed by, like one of my interviews, Alexis Kingbrook, essentially, and I kind of summarised why live view, where you see
documentation, a lot of my experience has been, people will document
00:47:48,000 something, a process, they’ll put it in a, a visual dome, and it gets
loaded onto a shared one side or something similar, and then a bunch of products, so then once that diagram has been shared, with senior
management, they’re happy, they have a process of business, but then the detailed
00:48:01,280 procedures underneath it might be in documents, it’s just poorly kept
and not linked easily, not updated, and what M-annual does, it allows
you to put in a, it’s a tool for doing this kind of thing. You whack it in, the
service in, they’re getting, they’re putting your process in flow, and you
00:48:21,760 build it down to its lower level of detail, even to the point of checklists where people check off them, done it, so it creates that guided
checklists, easy to create, easy to maintain, and all in one place, and
no one’s kind of rooting around to find the share point, and then when you
00:48:39,120 change to new share point, service isn’t, well that’s not, it’s all there, so if you pop along to NigelPrusus.com/mannual, it’s been more detail
there, a link there to click on to, go on, yeah, I think they offer a trial, it’s something I think can easily
00:49:00,320 reduce the amount of errors rework, etc, in our organisation, so, um,
get to go. My latest, the latest, the affiliate that I’ve got on the show
now, is Riverside, I use Riverside to do my interviews, Riverside ever, it kind of offers you a whole,
00:49:32,960 if you like, my pro studio management producer too, and goes beyond
that, has a really good free layer, and I, I mean, using it for a while now,
I find it really good when I’ve had issues, even though I’m not on one of the high paid levels, the support has been quick, responsive and
00:49:52,720 and, and the high quality, and people keen to help me, the organisation
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00:50:08,720 desktop resources being used to compare to some other products that
I’ve used, and what they also do is they do a, um, this streamer, a lower
quality version of it up onto, as you’re doing the interview, so you’re not burning bandwidth while you’re doing the interview and potentially impacting
00:50:25,680 on the quality of the conversation, and then at the end, the upload, the,
the higher quality from your browser, um, meaning it, it’s just a really
good way to do it, so, um, if you are, um, thinking of doing a podcast, and you’re supposed to, I guess, I would recommend using this tool,
00:50:43,360 if I’m really good, best, best of the tools I’ve tried using, um, today, and
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00:51:13,120 Uh, hope you enjoyed that, but are you thinking, oh, I wonder what the
next bit’s going to be? Yeah, it’s frustrating, isn’t it? Um, you heard at
the beginning of the show where I said, uh, there’s a way around that,
so if you’re really itching and you want to hear the next bit of this show,
00:51:31,920 jump down to Patreon, have a look, find the one that’s got a little lock
on it, click on it, and you’ll be able to get the second half, along with the
first half, all together, and you, you won’t get this annoying bit, or the annoying bit at the beginning that I just done as well.
00:51:45,840 Um, so, yeah, give it a go, soon you’ll play to the coffee, cheers. So this
is my final wrap-up, every week you’re going to hear this, you’re going
to get bored of it, but you can always click next podcast if so. Um, if you have enjoyed it, if you listen to this podcast
00:52:16,480 at the end of this show and you think that was great, I’d love to be able
to help nide you out, there are loads of ways you can do it. Um, the, the
first and obvious way is to, um, share the podcast, send it out to people.
Um, if you, if you know, colleagues or friends who’ve benefit from it,
00:52:36,160 think they’d enjoy it, just send them the link, grab one of the links, send, or send them to www.nidialcraze.com/podcasts. That’s
www.nidialcraze.com/podcasts, and that’ll push them over to a, um, a
link tree link, and it’s got all of the different ways they can consume the, the podcast.
00:52:58,240 Uh, if you are feeling generous and have a big bag of cash, you could
grab a copy of one of my books, obviously, um, uh, they’re available in
all the usual places and print and, and, and digital. Again, jump on the
website, uh, www.nidialcraze.com/shop, and that will give you a list of all
00:53:21,520 the different ways that you can contribute, um, and grab copies of the
book. I also got, um, links to all my guests’ books on there as well,
where I get a little bit of a kickback from them. Um, if you are of a
sporting mind, um, I have a number through doing some of my, uh, judo and running, uh,
00:53:42,160 antics, uh, I’ve managed to secure a few, um, uh, affiliate links and
affiliates, uh, there as well. So in there, somewhere in the sponsors page, there’s links to those as well. So clicking onto those and
grabbing, uh, your, if you’re, if you’re, with it, if you’re looking to, uh, get super fit,
00:54:00,640 then that would be fabulous as well. And I get a little kickback from
those. Uh, I have a Patreon account. It’s patreon.com/sundaylunchpm, uh, so again, you can ping something in there by me, a coffee or
whatever. And finally, obviously, the most important is coming back, coming back, listen again,
00:54:22,160 um, because, uh, the more of you than come back, uh, the more
visibility I get, because there’s more times that you’re downloading and
all the SEO works and things like that. So, yeah, that’s it. So, uh, if you
can help me out, I would be much appreciated. If you can, don’t worry about it. Thank you very
00:54:42,080 much, Chizna. Bye. Well, it’s goodbye from me, Nigel Kreaser, and it’s goodbye from him, the Sunday lunchpm. Goodbye.