n<\/p>\n
1da34df6f9f78156f3653daf53ad5f46.m4a<\/p>\n
00:00:00,000 funneling those things through that route so that I’m not because I will
\nslow it down. I’m not the worst people in the business to touch stuff. If I’m responsible for responding to customer queries or whatever,<\/p>\n
00:00:15,000 I’m going to be the slowest person to do it because ultimately is a
\nbusiness leader, the demand is on my time and whatever your role is, as a project manager, a program manager, whatever,<\/p>\n
00:00:25,000 ultimately that’s the game is increasing the value of your time and being
\nable to either outsource, delegate, automate, hand over things to other people and you kind of have to play that loop. So yeah, it’s an interesting one.<\/p>\n
00:00:40,000 I love your points around what you can do around automating things in
\n00:00:59,000 your email. I think for so many people that that’s the answer. [Music] 00:01:08,000
\n00:01:15,000 Hi and welcome to the Sunday Launch Project Manager podcast for 00:01:30,000 Sunday, the 4th of June 2023. This is your host, Nigel Creaser.<\/p>\n
And today I’ve got part two of my chat with Alexis Kingsbury, the business process man. Speak soon.<\/p>\n
[Music] I think it’s, it really echoes a lot of things that I’ve always kind of
\ntried to, I tried to talk to other people about it and I’m actually the,<\/p>\n
the, the, the, the fact that you say, now you get the joy out of seeing
\nsomeone sort of, sorts and things out and I remember showing a client
\nof mine because I took, whenever the key thing I say about the me not reading copy emails is I tell people<\/p>\n
00:01:43,000 that I don’t read them. I said, I’m not going to read it. I might reference it
\nlater but don’t expect me to read it if you copy me if you want me to read it send it.<\/p>\n
00:01:52,000 And, and I, and I helped her set up that same room on, on her, because
\nwe talked about it and then kind of set it up on her. And she had, I don’t know, how many thousands of emails in a inbox,<\/p>\n
00:02:04,000 unread or whatever, press the button and it started and she saw all
\nthese unread the number going down, click, click, click, click, click,
\nclick, click, click, click, click, click, click, and 300, 400, wherever the number was, a big number of emails disappeared and she’s like,
\n00:02:19,000 wow, that you could see a weight starting to lift off often because that
\nwas 400 they didn’t have to worry about. And, and we all do it and we
\nshouldn’t but emails still, and we’re, I think it will be a long time people
\nare changes from that it will still drive a lot of anxiety, drive a lot of communication,<\/p>\n
00:02:41,000 drive a lot of our, because it’s interesting you see lots and lots of instant
\nmessage or sort of like, yeah, more type of communications that were
\nalways followed up by a weekly emails telling you what was on there. So that’s always, yeah, I think all the horrendous amount of noise, yeah, I completely agree is.<\/p>\n
00:03:02,000 Managing that communication flow is really, really important, like if you own energy and be understood this, why I say like, often my aim is
\nanything that’s important shouldn’t be coming to me, which it sounds
\nlike a really odd thing to say, like, but I’m basically saying, yeah,<\/p>\n
00:03:19,000 invoices, time sheets, payroll, that should all be going to finance,
\nrequest for me to impair on stuff, marketing opportunities, that’s all going to marketing, new potential customers, opportunities to work
\npeople, that’s all going to sales, support questions, customer success,<\/p>\n
00:03:34,000 that’s all going to my support team, to some extent my job is about
\nworking out who else is going to do stuff. So I’ll tell you now, and in fact,
\nI sort of friend, we were joking about the fact that, you know, like, you
\nknow, I think a WhatsApp group that we were part of had got like 600 unread messages in it.<\/p>\n
00:03:53,000 And I said, yeah, light is fine, I’m okay with ignoring it because at some
\npoint someone will at me if I need to do something. And they said, oh, I
\nhate to see what your email count is and I showed them, and there was
\nan audible gasp, and they were trying to guess in the, in the car and then taxi off to a golf game.<\/p>\n
00:04:12,000 They were trying to guess how many and I invite you in listeners to play the same game. How many unread emails are in the Lexus email inbox
\nat that point. So you need to understand everybody. Yeah, I’m going to guess a three.<\/p>\n
00:04:29,000 Three unread emails. Wow, that’s a very brave get now. You are, you are out by orders of magnitude. The answer at the time was 145,000 plus something, something, something. So I wasn’t sure whether you would have marked all of them as unread, automatics.
\n00:04:45,000 No, no, I don’t even bother. I skim read and most get ignored because I
\nget a lot of email. It’s not the best way of communicating with me. And
\nmost, as I say, most of the stuff that comes to me is either unsolicited
\nstuff or stuff that I’ve had to sign up for with because I blah, blah, blah.
\nI’m not able to skim read and see if there is anything that stands out as
\nimportant. Most of the time it’s not. And, and stuff, you know, I get chased if it is, it does matter.<\/p>\n
00:05:19,000 But most of the stuff, I have team numbers that are responsible for it.
\nSo I don’t, I don’t feel that same anxiety that other people would when
\nthey’re looking at that number because, you know, I have some people
\nthat say, “I don’t know, you click in it and unsubscribe and so on, it’s
\nlike, why would I spend, why would I waste my time even doing that?” But I’m not, you know, there’s so much of that kind of stuff.<\/p>\n
00:05:41,000 So listen, listen, listen, it’s not even worth my time doing that. Instead,
\nthe game I’m playing really is what’s important that’s in here that, therefore, you know, that either takes up my time or whatever, that
\ngenuinely I need, either, I need or won’t spend my time on. And as a result, how do I get that managed through a more efficient medium? And so that’s kind of the game through processes like, you know, my everything process. Like, if there isn’t a process that exists for
\nsomething, then the answer is, I have to work it out. You raise it with me in a meeting or I get some message and I have to work it out and I come up with an answer.<\/p>\n
00:06:17,000 That is the least efficient process. That’s how I do it. But it’s how I do
\nwith everything that doesn’t already have a process. Like, an invoice
\nthat needs payment, there’s a process, a customer that’s interested in working with us. They, you know, they either go and download our
\nbrochure at M and your dot link for slash discover or if they want to call
\nwith us, then you change that last bit to forward slash discover. And then we have various like resources like ebooks on AI and all these
\nthings. I know the URLs off by heart because I’m essentially funneling
\nthose things through that route so that I’m not because I will slow it down.
\n00:06:57,000 And that one or the worst people in the business to touch stuff like if you know if I’m responsible for responding to customer queries or
\nwhatever, I’m going to be the slowest person to do it because ultimately is a business leader that demands on my time and whatever your role is, you know, as a project manager, program manager, whatever.
\nUltimately, that’s the game is increasing the value of your time and
\nbeing able to either outsource, delegate, automate, hand over things to
\nother people. And you kind of have to play that loop. So yeah, it’s, it’s an interesting one. I love your points around like what you can do
\naround automating things in your email. And I think for so many people
\nthat that’s that’s the answer. And of course, as you say, like when you were talking about the transcription, the AI stuff is is huge. You mentioned using off the AI and there’s in other function.<\/p>\n
00:07:47,000 And it’s come along. I used like D script even riverside that we’re using this podcast recording now. And you can use, you can use tools like
\nchat to you to then take that transcription and sort out of the editing that
\nyou mentioned rather than have to edit it yourself. You could say, you
\nknow, his common terms that I use that transcription often gets wrong, such as my company name, air manual or my name, you know, his, my
\nname, whatever. And then go right. Here’s a transcription. Now write it
\ninto a. Try and proper transcript and it’ll do it all right and laid out
\ncorrectly and so on. And that is ultimately yes, there’s a bit of thinking
\nupfront there to document that as a process and work out. Okay, first I do this, then I do this, then I’m from this.<\/p>\n
00:08:30,000 But now you’ve got something you can improve over time and you can
\npass through other people like it’s, yeah, it’s game changing when you
\nstart. When you start doing that through various activities because once
\nyou start to get the benefits, yeah, it’s addictive. You start to realize, oh
\nwait, I’m just saved a day or two days of my time. I invest in this one amount and you keep on just playing that game right.
\n00:08:54,000 Yeah, I just, I get so frustrated with wait time. That’s the thing that bugs the hell out of me because there’s so much in processes where the
\nwork is done. It’s the time to get it through the next bit of whether it’s an
\napproval, whether it’s a notification type thing, whether it’s having to
\nmanually go and check. Like we’ve got things, we’ve got things before when organizations have been with this way you’ve had something come to you.<\/p>\n
00:09:26,000 But the for whatever reason, never thought about it, it’s on it’s uploaded
\nonto a SharePoint site. Great. So in order to find out if your POs come
\nin or whatever it was, you have to go on that SharePoint site, you have
\nto go on there and you go on there and then you’re waiting for it and then you go there and then it doesn’t automatically refresh. So you have to press F5 to refresh the screen every 14 seconds and that’s what you spent that day doing because you need that PO because you need to get.<\/p>\n
00:09:53,000 And then and then just looking at the power automate stuff within
\nMicrosoft and went, what’s that? Severed. Let’s have a look. Oh, I can
\nset up a thing a rule that says this, this, this, this, this, this, send me an email. One file appears here. It sends me an info.<\/p>\n
00:10:12,000 Yeah, with these criteria and then I was like, oh, that’s it. Done. It was a bit. Well, my coding skills aren’t the greatest. It was a bit ether Robinson and probably could have been a cleaner and a bit of manual stuff in there.<\/p>\n
00:10:23,000 You could have improved it later, but it just meant that I could do it and
\nwe, and then I’ve seen that evolving to other situations, but just little
\nthings like that. I just, I’m a, I don’t know where I get it from or how, but
\nsometimes I’ll be there going, if I’m doing stuff in the kitchen, maybe it’s like I’m making a cup of coffee, making something to eat, tidy, or
\nsomething. Kind of find myself trying to go around the kitchen in the most efficient way to try and multitask it if I can.<\/p>\n
00:10:49,000 So if I’m carrying something one way, I want to be carrying something
\nback the other way. Yeah, maybe I’m just, there’s so much just a wrong
\nwith me on that, but that’s what kind of makes it. I think that’s pretty, pretty normal or at least it’s any wide day.
\n00:11:03,000 Yeah, and it’s just like it’s weird. Sometimes you think about doing something efficient, can save you 14 seconds or whatever. Just that
\nnatural looking for those opportunities. And I think, I think with, and maybe that’s again, it’s the project management about there.<\/p>\n
00:11:16,000 And then, it’s the critical path, that’s what I’m looking at. What’s critical
\npath to make my cup of tea, isn’t it? Yeah, and I’m not using all this, that’s probably true. And I suppose similar with me with my sort of background of management consulting, working on improving process and so similar thing, right?<\/p>\n
00:11:31,000 It’s always looking for where can I eat this out and improve it. And yet
\nwe might do it on a cup of tea and then spend four hours. And then go,
\nwait, why have I done that? And I think that’s the, that’s the kicker, right?<\/p>\n
00:11:51,000 It’s overcoming those mental, those mental barriers to kind of do it. But I
\nthink also, you know, you highlight a really interesting point around like
\nthe technology side is that I feel like a lot of the technology sort of
\nplateaued for a few years in terms of what was possible. Like, or at
\nleast the user interface for a lot of technology improved a lot, probably a
\ndecade, but actually the nuts and bolts underneath it didn’t change that much.<\/p>\n
00:12:17,000 And now we’ve had a fundamental shift with AI and what that
\nempowers us to do, that the game changes not just it’s already in over
\nthe last couple of years, the amount of AI options and tools that have
\nsomething became available to the generation. And then we’re going to
\nthe general public has massively increased, but also every day there are more developments that allow us to do stuff. You know, I was working with my engineering team and we were looking at particular
\nproblem that our clients have and we’re looking at how we could write something that would utilize AI to solve that problem.<\/p>\n
00:12:53,000 And we were reflecting on if we wrote that using standard code, it’s the
\nsort of thing that probably would have taken two, three weeks to write.
\nAnd we were talking about getting it done in like an afternoon and that
\nkind of absolute shift is pretty incredible. But I think the challenge for a
\nlot of people is like, oh, but it’s changing so quick or I can get my head
\naround, you know, what is all this AI stuff and is it going to make a difference?
\n00:13:20,000 And is it just a fad and so on? And it’s for our customers, we wrote a guide which we’ve now made available to everyone. So if people want
\nus, the business leaders guide to using AI and chat GPT, it’s available
\nat manniel.link\/ai\/ebook. And that the intent of that was to cut through
\nall the, you know, the hype and whatever and say actually how do you
\nmake practical use of this kind of stuff to be efficient and to and what could disrupt, you know, disrupt what you’re doing and so on.<\/p>\n
00:13:53,000 And I think for project managers, you know, we’ve been talking about
\nthere’s various ways in which as a project manager, you could use AI to create your project plan or to help you create a status report or
\nwhatever it is. Like to send to write and send emails to people to chase
\nproject status reports or updates on what they’re doing or clarity on
\nwhat their blockers are or whatever. Those things that basically take up
\nhuge amounts of your time and are not particularly exciting, like the best parts of the job, right?<\/p>\n
00:14:26,000 And the exciting parts are working out how, you know, how can I
\nreduce this critical power, and all we’ve got this new constraints come
\nin and how can I make sure that I’ve got this difficult stakeholder that
\nother like that’s where the value is, but doing or doing those bits of bits and mobbs around the edges, like that stuff can be massively made
\nmore efficient. And I think that’s quite exciting in terms of what it means
\nwhere we can be spending our time. Yeah, I think you were right. I think
\nI get a lot of frustration as I say, there’s two things, move, move, move, there were two or three things, move, moving the same information from one system to another.<\/p>\n
00:15:03,000 Me manually doing it, dealing with a lot of these, not essential tasks that actually the value that I had as a squishy human being. There’s someone who has a relative level of emotional intelligence is about working with that stakeholder, getting to know them, understanding
\nthem and delivering what they really need. And getting them to help me do that.
\n00:15:36,000 And then with the team, it’s the same thing. And really, I would have more time understanding those team members, but nine times out of
\n10, I’m just chasing the lead time sheet or with the customer, I’m just
\nsending a rag status report to explain why something has happened not
\nat all complaining that something. And all of these, these tools and I
\nthink there’s a lot of things where people, is it going to replace my job? Well, yes, it is, but not all of it.<\/p>\n
00:16:04,000 I listen to a lot of writing podcasts and a lot of authors are nervous, or
\npeople like the fact that you’ve got chat, GPT can write you a lovely
\nstory, a lovely short story, a very long story, and there’s tools being used
\nto facilitate and augment people’s writing. And it’s going to happen, it’s going to get used. It’s the next phase of Grammily, you know what I mean, is that sort of thing? Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n
00:16:35,000 But with that, with that creativeness about it. And but then it’s going to
\nbe how are you going to do that because still you can’t, at the moment, and I don’t think it would get to that. You write me a story about something, please, that I can publish as a book to chat GPT. That
\nprobably could, but it wouldn’t produce something that would be there.<\/p>\n
00:16:58,000 That pivotal element of that idea that you need to have as your idea as
\nyou as a human is the bit where we add. And then the same with that, what I would think of as the art bit, the art of managing and understanding that stakeholders requirement, understanding the team
\ndynamic, joining those two together and making that happen. That’s the
\npower. And agree. At the moment, and I’m wrong, I can’t see where the AI and that sort of stuff does anything more than augment that capability.<\/p>\n
00:17:30,000 There’s still a core thing running through the middle that is us that has
\nto be there. Yeah, and I think the way to look at it is it’s a collaborative
\ntechnologist. The thing I love about it and the way to use it is that it has
\nto be back and forth. Like I came across a piece of AI recently where
\nyou could take a YouTube video, for example, of this conversation and
\nyou could use Opus AI, where you basically give it the link, and it will create a series of short videos 30, 40, 50 seconds, light you would create in headliner.
\n00:18:04,000 But it will essentially do that automatically by sort of looking at creating
\na transcription, picking the bits content or that kind of stuff. Like
\nbasically going to save you having to spend that pocket money. No, you
\ndon’t. So sorry that they’ve lost their jobs on that, but like, but and that’s great.<\/p>\n
00:18:22,000 But the it’s not picking the messaging to put out there. So it doesn’t
\nknow what are the key points that you’re that are part of your brand or
\nyour values or that link into an offer or whatever that you’re making at
\nthe moment. It doesn’t have that sophistication. That’s why it has to be collaborative. Now Opus is an example of a clever AI, but one that
\ndoesn’t yet provide that sort of back and forth where I said to you BT is
\nvery clever AI that definitely does and say you can create a book as
\nyou say by having that insight that you give. But a great example of
\nthat. They’re related to like project management and so on. Be that right
\nnow there are add-ons that you can put into Google sheets that allow you to essentially prompt chat GPT. Now what that means is that you could say right in a in a sell in a Google sheet.<\/p>\n
00:19:19,000 So right, the these sells I’m going to give you some data, which are the last let’s say five weeks of wonder what might we use for project management like burn down or something like that right we could use
\nsome kind of productivity metric. And we could say right a sentence that
\nsummarizes any trend. And so essentially we’d send that office a query
\nto judge you BT and go right here’s the data and it will give a trend so it
\nmight say yes currently trending now with the. Now you could say, but
\nit’s not smart enough to know that actually it said that it’s going down
\nand it’s described it as being good thing but actually that particular
\nmetric in these be going up for it to be a good thing and actually it’s less about what it’s going up or down.<\/p>\n
00:20:08,000 Well, I want it to be a stable and consistency is important like, but you
\ncan tell it that so you could put that into the like let’s say this is what’s
\ngood. This is what’s bad. This is what’s okay. Exactly. So if you get
\noutput and you’re like, oh, it’s not very clever because it thinks this is like great tell it.
\n00:20:22,000 So now you can say, OK, here’s the numbers done. Good like ideally
\nwe’re looking for consistency. However, if it’s going to be not consistent
\nthen going higher is better going deck. Like you can set parameters and write that in normal language rather than have to do some really
\ncomplex like it can you know if this and then that and all these such
\nthings and can condition for but say whatever instead you could just tell
\nit that and then it will write you your report it will write your your Rags
\nstatus report and say this is green and this is dead like you could have it do that.<\/p>\n
00:20:56,000 Obviously there’s work up front and you have to put your smarts in there and you need to review it to make sure that it makes sense because you don’t just be checking that out each week because when
\nyour boss or the other client says like this doesn’t make sense to me
\nyou’ve said that this is like light it’s the buck stop with you. So you’ve
\nstill got to do the review you’ve still got to go and have the conversation and ultimately you want to spend a bit of spending the time not on
\nproducing the report but on saying so what. Like so if you know if I brought up to do you know okay what can we do about this you think
\nthat’s where you want to be spending the time and I think that’s what all
\nof this is about is it’s a collaborative tool it’s I think the temptation for
\nsome people is either to get one result out of and go that’s amazing and
\nthen not really work out how to build it into their day to day business like activities and processes or to see it produce something poorly like we’ve all seen perhaps seen images of.
\n00:21:53,000 And images of AI produced images of people that don’t look quite right or the hand in the hands aren’t right and there’s too many bigger
\nfingers. Yeah, good example like our ebook like the you see the image
\nwe’ve got not over the octopus if you look at this and video this one
\nmake more sense but for audio like on the front of our guide there’s a picture of the octopus now we asked it for an octopus with some
\nspeech bubbles and it does a fair job but what do you notice about the octopus is got too many legs. And that’s because mid journey the AI tool doesn’t automatically understand that when you’re doing an
\noctopus it should have eight legs and so stuff like that means that some
\npeople throw it out they go like oh but it doesn’t it doesn’t understand
\nthis it doesn’t it’s like yeah it’s a collaboration tool you have to go back and forth in the same way as even a spelling or grammar checker doesn’t get it right always.<\/p>\n
00:22:45,000 You know it will try and correct people’s names company names all
\nthese sorts of things and you have to have the the smarts and I want to
\ngo no actually in this case ignore that so yeah I think there’s lots of project managers in my project reports. Project manger is yeah yeah
\nproject manger is one I use a lot for some reason because my typing is so poor but it doesn’t get picked up. Yeah yeah exactly it spoke perfectly it’s all those project managers where we keep our baby
\nprojects it’s actually yeah yeah and it is it is fascinating and I don’t I
\nthink the it’s one of these topics which it’s every other article in LinkedIn
\nhas got that on there nowadays and there’s a really AI stuff in impact
\nit’s going to be massive and huge in there and obviously it and we talk about it here because it’s it from a project manager point of view process is.<\/p>\n
00:23:37,000 Is something that can get in the way and it can be something that can
\nable the project the end of the day the process is don’t get a work done
\npeople do. And sometimes and I think from from I’ll describe would talk
\nabout him and you’re a little bit knows if that’s right and I know we’re
\njust coming up on the hour so running quite quite well on this one. Just
\nthe something I know is the other day that struck me is that there was a situation where you’ve got a process that’s really well documented
\nlovely work for look great fantastic to the right management level it looks like you’ve got processes in place.
\n00:24:15,000 I was trying to use a process and I was sitting there going yeah what do I do yeah I know what needs to happen but what do I do what is the
\nprocedure for each of those process steps it sits sat underneath it and
\nin this instance I couldn’t find it where I was and that was struck me the thing that they how often there and maybe an organization will go
\nhere’s all our processes it’s all fantastic we’ve just spent thousands of
\npaying on a consulting organization they’ve done us loads of is your diagrams we’ve got now all got a license for the show yeah we know now we can manage our business processes but then when you get
\nsomeone comes in it doesn’t understand what going on it’s how do I get
\nwhat do I need to spend John to get him to actually prove that or what do they need you know and those bits underneath and from our discussions on what I’ve been<\/p>\n
00:25:04,000 with him and I think you’re kind of you you kind of drop down into that
\nlayer without it being a library full of word documents that are kind of
\njust put on a shelf and never look down never updated and you’ve got
\nthis process you can find a good document attached to it and I get the
\nfeeding from talking to you the air manual does that so you bit of a plug for air manual just tell us about how that works and how that helps
\npeople yeah so that’s a really good observation because I think what
\nyou’re you’re picking up there is really my biggest frustration back when I was<\/p>\n
00:25:40,000 in my management consultant sorting out processes for big companies
\nbecause that’s exactly what I do you know be brown paper on the wall and moving the post it notes around to work out what the optimal process would be and then I take that way and in the evening I then
\ntype that up into some physiodargrams or case wise or whatever it was
\nmaybe even PowerPoint if if they decided they didn’t want to use those tools and then we’d you know print that in a zero
\n00:26:05,000 and go get it laminated or whatever and it goes up on the wall and
\nexactly as you say like you’ve got that high level process but then how do you make sure that people do it and when you bring someone else
\ninto the organization and say right yeah you’re you’re in charge of let’s
\nsay working in finance processes it’s like you’re in charge of making
\ndoing the procurement stuff and procuring like when it’s at a high level
\nit’s very difficult to actually know but what do I do and the steps and so
\nit takes a long time for people to get up to speed and even then they
\ndon’t do things quite right and things are done inconsistently in this mistakes<\/p>\n
00:26:41,000 and whatever and yet in theory we’ve got this really efficient process that stuck in the wall but for some reason we don’t seem to have
\nreduced the amount of head count that takes to do it and I think that’s
\nthe problem is you know you have a similar thing with like stage gates
\nin projects we’re working with them a division of Sony where they had got this project team who had got these stage great gates of a
\nparticular project process which is fantastic you know you want these
\nmilestones so that you’re not working in working on things that haven’t been approved and so on<\/p>\n
00:27:13,000 but the problem was that they didn’t have the detail clarity on what are
\nthe series of things that need to happen so that you can get to a point
\nthat you get approval to get to the next stage. And so everything was
\neither sloppy or painful because either it was sloppy because the kind
\nof like well you know we haven’t produced all these things but yeah I
\nmean this is a priority project anyway so let’s just start and yet actually we haven’t technically produced this project plan or reviewed this
\nproject plan with the client or the internal like stakeholder and as a result guess what advice is on the bum you know months later when
\nwe’ve spent so much time developing it or it was frustrating because
\nyou’d have key stakeholders that you basically pushing these project
\nmanagers back and saying no I can’t approve this and yet the project manager is not even clear what they need to do.
\n00:28:01,000 And so what we did exactly is you say an airman you kind of bridge that
\ngap so an airman you can create your high level you know create your
\noutline of his the processes that I have in this area so for example project management here’s the as a project manager here’s the high
\nlevel processes that I have how to recommend a project how to provide a status update but also how to manage a project end to end through
\nthese five stage gates right so you’d have those but then crucially you
\ncan add essentially an infinite level of further detail where needed you
\ndon’t want to add it just you know everywhere like where needed but in
\nairman you’re like it’s actually concertine is it so that you know you click
\nto expand the project. And then you click to expand and click to expand
\nwhich means that I can look at that you know this particular project
\nmanagement process I can look at it and see it on one screen like one
\npage if you like I can see the entire thing but then I can click and I can
\nopen up the let’s say the agree project proposal stage and I can see that’s made of six steps and one of the steps is to catch all
\nrequirements from the inter the stakeholders and I can click on that and it expands that and I can see exactly one of the steps that are expected.<\/p>\n
00:29:14,000 So the steps that are expected of me as a project manager when I’m
\ncapturing that that input and what are the you know and I can click on a
\nlittle help content of suggested questions to ask or when I get to the
\nquestion on what’s the impact this will have there’s a little help content
\nthat goes what if the one of the stakeholders struggling to quantify the
\nimpact like and there’s a little thing that explains all that but I don’t need
\nall of that detail when I’m trying to just see one of the five stage gates or
\nyou know the one level detail and that’s the key difference. Like what we found when that when I was a process consultant would create these video maps and then you’d create a load of word documents
\nwhich were work instructions problem is that they don’t marry up and so
\non so if I change one. Yeah the video one is there now massive load of work to change the word documents and so on plus the word
\ndocuments are like 60 pages and no one likes looking at them you can’t follow them like to do the work because you go off and do something else and you come back and go what the
\n00:30:12,000 home where was I was I’m paid 32 or like you spend more time doing
\nthat and you go I’m just I’ll just it for memory like I think I think I need
\nnext need to do this until we created their manual as a tool that means
\nthat it’s faster to do the work using the checklist you know like it’s it’s a
\nbit like I’ve got a funny example my kids age seven nine they’ve got a
\nchecklist that they use every Sunday to get their bags ready for school
\nfor the week ahead so that’s getting the swimming kit ready getting their
\npeak it their games kit getting the snacks in the bag making sure their
\nbook their bags got their their books the pencil case their water bottle<\/p>\n
00:30:50,000 all these such things super easy to forget any one of those right
\nincluding for me as an adult yeah and yeah and so it makes sense and
\nit’s helpful to have a checklist and of course they’ve done it lots of times
\nso you can use memory but the key is it has to be faster to use it and
\nthat’s what the big insight that we had for our manual is like you need to
\nremove the friction because as soon as there’s the friction around oh I
\nhave to open the word document then I have to find the various bits and
\nwhatever suddenly it’s like it’s that you’ve lost already like that’s a team member is just going to avoid doing that wherever possible<\/p>\n
00:31:21,000 and so that’s why we we kind of created them and you know to be to
\nremove all of that friction make it super easy to use and as a result like you know my team members when they do you know stuff in in their normal day to day roast I for example myself people when they’re on
\ndiscovery calls with customers they’re using a checklist live on the call
\ncollecting data as part of it that you mentioned earlier about like we took when we were talking about freeing up our times using systems one
\nthings that we were just in the process of releasing and adding is the<\/p>\n
00:31:52,000 automations which means that one thing that my team do they follow
\nthe checklist from a discovery call and at the end they click complete
\nchecklist and it sends the data into the CRM and sends a message and Slack you mentioned that you hate copying and pasting between systems like that’s an example where we can you help me up yeah I’m
\nusing a follow up from a discovery call from an hour down to less than 10 minutes by putting that in place and but the key is that that
\n00:32:17,000 wouldn’t work if the team didn’t fail comfortable using the checklist for
\nevery single sales go every single discovery call they have they use the
\nchecklist to do it and that’s the difference like you can’t you wouldn’t expect that from someone with a word document you wouldn’t expect
\nthem to be like yeah I’m going to use this word document every single time so yes so that’s why while we created Manny always because
\nessentially we’d had that pain in our own businesses had solved it using a sort of partly<\/p>\n
00:32:42,000 solved it using a mix of tools that was messy and you know you
\nmentioned like your own coding and how it was all a bit he throbbington
\nthat’s kind of how it used to be for us until we kind of built Manny wanted to solve that problem and now we get to work with you know
\nlow to vulcanizations to help them sort of solve these problems without
\nhaving to go through all the pain and stuff that we put out the team<\/p>\n
00:33:04,000 through frankly yeah it just yeah it turns it turns ideal and it’s that sort of
\nthing that you want within a project you want that within an organization
\nreally don’t you know I suppose it’s it’s how you can do that but I think I
\nthink there’s a key thing is even if the organization doesn’t fit into that
\ngetting new tools because obviously getting new tools and all of those
\nare still but taking that mindset of and I like the way that you describe that is that kind of thing where<\/p>\n
00:33:34,000 meeting the person where they’re at and kind of you if you’ve got
\nsomeone who is in front of their laptop is on a on a mobile phone and this is part to do communication channels in general but if you’re
\nmaking something that someone can it that there’s no barrier to entry
\nfor it it’s easy to do that’s why I I for the years I’ve been trying to look at
\ndifferent things of automating using my echo to be able to just put it on
\nmy multiple to do lists put an action on there that would end up flowing through to whichever one whether it be my personal my<\/p>\n
00:34:12,000 work even but having the getting things done concept of trying to get
\none place of tasks to do I I just want because what I want to be able to
\ndo depending on why I’ve got in my hand or what I’m stood by I want to use that device now whether it’s an audio device whether it’s a the
\nphone or whether it’s from driving and I can’t touch it’s not on the laptop
\nor or I’m in it yeah I’m in into that kiosk in Havana which I know yeah just I want to be in a position where there’s nothing to stop me 00:34:46,000 and accessing and nothing’s going to stop me interacting with my
\nmanagement techniques tools for me and I know I kind of got part with
\ndifferent things yeah it’s now past night it’s late for you I know and
\nyou’ve got young children like you’re gonna you’re gonna have to get
\nthem up in the morning is there I think we can we can wrap it I’m sure that we could have another chat at a yeah in 12 or eight two months and everything would have changed and from the point of view of AI
\nand all that sort of stuff so we could go out now and there’s better be new stuff<\/p>\n
00:35:19,000 but if there was one thing you want to say to project project
\nmanagement community that’s listening to the podcast about your sort
\nof view on that productivity about on that improving delegation or on
\nanyone what’s the one thing you’d like to say to them yeah so I’d say
\nthat if you want to get great performance and consistent results then
\nyou need that clarity that certainty around the right way to do things and ultimately that comes down to having your documented you know processes your project management process and so on and<\/p>\n
00:35:58,000 like and project managers get this right they they know that yeah doing
\ncertain things in project management gets you better results and I think the more that you can make sure that those steps that clarity is
\nimplemented and that gives you incredible power it gives you the power to make sure things are done consistently it makes you possible to
\nmake it more efficient either by delegation simplification automation
\nusing AI and so on but also can give you a bit of sanity as well because
\nyou’re ultimately able to see what needs to be done and go through that process of identifying<\/p>\n
00:36:38,000 where’s my low value median value high value tasks so that you’re
\nconsistently set like even if there is a process that does make sense that is you even having it documented at the moment at least means that you can do it more efficiently you can improve it you can be confident that some some day maybe you’ll handed over but right now
\nit’s fine but it means that you’ve kind of got that road map road map for
\nit so I think that would be my key takeaway for people is to ultimately look at
\n00:37:06,000 the time challenge that and make sure that you’re making time for what
\nmy for what matters most really if people want to find out what I want to get in touch with you whatever was the best way to get on you yeah
\nsure so for information about air manual specifically so you can find the
\nM manual at M manual dot co there’s a few resources that I mentioned
\nincluding our guide on AI and chat you pity and how to like get groups of<\/p>\n
00:37:36,000 there as a M manual dot link forward slash AI forward slash ebook we
\nalso have a brochure about air about manual about our approach and a four stage approach that makes delegation and and so much easier and how you can use process to reduce mistakes get onboarding of
\nemployees really fast and all these such things people can find that at
\nM manual dot link forward slash discover from there you can also then I
\nthink there’s a link on the back of the brochure to arrange a call with our team so I highly recommend those<\/p>\n
00:38:08,000 I do also run a regular webinar on how to free up 15 hours a week and unlock growth so for anyone who’s a you know leader in the
\norganization project management looking to to help the organization to free up time people can check that out at M manual dot co forward
\nslash webinar or M manual dot link forward slash webinar both work for that and then yeah and then connecting with me like connect with me
\non social media Alexis Kingsbury I am particularly active on LinkedIn but you can find me on most of the other forms as well<\/p>\n
00:38:39,000 yeah or you can email me it Alexis dot Kingsbury at M manual dot co
\nbut know that it’s not going to my inbox it’s managed by my team but you’re welcome to reach out you know if you want to explore
\ncollaboration learn more about how partner and so on but yeah so I’d
\nlove for people to reach out and social media is a great place to do that
\nlike if you’ve if you found this useful share a key takeaway on social media tag me in I will see it
\n00:39:09,000 it’s the best way to reach it if connected with me brilliant brilliant well thank you very much Alexis and yeah have a fantastic rest of your evening and yeah thanks very much it’s been absolutely pleasure
\nthanks very much for having me here Nigel brilliant cheers well hope
\nyou enjoyed that conversation with Alexis if you jump in the show no she can get along to M manual and get access to their tools and techniques<\/p>\n
00:39:50,000 which looks great some great stuff there and I had a great demo from one of Alex Alexis’s team a few weeks ago and can really see how it
\ncould benefit so jump along there have go and well speak soon see you
\nsoon bye so this is my final wrap up every week you’re going to hear
\nthis you’re going to get bored of it but you can always click next podcast if so<\/p>\n
00:40:27,000 if you have enjoyed it if you listen to this podcast at the end of this show
\nand you think that was great I’d love to be able to help Nigel shout out
\nthere are loads of ways you can do it the first and obvious way is to
\nshare the podcast send it out to people if you if you know colleagues or
\nfriends who’ve benefit from it think they’d enjoy it just send them the link grab one of the links send or send them to<\/p>\n
00:40:56,000 www.nigelcrazer.com\/podcasts that’s www.nigelcrazer.com\/podcasts
\nand that will push them over to a link tree link and it’s got all of the different ways they can consume the podcast if you are feeling generous and have a big bag of cash you could grab a copy of one of
\nmy books obviously they’re available in all the usual places and print and digital again jump on the website www.nigelcrazer.com\/shop and
\nthat will give you a list of all the different ways that you can contribute and grab copies of the book<\/p>\n
00:41:42,000 you can get a lot of links to all my guests books on there as well where I
\nget a little bit of a kick back from them if you are of a sporting mind I have a number through doing some of my judo and running antics I’ve managed to secure a few affiliate links there as well so in there somewhere in the sponsors page there’s links to those as well so
\nclicking on to those and grabbing your if you’re looking to get super fit then that would be fabulous as well
\n00:42:18,000 I get a little kick back from those I have a Patreon account it’s patreon.com\/sundaylunchpm so again you can ping something in there
\nby me a coffee or whatever and finally obviously the most important is coming back coming back listen again because the more of you that come back the more visibility I get<\/p>\n
00:42:44,000 because there’s more times that you’re downloading and all the SEO
\nworks and things like that so yeah that’s it so if you can help me out I would be much appreciated if you can don’t worry about it thank you very much. Cheers now. Bye<\/p>\n
00:43:00,000 well it’s goodbye from me Nigel Creaser and it’s goodbye from him the Sunday lunch pm. Goodbye Introduction. Hi and welcome to project manager productivity hacks. Why write another book on productivity hacks? are they not enough of them already? The trigger was my interview with Sarah M. Hobern for my podcast the Sunday lunch project manager podcast<\/p>\n
00:43:32,000 plug plug. Find out more at www.nigelcriser.com\/seraM. Hobern. We
\ntalked about improving productivity for project managers and during the
\nconversation I recalled that a while ago I started a blog post in which I
\nplanned to share some ideas that I have used in my career to improve
\nmy productivity and get out of the office that little bit earlier. Over the years I have shared these with others<\/p>\n
00:43:58,000 and almost every time I received a positive and enthusiastic response. Having rekindled the idea I sat down and noted 11 hacks, tips, shortcuts, whatever you want to call them that I have used over the
\nyears. Why 11? Well it’s one more than 10 this book goes up to 11 one
\nfor the spinal tap fans. I see productivity is remarkably similar to an exercise program<\/p>\n
00:44:22,000 we all start off with good intentions and some of the changes work great for us and others don’t. Some changes stick and become part of our
\ndaily life whereas others are just a real chore. Even the ones we found
\nthat work well for us and are straightforward to implement can under certain circumstances end up being dropped by us.
\n00:44:42,000 Sometimes this happens consciously and sometimes little by little over
\ntime. Whether building healthier habits or improving our productivity it’s not just a case of making the changes and we are done. It takes
\nrepeated work. If you find them hard to implement then they may not be
\nfor you in your current situation. If you start using them and end up letting them drift then start again<\/p>\n
00:45:06,000 Improving our productivity is something many of us strive to achieve
\naiming for some kind of efficiency Navarna. Let me tell you it ain’t
\ngonna happen. Perfection is a myth. Give yourself a break. It’s a bit like yoga you can’t win at yoga no matter how bendy you get you can always be bendier that’s the same with<\/p>\n
00:45:26,000 personal productivity you can’t win at productivity you can always be
\nproductivity. Ed is that a word? I have not always been able to apply these hacks successfully but that is not a reflection of the hacks
\nthemselves it is more about my ability to stick with them even though I know they work.<\/p>\n
00:45:44,000 One last point as with your fitness regime trying to make loads of changes at once can spell disaster I recommend that once you have a
\nread of these hacks choose one that excites you maybe not excites but
\nseems to resonate and have a go at it. Once it is second nature to you move on to the next one that spoke to you.<\/p>\n
00:46:03,000 If you find that the first one was not for you then bin it. Choose another
\nand try that one out then rinse and repeat. So on with the hacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
n 1da34df6f9f78156f3653daf53ad5f46.m4a 00:00:00,000 funneling those things through that route so that I’m not because I will slow it down. I’m not the worst people in the business to touch stuff. If I’m responsible for responding to customer queries or whatever, 00:00:15,000 I’m going to be the slowest person to do it because ultimately is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcripts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1105,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions\/1105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nigelcreaser.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}