The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Build the Sidewalk Where People Already Walk

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

In Build the Sidewalk Where People Already Walk, we explore what happens when project teams design based on real behavior instead of assumptions. Drawing from a Lean Coffee discussion and PMI’s survey findings that the customer is the ultimate indicator of success, this episode challenges leaders to define “done” through the eyes of the end user. Kevin shares how observation, empathy, and feedback lead to better requirements, stronger outcomes, and lasting trust. Learn how to build projects that people actually use and appreciate.

Build the sidewalk where people already walk. We've all seen it. The worn dirt path that cuts across a field long before a sidewalk is poured, sometimes even after. It's the most honest kind of feedback there is. People show us what they need, not what we think they need. Same applies to project management. Success happens when we build based on where our customers already walk, not where leaders assume they will. Welcome to People Process Progress.

I'm Kevin Pennell, author of The Stability Equation and the People Process and Progress of project management. On this podcast and the People Process Progress YouTube channel, I share lessons from life, leadership, training, and exercise ideas to help you own your growth, align your work, and anchor your teams through practical steps. Now let's get into it. Welcome back to the People Process Progress podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Pennell. Thank you so much for being here. Here we help people think strategically and act intentionally, right? Move purposefully toward a better leadership and project outcome.

I'm the author of the People Process and Progress of Project Management, The Stability Equation, Seven Pillars Formal Balance Life, and this podcast and YouTube channel of the same name People Process Progress. Please go check this out. Please give this podcast a review and share it. Helps get exposure, helps more people plan, keep those people first, process aligned, and progress together. So let's talk about the phrase, build the sidewalk where people already walk. It came up during a session at the Southwest Virginia at PMI Symposium that I was fortunate to speak at. and attend and learn and network, a great session. Highly recommend if you're a PMI member, you get together with your local chapter, a regional chapter, and a colleague that supports a nonprofit used this statement as we were talking about topic items for the lean coffee. And lean coffee is lean. Everybody gets to vote on what we talk about. Then we narrow those down and it's over coffee. So right away, it hit me. It hit all of us. We were like, whoa, that is a great

statement. It makes total sense because it captures how people naturally shaped systems. We've seen it even when there are sidewalks, the cut-through path, right? Spaces, even projects and their behavior. So in organizations, people, whether their patients or customers or staff or students, are constantly showing us the paths they prefer. The problem often is that we design things from conference rooms and set up from these paths, right? So sometimes we're disconnected, especially as we move up to what's actually happening on the ground. And then we don't have the real insight. We don't know what's the path that they actually walk. And so we maybe lay down a sidewalk that they're not going to use as much. So for us as project leaders, it's on us to listen, to observe, to connect,

right? That's how we learn where the real sidewalk should go. So let's talk about process, right? Building strong requirements means resisting the urge to assume and asking better questions. And another thing is, just as a reminder, don't jump into requirements like meeting one, right? We still got to figure out what this thing is. The business case, maybe it was beautiful, it spelled it out. But when we get the people who are going to use this thing or fix this process or whatever it is, we need to sit down and say, here's our assumptions, and they're all assumptions before we start. Do they make sense?

Now let's dig into the technical stuff. So we do this by saying, how do we define our success, right? What does done look like to them? Right? I can save 10 minutes per patient. I'm in healthcare IT, so I'm using that example. I can save 10 minutes per patient because this device is going to send the vital signs and I don't have to write them down and then document them later. That's an outcome that's a KPI we could use. So we want to know what success is. Success is we made our customer's life better, right? Successes, we saved them time. And then how does this solution, which goes in line with those, make their experience easier, faster, or better, right? That's what we're all. trying to do and almost everything. How do we make it easier? How do we make it faster? How do we make it better?

And this focus on customer, in addition to being practical, aligns with some survey results that the representative from PMI, the Project Management Institute that was at this conference shared, where PMI had a mission statement. It was really nice and had the word success in there

and a bunch of people followed up and said, well, how do you define success, PMI? And they said, I don't know, let's ask you how you define success. And that definition and what the thousands of responses concluded was it the customer is the ultimate indicator of project success, which makes total sense.

But some folks thought and said, it's got to be the sponsor. They're in charge. They supported it. It's got to be other positions. But we always have to be customer focused, whether that's the laborer on the job site, if you're in construction, whether that's the chemist in the lab, if you're in a research-based capacity. Or like me, if you're in health care IT, that's our patients, right? That's our end users, our nurses and doctors and techs and supply chain, everybody that's going to use the systems, right? It's not the budget.

It's not the timeline. It's not executive satisfaction, even though those count. It's whether the customer feels their needs were truly met. That's the most important thing. And it tells us something really powerful that effective project management isn't just delivery, right? It's empathy at scale. So let's talk about progress. We build the sidewalks before we understand.

in the path. We're going to spend more time and more money, and then we're going to have to change the sidewalk, and then maybe we'll have to change it again because they'll keep cutting through and the grass will get jacked up. So when we listen first, though, when we observe when we prototype and test, which is a huge thing to really iterate too, right? So thinking about that agile mindset, we can create more alignment. And testing is part of pretty much every software project should be hardware as well, pretty much anything before you go live. Also being able to prototype things. Let someone try it. They give you feedback, fix it. It's a very agile kind of release train kind of thing. We can build that into waterfall stuff as well. Just fit, you know,

pieces of agile in, a waterfall thing, make it hybrid. The project management methodology landscape is like a buffet. You pick what you need to make things work. It doesn't have to be purest, right? And companies, I think that trying to be too purists do themselves a disservice and their people because it's very hard to do pure agile or pure waterfall or pure this or pure that and just stay in your boxes so by doing prototypes we can align that trust right and involve those end users early validate their feedback build the systems that serve them not us not our assumptions right it's also progress when we as leaders stop defining done in isolation and start co-creating or let your team co-create right we're going to empower our leaders to lead our team members

So that definition is what the people actually use from the boots on the ground, as we say, from the people on the street, from the whoever, from our customer, right? And then it can live and prosper and do better with this result. So we can operational this as strategic leaders, as PMs at the tactical level, whatever, it helps, embed the user stories in every requirement, hold real demonstrations, not just PowerPoints, right? The screenshots of the thing aren't as effective as somebody clicking in the thing or holding device and then measure satisfaction at the handoff not just delivery right so we've gone live how are we doing that the first day of go lives we're going to track issues follow up and then ask

yourselves are we building where people walk or where we wish they would walk you can read more and listen to episodes and buy the books on people process progress.com again the books are the people process progress and project management the stability equation seven pillars for more for a more balanced life because we as leaders need to be balanced as much as possible, right? We're not going to be balanced all the time perfectly. Wawa are also leading strategic programs, project portfolios, all the labels, right? Thank you all so much for helping build up this podcast.

Again, I mentioned the website. I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm on X and Instagram at Penel KG, P-A-N-L-K-G. Reach out and follow. You can listen on Apple and Spotify. Until next time, remember to keep those people first, keep your processes aligned. And then you and your teams and your organizations will make progress together. Godspeed, y'all.