The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Listen to the Best Episodes from May 2020 | PPP #24

Episode Date: May 30, 2020

Sharing highlights from the May 2020 episodes (19, 20, 21, 22 & 23) with my $.02 and guests Peoplelogic.ai CEO Matt Schmidt and Jill Grumbine, BSN, RN.

Everybody, Kevin Pinnell, your host of this People Process Progress podcast. Thank you so much for coming back and hearing the stories from other people, my two cents as a person, us sharing our processes that we use in jujitsu and healthcare and technology, incident management, project management, and other places. And hopefully this information has helped you all make progress. It certainly helped me progress as a podcaster, as a project manager, just by way of talking to great people. And so we're going to cover five snippets from May.

This is our May kind of roundup. I've done this annually, but not at the end of the month. I think it's maybe a good opportunity if you haven't listened to the full episodes or any full episode of this podcast, maybe listen to this one and hopefully it sparks your interest. And so I'll do some brief intros to each snippet to let you know what's happening. If you could, so that's what I'll do for you this episode. If you could go to wherever you listen to this on iTunes, Spotify, Google, iHeartRadio, wherever it is and subscribe and give us a rating. The more ratings, more stars,

more checks, more thumbs up that we can get, get to the top of the heap there and help get folks stories out and also share. I think there's a really big space for incident command system, project management, all hazard incident management in general. And that's where I started with best practices for myself and my colleagues. And then these great stories from jujitsu players and software developers and CEOs and public health nurses. And we got some other great guests lined up. So thank you all so much for all that you've done along the way. And let's get into the first clip. First clip is from episode 19 stuff project managers need to know it's based on a book stuff guys need to know and in this brief, brief early part of the episode I talk about in the book, we learn how to gather kindling and, you know, brushing things to start a fire,

prepare the site. And I equate that to and give examples of how we need to do that, have a good intake process, have, you know, a good business case, all the stuff that we can do at the beginning of our project, or a program or any initiative we start to really help us achieve success. And so here's a little snippet from that episode. And I hope you'll listen to the full episode after this. So this is number five in that book, as I mentioned, on kind of the manly stuff of fire making. So the first thing he has is to prepare the fireplace or the fire circle, right?

So when you start a fire, whether you're, let's talk about if you're in the house, obviously you want to have the fireplace kind of cleaned out. It's ready to go. It's ready for the, whatever materials, whether you have kind of the metal log holder or just going to stack them in there. And then if you think about a campfire, you know, you get all the rocks around in a circle to help kind of hold that heat in. You kind of clear out the old wood or maybe use some of it, but you need, you need to get the space ready. And so when I think about that for projects, that's early on, right? You've chosen your vendor or your product or something like that, and your preparation of the space includes your intake process. So hopefully, your organization is either getting to the point or at the point of maturation where

folks can't just kind of go out on their own and get whatever product and bring it in and say, oh, we need this installed. But rather, everyone knows and the message is, if you want something, and I'm going to talk kind of more heavy to IT because that's what I do. I'm an IT project manager. But if you want something to come into this organization, and it's connected and has technology, it needs to come through this intake process, which means you'll fill out a request form, which is great. Let us know what you're trying to solve. Let us know what you're trying to do. And we can kind of help direct that. Maybe we already have something, maybe we don't.

And then there's maybe a governance group, but a leadership group comprised of not just IT folks, but IT folks, business folks, if you're in healthcare, clinical folks, all the stakeholders that you should have there, but high-level leadership so everyone can look at something and know it's not just a high-level person whose name weighs a lot asked for it, but it's not practical and it takes a lot of work, but rather maybe it's something that actually benefits 200, 300 people. This clip from episode 20, we hear from Matt Schmidt, who's the CEO of peoplelogic.ai. And I asked Matt about his lessons learned from his first startup and what he wanted to carry

into the creation and development and growth of PeopleLogic. So here we go. What were some things that you were thinking and headed toward PeopleLogic that you wanted to make sure you were focused on, kind of like you had early on for giving developers a place, but looking at, you know, because it's a manager-focused solution, right, to help folks and lead their people and other things, and we'll get into that as well. But what were you thinking as you looked toward your kind of next passion project with PeopleLogic?

Yeah, great question. And so, you know, with PeopleLogic, what we were – there were a couple of things, you know, back toLogic, what we were, there were a couple of things, you know, back to lessons learned is one, I knew I wanted from the start to be surrounded by people that would inspire me. I also knew that I didn't know everything. whether that's around the people that knew more about the human resources world or the people analytics world or whether they were experts in sales and marketing and figuring out how to grow a business without spending huge amounts of money. Or whether it's finding great developers that can build the tool with to to really take it to the next level and so you know those were the things i knew from the beginning that i could do this business i could launch this business and have it grow faster than the 18 years it took me on the last one by surrounding myself with great people from the start and being able to really take

that from the ground up. Next up, former colleague in public health, a friend of mine and public health nurse currently, Jill Grombine. So Jill walks us through in this clip the steps once the health department gets notification or even from that point of a tuberculosis case. But this is also indicative of other reportable diseases. So, you know, COVID, other things, there's a whole list. So if you look up the Virginia Department of Health, those are on the website there. But this is very helpful, give folks an idea of how disease

investigation happens. And I think Jill does a great job walking us through it. So again, this is from episode 21, Public health nursing with Jill Grumbine. What happens when someone says, Hey, we think, or we know this person has tuberculosis one, how do we find that out as a health department? And then can you walk us through the steps of what we do from there? Yeah, sure. So tuberculosis is a reportable disease in Virginia. So if a physician or a laboratory discovers that someone has tuberculosis or even suspects, and that would be a physician, suspects that a person has tuberculosis and it would be laboratory confirmation of a culture of some sort, frequently it's a pulmonary specimen. We look at the people who've had the most contact with that person, which usually is household contact. And we look at those people the next group of people. And it really depends on the individual what that next group is. workplace contacts or if someone is very active at church, we would want to look at the contacts that they're closest to at church. And we look at those people and we

also test them for exposure. We go through a questionnaire screening for symptoms of active tuberculosis, and then we would offer a tuberculosis test, either a TB skin test or we now have blood tests to test for exposure to tuberculosis. And we work our way kind of out from that source case, from that original case, until we get to a background level of positivity that is quote normal. Far we've gotten tidbits of episodes 1920 and 21 of the People Process Progress podcast. Again, if you like these, if you want to hear more, we're on every platform, iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Google, just added to IMDB. Actually, that's an interesting ad that they're doing now. So still figuring that out.

But on the major platforms, we're there. Get a hold of me, peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com, LinkedIn, Facebook page, wherever. Thanks for listening. So heard, I think, pretty good two cents on setting the foundation for good projects with a good intake process as it equates to like starting a fire. Well, I'm hearing from Matt Schmidt from people, logic, AI has great focus on people, bringing them together, building a new thing and integrating lessons learned. And from Jill walking us through, you know,

when, when we hear about in public health, an issue, a reportable disease, how do we take action? What are the steps we go through? Who gets tested? Who do we screen?

So it seems, I think some really helpful information there. Please, again, go listen to the full episodes. There's more as well. I mentioned jujitsu. We have previous interviews. And I'll add some from the previous months. I'll kind of put this together based on y'all's feedback, some monthly summaries. And so next, what we're going to get into is from episode 22, where I talk about the practical application of these new domains in the upcoming changes to the project management professional exam that's coming in January of 2021, where the focus is people, process, and business environment. So of course, I'm all in right on the people,

process, progress podcast. So here I focus on three, business environment, task force, support, organizational change this has been close to me with some change both in my personal but mostly in professional life but also how we as project managers program managers leaders of teams you know we are the face of keeping things going we are the ones that during change can lift our colleagues up if the change is not a positive for them if it's a challenge. It's a change is a challenge for everybody.

And so I hope in this, when I speak to that domain three for the PMP exam, which is business environment, and in particular this task four, the support organizational change, hopefully gives some optimism, some angles maybe you could think of if you're having change in your organization. So here we go again from episode 22, practical application of the new 2021 PMP exam guide. Task four, this last one is support organizational change, right? Change is inevitable. Org charts change, people in the org charts change, restructuring happens.

It gets, you know, expands, contracts, you go new directions. You as a project manager are in a great place with your knowledge, skills, and abilities and exposure to people from the boots on the ground up to the C-suite to support change at every single one of those levels. I think in practicality, this is one of the most important aspects of a project manager's job as both a person and a professional is not everybody is going to support the change for many reasons. Maybe they've done the same thing for 20 years and they're comfortable. Maybe they're going to have a job demotion. Maybe they're not going to be there anymore, right? Any of these folks could be on your project team.

It could be you. So what I would say is if you're fortunate that it's not you, you're fortunate where you're on project, if you're fortunate to be in a position where you can still be influential and help do your best to support the change and help make the organization better, because in the long run, for me in healthcare, all of this impact, all of this change, all of the work we do is to help that one patient and that one unit get better, right?

To have that child have a better appointment, to have the cancer patient get a better treatment, to have folks have one last visit with their family virtually because we got phones in the rooms and they could call and their family could see them die and be with them. That and all this work that we do and all this people, this process, this business environment, and project management, particularly in the healthcare space, and it doesn't have to be patients.

It could be the kid in the Apple store. It could be someone that's going to move into this new house, right? All the projects that we support, that we manage, that we work on, have people at the end of them. For these domains and the PMP exam that's going to change, people is first. For this podcast, people is first. That's because people are

central to everything we do for this last clip in the last full episode of people process progress for may i talk about easy to follow phases for hospital and health care preparedness which is normal operations increased readiness response and recovery and then some details in each of those and in this clip i highlight there's nothing new about what's going on now other than perhaps the scale and the newness of the type of virus. But the preparedness we could do for this has been around for a long time. The emphasis on hand washing, staying home if you're sick, covering your cough, etc. None of this is new. So we have a lot of lessons learned. And I touch on that a little in this clip, but more so in the full episode, particularly focused on the recovery phase. So listen to this clip and then circle back around to episode 23, easy to follow phases for hospital and healthcare

preparedness. So we are trending, I would say toward recovery, there's still response, right? There's still on the street response going on. There's still hospital response going on. But we by and large are looking at how do we come out of this better? I saw a post on LinkedIn today and it was really pertinent. I think there's not necessarily a new normal because a lot of the stuff that we see on the news, the guidance we get, hand washing, distancing, cover your cough, stay home if you're sick, stay healthy, exercise, eat better. None stay home if you're sick, stay healthy, exercise, eat better. None of these are new concepts, right?

The biggest thing is the mask thing, right? So, you know, in America, adopting some of the stuff that folks in other countries do, but the most impactful stuff that helps with underlying health conditions or reduce them or remove them that keeps the surfaces clean that has your hands not be full of you know what you just wiped on your nose just you know all that kind of stuff that's been around forever we just don't always pay attention to it now with the media blasting us and you know breaking breaking breaking outbreak these numbers these numbers it's it's a lot that's one thing I would encourage you all. And one thing I've tried to do is look at the numbers. The numbers are not pure and keeping up with data like this is super hard. So kudos to the folks trying to do it.

No one can get this perfect ever. Just it can't. So I'll give them that for sure. But there's a mix, right? There's a mix I've seen, particularly on the CDC site, of a combination of COVID, pneumonia, and influenza. So they're not just pure COVID numbers. They're not just pure pneumonia. They're not just pure this and that. And so that gets to the debate of should we open, should you wear this or that. And I'm not going to get into that right here. I have my own opinions and they're mine.

And I'm sure you all do too. So that's the first May 2020 wrap-up. Look forward to many more months of podcasting with you all and years to come. Hope these tidbits were helpful. Again, I think I've kind of mentioned where to find the show, how to connect. Just look up People Process Progress on whatever podcast platform you listen on. We are there. And thank you so much for listening to the show where we highlight people, people's thoughts.

We share process and hopefully all together we make progress. Best to everybody out there and Godspeed.