The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Seven Patterns for Highly Efficient Project Managers | PPP #30

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

My spin on Stephen R. Covey's great work "7 Patterns for Highly Effective People" with emphasis on application to Project Managers.

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with People Process Progress in 3, 2, 1. Hey everybody, welcome back. Welcome to People Process Progress episode 30, the 7 Patterns of Highly Efficient Project Managers. Yes, this is a play on the outstanding work by Stephen R. Covey that was published in 1989 called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And I've seen direct rips of

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Project Managers. And that's cool. That's a good comparison. I wanted to do something a little different in the lines of the original podcast, but between the slides I used to host this podcast, how can we distill and make this easier for you, more effective, but actually more efficient, right? And so what's the difference? So instead of doing what everybody

else did, I wanted to put my two cents on it, right? Because that's what we do as podcasters, but also spin some of those concepts, which again is great work from Covey, but also with emphasis on more than creating habits and being effective, but also efficient. So you all know by definition, but they're used interchangeably sometimes, but effectiveness and efficiency are not the same. So here's some definitions that I looked up. And effective and efficient both mean capable of producing a result. This was a good kind of summary statement from learnersdictionary.com. I'll link to this in the show notes. But for Merriam-Webster, Webster's dictionary for a long time has been the authority. So effective is producing a decided, decisive, or desired effect. So effective

people. Efficient, Merriam-Webster says, dot com, and again, I'll have the links to this, capable of producing desired results with little or no waste, parentheses, as of time or materials, parentheses. So think about that as project managers. We are always trying to save time, materials, right? So schedule, cost, scope, quality. We need to be efficient in doing that. And what I've done is I've looked at Covey's work and I've looked at the seven habits and I've looked at, okay, what some of the stuff I've actually talked about've looked at Covey's work and I've looked at the seven habits and I've looked at, okay, what some of the stuff I've actually talked about on the show before, which some other things that other folks talk about, but things that I do as a project manager or that I've seen others do

as project managers, program managers, leaders in fields, and that I will find helpful and hopefully you will find helpful. What is also going to be helpful to this show is if you subscribe, follow us on Facebook, People Process Progress, peopleprocessprogress.com, some updates to the website coming, or reach out to me, peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com and Kevin Pannell, P-A-N-N-E-L-L on LinkedIn. Please feel free to reach out there. I'm on Instagram at peopleprocessprogress as well. So give us a follow, likes. That really helps get the show a little more exposure and hopefully get more subjects and more topics. And we have some exciting interviews set up and some more focus.

So let's get into this. So I'm going to move through these habits, through these patterns, right? So what we want to do is create efficient patterns in ourselves as project managers. I think we do. And so here's insight into how I think we can tailor these processes or tailor your processes, whether you're a project manager, whether you're a coordinator, whether you're not even in project management, whether you want to get into it. Hopefully this gives you some insight into how you can help. And even if you're not officially

wearing a project program coordinator hat, if you're working on something you've been assigned, whether you're in public safety, public health, private sector, wherever you are, these are things that can work anyway and help build efficient teams and help your teams make progress, right? That's a big thing on the show. So the first thing is take ownership. Yes, just like Jocko Willink and Leif Babin always say in their book, Extreme Ownership. It works.

It helps. It shows that you care. It shows that you're not going to use the they statements. And as the project manager, I've said this before and I agree, we don't really own any of the people and the stuff that we bring together to complete projects, right? But what we do own or should feel big ownership on is the process, right? And we should take responsibility for all the aspects of the project's successes and failures. So we should, when we do great, own it and give praise where it belongs to our team. When we have failures, and this is probably the hardest part, right? Of not using those they statements and while they should have done this and they didn't tell me and I didn't know. And again, you don't show up for the big meetings with people with leadership,

not knowing stuff about your project or your program or whatever you're doing. As the project manager, you have to take that ownership as Jocko and Leif say, extreme ownership. So even, you know, here's an example. So as a project manager, you're not the one that fat fingers a code, right? You hit the wrong button causes the system to crash, right? Unless you're in a really technical project management role and you're also part of the team kind of wearing both hats, you're probably not doing that as a traditional project manager. Now, could we consider as project managers, I'm not the one that hit the key. Okay. Could we consider though that we could have provided more clear direction or more time or more resources for the analysts to maybe they weren't as rushed

and maybe then they wouldn't have made the mistake. Could be, right? Sometimes stuff just happens, but you know what? Always look at it from that thing. Okay. I own this. I'm supporting the project. I don't like to say it's my project when people say your project and I get it. It's yours because you're assigned to it, but it's not really mine, right? It's the process to get people together to make that progress together on the project. So just think about that. How can you take ownership in different aspects? And it doesn't mean take all the blame, but how can you constantly do review? So the first thing I think that's going to be a really efficient pattern is first take ownership. You got to do

that, right? Always consider what could I have done better to help my teammate and the team overall, just every single time, you know, and throughout the life cycle of the project. The second thing, which, you know, kind of parallels Covey's second habit is playing with the end in mind. To me, I say plan ahead, but be flexible, right? And so Covey's makes sense playing with the end of mind, but, you know, sometimes trying to cram all the planning up front for projects is like trying to use a crystal ball or magic eight ball. And for some things, we do have to do that, you know, for construction, or we have to have like, say, you're building a house, a foundation, and then the frame, and then the pipes, you know, you have to do those things in order. But also be ready that if what if

something happens, and, you know, just be flexible enough to not be so stringent. And what we said this two months ago, it has to be just like this. Now, that doesn't mean you're not going to have, you know, fight scope creep and use your committees and make those decisions. It just means plan ahead, but be flexible. And dare I say, air quote, agile, right? That's a big thing, especially if you're doing software development. You know, again, it's hard if you live in that waterfall world.

I know primarily I do and I have and trying to get some more agile action in there. But you know, we need the foundation both for the frame as I talked about before. But you know, we have to be flexible. So if it doesn't go our way perfectly, okay, and then what and I'll get into that a little bit later, but but stuff happens, right? So people get sick, they change jobs, supply chains get stalled. COVID-19 anyone personal protective equipment, right? So imagine that you had this plan, even if it was say you're doing incident management or something, you had this whole plan. Now you can't order things from another country. Now you can't get meat from the supplier. Now you can't get supplies for the project you're supporting all of that real real

time stuff happening. So you could have planned ahead to a T, but you have to be flexible and think about, you know, how do we lessen or mitigate these risks? What does that lead to? We've talked about it here before, contingency planning. Did you contingency plan or are you able to do it quickly on the fly? So remember, we like to use that pace planning. So have your primary plan.

It's sunny. We got all the people and the stuff we need, all the time and the money. And then consider an alternate plan. Hmm. We have to go 50 to 75% people money and we have to do it in less time. Got to consider that alternate contingency plan. Okay. We lost our primary resource. Can we contract our expert, right? Our analyst that's going to do the work. So now you're getting into you can't necessarily replace or just go down in percentage. You're actually losing resources, losing time. Okay, this regulation says it now has to be a month earlier. So you can't move those things in an emergency plans. What if someone completely leaves? What if there's a total reorg? Just stuff that you can plan for.

In the emergency plan piece, really this PACE model is really focused on wildland firefighting, public safety, but it applies here in project management too, because there are emergencies, right? In real life, things happen. What if a pandemic hits your entire organization, right? So now what if everyone has to work from home? We can't do this. People can't visit, changes the whole thing. So pace planning, primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency plans, that's part of the planning ahead, but be flexible. Second, efficiency here. You know, if you didn't pace plan or you don't have a good continuity of operations plan, and I think we've seen this a lot from COVID and even I think, you know, from some of the protests, but more so the violent pieces of the protests, the civil unrest, it's not too late, right? Rally the team

plan out the steps and then be ready for and then what and just keep looking to that for the future. And here's a perfect quote that has to do with you can plan ahead all you want, but you got to be flexible. No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force. So that's from Helmuth von Moltke from 1880. He was a Prussian military commander. Most of you kind of recognize what I said there. Often quote that as no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Right.

Similar Eisenhower. Plans are useless. Planning is everything. Right. So it's all about put the plan together. But once you do that, and again, for me as the planning section chief, my whole thing was get the incident management team, the public safety folks together in a process. Make sure you get a good process going, relationships. We have good tactics, safety, all that good stuff.

And we do want to put it in a nice looking plan document and all that stuff. But I know as soon as I hit print, as soon as I send it, as soon as it's PDFed, it's messed up, and we just got to be ready to adapt. So my second way for people of the seven patterns of highly efficient project managers is plan ahead, but be flexible. Number three, so let's identify issues and set objectives, right? This is definitely a carryover from incident management, but I use objectives in every single project that I support. The issue piece, so all projects are pitched and bids are placed, right? Contracts are signed, resources are put in motion to solve some sort of issue, right? Something, whether it's, we got to improve organizational efficiency, provide a new non-existing service that we want to have, improve something that's in air, improve the life for our customers or our patients,

et cetera, et cetera. But there's some issue that's there, something. And so as such, project teams or perhaps even organizations should clearly define what issues you're trying to solve. So it's not exactly for the PMs out there, project managers out there, program managers or anybody in that world, coordinators. It's not necessarily your issues list. We've already kicked off the project. You had the risk and it happened. The risk was we would lose three people. It happened. Now it's not necessarily your issues list. We've already kicked off the project. You had the risk and it went, it happened. The risk was we would lose three people that happened. Now it's

an issue. This is more akin to a business need or needs analysis, right? So what are the issues that we're trying to solve organizationally? Not necessarily what are specific task related or resource related issues in the project, right? So from these issues, and I've touched on this before, there's this whole exercise you can do with sticky notes, right? So people get together and you can just say, hey, what are the issues you think exist with this special event, with this incident, with this project, the software upgrade, whatever, put them together and then group them, get rid of the duplicates.

And then now the next step, which I'm a huge fan of, is set objectives, right? So from the issues, the project managers or the PMO officer or whoever's, you know, coordinating this effort is going to create those good old smart objectives, right? They're going to be specific. They're going to have some kind of measure. So they're measurable. They're going to be achievable. And that's got to be agreed upon.

Do we think we can do this? They have to be realistic and they have to be time-based, like by when. So, you know, they won't all be perfect like that. That's why it takes practice. That's why I think you should for sure do objectives for projects, special events, incident response as often as you can because you'll get reps doing it. You'll get practice. This, if you've listened to the show before and if you have, thanks again, is the first of the foundational four is write set smart objectives. So I've said that about as many times, but it makes a huge difference. So leadership, or command approved objectives.

So for project leadership is what your sponsors, right, your business owners, you know, or its command, if you're out in the field doing stuff like that. So it serves as the team North Star, right? So the everything, all the tasks, all the tactics, everything that you line up under these need to align with the objectives, right? If the scope or the work that you're doing isn't aligning with the overarching objectives, then you need to pause and ask yourself, you know, do we need to consider a change? And do we need to realign that work? Because those were approved at the highest level, they were made by the team or with leadership of the project pretty early on. And that sets the tone to say, hey, everyone, here's what we're all focused on. Here's where the objectives we're all trying to make sure we meet. So again, if your compass is kind of

straying off north of those objectives, we need to take stock in that. So we are taking ownership, which is our first pattern to be highly efficient project managers. For the second thing, we're planning ahead and being flexible. We have identified issues and we've made those objectives, those smart objectives, right? For number four, Covey looks at win-win. I say don't let perfect be the enemy of good, right? And I'm all for win-win, but it's my two cents that often that's not possible, right? And read Covey's book. It's the fourth of his habit. He makes a great case for it. I'm just giving a different perspective here, right? So think about during contract negotiations, the seller wants to make profit while the

buyer wants to save money. At some point, agreements are made on initial purchase, ongoing support, and more. Is it truly a win-win? Does everyone really get everything? Or is it just the excellent art of compromise? I think it's the latter. Compromise is key key, like compromise happens. It's the key to successful marriage to successful, you know, parenthood. You know, you have to give and take, you have to be willing to stand up

sometimes you have to be willing to give sometimes and as a project manager, same thing. So that thing about contract negotiations, that's a back and forth. And can you get to a point where everybody air quote kind of win wins? Sure. But somebody gives a little more than they actually want to at some point. And that's my point. So, you know, I certainly didn't come up with perfect is the enemy of good, but I love it. I particularly believe in perfect is the enemy of good or remembering that when there's timings of the essence, when you're working from a contingency plan, we have less money, fewer people, you improve the scope. You know, especially COVID-19. I actually had someone else say that on the team that I was on and the program I was working in. And I was so glad they said it,

because you start iterating and trying to keep doing this and doing this and doing this. And you're like, okay, at some point, we just keep having meetings and we keep doing stuff. And at some point, you got to pull the trigger, hey, is it is it good enough to meet the solution now, and then we can put together a proper kind of more thought out more plan ahead, but dynamic plan down the road, great, let's do it. So sometimes, though, you know, we can get lost in the process and think, okay, we have to do all this administrative stuff, or we have to do this, or will this help the project? And who's going to read that? So I think consider that too. So what is an effective amount of communication, of documentation, of information to share, to set up upfront, to share with stakeholders, to get approved by your

business owners, by your sponsor? We need the support from our leaders. We have to lead teams. Sometimes we have to go off script, right? But it's still aligned with those North Star objectives. So while this may not be perfect right now, if it's an adjustment because we had to hit those contingency plans up, that's part of being a project manager is having that discrepancy to be able to do it. If you don't, your organization, you know, try and work that in as best you can. You know, much of that is going to come from experience. It's also very important to keep leadership in the loop. So again, if you're if you're in a contingency scenario, your direct leader and on up shouldn't be surprised when you say that in a weekly meeting

or monthly meeting to a steering committee, they should already know about it. And if you have some sort of 80% solution, you got it that you got to get it approved by the stakeholders, right? Make sure it is or do your best to communicate it in a timely manner so there's no surprises. That's not fair to you, to your teammates that you're representing on calls, certainly not to that leader. So we have taken that ownership. We have planned ahead, but we're staying flexible. We have identified issues and set those smart objectives. We are understanding that we cannot let perfect be the enemy of good because we are going to adapt these seven patterns of highly efficient project managers.

I think we should always consider the OODA loop. So the OODA loop and this parallel for Covey is seek first to understand, then to be understood. It makes total sense and I agree 100%. It hits on the principal application when you're communicating with your stakeholders, teammates, and vendors. I just like the OODA loop tool because it's easy to remember, right? Seek first to understand, and then be understood, to me, is very communication-focused, which he talks about in his book. And it makes sense, right? If you're a good conversationalist, if you want to show someone you care, you're going to listen more than you're going to talk. You're going to be listening not just to respond, to actually ask the question about what the

person said. I kind of touched on this too when I did the episode 26 of the show about crisis intervention team training. Listening to someone, letting them talk without just saying you understand or this or that is hugely important to de-escalate. It's also hugely important as a project manager. You are going to de-escalate stuff, right, as a project manager. But in this instance, the OODA loop and why I think it applies and is a great pattern. The fifth pattern here to be more efficient as a project manager is one, it was

developed by fighter pilot in the Korean War. And you want to talk about not having time to think when you have to have this system and you just do it. So if you don't know what the OODA loop is, it's very popular in public safety in the military. It's been in some leadership things, many actually, because it works. Why propose it? So OODA or O-O-D-A stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, right? I mentioned it's a methodology that a successful Korean fighter pilot, American fighter pilot in the Korean War came up with. it was a way when he was fighting against other people flying jets trying to kill him. How do I look and see what's happening by observing how to orient myself? How do we decide what to do and then act right? Because you don't have time? Well, so how does a project manager do that? So when we when we first joined

a project, we may or may not have been involved early, like an initial request for proposal, RFP or RFI, request for information process, or the intake process if you have one. When we're not, when we come in then, it pays to observe through handoff conversations with your leader, with whoever assigned us to the project, or shortly thereafter, your sponsor, your business owners, whoever's going to be key to give you that background information, if there's already a leader in that office, the vendor, when they come on, if they come on early, um, through this observation, you know, we will, we will begin to orient ourselves, right? So who's who in the zoo, as they say, so who's who on the team,

who plays what role, what's the dynamic that you can observe so far. And again, that's another dynamic for us as project managers, right? A lot of us are remote. And if you're not remote, there's masks on. So it's different body language. But you know, we're doing this via web conferencing calls. But you know, you can see like what was the bidding process like? Who's familiar with the vendor? What are the estimated resource needs? How accurate do we think they are? How many people and hours and stuff do we need? Do we begin to feel out each other as teammates, personality, styles, build the relationships, right? That's orienting to your people, to the folks you're there to support and get through the process, right? That's huge. And we're often as project managers put in positions to make decisions,

right? But there are rarely any decisions we should make in a vacuum. So this is where kind of the decide in the OODA loop is a little different for us. I think we're not alone in the jet in the air. We are an organization in the room or on the call. We may be alone as the representative for our project management office or it or whatever, but we're not totally alone. So if we have observed right, a new project environment, if we have oriented ourselves to our objectives, our teammates and the schedule we're moving towards, then we will be better positioned to influence decisions or if the situation does dictate to not lock up when someone says, Hey, Kevin, what should we do and go? I don't, it's not wrong to say I don't know, but you don't want to lock up if you don't know something, but you want to be part of the decision. I don't know, let me find

out more about that. But here's what I think based on what we have so far. Right? So you do want to be the one to decide on a project's key decision. Now, sometimes it's not your decision to make, but you can help steer the team to the decision that is probably the best outcome without, you know, spoon feeding the answer. And so that's how you often may have to decide on, yes, this task is good. Yep. You know, if you, the person who's been entrusted by your resource manager, by our leaders to make the decision on the testing plan, we don't need to go back to the same five people and ask them that every week, right?

It's not as efficient. And we've all been entrusted to do that, right? And so as a project manager, you can help people's comfort level with their decisions, how they decide, or queue up, you know, the decisions that are going to help us move forward. And then acting, I've touched on this concept that of the time wedge, so as time takes away, think of a triangle that's open ended on the left and the points down to the right, we start to lose options, right? So time goes down, options, you know, get smaller. Certainly, you know, for crucial conversations we don't have, or if we don't know, you know, how to say things when we don't escalate project needs sooner, rather than later, as the clock ticks on time, we have, you know, assigned resources because we don't have,

we can't keep the same people for ever, right? Just because, you know, our projects lagging behind. And if we think we can, we need to re up the resource requests and have those conversations with their managers and with them and do all that. And so we're losing decisions, we're losing our ability to, you know, have options. And so we have to act right. So project managers cannot be successful. If you're afraid to act. I think that's a pretty direct. I don't think it's bold because I think it's true. If you're not willing to act on behalf of your team, your project manager in office, what's the right thing to do?

What's the best thing for everybody? Just to do something, even if it's escalate, even if it's have that tough conversation with your resources, having a tough time, you just have to be able to act if you're a project manager, right? So we are rolling as project managers. We are developing seven patterns to be highly efficient project managers because we have first taken ownership. Secondly, we've planned ahead and we're flexible, right? We have identified issues and we've set those objectives that everyone's going to work toward as our North Star.

We're, you know, fourth, we're not going to let perfect be the enemy of good here. We're going to do our best but understand it's not going to be perfect. We're going to consider the OODA loop that's going to help us, you know, observe what's happening with the team, with the intake, who's who. We're going to orient ourselves. We're going to, you know, help make decisions or make some decisions, and then we're going to have to act or we're going to have ourselves, we're going to help make decisions or make some decisions, and then we're going to have to act or we're gonna have to get the team to act. The sixth of these patterns that I think is huge is to develop the team's operational tempo.

Covey calls his sixth habit synergy, which is cool. And why couldn't I just say that? It's shorter. To me, though, team operational tempo fits project management better specifically. Do we want to be synergistic in our relationship with internal and external partners? Yeah, absolutely we do. Sure. But to me, it's more than that, right? What is operational tempo? And here's a definition from pattern-based approaches for organizations agility.

And again, I'll link to this, but I thought this was a really good one. It's a focus on disciplines, activities, technologies, and resources that gives organizational leaders the mechanisms and controls they need to understand how to enable consistent and repeatable organizational change and response to changing patterns. Right? So I think that defines it great. That's operational tempo. So that means, hey, team, we're going to meet every week.

Hey, program manager that I'm working with very closely on the project, we're going to meet for a short catch up, make sure we're on the same page. Hey, leader, hey, whomever that your organization wants you to meet with, or that you think you should meet with, you're going to act on setting those meetings up those conversations, build those relationships. You know, to me, as a project manager, this means establishing the team's battle rhythm, right? I'm using all these militaristic sounding things. And, you know, again, this is to me the perfect crossover that I've talked about the whole time I've been a podcaster from, you know, doing between the slides, incident management, focus, public safety to this show. There's so much crossover and good process works anywhere. So battle rhythm, operational tempo, flow of the team, you know,

with the environment developing, you know, whatever it is, but, you tempo, flow of the team, with the environment, developing, whatever it is. But that battle rhythm in regular meetings with the folks that you need to do the full project team meetings and making those meetings efficient. The project team meetings should be part of the operational tempo. And that meeting should be my ideal meeting that's a weekly check-in with the project team is half an hour or less, right? Because unless something comes up, which happens every now and then, it needs to become a working session because it's already a block of time that everyone has reserved, then you know, every now and then sure, but every week, it should not be a working session, because there should be conversations happening between the weekly check ins, right? So the best option there, I think, an operational tempo is when your team kind of

starts self-driving, right? When it starts to self-organize, self-drive and your analysts or your experts on the team say, Hey, you know what? We're going to go meet and talk about this policy. We'll let you know. And you're in the loop and you're good with it. And you can let go of that, right? Cause you're, you're a project manager. You don't need to be involved in every level of every single meeting of every discussion that happens on your project. You just got to know what's going on, you got to be there to clear obstacles, you got to be there to help folks. But you're not you're not the one that's going to decide what code to use, or how best to pull this data or what policy this does or doesn't right, your job is to pull those people together and help put together the best solution, you know,

that you can get. And so in short, the operational tempo, it sets the pace for how the team should work the tasks right tied to those objectives and how often to communicate with one another. And it defines how we'll achieve success together, right? So what are we looking at? How do we do this, we talk to each other, we have to have good communication. Again, challenge because everybody's virtual, remote, whatever you want to call it, we're all using the internet like crazy, webcams, that stuff, but we got to talk to each other. We have instant messenger options if you don't look into those. And we still have phones, right? Phone calls still work. We're still going to do that planning ahead, but with flexibility, we're going to let everyone know, hey, everyone, here's the team structure. Here's our objectives. Here's all

the stuff that goes kind of in a charter. And I've talked about that. Look at that in previous episodes. But we're going to understand this could change. But here's kind of the framework that we have right now. We're going to make everyone has access to the systems, right? So that's a practical consideration as a project manager. If you've set the operational tempo or you've agreed on it with your business owners and your program manager and your sponsor to say, hey, we're going to meet weekly, all the updates will be posted in our online system, we'll send out once a month, or if the project dips into, you know, red light status or something like that. But that's part of the thing, too. And so you need to make sure everyone has access because you all know, if someone goes to look at that, particularly a

leader or somebody else, and they can't get in there, it's, you know, kind of a pain in the butt, and you may have lost somebody, and they'll say, hey, we'll just email that. And so that's organizational preference. My personal preference is if we have it online, if it's more real-time, near real-time as can be, that's the best place for people to go. Let's just make sure they can get there and they know where it is. And does everybody know the projects? Why? Right. So if you're setting the tempo, we've, we've taken ownership, we're planning, we're being flexible, we're, we're OODA looping, um, you know, and, and we're working together really well because we all know perfect is the enemy of good. Everybody also needs to know why. And the objectives will cover some of that, but some of those objectives are also going to directly impact

tasks and the work breakdown and all that stuff. But, you know, what's the difference we're trying to make, we're trying to improve patient outcomes for older patients that have this, or we're trying to make this system more efficient, because it's going to help, you know, people live longer, whatever it is, but the actual why. And again, I've mentioned before, check out Simon Sinek, he defines this way better than I have. But it's not just the what are we providing and how are we going to do it? It's really what's what's the thing we want to have everybody looking towards that's going to make a difference in their lives. And so that's part of to me the tempo, right? Everyone knows we're going toward that it's the A and add car the awareness piece, right? So again, I kind of summarize. So we're

developing an operational tempo we're starting to work together this last one so Covey says sharpen the saw and again I totally agree with that I say and call that this seventh pattern iteratively design yourself right because you are doing all this stuff for the team you're doing all this stuff your organization you got to look at yourself here's it here's a definition of that. My wife had the same question. She was like, what does that iteratively design yourself? So you can think of iterative design process as a continuous cycle of prototyping, testing,

and making adjustments and refinements. And this is from enginus.io. I'll save this link as well. The Google food was super strong. But I like that, right? So you are a prototype. Whether you're brand new as a're you're whether you're brand new as a project manager, whether you've been in the game for 1520 years, program it, whatever you

are, you are a prototype that's always changing your testing. Does this technique work? Did I talk to this person? Well, I'm going to adjust because I didn't do this on the other project, but I'm going to keep doing this because of the other project, right? So it's similar to sharpen the saw, but it involves personal care for sure but also professional adjustments right improvements as they say and i'm gonna do the old you know jiu jitsu quote here learn from losing right and that's a quote from there you know you're not losing you're learning so that's something too right again projects aren't going to be perfect that's fine um for me like I'm a pretty confident person, right? I also realize at 46 years old, with over 25 years of professional work, 18 years of

marriage, 13 years of fatherhood, I have a lot to learn, right? I cannot be complacent. I can't think, well, I know it all. Nobody needs to tell me what to do. It's just not true. It's not true for any person on the planet, right? As a project manager, I submit that we have to feel the same. I would say consider these things. Am I honest with my lessons learned from each project, right? It goes back to number one. Are you really taking ownership? Have I tried my best to kill the air quote they from my vocabulary when it's time to be objective, open and honest about the areas for improvement and project that we help facilitate, right? We were assigned the project. Our deal was we were handed this great opportunity, this great responsibility to get all these people together from different groups to solve this

problem to address these issues to work on these objectives to put this non perfect, but really good plan together. Are we honest with ourselves when it goes great? More so are we honest with ourselves when it doesn't? So do you look toward your future? Are you looking at what space you're in? Do you want to stay in that space? I'm in IT healthcare. Do I want to stay here? Do I want to go back to public safety?

Who knows? You're always looking. It doesn't mean you're not committed, right? But what sector of space, as we say, to sound more like grownups, you know, the space, do I want to work in? Can my skill set take me to any space or am I too specialized? Am I not specialized enough? Again, this is just thinking about yourself as a professional. What about certifications? I've touched on this. I have my project management professional. I had

public safety and incident management certifications. I'm still an emergency medical technician. The EMT was a little different because you actually have to do that to practice. You don't have to have a PMB to be a project manager but they are great for we'll speak to the PMP and other project management certifications they're great for establishing a place on your resume to pop up in job searches to stand out on LinkedIn and they do they do show that value right you went towards something that was challenging if it's you know one of the harder ones PMBs is one of the harder ones for sure, and there's other ones out there, that you said,

I'm going to try and do this thing, and then I did it. And then if you don't do it, try again and do it. But it shows that you set a goal and you completed it. Remember, though, this is what I've said a lot, and I firmly believe it. A certification, whether it's Scrum Master, Agile, PMP, whatever, does not make you a project manager. Doing the things we talked about here does, and this isn't a perfect definitive list. I think it's pretty darn good though. But just remember, because I see a lot of folks that want to bridge from non-traditional, as we say, project manager roles into project management,

and they think the first step is to get your PMP. So that could get you, like I said, pinged on a search and a resume, which is good, which is helpful. And you say, well, yeah, that's what I want. But when you get in the door to be a project manager, it's not going to make you any better, right? Other than knowing, you know, the terminology and the ITTOs and all that stuff. But the practical application of those things, it's not going to really give you. So if we keep in mind, to me anyway, that mindset of constant iteration,

we can help reduce our own complacency. We can help ourselves, our organization, and our leaders grow and succeed, right? Help make progress and we'll be more efficient people and project managers along the way, right? So this one, this iteratively design yourself isn't just for you as a project manager. It's for you as a person. And if you listen to the show, you know I would be remiss if I didn't also mention and totally agree with Covey that project managers need to, air quote, get after it, right? And he didn't use get after it.

I used that. You have to do some sort of exercise, right? It will make a huge difference in your life. You don't have to, I guess, but I would highly recommend it. Physical exercise of some sort will no doubt help you in your job. A morning workout before the kickoff meeting will invigorate you and get oxygen flowing to your brain. A nice walk after work will help the stress of the day like fade away. Consider jujitsu, right? I've only been doing it 19 months, you will get hooked, you'll probably be sore, all that jazz. But it's a way to put into perspective your hard day or something else, right? Go walk the hills in your

neighborhood or go for that bike ride or do a yoga class, but something where you have to make yourself do it or a group class, whatever. I have a garage gym, I work out a lot alone, juiu-Jitsu, obviously I did. Hopefully we'll get back to that next month. But I've been working out in my garage gym by myself. My wife's out there though. My kids start doing it. It will make a huge difference. It will help you no doubt. It will help take the stress away from the day. And we need that. We have so much stress these days, right? So with that, thank you all so much for taking the time to listen to this there's a lot going on in the world in america um and you know for for listening to me take covey's habits and consider some patterns right that that project managers i think can grow to

follow themselves and lead their teams to success um so to me an equivalent i think is we got to take ownership as project managers first we got to plan ahead but give ourselves and our teams that flexibility. We need to identify issues and set those objectives. We cannot let perfect be the enemy of good, especially in times of crisis. We need to fifth consider the OODA loop. We need to develop our team's operational tempo. We're going to help set the pace and the tempo of how we communicate, how often, what leeway we do or don't have or get or something like that. And the seventh one is iteratively design yourself.

We're always a work in progress professionally and personally. And so get after it. Thank you all very much. Again, if you haven't subscribed, please do so on whatever platform you listen on. I look forward to providing my two cents more, but more so some of the interviews we have coming up in the near future. Thank you so much. Wash your hands. And, of course, Godspeed.