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Erik Fisher:

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Beyond the To-Do List. I’m your host, Eric Fisher, and this is the show where I talk to the people behind the productivity. This week, I’m excited to share with you a conversation I had with Jay Scott. He’s the author of The Irreverent Guide to Project Management, an Agile Approach to Enterprise Project Management. And as you can guess with a title like that, that is what we’re talking about in this conversation. We’re talking about project management, and this is a great conversation to bone up on what project management is, as well as different approaches to project management. Because let’s face it, we’ve all got projects in our life that we want to run to completion or have projects that we are starting all the time and get derailed along the way in our personal life or our career. So if you are looking to better coordinate a team around a project or just drill down into your own project management skills, this is a great conversation. So I’ll get outta the way and just say, enjoy this conversation with Jay Scott. Well, this week it is my privilege to welcome to the show, J Scott. J, welcome to the show.

Jason Scott:

Thanks, Eric. I’m happy to be here. I’m excited about the conversation.

Erik Fisher:

Yeah, so pre-conversation or pre prerecord button hitting, this is something that often a lot of people or a lot of podcasters will say, Hey, pre pre-recording we were talking about this. And then we jump in and say, Hey, repeat what you said. Well, I wanna do that, but first I wanna set this up and say, basically this conversation’s gonna be about project management, and I’d love for you to say, uh, a little bit about where you’re from and what you’re doing, you know, in your organization. And then we can get into the nuts and bolts of, you know, some of the different views that, uh, come under this, this, uh, umbrella of, uh, project management or the, the tangential other, you know, change elements or change, uh, you know, perspectives when it comes to that.

Jason Scott:

Perfect. And so I wanna just start with some of the things that I’m gonna say are, are a little bit controversial in the world of project product change management, which is why we named the book that we’re, we’re gonna talk about today, the Irreverent Guide to Project Management. So when it comes to project management, pro project managers take on large initiatives that have a distinct beginning and an end, uh, with a fixed budget. And our job is to get it across the finish line on time and on budget. Well, in that vein, there’s also a role called product management. Those people are predominantly responsible for application development, and they use techniques called Agile or Scrum or DevOps. Um, so from my perspective, that’s really no different than a project manager just with a different, or with a focus on a different subject matter. There’s also change management, there’s project team, demand management, there’s program management, there’s portfolio management.

Jason Scott:

And somewhere along the line, we figured out that leadership in and of itself is a change discipline. So my focus and my firm’s focus has been for the last 20 years, helping organizations master these seven disciplines. Because when, when they have strength in one, there’s gonna be parts of their organizations that are, that are running optimally, but where they, they don’t have strengths. They’re not gonna be moving things forward as aggressively or as efficiently as possible. And so ultimately our goal is to provide services to organizations where we drive their projects, optimize their product pipelines, help them stick change initiatives, or enable them to do this on their own.

Erik Fisher:

And when you say all of that, you know, I can’t help but hear some of the similarities when it comes to, you know, when people talk about productivity like we do on this show and all the different aspects of it, and why this is an aspect of it. Ultimately, what we’re talking about here is, I am in one place, or was in another place. I’ve gotten so far and there’s still further for me to go. And that’s a change in mindset, change in location change in vocation change. In other words, I want to be better. I want to do different, I want to be more efficient. I want, you know, and all of those different, you know, productivity, project management, even buzzwords that we get into, it’s all about change, right? Right. It’s all ultimately about that.

Jason Scott:

Right? And I think that’s just human nature. We are, we are driven to improve. I like to look at people and organizations and recognize that we’re all currently optimized for the results that we’re getting in our lives today. We’re literally the architects of our situations predominantly. And if you want your life to be different, if you want your project to be different, if you want your, your situation at work to be different, you have to change something. So improvement is fundamentally about change. Like you said, you know, all these buzzwords about productivity, project management, product management, it’s, it’s, it’s all about change.

Erik Fisher:

Yeah. And, and again, thinking in terms of, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked about this before, like, quote, setting goals or, you know, uh, in, in other words, change, just being this, this, I mean, change comes in all different forms, but I, I, you know, when we get to this part of saying the word project, that that can be anything. It can be the, the all inclusive, like me as a human being, and I am a project <laugh> some more than others. Just kidding. Um, or individualized. Like say for example, I, I’ve been on a, I, I’ll call it that, actually, I’ll call it this. I, I have been working on a project of improving my health over the course of the past year, year and a half, and into next year. And I, I know how far I am in certain aspects of that. I know some of the certain changes that I need to be making in that. And that’s one way of maybe translating over into terms, uh, it’s not necessarily a metaphor, but it’s, uh, translating into terms people can think, uh, you know, can, can mentally grasp when it comes to the words, uh, specifically project management in real life.

Jason Scott:

Yeah, that makes sense. Something with a goal. Yeah. With an end state somewhere you’re trying to go.

Erik Fisher:

Yeah. So, and, and that’s the funny thing is like, uh, you know, again, there’s that whole like, uh, <laugh>, I’m, I’m in marketing. I just started a new position recently somewhere, uh, different. And I’ve had a lot of people come up to me digitally through, you know, messaging or email or face-to-face and say, so what do you do? What do you doing now? And <laugh> the same could be said of project management in a lot of ways where it’s like, okay, I think I get what that means as a macro level, but like, what is it you really do? And so do you have an answer for that question when people ask you like, Hey, I’m a project manager. Okay, well what does that mean? What is it that you do?

Jason Scott:

What’s funny about that is we get project managers in general, we get asked that a lot. It’s, it’s kind of a inside joke for us, <laugh>. Yes. And so often I’ll explain it and then I have to give examples. And so an explanation, I’ll say, well, someone has something that they want to accomplish, uh, transformational outcome. So what we do is we, we come in, we plan it, we then, after planning can say, it’s gonna take this long, it’s gonna cost this much. When you agree that it can take this long and cost this much, we then work with the people to move this initiative along, right? As efficiently and effectively as possible to accomplish whatever it is you want done on time and on budget. A couple of examples from my firm. When Trader Joe’s needed to upgrade their nationwide processing system from the swipe to the chip credit card, we led, we planned and led that initiative.

Jason Scott:

When I say led that initiative, we planned with the Trader Joe’s team members as well as the, the team members would five other vendors that they worked with on this project, and then led those people to accomplish this merchant processing system upgrade in six months, visa called it a flawless implementation in record time. Another example, I’m sure that, you know, everybody’s heard of the cloud these days, and I’m sure that most people know that organizations are moving stuff from physical servers to cloud servers. And so we recently migrated all of Sony Picture’s applications from on-premise to the cloud. It was over 240 applications, 900 environments. We did it in nine months without any service dis interruptions. This is an incredibly complex thing, right? So from our perspective, a project is anything complex with multiple stakeholders that has a beginning and an end and, and a financial target that needs to be met.

Jason Scott:

And our, I I’d say is from a project manager, our expertise is, is providing security, not like physical security, but our stakeholders want to feel like we have everything under control. Mm. And then our job is to accomplish some sort of transformational outcome. Nobody hires a leader or a project manager. ’cause that’s what we do. Nobody hires a leader because they want their organization to be the same in a week, in a month, six months or a year, right? So our job really is to help pull a group of people together and help them accomplish some transformational thing.

Erik Fisher:

Yeah, man, when you were giving those examples, I, I couldn’t help but think, oh yeah, those are hugely complex projects changes that need to happen and, and to have them happen without any, like you said, um, uh, downtime or, uh, service interruption is also just crazy to to think about. I can’t help but think that, you know, uh, not all of us are playing in that same sandbox. Obviously, often some of the scale, uh, is, is vastly different. You know, when I, again, I was giving a a, my example of a project in my own personal life is me working on my health, whether that’s losing weight, building muscle, like there’s five probably overall components of it over the period of a timeline. And it’s mostly me, somewhat my wife, and, uh, maybe a trainer. You know, that, that that’s the complexity there. But what you were talking about involves like, not only you as kind of, again, when you talk security, you’re not talking like people breaking in, but you’re talking peace of mind or Yes. That they know somebody is being the point person moving something forward, so they don’t have to be that role, right?

Jason Scott:

Because they’re literally a whole bunch of people whose success, reputation, and bonus is tied to this outcome. However, the principles on these large complex projects are literally the same as the principles would be on like a smaller human focused project. Like you were talking about your health, you have a timeline, you have a goal, you’ve got a couple people involved. I think you mentioned your wife, where techniques I think that would come into play both on large projects and, and tools that we use as well as on small human-based projects would be lead and lag measures. Hmm. So are are, are you familiar with lead and lag measures? Yes.

Erik Fisher:

Yes.

Jason Scott:

Okay. Right. So lag measure, you maybe exercise some, you maybe diet some you maybe do something. And at the end of the week, you step on a scale and you, you’re like, oh, did I, or didn’t I lose weight? If you didn’t, you’ve lost all that time. It’s a lag measure, right? A lead measure is establishing the tasks that, you know, will lead to an outcome. So evaluating, Hey, if my goal is to lose 30 pounds over the course of six months, and today maybe I’m eating a couple thousand calories, so I’m gonna restrict my diet down to like 1500 calories. I’m not really active, so I’m gonna start walking five days a week. Here’s what you know, that’s more than what you were doing before. And so if you literally track every day that you’ve restricted your diet to 1500 calories and you track did you do your walking, did you not do your walking?

Jason Scott:

You can kind of anticipate what you’re gonna see when you get on the scale. So, as an example, if you restrict your diet every day and you, you accomplish that, if you walk all five days that you committed to walking, you know, you’re gonna see a result from that lag measure when you step on the scale. However, if you didn’t, let’s say maybe one day outta the five days you restricted your diet and maybe two days you walked, you’re not gonna be surprised when you step on the scale and don’t see much of a difference. And so it’s the same thing with large complex projects. We literally work with the subject matter experts to identify all of the tasks necessary to accomplish this goal. And that might be six months, it might be a year. We identify them granularly down to the hour with a fixed number of days.

Jason Scott:

We’ve got some restrictions on how big tasks and can be. In my world, it’s no more than 12 hours and three days in duration. And so what that means is you’re gonna get really good estimates, right? When somebody tells you something’s gonna take 80 hours, that’s like a big guess. Ask somebody to explain an 80 hour task and they’ll, they’ll start fumbling, right? But when you ask somebody to explain something that will only take 12 hours, generally speaking, they can get through it. You can ask some questions, and ultimately at the end of that explanation, through the question and answer exercise, almost anybody can understand what’s gotta be done in these 12 hours. So, you know, you’re getting really good estimates. And so once we launch the project, we just start, Hey, on day one, we’re looking at the tasks that need to be done this week. Those are lead measures. We know that if we accomplish those tasks when we said we’d accomplish those tasks, that there’s a high degree of likelihood we’ll accomplish the project when we said we’d accomplish the project.

Erik Fisher:

Perfect. If people are following along, to kind of go back into what originally, you know, you were talking about when we were first starting this conversation, and even pre-conversation, uh, pre hitting record, there’s also many different schools of thought and many, many different, uh, approaches. And I was inadvertently even, uh, a couple of times there prior to hitting record saying the words product management when I meant project management. But that was, you know, it was inadvertent on my part. But that’s yet another approach, not to mention, there’s, I mean, you, you named off like seven all at once, and I was like, yeah, so <laugh>, how do, and I’m like, okay, that’s a lot of different perspectives actually. I mean, if you wouldn’t mind, like, would you mind ra rattling them off again and just kind of maybe stating, because you incorporate like all of them into your approach, really.

Jason Scott:

Exactly. And so what I could do is I could, I could state each discipline, and it’s, it’s use case, meaning where, where it would be most effectively applied. So project management is best applied to something where you’ve got a deadline. So you need to know in advance if the approach that you’re taking will accomplish the outcomes that you need by the deadline, or if you’ve got a fixed budget. And that requires you to plan the whole thing before you start. Because if you don’t, you’re just crossing your fingers and hoping that you’re gonna get to the deadline for the amount of money that you’ve set aside. So project management is best used when you’ve got a fixed deadline, a fixed budget, and you’ve got something that, that is known that you need to accomplish. Then there’s agile or product management. So today in the world of product management that that refers to application development projects, right?

Jason Scott:

So all those apps that everybody’s running around with on their phones, there was a product manager responsible for delivering the features. Well, there’s a product manager on a team. That team is responsible for delivering all these features. And as you know, like we’re always, uh, having to get updates to these apps. So what these teams are, they’re dedicated teams. They’re focused on a particular product, and their job is to consistently delight their consumers with constant feature updates. And they use an approach called Agile. Typically Agile’s a 73 word manifesto with 12 principles that are all about human nature and leadership best applied in formats like Scrum or DevOps. And I know I’m nerding out now, but you asked me to <laugh>. And so the, the idea is that these are fully dedicated teams and they’re constantly showing up every day, assessing where they’re at in the lifecycle of the features that they’ve ideated and working as efficiently as possible to develop them.

Jason Scott:

So agile is best applied when you have a dedicated product-focused team. And the other use case for Agile is when you’re not clear about your outcome, Hey, we need to create new features, we need to delight our customers, and maybe we need to experiment because we don’t really have any good ideas. So you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna spend a couple of days and we’re gonna have everybody go off and create their own thing and come back together and, and throw things around. So Agile’s a little bit the trial and error method, but it’s, it’s efficient because you’ve got a dedicated team that’s showing up every day and stating, Hey, this is what I’m working on today. This is what I plan to have done by tomorrow. Hey, I’ve got these problems. Can somebody help me? And so literally, it’s, it’s very efficient because everybody’s pulling at the same speed as the rest of the team, right? So if you, if you need to figure something out, Agile’s a great approach to figuring something out when the outcome is unclear or when you have an application where you have to ongoing deliver value to the business.

Jason Scott:

All right, the rest will go faster, <laugh>. So from project management, you’ve got program management and portfolio management. Program and portfolio management really is about a group of projects where somebody is responsible for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor projects. CEOs care about program and portfolio management as opposed to project management, project management being about an individual. Project. CEOs really wanna make sure that all of the projects that they have on the slate this year get finished for the amount of money that they set aside. They know that some projects are gonna come in early, some projects are gonna come in late, and so they need somebody keeping an eye on and across these projects. And when a project has a a resource deficiency, or they need a certain skillset that they’re borrowing from a project that maybe is ahead, that can give it up for a little while, or they’re swapping money back and forth, ultimately the maximize the output of their project portfolio.

Jason Scott:

Change management is about getting the adoption of these features that are being driven out of project and product management. And demand management really is optimizing the functional teams that are supporting projects. And then here’s the deal. There are process people, and then there are leadership people in both of these disciplines. So you can imagine how nerdy the people in these disciplines are where they’re like, I’ve got this tool and I’ve got this process and I’ve got this technique. Here’s the thing, you could be the master of process. If you aren’t a good leader, if you’ve not developed leadership skills, you’re not gonna be able to use these process and tools and get them in front of people to influence effective outcomes, right? So leadership is really the discipline that binds or makes effective all the other six disciplines because you could put tools in the hands of somebody, but if, if they don’t know how to use a hammer, it’s highly likely they’re, they’re gonna break something. So leadership really is about taking this data, taking these tools, taking these processes, and putting them in front of people in a way that enables them to accomplish these transformational outcomes.

Erik Fisher:

And now obviously there’s the skill of leadership, the l you know, and again, some people say, oh, he is a, he’s a natural born leader. Well, maybe some people, but not most people I don’t think, right? I mean, I’ve only learned to lead one through failure, <laugh> two through experience. Yeah. And then three through actually intentionally well, talking to people on this show for, for that matter, along with the, the books and things that, you know, the courses that I’ve gone through and intentionally investing in becoming a better leader.

Jason Scott:

Well, that’s the irony of leadership. Good leadership actually goes against our human nature. I mean, leadership isn’t about us, right? When, when you, when you decide to be a leader, what you’re saying is, I’m deciding to play for my team. A leader’s job is to enable their team to be as successful as possible. And when the team is successful, that leader is successful. A boss basically looks at the team as a bunch of cogs whose job it is to make them successful. So they dictate outcomes. They’re driving, they, they, they, these people are essentially commodities that are there to serve them. Well, those teams where there’s a boss or an executive or manager utilizing their authority, those teams are only as smart as that person dictating the outcomes, right? Whereas leaders are playing for the team, leaders are working with their team members to self actuate roadmaps to a shared goal, and they’re leveraging the collective iq.

Jason Scott:

So in the team where, where I might be a manager, I might be an executive, instead of dictating outcomes, I’m influencing outcomes. I’m soliciting not just feedback, but solutions to problems or even opportunities. And so what am I doing? I’m, I’ve got 10 minds working to come up with a solution. It’s faster, it enables innovation. But ultimately the first principle of leadership is that it’s not about you. You’re playing for the team. And it’s really difficult for us as human animals to put our self-interest aside, or even second, leadership is much more about listening than it is telling. Um, and ultimately, most situations that are kind of scary, the first reaction that we have as human beings is, how does this impact me? But you have to pause, because if you react in respect to how this impacts you, you’re not playing for the team.

Jason Scott:

You’re playing for you. There’s a high degree of likelihood that in that scenario, you’re gonna dictate an outcome. ’cause you’re trying to protect yourself. This is how we’re wired, right? It’s the ego, the the subconscious, the little three-year-old inside of us that never grows up. So if you’re familiar with Viktor Frankl, he said that the space between stimulus and response is golden. We have choice. And so as a leader, it’s really important to become self-aware, which again goes against human nature because you’ve gotta be able to catch yourself in those situations where you might react. Because if you’re reacting, you’re probably playing for you as opposed to playing for your team. So it, it’s interesting your comment about how you’ve developed as a leader. I, I think we all have to develop as leaders, and like you said, is a leader born or made. Well, even the best of us, even those that, that maybe we’re born with this, this natural ability to lead people. To be a great leader, you have to learn to be intentional. You have to learn to be self-aware, you have to learn to put other people’s interests before your own. And, and, and I don’t think that comes naturally to anybody.

Erik Fisher:

No, not at all. One of the things that I wanna make sure that we definitely talk about is maybe when it comes to projects, obviously we’ve all started things in the past and maybe we’ve not been completely, uh, up to speed on, you know, formal project management, but we’ve started things and we’ve had things hit roadblocks. So when it comes to project management, what are some of those common places where roadblocks come up and they keep us from moving forward? And, and are there ways to proactively clear the runway?

Jason Scott:

Absolutely. So what I’d like to get into briefly is, is how project management’s not new. It’s been around forever. There’s been hundreds of books written on the topic. So what’s different about this book? The, the difference in this book from any other book is it’s written by a firm that delivers large transformational projects for the Fortune 1000 for a living. It’s literally our playbook. And so it’s not, we get into the why we do things, but it’s not theoretical at all. It’s very prescriptive. It’s very how to. And it’s exactly the playbook that we use to deliver the large transformational projects that we’re responsible for, for our customers, right? And so when you look at a project lifecycle and, and how we go about mitigating some of the things that we know are gonna happen is we start with a human being. So everything we do in driving change we know is about people because we’re there to enable other people to accomplish things that will lead to a transformational outcome.

Jason Scott:

So we’ve come up with seven reasons that projects fail. The first is the law of physics, self-interest, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, apathy, egos, and unreasonable expectations. So if you take a look at that and you know that those are all of the real things that could potentially get in the way and stall your project, well, what do you have to do? Well, the first thing you have to do is bring the team together and you have to get alignment on what it is that you’re gonna do. So projects all start by defining an outcome. There’s two schools of defining an outcome. The old school would be the executive is like, this is what we’re gonna do and this is how we’re gonna do it. Well, the problem with that is the executive isn’t the subject matter expert that’s gonna be doing the work. And if the executive dictates to the smart people, the people that are qualified to determine the steps, they’re not gonna buy in.

Jason Scott:

And they might go along, but there’s no then guarantee that you’re gonna get the outcomes that you’re looking for. And so the way that we go about planning projects is we first define the vision with the executives and their stakeholders, and we get alignment. The other thing that we do is we address the law of diffusion of innovation. And that’s that the vast majority of these executives think that they’re gonna announce this project. They’re gonna state the vision super clearly. Everybody in their organization’s gonna get super excited about it, and they’re gonna get on board and they’re just gonna start working at transform the organization. It’s not true. Two point a half percent of the population at any given time is super pumped about change for the sake of change. Everybody else is super leery about change. Yes. And, and the first thing that people beyond that two point a half percent start thinking when they’re listening to this announcement and this executive speak about the vision is how does this affect me?

Jason Scott:

They’ve stopped listening within the first 120 seconds of the presentation because they’re thinking, is this gonna impact me? How’s it gonna impact my job? How’s this gonna affect me? Am I gonna have to learn something new? In the space of not having an answer, they start to catastrophize their subconscious paints this picture of the worst possible scenario. And so now what you’ve gotta recognize is you’ve got this whole, this big group of human beings that have assumed that this change is gonna affect them in the worst possible way. And these executives just naturally expect that they’re gonna cooperate. Even though every single time that they’ve done this or taken this approach throughout their career, it didn’t work. These projects flounder. They struggle to get off the ground. So the the first thing that you need to do is not just get a vision together, is then bring all of the people that are gonna be affected by this vision together to collaborate on two things, how they’re gonna get it done.

Jason Scott:

’cause these are the people that are gonna be doing the work as well as the receiving, or be the recipients of the outcome, right? And work with them to come up with the best possible approach to accomplishing that. So when they’ve had input, when they’ve had the ability to, to speak into how it’s being accomplished, through that process, they get some clarity. The other thing too is acknowledging that people are going to need, how does this affect me? Answered? You want to work through that, make it safe and work to get that answered for these people. Because here’s the irony I’ve heard that people are, are resistant to change. People don’t like change. People are afraid of change. In my experience, it’s not that. It’s that people fear the potential consequences of change, right? They, if they don’t know how it’s gonna affect them, they’re gonna resist.

Jason Scott:

They can’t get on board. Now, if you run through, if you can create transparency, if you can create clarity around how this change is gonna impact everybody, even the people that are gonna be impacted negatively, they can get on board. And here’s the ironic thing, when you help somebody see that a change is gonna impact them negatively, they now have clarity on what the impact is gonna be. And if they don’t like it, they can leave. Right? But what’s the greater unknown? Now if they leave, they dunno what their world looks like. They dunno what their next job’s gonna look like. And so now the greater unknown is actually leaving. So more often than not, these people will actually work really hard and be the people that drive your change more effectively because they’re thinking, Hey, if I contribute to this in a positive way, I might change my outcome here.

Jason Scott:

Yeah. Right? Yeah. So they want, they, they are empowered to take their destiny into their own hands. I think those are, those are probably the biggest two things is you wanna define it. You wanna get, you wanna get everybody aligned, you wanna create alignment, clear expectations, and from there you can create a plan From there, then you wanna execute the plan. And once you basically kick off a project and you start executing against the plan, that job number one really is identifying where you’ve got deviations. So you can make near term decisions to control a future outcome. And if you don’t have a plan or a baseline for where you’re going, and this is really the point of a plan mm-hmm. <affirmative>. ’cause nothing ever goes according to plan <laugh>. I mean, the plan never survives engagement with the enemy, right? So ultimately you’ve got this plan, and every day you’re looking at the deviations and you’re making decisions to mitigate the impact of those deviations back toward this plan.

Erik Fisher:

I have in the past been in places where I have been given no opportunity to get on board to have buy-in to the vision. I’ve also not then been given any kind of incentive to give myself ownership of the change that is about to happen, let alone any kind of voice to speak in, to give feedback slash how is this going to affect me? Have we thought of how this is gonna affect them or somebody else and, and this, this or that or that, you know, whatever process, which I think is exactly what you were talking about there with that kicking it off. But then also we get so bogged down in the deviation section of where things happen or happen differently than we initially had thought that if we didn’t take the time to do all that stuff up front, then that’s definitely where things fall apart. Because I didn’t have any say, I don’t have any ownership over this. Right? And I didn’t have, I didn’t catch this vision in the first place, right?

Jason Scott:

And that’s, that’s actually one of the things that we, we call, that we look at as a procrastination tool or, or resistance. People literally will say, I didn’t agree with this. Yeah, I didn’t do it because I didn’t agree. And it’s, it’s an interesting thing because in the old, you know, dictator days off with their head, but it doesn’t work like that when people have a choice of where they work, right? These are human beings, they can work anywhere, right? Especially, you know, skilled workers are in high demand, unemployment is at all time lows. And so, you know, people will say, I didn’t buy in. I didn’t agree, I didn’t have a say. And this just stalls things. And, and ultimately it, it doesn’t make sense with human nature. There’s this old school management thought where they wanna hide the potential negative outcomes from the team members.

Jason Scott:

Well, here’s the thing. These people aren’t stupid <laugh>. They’re looking at this thing and they’re thinking there could be some impact to me. Alright? And, and if you are not saying anything, if you’re not addressing it, if you’re being quiet, they’re gonna distrust you. Which, which only reinforces the worst possible scenario that they’re making up in their head. So if you don’t trust your team enough to share with them what the, what the potential impacts are gonna be, they’re not gonna trust you. And if they don’t trust you, that only reinforces these negative pictures in their head. Which is, I think what you’re describing. You’ve, you’ve experienced this.

Erik Fisher:

Totally. Yes. And, and I think we all have at some point, we’ve either been somebody who’s been starting something or we’ve been somebody who’s been, you know, something’s been started for us and whether we were on board or not, we found ourselves in the van or on the train <laugh> at some point.

Jason Scott:

The power of choice is, is really important. If you give your team members a choice, even the ability to, to architect their approach to a shared goal, meaning we have a goal, and you might approach accomplishing that goal one way, and the way that they wanna accomplish it is not at all how you’d accomplish it. However, they’ll get there giving them that choice. One, we, we as human beings believe what we think and feel and say over what we hear from other people, period. So if they’ve come up with the approach, they’re bought into the approach, they’re committed to the approach. You’ve established accountability upfront. And that’s really what accountability is about. I hear people all the time talking about holding other people accountable. How do you do that? You, you can’t, it sounds like you’re gonna tackle them and hold them down on the ground and be like you said, like it, it’s terrible.

Jason Scott:

The thought. And, and by the way, it’s not possible. People can be accountable. And my job as a leader isn’t to after the fact, shame them. ’cause that’s generally speaking what people mean when they talk about holding people accountable. It’s after there’s been an unexpected outcome, they wave their finger at them and they shame them. And they say, you said, well, again, lag measure, you’re not gonna get any of that time back. How did you, you might be able to assess how you got there and be a better leader going forward. But ultimately leadership is about establishing accountability upfront. Establishing accountability is, is enabling people to one, architect their path to a shared goal and then establishing a clear commitment, right? Good commitments are public, active, voluntary, explicit, and mission-based. So if you’re working with a team member and get them to make a commitment that addresses, that’s public, that’s active, what by when and where? Or, and explicit what by when and where active, meaning you’ve explained what you’re looking for, they’ve explained how they’re gonna accomplish it. You’ve paraphrased back like what you think they’re saying, they’ve acknowledged that’s what I’m gonna do. Now, now you’re, you’re aligned and you have clear expectations because you’re clear on what it is both of you’re gonna do and what needs to be accomplished. There’s a high degree of likelihood you’re gonna get the outcome that you’ve expected and that individual is going to be self-accountable.

Erik Fisher:

Yeah, man. So part of being self-accountable though, I, I think it comes down to again, them being involved in the process, right? It’s, it’s, it’s them. Yes. Like they have to be involved. And I think that’s one of, I, I mean, again, , I hate to keep going back to this, but like I’ve just been in so many instances, whether it’s been, you know, across the organization or down to just a single department or section of a department where I have been, and I’m not bitter about it, trust me. No, <laugh>, <laugh>, it may sound like it, uh, but this is all like way in the, in the far past, but like small to large scale, it’s, we’ve all been there. And so this is one of those biggest lessons you can learn as far as the leadership goes. That uh, and maybe, maybe that’s the key right there is as a leader, remember when you weren’t given the opportunity Yes. Or the buy-in or the <laugh>. Yes.

Jason Scott:

Absolutely. Because we’ve all been in that situation.

Erik Fisher:

Yes. Man, there’s so much more we could go into, but I honestly want to get into the book a bit here and just say, one of the things that’s gonna maybe throw people is that it’s called the irreverent guide to Project management. Can you explain that a little bit?

Jason Scott:

Yes. So a couple of times on your show we’ve talked about the different disciplines, what we call the seven change disciplines, project, program portfolio, product management, change management, et cetera. The vast majority of the world today consider those things distinct. And a panacea meaning, or a silver bullet, meaning that if you’re a champion of product management, so agile, uh, scrum or DevOps, you might espouse that. That’s the only approach an organization needs to establish or develop to drive change. And I’m seeing that’s, that just, it’s just not true. It’s not even ra it doesn’t even sound rational. And so in this book, we go into and we marry project, program and portfolio management with all of the agile principles in the Agile manifesto. It’s called the, the Irreverent Guide to project management, an agile approach to enterprise project management. And so in, in the book, we weave together project, program, portfolio management, agile practices and principles, change management, demand management, um, and we give you a roadmap and we, we literally, as you’re reading through and applying these, ’cause it is a step-by-step guide. It starts you on the first day all the way through the first week, all the way through the end of a project. It literally marries these concepts and allows us to bring the best out of each of the disciplines. And so that it’s irreverent because it’s a little like, and I mean I, I hate to bring up religion, but it would be like me reminding the Christians that the Muslims are their brothers. Mm. Right. That they all come from Sure. The same family <laugh>

Erik Fisher:

That we’re all humans

Jason Scott:

And, and, and people just stop the podcast. Yes. You see what I mean? Yeah.

Erik Fisher:

<laugh>. Yeah. That’s great. Um, and, and so I I, for somebody who maybe has limited experience with project management at all, is this going to be something that’s going to help them or is this more for say, an enterprise or cubicle person?

Jason Scott:

No, so that’s a good question. So it’s a guidebook. We hire seasoned senior project leaders and they come through our training program. They use the guidebook. They’re basically learning our consistent approach by using the guidebook. And it, it’s important that even though they’ve been successful in the past and that they would probably be successful leading a large global initiative without falling the steps in the guidebook. These are best practices that are proven. It’s our brand promise to our customers that we approach this using a proven standard. ’cause there’s all kinds of benefits to doing that. But we also put this book in the hands of brand new kids outta college. And, uh, just as an example, we had a gentleman who wanted to get into the field of project management who was the assistant manager at a North Face store in Beverly Hills. He’d already gotten his project management professional from the P M I institute.

Jason Scott:

He’d already gotten his scrum master certification, which are two dominant certifications in our field. And he was sending his resume out, trying to get a project management job and he just, he couldn’t get a response. He took our 14 week project leadership program, which runs you through all the material in this guidebook as well as a ton of additional material on leadership that’s not in the guidebook. But within six weeks of finishing our course, putting this on his resume, he got a call from a recruiter that said that they had called him because he had project and leadership on his resume. And that’s, you know, one of the things that’s important, project managers are constantly given the feedback that to develop, they need to improve their communication and their leadership. And in my world, we communicate to lead. And so there’s a great emphasis at 120VC in this guidebook as well as additional in our leadership course on the leadership fundamentals, literally how to be a good leader step-by-step.

Jason Scott:

’cause we’re all about step-by-step as opposed to like aspirational mumbo jumbo. I mean, some of it’s aspirational. But anyway, in this interview with the recruiter, he literally was able to apply what he had learned in our class to his past experience, answer the recruiter’s questions. The recruiter then put him in front of Kaiser Permanente, which as you know, is at least it’s a national healthcare system. And literally within six weeks of finishing our course, he had his first job as a project manager. And he’s been there well over a year. So I would say that the book is pretty buzzy from a buzzword perspective. But then there’s the Google, right? So if there’s a word that you come across that you’re not sure of, you can look it up. Uh, but otherwise the book is, is for beginners, the book is for advanced practitioners. The book is even for program and portfolio managers.

Jason Scott:

The how can a C E O know whether they’re project managers are delivering efficiently and effectively if they have no idea what they should expect of them. So I wouldn’t expect a c e O to read the entire book, but there are definitely to skimm through it. There are definitely sections and highlights that I would want senior leaders and organizations to be aware of, because otherwise they don’t know whether their PMs are being efficient or effective. They don’t know how to help them be accountable to best practices. So we, we called it the Irreverent Guide because for Dummies was taken <laugh>.

Erik Fisher:

Yeah. Perfect. So as far as, uh, you know, people interested, they’re hooked, they want to check it out. Is there a best place for them to maybe on your site find out more and see if this is right for them?

Jason Scott:

Well, so best way to get it is on Amazon. Okay. You can get a Kindle version or a hard copy if you wanna be able to browse through the guide. Literally the entire guide is accessible from our website 120vc.com. Uh, if you go to the shop page, you have a choice to purchase the P D F or just use the book online. And so we, we, we see the correlation to people accessing the book online to Amazon Sales. Again, you can buy it from our website, but you’re gonna get a P D F version. If you buy it from Amazon, you can get a Kindle version. Some people like one format over the other. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. It’s basically all available and in the future we aspire to have it audible, but I, I feel like textbook and audible. Yeah. I don’t know how those two things go hand in hand.

Erik Fisher:

No, I, I totally get it there. And so, at least in the other formats, they’re, they’re readily available and it’s cool that you’ve got it on the site to be able to just go through and look through the entire document at this point. So I’ll make sure to link up to both those paths in the show notes for this episode. And uh, Jay, it’s been awesome talking with you. There’s so much more we could probably dive into. So I probably should have you come back on the show at some point in future I’d near future do it. So let’s make that happen.

Jason Scott:

Eric, thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s been great talking to you, man.