He was making calls that normally they let slide or only call when the infraction is really obvious. Most of us parents on the sidelines have never played before so we're still learning about things like off-sides and indirect kicks. So at half time my son's soccer game the referee did something really surprising... he came over to the sideline and asked us how we thought the game was going and if we had any questions about what he had called on the field. Silence.... But he did not leave it there, he reviewed three calls that he made that may have been controversial or misunderstood and described them to us. He explained that "The goalie can step over the line of the goalie box and kick the ball if it is released behind the line" - in our case he did not release it soon enough and the penalty was called against us. After two more scenarios he asked if we had any other questions and when no one did, he thanked us for coming to the game. This all took about two minutes of his time, but made a big impression on all of us.
In this two minutes, he established his expertise in a way that was helpful, non-threatening, and positive and he gave us the gift of new knowledge and understanding. In doing this he had to step over a line himself. He did not follow normal protocol and go get a drink and talk with the line judges for the short half time. He took a risk and made a positive impact. We left this brief interaction feeling better about him, the league, referees in general, and ourselves.
I think this is something we can benefit from as project managers too. We can be on both sides of this dialogue as well (that may be considered off-sides in soccer - I really don't get that call yet!) . We can receive new knowledge by being interested and 'coachable' with our project teams and share our passion and expertise in project management or any subject as a way of building a high-functioning supportive team. All we need to do is care enough to share two minutes of time receiving a gift of knowledge from an expert with passion and pass it on. I hope you do!
Do great things -- (with goals!)
Ed Sullivan, PMP
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Still teaching at 99
No, this is not about some amazing near-centenarian who is still in the workforce slogging it out with the rest of us! It does involve a woman I met a few weeks ago who recently turned 99 and is still teaching valuable lessons to everyone she meets. She teaches by example. Not everyone understands or appreciates the lessons as they receive them and I found myself recognizing my learnings only after some reflection.
So what were the lessons?
I'll just start today with the first - "think positive"
Margaret is her name, she was born in 1912 and lived through the depression and has always been a positive person with a can-do approach to life. When she was in her mid-nineties, she had a fall and injured her head leading to the need for brain surgery. Post operation, she worked to regain her independence and eventually she moved back into her home where she had lived independently for nearly 40 years. Unfortunatly this was short-lived as her memory was challenged either by the injury or in combination with some form of dementia and memory loss. She eventually moved to a nursing home and has been there about two years now - which brings us to my visit a few weeks ago...
She was tired and did not recognize her son who was trying to introduce me. She did not know that her mother or siblings have all passed or where exactly she was. She does not understand much about her surroundings, her past, or her current life. She could recall the name of one of her sisters and that for siblings "there were a bunch of us". I imagine this type of environment with limited connections to past or present could be very frightening, cold and negative.
Despite this, during our conversations she regularly inserted comments of positivity. When walking slowly to a chair she said "we'll get there", when talking about birthday cake she said "that will be nice" , when talking about something difficult she said "we'll get through it" on the subject of work she said, "well we've all got to work hard at it". When asked how old she felt, she said "I don't know, maybe 29?"
With so much of her memory and history erased, positve responses and affirmations like these still came easily to the surface! My belief is that these must be so core, so foundational and automatic in her being that she still has them with her. She has used them (and still does) to motivate and provide strength for herself and others through the difficult times in life.
Lesson learned!
Do Positively Great Things!
Ed Sullivan, PMP
So what were the lessons?
- think positive
- say nice things
- smile a lot
- touch is important
I'll just start today with the first - "think positive"
Margaret is her name, she was born in 1912 and lived through the depression and has always been a positive person with a can-do approach to life. When she was in her mid-nineties, she had a fall and injured her head leading to the need for brain surgery. Post operation, she worked to regain her independence and eventually she moved back into her home where she had lived independently for nearly 40 years. Unfortunatly this was short-lived as her memory was challenged either by the injury or in combination with some form of dementia and memory loss. She eventually moved to a nursing home and has been there about two years now - which brings us to my visit a few weeks ago...
She was tired and did not recognize her son who was trying to introduce me. She did not know that her mother or siblings have all passed or where exactly she was. She does not understand much about her surroundings, her past, or her current life. She could recall the name of one of her sisters and that for siblings "there were a bunch of us". I imagine this type of environment with limited connections to past or present could be very frightening, cold and negative.
Despite this, during our conversations she regularly inserted comments of positivity. When walking slowly to a chair she said "we'll get there", when talking about birthday cake she said "that will be nice" , when talking about something difficult she said "we'll get through it" on the subject of work she said, "well we've all got to work hard at it". When asked how old she felt, she said "I don't know, maybe 29?"
With so much of her memory and history erased, positve responses and affirmations like these still came easily to the surface! My belief is that these must be so core, so foundational and automatic in her being that she still has them with her. She has used them (and still does) to motivate and provide strength for herself and others through the difficult times in life.
Lesson learned!
Do Positively Great Things!
Ed Sullivan, PMP
Monday, December 6, 2010
Good for the Goose!
All summer long we had dogs chase away the birds from the man-made pond around our office. They jumped out of a truck and ran around the pond watching and chasing until the birds decided to fly away. Most of the birds were Canada Geese I am told which are seen as a nuisance. I can understand why as they are a large bird which produce a large amount of fecal matter and can harm water quality and also apparently pose a threat to air-craft when they gather too close to airports.
This week ducks and geese arrived fearlessly back at the pond in massive numbers with seemingly orchestrated patterns of arrivals, take-offs and fly-overs -- truly beautiful to watch as many of us did. It's cold and wintery now and the border collies are off the payroll but if they were familiar with the Hitchcock movie 'The Birds" I think they would have called in sick this week anyway!
Watching the hundreds of birds fly in and hanging around the pond made me think about the whole problem and how the efforts were not a very complete or root-problem solution. In the summer, the dogs came and moved the problem to another location where there were no dogs at the moment - maybe to your pond? So we only solved the problem from our perspective and really only moved it on down the line to someone else not addressing the root cause.
We also don't have our deterrent (dogs) here all the time so the birds came back by the hundreds and for a week or more and made themselves very comfy in and around the pond. I'm not suggesting that we should address the root issues with the bird problem or that it should be managed any differently going forward. I think most projects have aspects like this that cannot be solved in the current effort and require work-arounds and temporary fixes to meet the other project objectives like time, cost, scope. So my question is if we sufficiently consider which problems should be fixed at the root cause and which ones are ok to treat like the 'goose' problem. My guess is that we treat too many problems like the 'goose' problem because it is seductively easy to do so - right up until you are tip-toeing through a fecal-matter landmine!
Here are some potential questions to ask yourself to help your decision:
Do Great Things! -- (with wings!)
Ed Sullivan, PMP
This week ducks and geese arrived fearlessly back at the pond in massive numbers with seemingly orchestrated patterns of arrivals, take-offs and fly-overs -- truly beautiful to watch as many of us did. It's cold and wintery now and the border collies are off the payroll but if they were familiar with the Hitchcock movie 'The Birds" I think they would have called in sick this week anyway!
Watching the hundreds of birds fly in and hanging around the pond made me think about the whole problem and how the efforts were not a very complete or root-problem solution. In the summer, the dogs came and moved the problem to another location where there were no dogs at the moment - maybe to your pond? So we only solved the problem from our perspective and really only moved it on down the line to someone else not addressing the root cause.
We also don't have our deterrent (dogs) here all the time so the birds came back by the hundreds and for a week or more and made themselves very comfy in and around the pond. I'm not suggesting that we should address the root issues with the bird problem or that it should be managed any differently going forward. I think most projects have aspects like this that cannot be solved in the current effort and require work-arounds and temporary fixes to meet the other project objectives like time, cost, scope. So my question is if we sufficiently consider which problems should be fixed at the root cause and which ones are ok to treat like the 'goose' problem. My guess is that we treat too many problems like the 'goose' problem because it is seductively easy to do so - right up until you are tip-toeing through a fecal-matter landmine!
Here are some potential questions to ask yourself to help your decision:
- How much more effort is it to fix the whole problem permanently?
- How many other ponds are nearby? - are we pushing this problem onto the next project(s)?
- Is there an potential business case/ROI on fixing the problem
- How much float/capacity does my project have to fix this and still meet the other project objectives.
- How would you have wanted the last PM to have handled this problem?
Do Great Things! -- (with wings!)
Ed Sullivan, PMP
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Perspective Muscles
I attended the PMO Symposium last week and had a great experience. It was my first time at the symposium and I met a lot of people (some of whom commited to be followers of this blog!) and took back a lot of ideas for my organization and some opportunities for myself to work on. As I reflect on the conference and the themes there are many directions that I could write about but I keep coming back to persepective.
To be successful, a project manager (and just about everybody else too) needs to see the world in diffferent ways than their default ones to be successful. They need to understand the context from the perspective of the client, the technologist, the builder, the team, the sponsor, management, finance .... etc. They need to be able to adjust their communciation and message and style and methods to the different contexts that are created by people with different perspectives - and still be true to their message. They also need to form a functioning team from a group of people that will certainly have different perspectives on many things. The more rapidly they can understand these, the faster their team can move through the storming phase of team building.
My theory is that we can flex and grow our perspective muscles by using them more. If you are inquisitive and acknowledge and celebrate some different perspectives on things in contexts where it is not critical to do so, can that make you better at doing it when it does matter? I honestly don't know but I think it could.
So, maybe you can try flexing that perspective muscle in the next few days/weeks and see what happens I will let you know if I have any great break-throughs and you do the same!
Do Great Things! - With your Perspective Muscle!
Ed Sullivan, PMP
To be successful, a project manager (and just about everybody else too) needs to see the world in diffferent ways than their default ones to be successful. They need to understand the context from the perspective of the client, the technologist, the builder, the team, the sponsor, management, finance .... etc. They need to be able to adjust their communciation and message and style and methods to the different contexts that are created by people with different perspectives - and still be true to their message. They also need to form a functioning team from a group of people that will certainly have different perspectives on many things. The more rapidly they can understand these, the faster their team can move through the storming phase of team building.
My theory is that we can flex and grow our perspective muscles by using them more. If you are inquisitive and acknowledge and celebrate some different perspectives on things in contexts where it is not critical to do so, can that make you better at doing it when it does matter? I honestly don't know but I think it could.
So back to the conference and different perspectives....
- I heard about a PMO in an organization that has 27,000 project managers - wow that is different!
- I learned of different perspectives on politics and perceptions from people from South Africa and France(Vive la France!) and other places around the globe and found some common ground
- I learned about different perspectives on prices and value (of beer and houses esp.) from around the world
- I sat next to a four year old who had never flown before and was very excited about it and climbed over me several times to see out my window!
- I looked out the same window myself and saw tiny perfect rectangles and squares of farmland - I bet the farmer does not see it that way. (That's about the size, where you put your eyes....)
- I heard about PMOs that get by on shoe-string budgets or that don't have PMs or that are at the Enterprise level, or that don't manage resources or that participate in strategy and Portfolio Management -- many different types of PMO perspectives and contexts.
- I attended sessions where attendees perceived great value and I saw none - and vice-versa
So, maybe you can try flexing that perspective muscle in the next few days/weeks and see what happens I will let you know if I have any great break-throughs and you do the same!
Do Great Things! - With your Perspective Muscle!
Ed Sullivan, PMP
Sunday, October 31, 2010
A Project Manager is Fair
(Originally Published in PMI Madison/South Central WI Newsletter, Winter 2008)
I remember a night over 25 years ago now at a Boy Scout troop meeting. My friend Andy was on the short end of the stick again with the way a game was being played and he was fed up. He knew the only way to win this battle against the older and bigger boys, and specifically his brother, was to make it perfectly clear to everyone how un-Scout like they were being. He half-shouted That's not fair!! To which his brother, who was very focused on winning, said so what? I think Andy had run into this wall before so he quickly went to what had worked in the past. He leveraged the referential and mystical power of Lord Baden Powell himself as he hurriedly quoted the Scout Law. Now fully shouting he declared A Scout is Fair !
As it turns out, this is not the case and Andy's battle was lost - at least for the moment. According to the Boy Scout Law, a scout is many inspiring things, but Fair was disappointingly for Andy, not one of them. For months after this incident however you could hear Andy and eventually everyone, recite the Law this way:
A scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent ... and FAIR!
Everyone agreed that a Scout should be Fair and that while it might be encompassed in some way in the other words of the Law, for our purposes we needed to spell it out. It often brought a smile, smirk, or giggle to our faces when we said this - it was funny and cute but most importantly this law was ours. Amazingly, the Scout Law has been around since 1910 without any change and yet we determined a need for a change - just for us, just for that moment of time. Making it our own gave us power and allowed us to correct a perceived oversight and we could again really believe in it. We, a bunch of kids really, changed the law, and were confident that our change fit with the original intent. We had no need to promote or sell anyone else on our version - it simply met our needs.
We have so many tools and templates, methods and methodologies, processes and procedures, slogans and 'Laws' at our disposal but these are not what make our projects successful. They are familiar and make us comfortable but that comfort may come at the expense of a more important understanding. The understanding that this project right now has its own special needs and these comfortable 'helpers' may need to be customized even in some seemingly insignificant way to make it the project teams own. Ignoring these needs may have impacts ranging from unnecessary work to missing details, to a completely non-performing team. I'm not suggesting that there is no need for process and procedure and standards and best practices and tools, but rather that they are means to an end and hopefully not so in-flexible (or un-'Fair') that they can't make accommodations for the needs of the unique endeavor that you are embarking on.
P.S. --
Say what you will about the Boy Scouts - I know they've had their problems as many large organizations have, but relaying this story left me with renewed appreciation for the Scout Law. As I mentioned it's been unchanged for almost 100 years and the first item listed is "Trustworthy". We know that the most important items in a list or story come first - just check any newspaper headline to verify this! So Scouting chose Trustworthy as the first and most important thing for scouts to be.
It seems like there is a resurgence and re-discovery of the importance of trust lately. I've read about it over & over in books and articles on leadership, communications, emotional intelligence, project management as if it is something new. Gaining trust, building trust, maintaining trust, doing what you say you will do... all of these hot/buzz topics. If you search Amazon for 'Gaining Trust' you'll find over 2,800 books on the subject.
Do Great things! (Fairly)
Ed Sullivan, PMP
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