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The Agile PrepCast for the PMI-ACP Exam

John Kleine

John Kleine, Global Manager, Product Strategy & Delivery

The Project Management Institute (PMI)® has made a number of changes to the Continuing Certification Requirements (CCR) in the past 18 months. These requirements define the policies and guidelines that certified project managers must follow in order to earn PDUs and renew their certification.

In this interview we speak with John Kleine (LinkedIn Profile) who is the Global Manager, Product Strategy & Delivery, at Project Management Institute. One of John’s responsibilities is overseeing the CCR and any changes made to it.

We begin by discussing the recertification requirements for a certified Project Management Professional (PMP)® and walk you through many of the updated rules. Of course, the interview is also full with good ideas and suggestions on how to earn PDUs. For example, what would you expect are the most frequently used, and the most under-used PDUs earning activities?

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Podcast Introduction

Male Voice:   In this episode of the Project Management Podcast™, we talk about what’s new and coming regarding PDUs for all those who hold a PMI® certification.

Podcast Interview

Cornelius Fichtner:   Hello and welcome to the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com. I am Cornelius Fichtner. We are coming to you live from the thrilling 2017 PMI Global Conference in Chicago. With me right now, sitting on the other side of the table is John Kleine who is the Global Managers Certifications at PMI. Good afternoon, John.

John Kleine:   Good afternoon, Cornelius.  

Cornelius:   We’ve had you on before and every time we talk about the same thing—PDUs, CCRS [laughs]

John:   Oh, well it’s a very important topic.

Cornelius:   I was just going to say it’s an important topic and a lot of people need to know about it and want to know about it. Yeah. So, the CCR, the Continuing Certification Requirements Program has seen some major changes over the past 18 months. They have been widely publicized and every PMP should know about them by now yet I’m still being asked to explain the new guidelines again and again.

So, to get us started, would you please give us a quick overview of what the requirements are for someone who has just passed their PMP exam maybe yesterday. What do they need to know in regards to PDUs?

John:   Right. I can tell you somewhere in the world yesterday, someone did pass the PMP. Well, the first thing I would tell you if we were in a hotel lobby or something and we’re limited on time, would be go to www.pmi.org, click on “Certifications” and then click on “Maintenance of Certifications” and that’ll have a much deeper dive than what I’m currently going to give you but I would tell that individual that within a three-year cycle to maintain this PMP certification that they’ve worked so hard for and had earned that over three years, they’re going have to earn 60 PDUs—60 Professional Development Units and those are broken out into two categories.

We have Education and we have Giving Back to the Profession. Now within Education, PMI in the new changes stated that you have to have a minimum of 35 PDUs but you could have up to 60—which means in Giving Back to the Profession, you don’t have to have any but you can’t have more than 25 because the whole program’s emphasis is on professional development. And then within the Education, based on research and feedback from organizations, what we’ve done is we’ve now directed the learning into three areas—technical skills, the leadership skills and the business and strategic skills.

So, skills and knowledge in all those areas are what we’ve learned from employers that they really want to see development within the project managers and their organizations. And so, from that, that’s the basic. The thing is getting them done within three years.                                                            

Cornelius:   That seems to be the problem for some people.

John:   Yes.

Cornelius:   The new rules for the PDUs, they have been in effect for quite some time now—I’d like to hear what kind of feedback you have received from the three main stakeholder groups—yourself, first of all, then PMP certificate holders, as well as education providers. So, how does PMI feel that these rules are working out?  

John:   Alright. First of all, the rules are working out great from PMI from doing this and this is going to sound a little conceited or whatever, coming back but I’m not surprised because of it because when we did this, we didn’t go into a conference room and go “Hey, this will be a cool idea. Let’s change it and do it”.

There was a lot of research, resources and effort put into this so that when we roiled it out, we knew we were meeting what the market wanted to happen. And I think as we get into the other two groups, you can do it but from what I’ve seen so far, as we progress into this, it’s been very well received and it’s going—I have nothing but the highest regard for our certification holders on how they received it and how they are working through it.

Cornelius:    OK. Well, let’s move on to the certification holders—what are they telling you? 

John:   Again, based on the earlier question, I wouldn’t have said “great” if I did not think this but honestly, we’re hearing great feedback from them as well and this always takes me back to when we were researching this and the reason that I started having confidence we were doing the right thing and that it was the right thing to do for the profession was in the focus groups, I started seeing around the world, started seeing a common thing coming out of this—the practitioners we were interviewing—I was literally behind the glass looking and they were all talking about how much PMI did to create the PMP and what they had, you had to go through to attain the PMP but then all of a sudden, once it was bestowed, they kind of felt that we just left them alone.

We didn’t provide them any more kind of direction of what was happening, what was in demand within the profession and it really fell upon them to try to learn what they didn’t know. So, once we rolled it out, the feedback has been very positive and when we do get a criticism, usually isn’t about the program—it maybe someone would go:” I think it should have been seven PDUs required in technical versus eight PDUs so the content is always not what this discussed but maybe a little bit of the process. So, it’s been well-received and it’s kudos to our—as I said, to our practitioners.  

Cornelius:   What about the training companies—what do they tell you?

Above are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Please subscribe to our Premium Podcast to receive a PDF transcript.

Every few months or so, we will bring you a new interview with a featured 280 Group Consultant who discusses a number of Product Management issues.

Our second featured interview in this series is with Leslie Bixel, a seasoned PM veteran who talks about how she broke into Product Management and her advice for individual Product Managers and organizations

Be a great communicator. Product Managers are the hub for all the company functions contributing to bringing a great product to market.

What is your background?

I had lots of student loans when I graduated from Stanford University in the ‘80s. Not a lot of jobs at the time, so I made ends meet by taking temporary jobs in the Valley. One day I walked into a tiny software start-up and fell head over heels with the idea of desktop computers helping people to communicate. A week later I had convinced the founder that if he let me do the marketing, I could help him be even more successful. The company’s sales went from $0 to $5 Milion in just a year.

How did you get in to Product Management?

I got into Product Management at a time where it wasn’t required to be super technical in Silicon Valley. That said, the transition from a marketing role to Product Management did require that I show some technical chops.

Adobe Systems was a very small company, less than 100 employees, when I first saw a demo of the software program called Illustrator. I was so excited by the concept of digital tools for creatives. I was determined to work at Adobe. I took on a couple of desktop publishing gigs and learned enough to get me in the door as a member of the newly formed technical support organization. Within a year I had created one of the very first Product Management jobs at Adobe. I became the PM for all of Adobe’s application business in Asia and was charged with figuring out to deliver digital typefaces and desktop publishing to Japan. Having that experience allowed me to go on to many different roles within the Adobe product organization.

What general advice would you have for an individual Product Manager?

Be a great communicator.

Product Managers are the hub for all the company functions contributing to bringing a great product to market. Flex your leadership muscles and embrace the role of communicator. Have a standing team meeting that is limited to one hour (hard stop) and make sure everyone on the team is invited and encouraged to participate. Create and distribute a simple status report every week, on the same day, at the same time. Keep it short and include an open issues section with the hot topics for the week. Copy your direct management team, but don’t let the distribution list go crazy or else you will spend your days answering questions rather than solving problems.

Finally, have your elevator pitch ready at all times. You never know when you might get the ear of some senior manager who can aid you in resolving some tough product issue! Make sure you share recent successes as well as what you are currently working on. Feel free to talk about a hot topic and the solutions you are considering, just be clear that as Product Manager you own the solution as well as the problem.

What general advice would you have for a Product Management organization?

Don’t be afraid to hire someone smarter, more experienced, and/or just different from you. The best Product Manager I ever hired was an Economics PhD who had worked as a reporter for a national business newspaper. No direct Product Management experience, but a unique understanding of business and a talent for asking great questions. People have a tendency to look for very specific domain experience and skills and to hire folks that look like them. Look to add diversity to your Product Management group for the good of your products. Product Management is a role where a generalist rather than a specialist thrives. Product Management is the training ground for future general managers. Bottom line…Hire interesting, thoughtful people.

What do you find to be the most rewarding part of being a consultant?

Helping our clients be successful.

I really love being a consultant and mentor to 280 Group clients. It is so great to be able to leverage my experience as a Product Manager and business development executive in service of smart, passionate folks who are trying to make their businesses grow and their organizations thrive.
I have a fondness for small businesses and start-ups. Especially those in the throes of a “success crisis”. Working with the leadership team to pull together a roadmap or product strategy can quickly get them from overwhelmed to focused.

I often work with very large organizations to help them sort out their product process through a comprehensive change management program. It’s very satisfying work when roles and responsibilities get defined, communication improves and product organizations really start to hum.

Is there anything you would re-do in your career?

Not really. I have always said that a “career” only makes sense looking backwards. It’s very hard to make a plan.

I would say that my biggest successes as a Product Manager came out of taking the biggest risks, being willing to not know all the answers, and to ask for help when I was lost. Being able to fail and recover without too much ego bruising was essential.

I am lucky to have worked on so many creative software products like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. that people actually love and use on a daily basis. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing your hard work turn into something real. And when customers make beautiful stuff with your products, well that is just magic.

The post Featured Product Management Consultant: Leslie Bixel appeared first on 280 Group.

Source de l’article sur 280Group

For our next installment of the Women in Product Management Series I interviewed Jennifer Lyons, a Product Management Executive who has focused the last twelve years of her career in healthcare.

To read the entire series on Women in Product Management make sure to sign up for our newsletter.

How to Balance Strategy, Sales Requests, and Roadmaps

Those were just some of the topics shared by Jennifer Lyons as part of our Women in Product series.

Jennifer started her career working for a sales training company that had classroom training. When the company decided to broaden their offerings by adding computer-based training (CBT), Jennifer had the opportunity to work closely with a product manager from a third-party vendor contracted to help with the technology. That was Jennifer’s first exposure to product management.

“She was doing a lot of really cool stuff. That was what really got me interested in, and exploring what, product management meant. My career started out focused in consulting and program management, moving into product management and marketing. I think the exposure to clients, and managing clients on consulting engagements, actually instilled in me an awareness that companies need to be driven by the market and problems clients are trying to solve, not what we think our solution is. Product Management training companies like 280 Group teach the importance of voice of the customer. It’s very important for product managers to have those practical tools, but I think voice of the customer needs to be inherent in a product manager. You have to have passion for product and compassion for the consumer.”

When I asked about missteps or lessons along the way in her career, Jennifer focused on her partnerships with Sales.

“I think if any product manager is honest, they would say that our relationship with sales is both our best ally and biggest source of frustration. From my perspective, sales teams often react to solving a problem a client has raised as a blocker to closing a deal, rather than considering whether the ask is applicable to the market, or benefits our products holistically. They’re very focused on the here and now. Product Management can be focused on the future, while still addressing concerns that are raised regarding the here and now. We have to find ways to navigate the challenge of disruptive opportunities that every product manager is brought when there is a need identified by a prospect in the sale cycle. The key is to weigh the opportunity against the bigger picture of where the company is trying to go, and the value the opportunity brings. Sometimes you have to compromise because we have a shared goal, and we want an effective, bought-in and engaged sales team.”

I was curious which aspects of Product Management she found the most interesting and most challenging.

“What always interested me about Product Management is the strategic influence it has. If you have a product driven company, the product itself drives a lot of the strategy and the direction that the company takes. I find that to be the most interesting piece because in product management you’re engaged with and exposed to a lot of directional discussion.

The biggest challenge is balancing the day-to-day with the desire to be innovative, and engage in blue sky thinking to identify growth opportunities. As product managers, we all have to live in the operational day-to-day reality at times, but it can be frustrating when it feels like we’re not making progress on the innovation front.”

When I asked how she mentors product managers to do both, it came down to iterating on the product roadmap, and appreciating the importance of operations as part of the whole product

“It is increasingly important as companies embrace agile development that roadmaps be organized around a product vision that supports organizational goals the scrum and operational teams can rally behind, and achieve in a 12-18 month period. That way, success is measured by not only delivering product to market ‘on time,’ but also based on the value created by building in the flexibility to iterate and pivot based on usability and A/B testing during the development and release cycles. It is equally important to take early stage work to your internal stakeholders to build buy in and create excitement so the operational teams supporting the product have an opportunity to proactively plan how to package the ancillary services and support that are the wrapper for a great product. Good product managers can influence this to reinforce the vision they have for the client experience.

Longer term, I recommend Product Managers build a backlog of ideas – from stakeholders, healthcare market trends, expressed needs of clients, prospects and markets, product gaps, etc. – and determine which ones to invest time analyzing and structuring into business cases. Basically, you don’t want to pursue building things that don’t add value for your clients or the market. Anyone who’s done product management long enough has had that great idea that we believed would be a differentiator, and when released failed to resonate with our sales team and our clients. Don’t get discouraged, never stop learning, questioning and adjusting as your market evolves.”

I asked Jennifer what she looks for when building a team.

“When I’m growing a team, I look for cultural fit with my existing team – looking for skills that compliment and contrast, as well as personalities that will align – so that we can learn and grow with each other. Product management acumen comes next. I look for people who have product management experience, but who are also able to express their ability to collaborate, problem solve, are creative thinkers and can navigate an organization. I look for people who are able to have and to share their perspective, but who are also willing to listen and compromise.

If I’m inheriting an existing team as is often the case when consulting or collaborating with a new organization, I like to get to know each resource as an individual, what motivates them and where they believe their strengths are and where they see opportunities to grow. I tend to be more leader than manager, and believe building strong relationships and empowering people with situational coaching when needed goes a long way to establishing trust and bringing out the best in teams.”

Jennifer’s advice for getting into Product Management

Get a Mentor!

“Find a mentor. Find somebody that you respect, regardless of what they do in the organization, listen and learn. Be naturally curious about the market. Always ask a question. If a customer tells you that they want something, ask them why. What is the problem they’re trying to solve? What is the value they’re trying to create? Foster that tendency to be curious and ask questions. When you’re bringing that content in as a product manager or in another role, you’re creating value because you’re really showing and demonstrating you understand the market. I think good having good mentors is important, especially for women.”

Jennifer’s guiding principle

Focus on your sphere of influence!

“I like to tell my teams to focus on their sphere of influence and the things that they can control, because as a product manager there are so many things they can’t control that can bog you down. If you get too bogged down, you’re going to lose sight of what you’re trying to accomplish.”

To catch the entire series on Women in Product Management make sure to sign up for our newsletter.

The post Women in Product Management: Jennifer Lyons, Product Management Consultant appeared first on 280 Group.

Source de l’article sur 280Group

Mobile product managers have a long list of metrics to pull from when determining the success of their products. Although it’s great to have options, the sheer volume of metrics to choose from can make selecting the right metrics for your product challenging.

To understand which metrics most mobile product managers care about, Apptentive recently ran a survey with over 200 product managers and asked respondents to tell us which metrics matter most in their reporting process. Their answers gave us new insight into what metrics matter most as we move into the new year.

Apptentive Mobile Product Management Metrics

Active users (both MAU and DAU), downloads, time in app, ratings, visits, and in-app revenue were the most important metrics our respondents used in order to determine the success of their app. However, there are plenty of other metrics to pull from to determine the true health of your mobile product.

To help you select the metrics that will share the best insight into your mobile experience, we’ve listed 25 metrics many mobile product managers track, broken down by the goal the metric can help you support. A short explanation (along with calculations, when applicable) follows each metric to help you understand what it can tell you.

Here are 25 metrics for mobile product managers to track and measure in 2018.

1. Customer Activity and Engagement

Activity and engagement metrics include many of the popular metrics mobile PMs regularly track. Most daily/weekly/monthly activities you track about your customers fall into this category.

Downloads

Downloads are the number of people who have downloaded and installed your app on their device.The most accurate way to track downloads is directly from the app stores. While downloads alone don’t paint the whole picture of success, they sure do help. Measure this metric directly from the app stores. Third-party tools like App Annie can help you crawl the app stores to get the most accurate download data.

Monthly Active users (MAU)

Monthly active users (MAU) counts the number of unique users over the course of a month. To calculate, count the number of unique users during the previous 30 days to understand how many users have been active in your product. Specifically, MAU helps you gauge the “stickiness” of your experience and can help identify trends in loyal users.

Daily Active Users (DAU)

Daily active users (DAU) counts the number of unique users in one day. To calculate, count the number of unique users during the previous 24 hours to understand how many users have been active in your product. DAU is a great metric to watch if loyalty within your mobile product requires daily use (for example, a shopping or social media app) rather than less frequent use (for example, a banking app).

Session Length

Session length is the period of time between app open and app close, or app timeout. It indicates how much time your users are spending in your app per individual session. To find this metric, calculate how long a user is in your app from the time they open the app to the time they close it. Once you have individual data, segment your users to see which groups spend more time in your app and why. Tracking the length of sessions is particularly important for unlocking revenue potential in your app flows.

Session Interval

Session interval is the time between the user’s first session and their next session. This metric shows the frequency in which users open the app and how sticky your app is. To calculate, pull the time a user has spent from when they last close your app to the next time they open it. When you know the typical time lapse between sessions per audience segment, you can use that information to optimize the customer experience to encourage more frequent app usage.

Time In-app

Time in-app tracks how long a person was in your app over a period of time. It identifies how often your app is being used and is an indicator of how valuable your app is. To calculate, select a certain time period and add all of the session lengths for an individual user during that time period. By identifying how often users engage with your app, you can identify behavior and patterns over time. If a certain segment of customers consistently opens your app for a long periods of time, dig into why.

2. Onboarding and Activation

Onboarding customers and activating their engagement is all about product adoption and ease of use. It’s crucial your customers find your product easy to integrate and begin using, and data in this category helps you understand how customers perceive your current onboarding process, along with giving insight around what you can change to make the process smoother.

Org Creation Date

This is the date a company’s account was created with your product. Many products allow multiple collaborators to engage on one account, so backtracking to find out who the first user was is critical in understanding the customer’s complete experience with your product. If the org account was created long before engagement started picking up, something was likely amiss.

Integration Date

Does your product require integration? If so, we recommend pulling its integration date to help with two primary learnings. First, look at the date the customer closed from your sales team and compare it with the integration date to get a sense of how long this phase of the onboarding process takes customers. Second, look at the integration date to the date account engagement started picking up to understand how long it took the customer to begin fully leveraging the product.

Account Launch

As mentioned above, it’s important to track the time between product integration to product launch, if possible. Your mobile product team should have an idea around the average amount of time customers take between integration and full use of the product (i.e. launch), and if a customer has fallen too far outside of the average window of time, something is likely off.

Collaborator Additions

The time it takes a customer’s main profile to add collaborators is a strong indicator of how quickly the product is adopted among a team. Additionally, it’s fascinating to go deep and to look at how different collaborators on the same account use the product, especially if they have different roles within their organization. These metrics offer invaluable insight into how different teams can leverage your product, which can help your product, sales, and marketing teams.

3. Conversion and Retention

Conversion and retention may look different at every company, but even though they can be ambiguous, these metrics offer crucial insight into your app’s overall health. We recommend working closely with your marketing team to set goals and strategies to move these metrics in the right direction.
Conversion Rate: The number of potential customers who started a trial and end up converting to paid customers in a set period of time. Conversion is most commonly measured by taking the number of leads or trials in a period of time (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) and dividing by the total number of new customers added during that same period of time. By increasing your conversion rate even a small amount, you can quickly increase your customers, MAU, and revenue.

Conversion Rate

The number of potential customers who started a trial and end up converting to paid customers in a set period of time. Conversion is most commonly measured by taking the number of leads or trials in a period of time (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) and dividing by the total number of new customers added during that same period of time. By increasing your conversion rate even a small amount, you can quickly increase your customers, MAU, and revenue.

Churn

A measure of what was lost during a given period of time. Churn can be in dollars, customers, unsubscribes, etc. To calculate, divide the number of customers lost in a month by the total number of users from the prior month. Once you’ve assessed your customer churn, map out how much revenue was lost (as some customers will be on different payment plans than others). Some amount of churn each month is normal as it’s inevitable that a few customers will cancel. Looking back on historical data will help you better understand how much churn is “healthy” for your team.

Retention

Retention is a measurement of customer churn that tells you how many customers continue to actively use your app in a certain period of time. Aggregate retention is best calculated monthly. To calculate, divide your MAU by the number of installs you get in a given month. To calculate retention for a specific period of time, divide the number of users retained at the end of the time period by the number of installs at the start of the time period.

Cost Per Loyal Customer

Understanding cost per loyal customer, or CPLC, helps your team with budget planning and forecasting. Calculating CPLC is similar to calculating CPC: Divide all your acquisition costs by the number of customers acquired in the same period of time the money was spent, but go the extra mile to segment customers who fall into your “loyal” bucket by segmenting by customer behavior. From there, you can better understand how to drive more loyal customers and forecast how much it will cost to get to your goal.

4. Customer Segmentation and Growth

Segmenting customers is a great way to plan acquisition, engagement, and growth strategies. We recommend looking at demographic data to start segmenting, and then coupling by the engagement metrics we covered above to expand your segments. Here are a few important demographic data sets to keep an eye on.

Tier

If your product has different customer tiers, be sure to track which tier your customer falls into when you begin segmentation. Customers from different tiers will undoubtedly use your product in different ways, and it’s important to set your expectations accordingly.

Industry

Industry standards play a huge role in how a customer will use a product, so add this field to your segmentation metrics as early as you can.

Country

Tracking a customer’s country (or geographic location if your product only sells to one country) can help you understand more about consumers, which can help you localize product features for faster adoption and higher engagement.

Count of Collaborators by Job Function

Your customers may use your product differently depending on their job function (e.g. product manager, marketer, developer, etc.) and role (administer, collaborator, etc.). Help set them up for success early by tracking what they do for their company.

Count of iOS and Android Apps

Regularly count how many iOS and Android apps each customer has to understand how many consumers your product helps them reach.

5. Revenue

Revenue goals come from the top-down, and it’s not enough to simply know how much money your mobile product is bringing in. Your CEO and leadership team is constantly iterating on the company’s revenue goals, so understanding how your mobile product fits into the grand scheme of things is imperative to gauging success.

Download Revenue (for paid apps):

The percentage of your total company revenue that comes from people downloading your app from the app stores. If your app is free to download, you can skip this metric. Find the percentage of your total revenue driven by your app downloads by dividing your app’s monthly download revenue by your MRR (monthly recurring revenue).

In-app Revenue:

In-app revenue is revenue collected from customers as they use the app from purchases, ads, unlocking levels, purchasing points, etc. This metric does not include download revenue. Find the percentage of your total revenue driven by in-app purchases by dividing your app’s monthly in-app revenue by your MRR (monthly recurring revenue).

Lifetime Value:

Lifetime value, or LTV, is the estimated total revenue from the customer over the life of the relationship. Determine customer LTV by taking the average revenue per month and multiplying it by the average lifetime of a customer in months. LTV is great at showing growth over time for different segments of your audience (by acquisition channel or by monthly cohorts, for example). This can tell you which customer segment is the most loyal, the biggest evangelists, and spend the most money.

6. Team

It’s easy to only look at numbers when calculating success, but don’t forget to look at your team’s health to understand how your mobile product is performing. It’s important to gather data on everyone involved to understand how the internal machine is movin’ and groovin’.

Quality of Features Released

This metric helps you understand how the quality of your recently launched product and/or feature compares to the quality of previously launched products and/or features. Gauging quality isn’t a perfect science, but you know the standards set by your team better than anyone. Dig deep into how you’ve rated features and products in the past, and compare those scores with your most recent release. How does it stack up? This metric is meant to help you understand what you can improve for next time.

Timing of Features Released

This metric helps you understand how “feature creep” affected your release so you can better assess what to change for next time. Look at the deadlines and release dates you gave yourself for a feature update/product release/etc. How many deadlines were hit? For the deadlines that weren’t hit, how delayed were they? Take the number of deadlines hit on time and divide them by the total number of deadlines set for the project to give yourself a percentage score. Example: If three out of my five deadlines were hit on time, my team gets a 60% feature release score out of a possible 100%.

Team Sentiment

This metric takes many different components (including individual happiness, team progress, communication, individual involvement, etc.) into consideration. It’s the least scientific metric metric you can gauge your team’s success on as “sentiment” is quite interpreted; teams (and even individuals) define happiness in different ways, and what works for you may not always work for the next group. To calculate, think about the “happiness” metrics that matter most to members of your team. Spend time with each team member and allow them to score themselves and the overall team on each metric, whether through survey, email, or in person. Once everyone weighs in, average the score for each category, then sum your averages to come up with a final score.

In Conclusion

The field of mobile product management has changed drastically over the last few years and shows no signs of slowing down. Between rapid advancements in technical skill sets and the ever-shifting needs of mobile consumers, mobile product managers are at a unique crossroads when it comes to influencing their products and impacting their company’s larger business goals

We hope our research can help mobile PMs improve their work, make better business decisions, and overall, become better at their jobs. If you’d like to see the full details of our report, you can download it here: Mobile Product Management: New Trends and Data.

Ashley Sefferman Apptentive

Author Bio: Ashley Sefferman is Head of Content at Apptentive, mobile customer engagement software that helps companies listen to, engage with, and retain their customers. She writes about mobile engagement, customer loyalty, and making the mobile world a better place for people. Follow Ashley on Twitter @ashseff.

The post 25 Metrics that Matter for Mobile Product Managers in 2018 appeared first on 280 Group.

Source de l’article sur 280Group

This is the first article in a three part series on navigating the Problem vs. Solution Space with a focus on understanding customer needs.

Understanding Customer Needs

“Well, we could…” I stopped myself quickly. I had fallen into the most common of traps. I had stopped paying attention to the customers’ needs and started working on a fix. Product Managers and the teams of developers they work with often tell me that Product Managers have problems writing good requirements. The teams complain that there isn’t enough detail. The Product Managers struggle with how to phrase what they are explaining. And through it all, no one stops to ask a basic question: What problem are we really solving.

I Blame It On The Word Requirement Itself

It has two concepts buried into one word: customer needs and product requirements (sometimes called a solution requirements). Instead of clarifying which one we mean, we start conversations about requirements either in person or with whatever electronic media we choose – and then the confusion starts. The way out of this quagmire is to differentiate between problem space and solution space.

Problem vs. Solution Space

Problem Space Conveys What The Customer’s Situation Is

Diving deep into what the customer’s problem is takes time and isn’t always comfortable unless you explain what you are trying to do. Sometimes customers listening to me ask questions and look uncomfortable since I keep asking for more and more detail. It’s as though I’m taking too long. I can almost hear them thinking: “Maybe she doesn’t have the skills to know how to fix it. Maybe she’s stalling until she comes up with a good answer.” I have to stop and explain the process and then the customer regains confidence. Over time, I’ve come to see this time of confusion as an opportunity to slow down the process of making a move towards a solution until all the pieces of the problem have been exposed, turned over and examined. Impatience in others is a signal that I’m on the right path.

Solution Space Is The Part We Are All Drawn To

It’s when we get to pull a rabbit out of a hat with an answer. Most of our schooling relies on our ability to solve a problem and give the correct answer. Our development teams feel most comfortable working in this area as well. If, when you define the problem space more accurately, you are writing good requirements, your engineering team will then be able to define the answer to the customer needs and problem you are presenting.

The following quote has been incorrectly attributed to Albert Einstein. It neatly sums up how we should approach any issue we are trying to resolve:

If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.

If we constantly slide between problem and solutions spaces, focusing your team on clear boundaries between these spaces will go a long way to making sure that when you finally have a customer requirement that it’s the right one. One that you’ll have evidence to support and that your team understands fully.

4 Ways To Keep Your Team On Track

1. Ban The Word “Requirement” On Its Own

Instead of requirement, ask people to use the words ‘customer need’ for a problem and ‘product feature’ for a solution. Talk in terms of customer problems/pain points/needs and then corresponding feature descriptions to meet that need. This linguistic hygiene avoids team members slipping from a discussion about problems into a discussion about solutions without anyone realizing that the discussion has switched.

2. Make A Sign

Tape two sheets of different colored paper together and write a large P on one side and a large S on the other. Put it in the middle of the table. When the conversation switches to discussing a solution instead of the problem, flip the paper over. If the switch is premature, get your team working to turn the discussion towards the problem space. Once it is, turn the paper back to the side marked P.

3. Hide Solutions While Working On Problems

It can be difficult to stay focused on the problem if you have a brilliant solution. Give team members large sticky notes. If they discover a solution, they can write it down and turn the paper over. The discussion should remain focused on the problem space. If you take a break, the sticky notes can be posted on the back side of flip chart paper – out of sight. When it’s time to discuss possible solutions, review the ideas that came up. Chances are a lot of them no longer apply, but the process can make solutions-oriented folks more able to feel like their ideas are written down and they can then focus on the problem again.

4. Brainstorm Problems With As Much Enthusiasm As You Brainstorm Solutions

Hold a customer problem brainstorming session with many different departments and functions in attendance. Give prizes for the most ideas, strangest customer problem discovered, group prizes for those who come up with the same customer problems. This is great activity early on in the process when your team isn’t sure what they have to do next or teams who want to expand the breadth of problems that they should be addressing. Have fun giving out the prizes!

What’s Next

Once your problem space is clear, move onto the next steps:

Validate, Prioritize And Then Solve The Problem

Have a culture of validating the problems with as much energy as you put into identifying potential solutions. Create a system for validating each problem and then set aside time to prioritize which ones are most important. And finally, develop solutions to each problem your team has decided to solve. Words are imperfect communicators of information. They only make sense with pictures, diagrams and conversations to fully flesh them out. When your product requirements or features are given this 360° treatment, the way forward is much clearer for your entire team.

Chances are your engineers are brilliant people who can provide a much more elegant solution than you as a Product Manager will be able to think up. Give them a clear problem to solve focused on customer needs and sit back to be amazed at what they come up with.

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Understanding customer needs and navigating the Problem vs. Solution Space is part of the Conceive and Plan phases of the 280 Group Optimal Product Process™.

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Meet the Author

Pamela Schure is the Director of Products and Services with 280 Group. She is a 25 year Product Management, Product Marketing and international business veteran with companies such as Apple, Sun Microsystems and Adaptec.

Pam Schure People Skills for Product Owners

 

Pam Schure
Director of Products and Services

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Brian Lawley is the CEO and Founder of 280 Group and an author of 5 best-selling books including Product Management for Dummies. In this video he is going to share with everyone the three secrets to successful Product Management. Without waiting any longer, let’s begin. Watch The Video The first secret we are going to talk about has to do with listening. What Brian recommends, and tries to follow, is that you listen far more than you talk. This is…[continue reading]

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For our next installment of the Women in Product Management Series, I interviewed Lori Anderson, VP Technical Product Management at McGraw-Hill Education

To catch the entire series on Women in Product Management make sure to sign up for our newsletter.

How does a teacher in the inner city of New Orleans become a VP of Product Management at McGraw-Hill Education?

That was the journey I learned about when I spoke with Lori Anderson as part of our Women in Product Management series.

Lori took a long winding road into product management. Her early years as a marketing professional, followed by being a 4th grade teacher with Teach for America in the inner city of New Orleans, led her to ALEKS Corporation where she has been able to combine her skills and passion for education.

She joined ALEKS in 2006 when it was a start-up with ~40 employees, and immersed herself in the ALEKS products and customers for the Higher Education, School, and Consumer education markets. (ALEKS stands for Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces. It is a Web-based, artificially intelligent assessment and learning system primarily for Math and Chemistry.) ALEKS was acquired by McGraw-Hill Education in 2013, and Lori continues to work on the ALEKS products, along with some of MHE’s other digital learning products.

“As soon as I found ALEKS, it was a perfect fit for me. It combined marketing and educational technology, and as a startup company, it offered a lot of opportunity to just do whatever needed to be done. I like that kind of role. I think Product Management has a lot of that: we assess what needs to be done to meet the customers’ needs and figure out how to pull all the parts from different areas of an organization together to create a successful product.

I definitely have the foundational skills to be a product manager; it just took a while for me to realize that was what I was really good at and ultimately going to do for the long-term. When I joined ALEKS, I was in marketing, but then quickly evolved into product development. I got thrust into a fire drill product development project, did a great job with what was put on me, and realized that I really liked it (and it felt intuitive). I love being an advocate for the customer, doing user-centered design, and getting to talk with and better understand my customers. “From that initial product development project, I evolved into user experience, which I believe is very closely interwoven with successful product management. For a while, I was simultaneously the Marketing Director and the UX Director, which was a great opportunity to both build and then sell the products we created. I eventually shed my marketing responsibilities to do Product Management full time. That’s what I do today, and it’s evolved from working on just one product line to many.”

Having a close knowledge of the customer and then being able to use that information to actually make decisions is the biggest step into Product Management.

“I think a huge part of product management is to know what the customer wants and not guess. Product Managers need to meet their customers, empathize with their needs, and be able to speak on their behalf in development discussions. We have checks and balances in place to verify that what I think the customer wants is in fact what the customer wants.

In my previous marketing role, I was frequently at conferences and customer events meeting with teachers and figuring out how to describe and create our products in a way that would resonate with my end users. Having been a teacher, I think I also have insight regarding what it’s like to use educational technology in a hectic classroom where teaching is just one of the demands placed on teachers. So when we are making a decision about a feature or functionality, I have been able to say, ‘the market’s not going to want that; they really need this. This is their biggest pressing problem.’ Having a close knowledge of the customer and then being able to use that information to actually make decisions is the biggest step into Product Management.

In order to have the voice of the customer constant in the development process, I established a user research group. We were doing user-centered design without much of a user research presence. So I pulled someone from customer support, pulled in the receptionist, and pulled in whoever had hunger and talent and who was willing to learn that new skill to form a team. I learned it myself by going to UX conferences, reading about best practices, and being a research participant myself. We started doing moderated user testing, and quickly evolved our best practices to do it effectively and efficiently. We’ve gotten really good at that and have since built up a team here at ALEKS and throughout McGraw-Hill Education that is able to do customer research and keep our development honest.”

When I asked Lori about missteps along the way, she reflected on trying to do everything at once.

“Delegating is something where I’ve had the false belief earlier in my career that it was faster if I did it myself. That belief isn’t sustainable and certainly not scalable. Being able to delegate is a skill that I have continually worked at and it’s allowed me to create more best practices with a greater scale than me just trying to do everything on my own.

Other missteps were around user research. I believe we can use research to tell any story we want if we’re not being honest about it. We did research on a particular feature in our student interface, and we were deciding if we should proceed with option A or option B. Option B was definitely a lot harder, required more development time, and felt like it might be more of a fringe scenario than the common use case. Looking at available resources and time to market, I decided to go with option A, rationalizing that option A would meet the minimum viable product for the initial milestone, and we could always come back to option B.

Had I really been honest with myself and looked at the research, option A was never actually an option. There really was only option B and we should have just built option B the first time around to avoid any kind of customer disturbance. I interpreted the data a little bit too close to the hypothesis that I wanted it to be. So sure enough, once we launched that particular feature, we had to come back and build option B because option A didn’t meet the customers’ need.”

What do you find most interesting about the role of a Product Manager?

“I love getting to work with all the different areas of development. At McGraw-Hill, the Technical Product Manager role is a leadership role. It’s a balance of leading the team, being the conscience of the product, and ensuring the product is successful. I work with my stakeholders to envision the product that will meet customers’ needs, obtain commitments from the development teams to build that product, and then empower the development teams to make the right and best decisions along the development path to deliver a high quality product.

I want my teams to be autonomous and think like the customer. I’ve done activities to get the development teams, engineers, and Q.A. into the field (i.e. classrooms) where they’re observing students and teachers using our products and competitors’ products. I try to get team members, like an engineer who wouldn’t normally go out into the field, in front of the customer to observe how the customer succeeds or fails with the software we’ve just built. Engineers get to see the customers’ pain points. No matter how bulletproof we think the software is, we’re continually surprised to see how people actually use it in ways we never intended. Educators are super creative in how they adapt our learning programs to fit their unique needs.”

Lori has over 20 employees on her team including product managers, business analysts and people doing UX, research, technical writing, and training. Empowerment is the key to their success.

Sharing the ‘why’ with teams and then empowering them to actually make the day-to-day decisions on how they’re going to execute the work, has been a really successful exercise here at McGraw-Hill.

“We do agile development, and the teams are empowered and autonomous. It’s important to share the vision of what’s needed with the teams so they can then creatively develop the most efficient and high quality path to meet the customers’ needs. It’s not enough to just share the ‘what’ of what’s needed in terms of requirements, but to also share the ‘why’ it’s needed and the value it will create for the end user. Team members need to know why the feature needs to do B instead of A, as in the case of the misstep example I highlighted earlier. When the teams understand the why, it’s meaningful work. The why drives teams to go above and beyond into the wee hours of the night to meet their customers’ needs.

We have a culture at McGraw-Hill of delivering on our commitments. In the education market, we have market-specific timelines that we have to honor: Back-to-school is a major milestone every August. After the academic year begins, instructors and students don’t want to see big changes in their learning programs, so we have limited windows to release major software changes and we have to get them right the first time. The teams understand this. It doesn’t mean we don’t release iterative improvements throughout the year, but we’re not going to do a big dramatic change and disrupt the customer in the middle of the year just because we think it’s a great improvement. We’re going to wait until users want and need it, and when it’s most appropriate for them.”

Time For The Lightening Round

What do you look for when you’re hiring new product managers?

“I look for people who have demonstrated grit. What did they want to accomplish in their last position and how did they go about achieving it despite obstacles? Cultural fit is important. I want to make sure that this is somebody my teams and I want to work with day in and day out to meet our customers’ needs and have fun while doing it.”

What’s most challenging about your role?

“Doing all the different roles at once while still staying close to the customers’ needs; being the team leader and the conscience of the product. Now in my leadership role, my focus is more on the long term vision and strategy for our products, as opposed to just delivering the next cycle of development. Coaching and mentoring my teams are also priorities. In any one day, there are at least fifteen things I could do, and it can be a challenge to choose the A drawer priorities that are most important for the product, over the B and C drawer priorities that can wait.”

What advice do you have for Product Managers entering the field?

“Gain expertise about the product. If you’re going lead product development for an education company for example, learn the products that you will support. Make sure the products are ones you can be a rabid advocate for. I think it would be tough to be an effective product manager for a product that I was just lukewarm about.

Be nice. There’s enough grumpiness in the world and I feel like being upbeat, positive, and kind helps me be a better leader that others want to work with. Not to the point where it is being fake or inauthentic, but when I’m at my best, I make a choice to be positive.

As a woman in product management, I also think speaking up and being direct with my words have served me well. If you’re sitting at the development table, open your mouth and contribute.”

Any Motto or Guiding Principle?

“A guiding principle is to incorporate user research and testing into the development process. It’s a good check on my expertise and keeps me humble. It keeps me close to the customer and it enables me to be an effective Product Manager to meet the needs of my customers. Don’t underestimate the power of user testing; it only can give you more strength to tell the product story that needs to be told.”

To catch the entire series on Women in Product Management make sure to sign up for our newsletter.

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The Agile PrepCast for the PMI-ACP Exam

Mike G, Jesse F, Cornelius F

Jesse Fewell, Mike Griffiths and Cornelius Fichtner

Work is changing from industrial, routine work to knowledge-oriented work that requires more of an ongoing collaborative endeavor to manage change, complexity, and uncertainty. Learn how project management has evolved to reflect these changes with the publication of the new “Agile Practice Guide,” developed in collaboration with the Agile Alliance.

This interview with Mike Griffiths (LinkedIn Profile) and Jesse Fewell (LinkedIn Profile) was recorded at the splendid Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Conference 2017 in Chicago, Illinois.

We not only discuss the implications that The Agile Practice guide has on the PMI-ACP exam and your PMI-ACP exam prep, we also examine the core chapters of the new guide and discuss application and adaptation implications. We explore many elements of the guide and learn more about its content and use in a variety of domains.

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Podcast Introduction

Cornelius Fichtner: In this episode of The Project Management Podcast™, we talk about the Agile Practice Guide that was released earlier this year.

Hello and welcome to The Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com. I am Cornelius Fichtner.

We are coming to you live from the splendid 2017 PMI Global Conference in Chicago.

Podcast Interview

Cornelius Fichtner: And sitting with me here at the PMI Bookstore are Jesse Fewell and Mike Griffiths. Hello Mike!

Mike Griffiths: Hi, hi everyone!

Cornelius Fichtner: And Jesse!

Jesse Fewell: Hey, good to be here!

Cornelius Fichtner: And listeners of the Podcast, you already noticed this sounds a bit different than normal interviews do. Yes, we are using the handheld mic today because there are three of us. And since I started out with mic, let’s continue with Mike.

Mike, question for you. The people, listeners, they have been introduced to PMI before. However, the Agile Alliance was part of the development of The Agile Practice Guide. Who is the Agile Alliance?

Mike Griffiths: Sure! So the Agile Alliance is a not-for-profit group that exists to promote and educate people about Agile methods. So Agile is a broad umbrella of methods. People are very familiar with Scrum but it includes other approaches such as XP and Feature-Driven Development and another type there.

The Agile Alliance is like I say is not-for-profit group that creates their own conferences and promotes Agile and Agile practices in organizations. So there are resource center. You can go there to learn more about Agile and techniques.

Cornelius Fichtner: What was the vision for developing the Agile Practice Guide?

Mike Griffiths: So it was really to provide guidance for project practitioners that are frequently in the space of having Agile teams or being asked to spin up Agile teams quite often in less than Agile environments. So we described the hybrid environment being where we have some Agile elements in play but parts of the organization are still traditionally predictive or plan-driver.\

And so the Agile Practice Guide was really the basic steps for project practitioners who are in that space, who would like to become more Agile and perhaps not sure how to do that or what steps to follow. And we wanted to provide a methodology agnostic independent way of providing that guidance.

Cornelius Fichtner: And Jesse, even though it’s methodology agnostic, what methodology or framework did you actually follow as you prepared and developed the guide? What is more a plan-driven or was it more an Agile approach?

Jesse Fewell: Well Mike would say was a hybrid approach. We had a very firm fixed deadline for the perspective publication. I mean this is a publication project and so there is a fixed deadline that had to synchronize with the publication of PMBOK® Guide Sixth Edition. Because we needed to align with that from a content perspective and from a product delivery perspective. But within those firm fixed kind of constraints before which a lot of things happen and after which a lot of things happened, we were very organic and very fluid and very iterative in the creation of the draft, the manuscript itself.

So we started first maybe with weekly iterations and that kind of evolved later down the road to more ad hoc iterations once we were getting crunched, crunch time. So we didn’t actually follow any formal methodology per se as much as we were trying to be as flexible and adaptive and iterative within fixed schedule.

Cornelius Fichtner: Who is the intended audience of the guide?

Jesse Fewell: It’s really for project managers who are starting on their Agile journey. There’s just so much this conversation that one of the explicit things that Mike is mentioning is we had to choose an audience. We had to choose a firm what is in-scope and what is out of scope definition.

And so, we really wanted to center it towards project managers who are kind of beginning in their guide. So for those of you who are listening that are little bit more experienced with Agile method, you will find the guide to be filled with very familiar content. So that’s what we targeted.

Cornelius Fichtner: Let’s talk about your roles on the guide as you were developing it. Mike, what was your role?

Mike Griffiths: So I was representing the PMI. I was the Chairperson for the Core Writing Team. As Jesse said it was very organic so I don’t really think my role was very different from everybody else in that I was part of the team that did the pair writing and the pair reviewing of chapters. I had a little bit more coordination I guess to do so I help with the kickoff like prepared some slides or ironed what we hope to achieve, what some of our inputs and some of our constraints are likely to be. It was really down to me when we were missing deadlines or up against a gun in terms of having to deliver.

Our sponsors of PMI and Agile Alliance would approach me and say: “Hey Mike, where are you at? When do you guys are going to be done? We need to see a new draft.” Or whatever. So my role was fairly light from the coordination perspective because I basically just pushed everything to the team and said: “Hey, here’s where we are at. They are looking for a new draft. What can we cut by the date?”

Cornelius Fichtner: And Jesse, where were you involved?

Jesse Fewell: I was one of the other I think there were a total of 7 core team members and my experience was very similar to Mike’s. Mike’s had a lot of that public facing responsibilities. Some of the more administrative things but all of us work in pairs and each pair was responsible for a chapter and then after we finish the chapter, we would rotate where there would be another pair that would review it and then offer feedback and then we would synthesize those different parts of it.

We also had a couple of face-to-face meetings in person and that’s where everybody had a responsibility to contribute as a group. And then it was fortunate that at our last face-to-face, we had the full team together where we could actually finalize everyone’s opinion. So each person had to write a certain chapter but it was done as a pair. And so each pair will self-organize. Well who would get one part and who would get another part and then another pair would review it afterwards. So that’s what kind of like a day in the life of Agile Practice Guide team member would look like.

Cornelius Fichtner: How long did it take from start to finish in the project when you first got on board to okay it is now September 6 and it’s out?

Mike Griffiths: So we started I think in August of 2016 with our kickoff meeting. We basically only had from then until the end of the year to do our writing. So we had from August through December to get the first draft written and then it went out for pair review. So we had 30 Agile practitioners and 30 PMI sort of more traditional project managers review it and provide feedback.

We expected to get about 1000 comments on it. That’s typical for guide of this length. We get over 3000 comments back so we really scramble to try and sort our way through all of those comments. So the writing period was compressed into a few months. We then had this period of review because that takes awhile and then figuring out what to do with the comments. Because this is a PMI standard, each comment has to be reviewed by at least two people and then we got to either accept it, defer it, or reject it or accept with modification. So we had this to do for over 3000 of these items that came back.

So a good chunk of our time in the new year before it went for final publication which I think was around April or May time was working our way through those comments. How many of these things can we incorporate? How many of these things should we defer until iteration two and how many of these are just plain perhaps wrong and we should politely say: “Thank you for your comment but we won’t be undertaking this at this time.”

Cornelius Fichtner: Personal interest last year at the conference in San Diego I believe we were, you had a workshop where people could come in and also provide input. How was that input used in order to develop the guide?

Above are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Please subscribe to our Premium Podcast to receive a PDF transcript.

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Jeff and Cornelius

Jeff Kissinger and Cornelius Fichtner

You’ve been there, right? You’ve managed a project where nobody on the team reported to you. But what can a project manager do to succeed other than beg borrow or steal in this situation?

This interview with Jeff Kissinger (LinkedIn Profile) was recorded at the superb Project Management Institute (PMI)® Global Conference 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. It is based on his presentation « Leading Without Authority: The Project Manager’s Dilemma » and looks at what project managers can do to successfully deliver their projects even in situations where they have little or no authority at all over the people on their project. Here is what Jeff wrote about his presentation:

Leading project teams without direct authority is a dilemma that many project leaders face. Doing this well is an art. And, like art, it’s often practiced using a mixture of skills, techniques, and tools. Attendees will learn how to identify and resolve authority issues quickly that adversely affect their projects and learn how to lead their project teams successfully without direct authority.

You can find the Unified Vision Framework discussed in the interview by visiting http://www.pmobrothers.com/.

Episode Transcript

Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only.

Podcast Introduction

Male Voice:   In this episode of the Project Management Podcast™, we discover how to lead project teams successfully without direct authority.

Podcast Interview

Cornelius Fichtner:   Hello and welcome to the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com. I am Cornelius Fichtner. We are coming to you live from the superb 2017 PMI Global Conference in Chicago. And with me right now is Jeff Kissinger. Good afternoon, I think it is. Hello Jeff!

Jeff Kissinger:   Good afternoon. Just turned afternoon. How are you today?

Cornelius:   I am doing very well. How is everything going for you, so far? I understand this is what—your eighth day in Chicago?

Jeff:   Yes, it is. I’ve been here since Monday. I was here for the PMI Master Class and I graduated with 34 wonderful people that I can see again soon.

Cornelius:   Congratulations!

Jeff:   They’re all over the world. I hope to see them again, if not next year, sooner.

Cornelius:   Yeah. The Master’s Class is a PMI-sponsored program. I think it takes four years in total, right?     

Jeff:   Well, it’s one year—they take you, they start you at the LIM. Others at class 2018 started at this LIM that we had—that Leadership Institute Meeting and they had their classes before the LIM and then they have group projects they do and they meet again next year, March or April and then they’ll meet at the next one in Los Angeles for the final classes but they work throughout the year. They’re constantly doing work challenging each other, connecting with each other, learning –it’s intensive. And I really feel grateful I got to go through it.

I put my information against all these other people who applied for it and I feel fortunate to have been chosen and I can’t stress enough to anybody who’s a PMI chapter leader just volunteering for the first time if they have an opportunity to apply for the Master Class to go for it.

Cornelius:   How are you enjoying the conference?

Jeff:   I’m enjoying it. I met a lot of people here that are just very kind, interesting, willing to talk about what they do. That’s amazing when you put a bunch of people who have a lot in common together how much—whether it be commiserating together about things about projects or sharing ideas that I’ve never heard of before but doing this for a while but I can always learn something. It’s wonderful to meet these people and talk about it whether it be at the conference or the LIM or the Master Class.

Cornelius:   So, the people who are listening to this, they are sitting at home and weren’t here—they’re missing out?  

Jeff:   Yes, they are.

Cornelius:   Hear this, listeners—you’re missing out.

Jeff:   [laughs]  

Cornelius:   I sincerely hope that many of our listeners are going to consider to come next year. Los Angeles, I believe. 

Jeff:   Yes, it is.   

Cornelius:   And it’s going to be just another great conference that we’re going to have there.

Jeff:   Absolutely.

Cornelius:   The topic of your presentation is “Leading with Authority: –Without—Oh my God, I can’t even read. It is “Leading Without Authority: The Project Manager’s Dilemma”. There’s always a story behind the title. What’s the story behind this presentation?

Jeff:   Well, I’ve been involved in Project Management for many years. As a volunteer, I’ve led projects for over 25 years and as an employee whether it be in a commercial or an academic setting, I’ve done it for 17 and in almost every case, I have not had authority—direct authority, but I’ve also worked for people who had authority that had misused it, abused it or they used it well. But knowing that I have to go out there and do—sometimes it seems like the impossible without authority, I know I had to develop influence and I have to drill up skills that I had to learn from people.

So, it goes back for me 20 years ago. That was 20 years ago this month that my wife broke her foot. She was cleaning something and she fell off the couch and she broke her foot. Now, that may not seem like a big deal or how this even relates but she was earning most of the money in the house and I just graduated from college back in December 1996. I was 28 years old and I never had a real job that didn’t fold the nametag or something like that and I was going up there applying for jobs and trying to get something going on and I finally got a little contracting gig that I was doing.

It was working out pretty good but it wasn’t making the kind of money she was making because she’s a hair stylist and we’re living in Las Vegas, which is vanity capital of the world. And when you’re a hair stylist, you make decent money. When she broke her foot, she had her foot up for four weeks, she couldn’t work. And we had to depend on my income which really wasn’t enough. Two days later, I got a contract. A pretty big contract because I was doing technical writing, consulting services with another person.

I went into that project ready. No one to help you —I’m going to make some money but this thing doesn’t come right away, it was just contract money, not 30 net 60 whatever they tried to throw at me. I decided that I’m going to do whatever it takes. I’m going to get this done. And the project manager for this was somebody who was given quite a bit of authority and there was about eight of us on this team. Real smart people, real good people. And we were subcontracted as part of the contractor who was working for Hewlett-Packard. It was during the net server days.

We went at it but I was given— »Here, take these Lotus notes slides and convert them to PowerPoint slides”. And it wasn’t really easy because they all just disintegrated and I had to reintegrate them together and I did all this and the project manager said, “Ok, we’re getting ready to put our output for the training together. So, he prints off a few of these slides I did—I did 2000 of them. He prints off maybe 20 and he faxes them up to Hewlett-Packard and we all just looked at each other and went: “Oh my God! We’re going to die. This is awful. This isn’t an output. This isn’t what I signed up for!”

But I had to keep working because I needed to make money. I didn’t feel I wanted to be a part of this at all. This thing had no vision, does have no direction, doesn’t have nothing and we’re going to get beat up. And then this guy, who I’ve known for a while now, brises up out of it and says: “Look, we have a deadline. We got to get this done by January. We have these things I got to get done. Let’s forget about him. Let’s get to work”. So, he gave me very clear direction what he wanted me to do, what he wanted me to write, some website, stuff he wanted me to develop. Other people working on their parts. He organized it all, he did his part and we came in, we delivered on time and got it done.

He had vision, he had clarity, he had reason, he defined what needed to be done, he got us to agree on what we’re doing, he got us flowing in the right direction and we executed it and we stayed together as a team for a while on other projects. He was really good and that taught me that he didn’t even have any authority. He had no authority on this thing but he was a leader and it taught me that I need to be a leader. I don’t need authority to be a leader and that’s the whole point of the whole talk that I did.

Cornelius:   So, let’s take a step back. How do you define authority?  

Jeff:   Authority is having the jurisdiction, the power, the ability to control the granted as managers typically have over reports and to make decisions and to say this is what I get to do and we’re doing it this way. And some people that have authority, when put in the wrong hands, is like a nuclear weapon. They can go out and just ruin people with it. “I told you to do that because that’s the way it’s got to get done. Now go do it”. Micromanagement –an authority like that. Or somebody who has authority but doesn’t use it properly in the sense that they’re too afraid to use it.

But somebody who is balanced, somebody who is humble, somebody who’s principled, having authority, they use it judiciously, they’re very careful about it, they don’t try to tell people what to do but to show people what to do. They have a clear vision of what it is they need to do. They break things down into small batches and they allow people to have the autonomy to do it as they need to get it done and they lead them through it. They listen to the ideas of others. They tell people that I can’t do this without you. We can’t do this without each other and they bring them in as a team. They create which is essentially a clear flow of information, a clear flow of ability and a clear flow of productivity.

Cornelius:   You sent me your presentation before the conference here and I printed it out and I looked at the first page and the one thing I was immediately thinking was “Leading Without Authority: The Project Manager’s Dilemma” but wait a minute, purely theoretically, the project manager’s name should be mentioned in the charter so the project manager has the authority—the formal authority.   

Jeff:   Yes. Well, they do and they don’t. Depending on the organization. I’ll give you an example. I always put the project charter out front. I talk about that right in the beginning of the presentation. One of the ways that I can try to gain authority is by including it in the project charter and also having a sponsor that I work with who trusts me and the people that report on the team also are connected to that sponsor—that makes it easier. But the person who gives me that authority, so to speak, in the project charter, I had them take it back, whether they write it down or not, it depends on what kind of leader they are and the charter, again, it’s provisional, at best.

It’s not something that I get to take with me. I don’t have direct reports. This person, yeah, they are my team and I’m given this provisional authority but that person reports to somebody else and they’ll do what that other person tells them. But when I can work with somebody and do the things that I talked about in this discussion, they commit to it. Their enthusiasm, what they want to do is attached to the reason why they were doing this. It’s attached to the vision of a project which is attached to the vision of the organization.

Cornelius:   What are some authority issues that we should look into at the beginning of the project?

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Source de l’article sur Project Management

Toutes les organisations ayant du personnel dédié à la gestion de projet n’ont pas besoin d’un bureau de gestion de projet (Project Management Office : PMO) ou ne prendront pas le temps, ne dépenseront pas l’effort ni les coûts pour en créer un.
Le devraient-elles ?
C’est probablement une question qui dépend de leur industrie, leur financement, la taille de l’organisation et leurs perspectives en management gestion de projet. Mais, si un PMO est nécessaire, pourquoi s’arrêter à mi-chemin ?