Building A High-Performance Workplace Culture – During Times of Uncertainty Free Webinar, Training, Tools and Resources #covid19
Company culture is the synthesis of values, vision, mission, and purpose that sits at the center of any successful business. It is the cohesive atmosphere that permeates a company and directly affects the way people work within that company.
Culture is not something that can be fabricated when one is lacking as no amount of company perks, cool furniture, or hip employees create culture. It’s more than that, and it is one of the most important things to get right in order to become a successful company.
A strong internal culture is necessary to create strong, lasting brands.
“For [a product] to surprise me, it must have satisfying expectations I didn't know I had. No focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.” Paul Graham, Made in USA
He was commissioned in the US Army as a second lieutenant in 1958 and is a veteran of the Vietnam War from 1962 – 63 and 1968 – 69.·He was promoted to a Four Star General in 1989 and was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993.
·He directed the deployment of the Panama Invasion in 1989 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
·He was honored with the Bronze Star, The Purple Heart, and was decorated with the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.
Colin Powell is an expert at managing expectations. Although he is known as one of the nation’s most influential black military leaders, the national security advisor to Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State during the George W. Bush administration from 2001 – 2005, and the Founding Chairman of America’s Promise, General Powell is astonishingly skilled at stakeholder management which he developed throughout his distinguished career.
Think of the different political, social, and personal agendas he has had to manage from various stakeholders to successfully execute consistently on events that have had global consequences.
General Powell was born in New York City in 1937 of Jamaican descent and was the youngest child born of Maud Arial and Luther Theophilus Powell. What’s amazing to me about General Powell was that he graduated from Morris High School with mediocre grades and started his college life at City College in New York City. Yet after discovering and joining ROTC, he developed a disciplined and continuous improvement focus that changed his life forever.
As stated in the book Soldier; the Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung, “Colin found he liked leading others and had a talent for the delicate balancing act required to win the respect and affection of those he led while demanding their performance. He started a mental list of leadership qualities: A leader had to set an example and keep up standards. If he wanted his troops to drill an extra hour, he had to show he could do it with them.” He learned early in his military career that managing stakeholders’ expectations was more about leadership and setting the right example.
What keeps them up at night
The key role of any program or project manager is to learn the hidden agendas and expectations of your main stakeholders. People only initiate programs or projects to move away from pain or to go towards gain. Your job is to learn which direction the stakeholders are going, and then ask them this question, “If you have the perfect solution to this issue, what would it look like and what would it allow you to do that you cannot do today?” A great resource to learn more about this line of thinking is the book Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play by Mahan Khalsa.
Requirements need to be collected and documented using best practices and standard documentation processes that are reviewed and approved by the key stakeholders. Whether you are developing software, building a house, or constructing a highway, requirements need to be recorded from the users of the solution perspective. A great site to learn more about requirements is: Leading Answers
Real communication is how your message is perceived, not only by what you document or say. Brain Tracy in a post called “Making Strong Connections” states, “In communicating well with another person, time is the critical factor. The value of a relationship can increase for both you and the other person depending on the amount of time that you invest.” http://www.briantracy.com/blog/general/making-strong-connections . I would also add that we should ask our stakeholders how they would like to be communicated with and how frequent they would like to receive those communications.
Do you know how the success or failure of the program or project will personally impact your key stakeholders? Are their conflicting desires between key stakeholders (i.e. someone wants the project to succeed while someone else really wants the project to fail)?
Key stakeholders in business want and need to be involved in making key decisions. Can you imagine Colin Powell not keeping other generals or the President informed about key decisions and still being successful in his missions? Stakeholder involvement is a major key to being successful at executing for results.
Learning to speak the language of your business stakeholders is a critical success factor for gaining their buy-in and support. Most highly skilled experts are cursed with the ignorance of knowledge. We have become so comfortable with the gobbledygook technical terminology of our profession that we fail to remember how difficult it was for us to speak that language and now that we have mastered it, we cannot remember what it was like not knowing it. Our stakeholders will be more impressed and influenced when we speak their language and present our ideas in terms that they understand and are comfortable with.
Do your stakeholders know who’s on first and what they are supposed to do while they are there? One of the keys to building a great project team is when everyone on the team understands their roles. Managing projects are more like managing a baseball or football team. Each player has a position and the team will win games if everyone plays their best within their position. A great resource for document roles and responsibility can be found on the blog “The Critical Path”. By clicking on the link, you will gain access to a free project team organization worksheet that contains a RACI chart. A RACI chart helps you define the roles, but also who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed on the project regarding any major tasks.
Do you prefer to be sold a new car or to buy a new car? Most of us would prefer to buy the new car and to make the decision to buy the car the salesman educates you on during the entire buying process. We need to teach our stakeholders about our methodology and process to educate them so that they can buy into our processes. Stakeholders want to know how your processes and methodologies work in a simple understandable language.
Are you aware of your stakeholders’ learning style? Do they really need to sit in a 1 or 2 day class to learn the new system or process you have implemented? Do they learn better by conducting role playing scenarios, typing at the keyboard, reading a case study, or attending a presentation? Some of the best advice I have ever received regarding training stakeholders was to ask the questions, “What should my students be able to do once they have attended my training or learning program?”
Ken Blanchard is famous for the axiom “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Do your stakeholders see you as a champion for proactively eliciting their feedback? Companies and individuals who are consistently seeking feedback from their customers are on a path of continuous improvement. When was the last time you sought feedback from your customers?
Share your ideas or thought! Do you have other ideas regarding what stakeholders wish we knew, but won’t tell us? Has this list of stakeholder concerns helped you to think differently?
“The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems.” -S.L.A. Marshall
Establishing the correct level of process standardization and integration is a fundamental building block for identifying an organization’s strategic road map and target enterprise architecture. The strategic road map and reference architecture (current and target architecture) sets the stage for the development of the IT investment portfolio. These are critical tools for aligning the business and IT capability that will enable an organization to achieve its strategic intent and answers the question, “What are we attempting to accomplish?”
The critical need of organization's today is to align the IT strategy with the business strategy, establish the target enterprise architecture or desired IT capability, determine the right mix of IT assets (services, information, applications and infrastructure) and execute the IT project portfolio while optimizing the use of the organization's resources while remaining agile enough to response to market variability. The operating model provides the guidance necessary to reduction duplicative services, contracts, solutions and commodity technologies (laptops, desktops, servers and data centers) while providing the blueprint for business transformation.
The operating model will also assist management with breaking down organizational silos and building a better alignment between the business's needs and the IT Service organization's delivery capabilities.
So, what are the challenges with defining an organization’s Operating Model? What are the culture and implementation challenges of transforming an organizations Operating Model? “For Lenovo’s IT organization, charting how to support the new operating model was daunting. Inherited legacy IT systems had to be replaced by an enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) system that could foster standardized processes yet remain flexible enough to handle important variations in local markets. Rolling out a global IT system is an enormous challenge that many CIOs have taken on but few have managed to pull off,” according to a McKinsey interview with Xiaoyan Wang in an article titled, “The IT factor in a global business transformation: An interview with Lenovo’s CIO.”
For many organizations the requirement is to determine which operating model quadrant is positioned to support their desired process integration and standardization needs. According to Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill and David C. Robertson in the book Enterprise Architecture as Strategy, “the operating model is a choice about what strategies are going to be supported.”
There are 4 types of operating model positions according to Ross, Weill and Robertson; they are:
Microsoft SharePoint and Project Server solutions can enable organizations to move to the unification quadrant if high integration and standardization are required. These applications are designed to support a global integrated business process and for increasing visibility of the investments portfolio into a single web view. They also support the elimination of overlapping processes, administration, and standardization of workflows to enable better governance compliance.
Project Server Project Inventory:
Project Governance Workflow:
Are you using SharePoint and Project Server to help enable your organization's current and target operating model? What are the benefits of conquering these challenges for your organization?
Additional Resources
Reference
“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
Variability is a fact of life!
The first image in this post is from an actual project that I managed using Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and the ProChain add-on. This was also my first time using Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) instead of the normal critical path methodology that is common in the market today.
The greatest benefit I received from using CCPM as my project management methodology is visibility into how I use slack or buffer on my project. I also incorporated a specific planning process that ensured that I include the full scope of work from my project’s charter, WBS and project team; this is called Network Building. My project team benefited by gaining insight into the critical integration points that could cause major delays in executing the initiative. Although we hoped for the best and planned for the worst, we experienced a tremendous amount of variability (the worst scenario) which we all know is a fact of life. Here are some of the challenges that we encountered:
All of these challenges created the buffer image at the top of this post. What saved us from total disaster? We used the processes and procedures that are core to any key CCPM project. Each task has only two estimates:
What’s the point?
“It’s not what you do once in a while; it’s what you do day in and day out that makes the difference.” Jenny Craig
He was known for making a difference. One of his favorite sayings was “Digging for gold is more important than the gold itself; that's why I say let's play two.”
Banks, born in 1931 as the oldest son of 12 children, grew up in Dallas, TX. His father worked in the cotton fields earning $10 a day. Ernie was a keen observer during his early childhood, watching and learning from the older kids as they played baseball. Banks quickly learned as a young man that he could make everyone around him smile and a lot more comfortable by how he managed his attitude. He focused his energy on his circle of influence instead of his areas of concern, which he had no control over.
What did developing his competence while growing his grateful and positive attitude achieve for Ernie?
·He was signed by the Chicago Cubs when he was 22 years old.
·He hit a home-run his first time at bat in the major leagues.
·He was the first Negro player on the Chicago Cubs baseball team.
·He was the ninth player in the history of the game to reach 500 home runs and ended his career with 512.
·He won two MVP awards, one in 1958 and the other in 1959
·He was chosen to be on the National League All Star team for 11 years.
·He was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977
What can we learn from Ernie Banks?
1. Take responsibility for your attitude — create your own weather. (To learn more about taking charge of your attitude, read John Maxwell's book, “The Difference Maker: Making Your Attitude Your Greatest Asset.”)
2. Set the tempo; be a trend-setter.
3. Be loyal to your friends, family members, colleagues, and organization. (Ernie remained with the Chicago Cubs for 19 seasons.)
4. Focus on your circle of influence and not your areas of concern over which you have no control.
5. Take responsibility for your education and learning goals.
6. Learn to excel despite the political or social pressures or obstacles you'll face.
7. Strive to stay humble and grateful; no one is a self-made person.
a. (Ernie Banks understood he was blessed; between games he would walk through the poor neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago to remind himself of other people's lives.)
8. Give back and mentor someone less fortunate. (Ernie visited and supported little league teams in Illinois.)
One of the key attributes of being a high-performing project manager is taking ownership and responsibility for your project's outcome. Leaders take responsibility for both their results and outcome.
Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” The goal of strategy and culture alignment is to keep the organization working together like a well-oiled machine that’s ready for a cross-country excursion. What changes does your organization need to make to align its strategy, culture, and talent?
I've updated the post on Portfolio Management Maturity, I received the link below highlighting PwC's 2017 global project management report which includes key survey results on Portfolio Management insights collected from over 1500 IT leaders in 38 countries.
In the spirit of sharing, I have provided a list of lessons learned or takeaways I gleaned from reading the report along with a link to the document.
Here's what I learned:
To learn more click on the link below to access the full report.
https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/advisory-services/assets/ppm-service-catalogue-june-2017.pdf
The essence of an IT strategic plan is to align the IT department with the organization’s strategic intent, vision and business objectives in concert with the senior executive team. The goal is to develop a road map of initiatives and activities that will enable the organization to achieve the vision, and optimize the IT resource capability to deliver on the promised benefits and outcomes needed to accomplish the firm’s mission.
In April of 2000, Cirque du Soleil engaged Danielle Savoie as the first CIO of the famous Cirque and she placed the organization on a course of upward maturity by developing their first IT Strategic Plan. According to a CIO.com 2002 article titled “Rapid Deployment: IT at Cirque du Soleil”, Ms. Savoie delivered on her department’s strategic intent to streamline the Cirque IT infrastructure to provide a perfect show under the big top night after night.So what does IT Strategic Planning and Cirque du Soleil’s accomplishments have to do with Project Portfolio Management Maturity Modeling? Everything!
When an organization starts down the road of maturing its IT department to execute the right projects more efficient and effectively, they have embarked on a form of Project Portfolio Management Maturity. They are addressing the questions: are we doing the right thing and are we doing them right?
Organizations are made up of individuals who will only change their behavior for one or two reasons: avoiding pain or going for gain. Pains that prompt an organization to pursue maturing their PPM capability are:
One of the greatest challenges to Project Portfolio Management Maturity assessment is the lack of industry standardization. There are a number of recommended ways to conduct an assessment but no official methodology or process has been sanctioned.
Free Assessment
According, to James S. Pennypacker in his book “Project Portfolio Management Maturity Model”, there are 5 Levels of PPM maturity that an organization can use to assess its organizations PPM processes. They are:
Each level is then subdivided into (6) six sections which are:
Gartner developed the Five Progressive Levels of the Maturity Model which is displayed below.
Source:
Gartner (April 2012)
Also, in their book, “IT Portfolio Management Step-by-Step,” Maizlish and Handler state that, “The overall goal of IT portfolio management is to optimize the risk reward trade-off when allocating resources in support of organization objectives.” Their PPM Maturity Model follows the steps below:
Maizlish and Handler’s maturity model is further sub divided into the following section:
Organizations embarking on a Project Portfolio Management Maturity Modeling journey need to select a maturity model that is aligned to their company’s culture. In my experience, this is more important than the specific vendor model chosen to perform the assessment. In the end, the executive leadership’s goal is to impact the following areas of their organizations:
Project Server can be configured and modified to enable an organization to align it's project investments with its strategic objectives. Whether on premise or online, Project Server can provide:
Sources:
In August 2013, I spoke at the Project Management Institute (PMI), and the International Legal Technical Association (ILTA) conference in Las Vegas. The audience and a panel I was on debated about the value of the PMO. We were discussing how the PMO helps organizations enhance workplace productivity. And, as the conversation went on, we began to realize that people were confused about which PMO we were discussing. Was it the project PMO, was the program PMO, or the portfolio PMO? Because those three are very different environments in which to operate, and they all have different governance processes.
Regardless of which PMO we were discussing, we all agreed on one thing, all of these environments enhance workforce productivity. The value of project portfolio management is in its ability to move the needle with accomplishing goals and objectives in a consistent, reliable, and predictable manner. It's how value gets delivered to an organization.
No matter which role you play, we all leverage these processes to deliver value to our companies and improve workplace productivity. So, the ideal audience for mastering the concepts of project, program, and portfolio management should include:
So, if portfolio management is the apex of the project management ladder, then project management, is like starting at the base camp. And, as you ascend the mountain to the summit, it requires multiple activities which encompasses program management. Below are three comprehensive definitions for each of these areas, starting with portfolio management, program management, and then project management.
Portfolio Management
Program Management
Project Management
Dictionary of Project Management Terms, 3rd edition.
In summary, the value of project programs and portfolios is that they provide the structure which enhances the workplace productivity and align with your overall goals and objectives.
To learn more, click here.
Sincerely,
Project Management Productivity Hacks
Napoleon said, “All plans are useless, but the act of planning is essential.” So, as we go through this material, you're going to get the opportunity to plan. You're going to get the chance to go through the act of planning by planning out how you can radically improve your productivity by understanding these top 10 productivity hacks.
How to increase productivity?
As you learn them, you'll be able to plan out how you can use them in your day to day activity and see an impact in your business and your professional life. These 10 productivity hacks make up a recipe for project execution. When an organization, a family, or any agency decides to achieve a strategic goal or an objective, the only way to get it done is by getting everyone on the same page. Well, these 10 hacks create the recipe that if you roll them out, you will create a culture within your group that knows how to execute.
Why is productivity important to you?
Why am I creating this free training program? It's because I sincerely want to help. I've been working in the project, program, and portfolio management industry for 20 plus years. I've gotten a number of certifications. I've done quite a bit of studying, but I've also had a lot of boots on the ground training. I've watched younger project managers struggle because they don't understand the hacks that can increase productivity.
What is the concept of productivity?
Just like when you go to Thanksgiving dinner with your grandmother or your mom, and she makes that amazing casserole, and there's a recipe, there's a recipe card box, and you open that box, and inside that box is that favorite dish that you love. Well, on that paper is the recipe. It's the five steps, it's the 10 steps, and it's what you put in and the steps you have to take.
These 10 productivity hacks are like the Thanksgiving dinner process. It is a recipe to help you and your organization go to new heights, make further changes, and have an incredible impact. So, I want you to buckle up and get your pen and paper out. So, as we get ready to go through these productivity hacks, they're going to help you make some significant changes in your business and your personal life.
What factors increase productivity?
If you are interested in taking it to the next level and learning these 10 productivity hacks, sign up for this free program by clicking the link below. That'll get you so that you can go through the program. You’ll also get a white paper; a few worksheets and the status report form I’m providing as a bonus. You’ll have a chance to learn somethings that are going to transform the way you do business.
I heard a quote one time that says, “We change and grow because of two things. It's the people we meet, and the books we read are the programs that we take.” And so I'm offering you one, you get a chance to meet me and get to learn about me as a musician, as a consultant, as a coach, as a certified project, program, portfolio consultant, and as an accredited neuroscience conversational intelligence coach. You get to learn from someone who has a lot of varied experience, but you also will get a chance to be exposed to some information that I truly believe will change your life. I could not have accomplished all the things that I've done without learning these productivity hacks, and I want to pass them on to you. So, go ahead, sign up for the program, and I'll see you on the other side.
To learn more, click here.
Sincerely,
Copyright @ 2022 - Gerald J. Leonard - All Rights Reserved Productivity | Neuroscience | Music