PM Point of View Final Milestone Productions & M Powered Strategies

We all talk Agile, and sometimes we "say we wanna do agile", so this conversation is about the challenges of implementing Agile in different environments with guests David Forsyth, Mike Mellane, and Caitlin Kenny.  Co-host Mike Hannan takes our experts through a journey of the tensions between customers and vendors and the difficulty in managing communication pathways, budgeting, and the principle-agent problem. Solutions you care about included dedicating teams, synchronizing resources, capacity-based budgeting, and fixed-price contracts. Ah, and culture, it always is culture...that the shift that comes with embracing Agile and how transformation should be a continuous journey that focuses on business value. So, with a little patience and a focus on interpersonal accountability, incentives, and autonomy you can build the trusting teams needed to do the Agile dance.  Fight the zealotry, power to the edge, and download the episode!

First, "do no harm"--seems like a good adage, and is consistent with our guest Kevin Coleman who discusses some tenets of his UMD PM Symposium presentation coming this April, called "Unconscious Bias: Recognize it and correct it." Our second critical conversations guest is John Hovell on his UMD presentation, "Conversational Leadership: Convening Conversations that Otherwise Wouldn't Happen" where grounded in Gestalt theory, he pushes us to develop conversations that affirmatively support ourselves and others. He asks us to consider, "are we creating community" when we interact. Our third guest, Paloma Martin lays out the underpinnings of our need to consider gender perspectives directly in our stakeholder engagement and across all of the PM processes, as she gives us the teaser for her presentation "Project and Change Management with a Gender Perspective." These speakers are three of the 50 you will hear at the UMD Project Management Center for Excellence 10th annual PM Symposium this April 20-21…if you register (pmsymposium.umd.edu). See you there, but stop by this episode first!

Oh Boy, AI projects…they're the worst!! Exploding scope…the endless project. The scale of risk when something goes wrong can literally be exponential. While we PMs always had to watch quality, and we always focused on scope and schedule…the project management problems to launch an AI solution can be insidious, allowing us to make these scope, schedule and quality errors in unobserved and massive ways. AI solutions may be great, but the project management of AI has potential for tremendously bad projects; and we may not even be considering the ways an AI project can go bad wrong. As co-host Mike Hannan says, "as AI projects are making the management challenge exponentially harder, it stands to reason that we're probably getting worse at it." Join me and Mike as we hear from two experts in the field of AI implementation training, Ron Schmelzer and Kathleen Walch of Cognilytica discuss pitfalls old and new of this unique type of software development and implementation.

Recognizing the importance of identifying "what is the work in front of us" co-hosts Kendall Lott and Mike Hannan discuss improved ways cracking scope to improve project delivery and project value with guests Steven Devaux and Sergiy Potapov. Get past the traditional WBS to Product Flow Diagramming…which gives you progressive elaboration of the sequencing of work as you define it. Then step up to Value Breakdown Structures to identify total costs of work, including the drag (opportunity) costs of not executing some work. The goal of planning is to create understanding but also decision-making…what is worth spending more or less on to drive value? Look for the "-ity" words to identify value, (quality, usability, productivity, etc.) to help assess value. Beyond the value of the work, we move to ways of systematically defining the Risk to Value…where are the steps that are most sensitive to dropping or enhancing value? Listen, learn, and then investigate the approaches…we do!

Compound Security Threats. Sends a chill through us, yes? Our military expends huge effort in thinking about that future, long-term for planning, short-term planning for execution all to address increasingly complex security concerns. And as our listeners know, where there is planning ("anticipatory decision-making"), there is the collision with cognitive behavior and neuroscience. Yes, Dr. Josh is back and bringing his colleague (and student of NeuralPlan) Jay Macias of the Joint Special Operations University. Listen in as Co-Host Mike Hannan joins me in drilling in and learning about the role of neuropsychology in the military style command and control and mission orientation to planning and execution from a Project Mangement Point of View. Hint:  its about designing how we act with behavioral science data in mind

Analytical Hierarchy Process--check this as it is a method (and you can get tools) that absolutely help you with project prioritization.  Co-Host Mike Hannan and I talk with Stuart Easton, CEO of Transparent Choice, about this accessible approach tying decision science to project prioritization, selection and sequencing. Lending focus to executive teams, it helps us focus on what to do and more importantly, what not to do. Value is not an objective thing, and humans aren't great estimator. The AHP process let's anchor the value understanding, then break down value into meaningful application as criteria, creating transparency and standardization of the decision process, and more and better information as input.  The result, higher flow of project throughput completion, and better quality of project value.  What's not to like?