[00:00:01.370] - Announcer
Do you wonder if others are dealing with the same project management challenges as you, not sure where to turn for guidance and Leadership Office Hours are in session as we discuss project management and PMOs with global leaders hearing their story and learning their secrets to success. Our goal is to empower you and help you elevate your PMO and project management career to new heights. Welcome back to Project Management Office Hours with your host, PMO Joe.
[00:00:29.770] - PMO Joe
Welcome everyone to Project Management Office Hours. We're the number one live project management radio show in the US, broadcasting to you today from the Phoenix Business RadioX Studios in Tempe, Arizona. I am your host, PMO Joe, and for the next hour or so, we're going to be talking project management with our special guest. And agile really more than the project management today. So that's going to be a fun discussion, as we always do. Before we jump into the show, have some announcements that we run through. If you're listening or joining live, just drop a comment out there, let us know where you're joining from. It's always interesting to see where people join from and also an announcement. May be sad for some, may be happy for others. Bittersweet, I don't know. But this is going to be our final live show of Project Management Office Hours. After an incredible run of five years, over 110 shows, I think we're up around 115 or so, just decided that we've kind of achieved what we wanted to achieve. And now time to move on to a new adventure, a new purpose. We're not going to really be ending.
[00:01:39.190] - PMO Joe
We're going to go back and revisit all of our shows. There's been so much incredible content from the guests over the years, and even I, who've been sitting here for all of it, front row seat, I don't remember all of it. And I want to go back and revisit those shows, find those nuggets to share with the community. Because over five years, so much has changed in the world and so much has changed in project delivery that I think we can learn from going back and revisiting some of those episodes. So we'll be back. We won't be live. We do have one show still to go. It was recorded in the five year history of our show. We've never recorded a show until this last one that's coming out and I've been kind of chasing a guest. Fabio Zaffagnini from Italy was the founder and lead on a project called Rockin 1000 for those who in December will have the show come out. But to me, I think it's one of the most impactful projects that have happened over the past several decades, but not in the way of building the Sydney Opera House or building something consequential or going to the moon, but in an entertainment way.
[00:02:49.320] - PMO Joe
Rockin 1000 started out utilizing modern social media to drive change. A group in Italy wanted the Foo Fighters to come play a concert in their hometown. And they recorded a video that resulted in the Foo Fighters coming to play a concert in their hometown. And of course, that's not just an easy thing to do. So tune into that show when we go live with it. We're shooting and get that done by the end of the year. So that's going to be something to look forward to as well. Also a reminder to everybody that these shows are live, right? We're out there on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. We're on Internet radio, and we have a library of over 100 shows. So if you're looking for PDUs, great opportunity is to be able to go back and look at these past shows, listen to the shows. They're all available on your favorite podcast platform. And we've had some amazing guests over the years that I think you'll find very insightful, not just to capture the PDU, but also what you can take away from listening to Harold Kirzner and Lee Lambert and so many others over the years that we've had on.
[00:03:58.590] - PMO Joe
So that's our announcements. Now I'm super excited to have with us our special guest, Sanjiv Augustine. Welcome, Sanjiv.
[00:04:07.770] - Sanjiv Augustine
Thank you very much, Joe. Great to be here with you. And I do want to start off with a word of congratulations. I guess it's a bittersweet moment as you're hanging up your skis over here. You didn't like skis.
[00:04:20.590] - PMO Joe
Yeah.
[00:04:22.770] - Sanjiv Augustine
But congratulations on a long, illustrious tenure and I feel both honored and grateful to be here with you.
[00:04:29.940] - PMO Joe
We'll have you introduce yourself here in a second, but based you're you're an agile guy, right? And to me, this is kind of like an agile moment, right? It's a recognize the moment shift to what's next and be thoughtful in how you do that, but also don't think you have to plan it out ten years in advance, right. So we're making an agile type move and I think it's going to be exciting. So thanks for being with us today, but let everybody know who you are. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
[00:04:55.710] - Sanjiv Augustine
Sure. So my name is Sanjiv Augustine. I'm the founder and CEO of Agile Management, coaching, training and consulting company headquartered right here in the Washington, D. C. Area. We have clients globally and certainly within the United States and have been doing this agile stuff for coming up on over 22 years. So quite a long time and happy to talk to you a little bit about this stuff. And I don't know that there's any specific definition of an agile guy or an agile gal, but I think we're all inherently and intrinsically agile.
[00:05:29.210] - PMO Joe
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a great way to wrap up a five year run on a project management show to talk about kind of the modern movement away from the standard waterfallish type mindset to say, listen, there's more than one way to deliver projects and certainly Agile is known by everybody. It's not like it's a new thing anymore, but it's still in its adoption stage in many parts of the world and within organizations. So how did you get into it? Right? What's your story? What's the Genesis story for you becoming 22 plus years of an agile career?
[00:06:08.270] - Sanjiv Augustine
So let me dial back probably to my first job out of grad school, working on base at Fort Lee, Virginia. This is on a defense contract, a military contract. And I had an amazing role model. And this was before I knew about any of this term. I'm talking about 30 years ago. So the term agile was probably in its infancy itself. But there's something about the way this gentleman ran this particular project, our organization, our team. He was very accessible and he exemplified what I think of as really good leadership, really great leadership qualities that brought the team together and helped us work very closely with our customers. So 30 years into the future, if I were to peel back and say, what are some of the elements of the way that we worked in those days that we now consider agile? One is we have very close, direct and ongoing contact with our customer. Our customers was a lieutenant colonel. And lieutenant colonels are generally at a position that they can make quite a difference in what they do, as if they have the budget, the authority, and they have an incentive to get promoted from being a lieutenant colonel to a full bird right to full colonel.
[00:07:29.130] - Sanjiv Augustine
And so they make the great, probably great customers to have. So we long story short, we had direct access to our customers. We started early in the day, 07:00 in the morning. So I would be driving out in the wee hours of the morning. We would get our team together and we would meet with a customer pretty much every day. And then our team cross functional. Bunch of people of different skills in those days. Colocated lieutenant Colonel is down the hall. My manager is close to us. And we just kind of sat not in the same room, close desk closely enough that if we had a question, we would walk up to each other and just imprompt to discuss anything. So integrated cross functional team, very close communication, ongoing communication and direct access to a customer and adapting as we go along. So that's how I got into agile methods. And as I progressed in my career, I found that in reality, in those days, things got further and further away from that ideal because that really worked well. We rolled out a lot of stuff. We got a lot of good stuff done for the military, for the US.
[00:08:38.630] - Sanjiv Augustine
Government. And then as I got more into industry, I thought that things were very bureaucratic and lots of focus on approvals and rigidity process and organizations and sort of command and control. I knew what really good felt like, looked like and so I got more and more dissatisfied with the status quo until we ran into this thing that we called Agile and for that I have to check my former boss. He brought in Agile methods to the company that is working and introduced our group to none other than Bob Martin and his company and then also Kent Beck and all these folks who ended up writing the Agile Manifesto. So I just had a sort of early serendipitous exposure to all the angel folks and was able to jump in but already came with that sort of DNA of wanting to do things in a different way.
[00:09:38.090] - PMO Joe
It's interesting to hear that because when we think of the military or the government we probably wouldn't think that they would be agile in their thinking rhetoric because we perceive it to be so rigid, right? But if we then think from a different perspective, a non project management perspective and think of battlefield operations, they have to be agile because you don't know what's coming around the next corner. So you have to be trained and capable to be able to make decisions as a smaller team that can impact the performance of the team. So it's an interesting start, very interesting way to be able to get introduced to Agile from a mindset perspective. Now, are you the founder of Lithespeed or are you just now the leader of the organization?
[00:10:24.950] - Sanjiv Augustine
I'm founder in the end the head with all the good and the bad. That entails.
[00:10:30.510] - PMO Joe
Listen, I got The PMO squad. I know exactly what that means. So how does that so you go through that career genesis and then journey and then you get to a point where you say hey, I want to start my own company and be someone that's a leader of an organization. What's that story?
[00:10:46.960] - Sanjiv Augustine
I think if you want to have direct impact I'm sort of a person who likes to be hands on, close enough to the trenches, maybe not completely in the trenches, but I got tired of a desk job. I was working as a managing director and then founded a consulting division. In the previous company it was too far removed from the lean. We would call it the Gemba. The place where the action happens, where the work happens and the career trajectory to moving closer to the Gemba be part of a team, part of a high performance team and working with the team to get awesome delivery delivered to our customers led to the foundation of this company Lithespeed.
[00:11:31.550] - PMO Joe
So tell us a little bit about it. What do you guys do? Where do you serve your customers? The name, where does the name come from? Help us know a little bit more about them.
[00:11:42.790] - Sanjiv Augustine
Yeah, it is completely serendipitous, right? So lithe is an English word, it means flexible. So we were looking for analogies to the words agile and lean and we came up with this idea of this term lithe with speed. So speed from lean and lithe from Agile. And other than the fact that it's extraordinary difficult to pronounce it and just completely the wrong thing to do. If you look at Guy Kawasaki's old book, The Art of the Start, he tells you pick a domain name that is easy. Well, all the domain names were gone in those days, 16 years ago, but this one was available. So some of it has some design and intent behind it and then the other is just constraints. Domain name was available. Yeah. In terms of what we do, it's a combination of enablement. So it is enablement at the individual level for individual project managers, leaders, Chrome Masters, if you're familiar with Agile, other team members and then enablement at the organizational level. So specifically, if you were to go to our website, we'll be talking about Agile training, consulting and coaching. And those services are rendered right now primarily.
[00:13:04.790] - Sanjiv Augustine
Virtually though, we're starting to go back in person with many of the folks who want to be in person. But we're working with individuals, we're working with teams and we're working with executives and we're helping them achieve agility. And we'll talk more about what that means, what it means to Agile, what it means to move towards agility. But that's what we do. Our mission is to work with our customers and make them successful.
[00:13:29.950] - PMO Joe
Fantastic. And certainly probably a similar story to what we've done with The PMO Squad. Just a different service, but it's same sort of mindset. So something we didn't talk about previously, but I'll just throw back to you. Would it be learned as the owner of the organization? Because part of what I like to do as we're having these shows is provide inspiration to people who might be thinking, hey, I've got a story similar to Sanjiv's, but I don't know if I could really go start my own company. I'm not sure if I could make that happen. What's some advice that you would have for people that are maybe at that precipice of trying to make that decision?
[00:14:07.150] - Sanjiv Augustine
I think that's a great question and it's something I was actually thinking about in the last week, in the last month, and perhaps in the last two years. The first question is, do you really want to? It's not easy, right? I think it's a choice that one has to make. It's a choice that one has to make about how individualistic one wants to be as an entrepreneur and whether you want to be in a position that is leading people. Leading people, as we know on their show and elsewhere, is different from just managing people. Managing people and leading people come together. And as a founder and an executive, it's a hard job to do both of those together in a way that makes the company profitable, helps their customers, and also provides a meaningful place to work for the people who are part of your team. So I would say if you start from there and say if you believe that you have a passion for what you do and if you believe that you have a gift that can be shared with other people, certain customers, and certainly to your own non altruistic benefit of making a profit from a business, let's not discount that.
[00:15:23.990] - Sanjiv Augustine
But first and foremost, can we find a place where people can come together on a shared platform and add meaning and purpose to our lives? We spend a lot of time during our lives at our workplaces. People who run businesses, people who found businesses or people in positions of leadership have this unique vantage point and unique ability to make the world a better place in this way. So I'd say look at it as an opportunity to do that. Later on, I want to talk about this concept of intrepid leadership. The self examination becomes, well, there are three elements that look at courage, agility and resilience. And so if you're looking at starting a business, obviously you're going to change something. You might be leaving there established piece of work or you're changing direction or Joe saying he's hanging up his boots after five years doing something else. It's a courageous move. So as an entrepreneur, as a leader, you're going to have to have courage. You're going to have agility. Things are going to change. There's a lot of uncertainty that you're dealing with. So we have to be able to adapt to that uncertainty with agility.
[00:16:37.880] - Sanjiv Augustine
And then I think the number one defining quality about whether we can be successful or not over the long term is resilience. So I would say the advice or just the introspection I would give to everybody who's considering a career as an entrepreneur, as a leader is like, well, look at it as a great opportunity to make the world a better place and then make sure that you're driving forward with courage, agility and resilience.
[00:17:10.810] - PMO Joe
That's probably more than I asked for. Thank you. That was fantastic. And ten years in now with The PMO squad, as you were talking through those elements, I can tie and connect to each one of them. I probably wouldn't have come out with those three, but I can certainly relate to those three as necessary for everything we've done over time. So thank you for sharing that with everybody. And the one thing I would just add to that is that you touched on is have a purpose for doing it. Don't just do it because you can do it. There's a lot of people who can do it. And if you don't attach the purpose, you'll never have the resiliency. Because to be resilient, you're going to have to have something to attach to. And for me, it's making sure that you've got that purpose to change, to make the world a better place, whatever it may be. So let's dig into it. That's kind of the background stuff, right? We've laid the foundation. We know about Lithespeed, we know about you and the beginnings of both some of your mindset here. But listen, you're a service provider out to organizations that are trying to do better at Agile.
[00:18:19.870] - PMO Joe
That must mean that organizations have some challenges, right? There's something that they need to improve upon. So what do you see out there right now from organizations that are having challenges within their agile framework or transformations?
[00:18:32.870] - Sanjiv Augustine
If we for a moment were to set aside the aspect of whether it's Agile or not, let's just talk about challenges in general. We're living in what I can think of, at least in my lifespan, perhaps the most challenging times ever. We have the macroeconomic situation, we have the conflict in the Ukraine. We have economic conditions that go up and down. We're just not maybe not fully out of a pandemic. But the pandemic is becoming an endemic situation. We don't know when the next thing will affect us. And yet it's been a phenomenal opportunity for the folks and for the organizations that plowed forward with those three elements that we mentioned with courage and agility and resilience. And so I think the challenge is if I were to lay them out. Let's start with corporate america. Corporate America has to figure out a policy that works well for everybody. We're going back and forth between leaders want people to be back in person. Individuals are saying, well, we don't necessarily want to come back. We have to find where the success factors is it back all in person? Is it completely virtual? Is it somewhere in the middle?
[00:19:57.050] - Sanjiv Augustine
But a challenge for leaders everywhere, including whether we're doing agile or not, whether we have an agile team or not just to figure that out and to figure it out sooner than later. I'm shocked as to why it's taking people that long to figure out are we going back to person? Are we not? And the answer may differ. An operational capacity we too have established in the run. Obviously everybody's going to be in the building. But with the Fortune 500 companies, leaders are still struggling and they're creating a sort of animus between themselves and their teams by going back and forth, decide something, try to out bring your team up along and figure it out. And so I think that this return to work policy or the return to work way of working has to be determined and determined quickly. I think that's the success factor. It's a big challenge before us. The second thing that I see as a challenge out there is a diverse workforce that may or may not be getting the opportunities to interact with each other. I think we're up to four generations now, right? So it's what is it?
[00:21:04.970] - Sanjiv Augustine
Gen Z working with Gen Y working with Gen X and baby boomers for generations in a diverse workforce many times in a global situation, many large companies are globally distributed. And so as a leader or as a company, how does one figure out how to create a common way of working aligned to that purpose that you just mentioned? Joe, very important. How can we all attach to something that universally drives us all forward in an aligned fashion? That's another big challenge. We have the volatility of the macroeconomic conditions and then the return to work. We have the diversity of workforce. And then there's a question of this one. Is this classic? How do we continue to deliver value? What is value? Things change. You mentioned that things are going to change in six months. Things will change in three months. We're sitting here December 15, 2022, in three months. By March 15, by the end of March, things will change. Things will be very different. And so how do we keep track of our customers? This is like just as we have a diverse workforce, we have to be very clear about who our customers are and how we can deliver value to those customers.
[00:22:19.960] - Sanjiv Augustine
Other customers might be internal to our organization, they might be external to our organization or they might be both. But those are the three challenges that I see facing all of us at all levels of the organization.
[00:22:31.410] - PMO Joe
It seems as if perhaps we don't have control to be able to define or move the needle on any of those. Right. Some of those are outside our control. Certainly from a macroeconomic perspective and from a workforce perspective, I think it's almost a movement back to the power of unions where the power went back to the employees of an organization COVID created that unintended consequence. Right? It was an empowered employees within an organization to say, no, I can work remote and I'm just as effective as I've always been and you can't make me come back to work. Same point leadership, as Elon Musk has showed us recently, can say, well, then you can all go home because you're not going to work here. So great observation to be able to say how do we as organizations even function if we can't determine how we're going to work amongst one another? So, tying into that, I'm actually going to be a guest on a show tomorrow, so I may be done with my hosting, but I'm still talking to people and we talked a prep meeting yesterday about it and part of the discussion came up of the standard stupid agile versus waterfall discussion.
[00:23:42.320] - PMO Joe
And one of the other guests came up and said no organization is agile anyway, so it doesn't matter. Everybody has thought or an opinion on that. But I'm going to talk to an expert today on my show, so I'm going to ask him about this. Right? So all of those challenges organizations face, if we attach these silly labels, can we say an organization is agile? I mean, how do we attach a label like that to an organization?
[00:24:06.190] - Sanjiv Augustine
Yeah, it's kind of funny. We tend to glom onto things that are simple, simple things that are labels, and then more importantly, things that we can get tribal about and then fight with each other. I come from a different place. I come from a place that is we call it the Via Media or the VM media, which is the Middle East. Like, okay, there is no Agile, there's no waterfall. Start with the Deming if you're taking the lean inspiration or with Peter Drucker, or if you're taking the management inspiration and say management. Good management is timeless. Good management and delivery of customer solutions and value is timeless. And whatever the label of the day, figure out how it fits into these timeless practices. So I'm going to throw back. I'll give you something that you maybe can take on to your show tomorrow and say, okay, if there is a difference between Agile and waterfall, how come in the pinbox for as long back as I can remember, there's been something called rolling wave planning. Rolling wave planning is the older term, but it has the exact same concept and manifestation in Agile. In Agile, we have a longer term plan that's called a release plan.
[00:25:26.550] - Sanjiv Augustine
Or if you're doing this at scale Agile framework method like Safe, then we call it a Pi or Program Increment plan. It's a quarterly plan laid out over the long term. And then we have a shorter term plan. And the shorter term plan is meant to be an elaboration of the longer term plan. So rolling away planning been around forever. Is that term Agile? Is it water, polished? Either? Right. It is timeless management. Take the term progressive elaboration. Again, something that's been around for 20, 30, 40 years. Progressive elaboration, same concept. Take a higher level concept, break it down and progressively elaborate as you learn more as we go along. And so working in a circular fashion, as in the plan do check act, which is also in the pin block and has been for as long as I can remember, which is from Edwards Deming. Right. The quality improvement cycle. Just doing that quality improvement cycle, the plan do check act over and over again. That's the iteration that we talk about. So an Agile method would use the term iteration or sprint. But anybody who's been around and has been looking at these things from a different perspective recognize that within Agile, what we're doing is nothing but the Deming quality improvement cycle over and over again.
[00:26:47.140] - Sanjiv Augustine
So if you could kidnap somebody from the I don't know, that's not that's a violent term. If you transport somebody from a Deming shop in the 1950s or 1960s and then bring them and put them on an Agile team, they would look at it and say, yeah, this is kind of familiar. I'm from a different time and a different planet. Maybe but the techniques look similar, if not identical. So I tend not to want to attach any labels of agile versus waterfall. I think we're all committed to delivering customer value. I think for me, there are two inspirations that I seek, that I lean upon when it comes to process and project and all of that stuff. It comes to me from what comes to us from Lean and from Edwards Deming and Taichi Ono, and then from management, it's Peter Truck.
[00:27:38.850] - PMO Joe
And the reality is, again, my perspective on this, and I think I aligned pretty close with you, is we're trying to deliver a good or service. The organization already does that by producing the Widgets, whatever their widgets are. So they already have baked into their processes that we're a delivery organization of some kind. We should be transferring that sort of culture to the project side of the world as well, to be able to use, whether it's a Toyota manufacturing system or any of the other kind of spin offs of everything. At the core, they're all doing the same thing. They're just finding it or trying to find a more efficient way to be able to deliver which one fits best for your organization, which one fits best for your culture. So going back to the challenges, though, because I digressed a little bit on there and we've got some comments coming in, great insights on Jeev Zoya. Thank you for that comment. It's always great to know when our guests are getting value from this. So it's fantastic. But organizations have these challenges, right? You laid them out for us. And then there's kind of the executive leadership, which is visionary, the line workers for whatever role they're in, or the producers.
[00:28:51.430] - PMO Joe
And then there's a middle layer of the organization that's trying to work between both those levels. How does middle management come into play to try to resolve or work through those challenges that you had mentioned before?
[00:29:05.070] - Sanjiv Augustine
All right, so this one is near and dear to my heart, having written at least the latest book and maybe other stuff as well, publications that address this. So if we loosely break out a company by those layers, right? Executive management, middle management and teams or individual contributors. Quite often one of the challenges that we face is that even when our leaders, our executives are able to put in place a very good, clear and strategy at that executive level to say, well, we're going to compete with Company X, or we're going to compete with this particular issue. And here's our strategy laid out quite clear. There's a big gap in the chasm, if you will, between strategy and execution. Once our leaders lay out a strategy, can the organization move forward and execute on that strategy? And if you liken that to a car, you're sitting down in your car and you're getting ready to drive and you press your accelerator, that's our strategy. We want to. Move forward? Does the car move forward together in all directions and can you steer it as you go along? And strategy execution, you know where we want to go, we have our plan.
[00:30:29.400] - Sanjiv Augustine
When you press the foot down on the accelerator, does the organization move in the direction desired? And that's execution. And so many, many organizations, in fact, there are statistics that you can pull out from Harvard business review and all that, that show us that most organizations fail to deliver their strategy. Now where do they fail to deliver? One of the big issues is that many strategies, execution, fail to be executed at the middle management layer. And this is because teams of people can work together, but they can't necessarily find ways to be aligned with that strategy. So we have this issue in that there are two major problems with the way organizations are designed today or have sort of evolved today. One is most organizations have silos, unless you're a really small company, seven to nine silos between customer and in delivery impact on average seven to nine silos. So we have to deliver value across multiple silos. This might be business organizations like sales, marketing, legal, It organizations, development, test, infrastructure, such, and then deployment and stuff. So seven to nine silos. So we have to be able to deliver value across those silos and even flow.
[00:31:49.510] - Sanjiv Augustine
And that's coming back to our lean principles. Can we take figure out what that value is, something that we need to deliver our customers and then flow that value from stage to stage as quickly as possible. And that's a big challenge for that. Only middle management can solve because it can be solved in the executive levels, they're too far removed from the teams. It can be solved at the team level because they're far too down in the trenches. It has to be solved at that level above the teams. So getting value to flow from end to end is a huge issue that our middle management needs to be able to solve and we need to be able to pull middle management to solve that. The second problem that we have is in the height bound nature of our organization because a lot of us have come from a command and control type environment. It takes a long time for a decision to be made. So let's say you need a decision to be made on a team. You have to go to your boss who has to go to her boss, who has to go to her boss, and then that person has to go to their boss.
[00:32:52.940] - Sanjiv Augustine
And then once the decision is made, it has has to come all the way down. So we have this long latency or lead time to decisions. And so decision velocity is another huge hindrance or impediment to agility. So getting things to move quickly from start to finish across from customer to delivery and then getting decisions made quickly these are the two major challenges that middle management has to solve. And honestly, when we can do this, when we can enlist middle management and we can give them a value adding role to solve these problems, change management initiatives are much more successful. I believe there's a statistic somewhere out there that says 90% or more of the change management initiatives that are led by middle management succeed. So think about this. If you're able to get middle management engage in what we need to do, which is flow value from start to finish back and get decisions made up, up and down the chain, 90% of our change management initiatives will succeed. Yeah.
[00:34:01.890] - PMO Joe
And that aligns with PMI pulsar profession stat from a few years ago, about the highest indicator for project success with an 88% score on that was engaged executive sponsors. In the case of executive, it's just not necessarily meaning executive within the organization. So that certainly makes sense. Mazan, welcome joining us from he's on his way to DC. So maybe he's coming to see Yuzan Jeep. I don't know if he is or not.
[00:34:34.460] - Sanjiv Augustine
Well. He's from the UAE.
[00:34:35.890] - PMO Joe
Yeah, he's from Dubai and headed to DC. So that's great talking. As you were talking, a couple of things came to mind. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Morris Chang says, strategy without execution is useless and execution without strategy is aimless. So we find ourselves within organizations doing for some unknown reason and or we're failing on our ability to deliver strategy. So, yeah, it's very interesting to think of the flow through middle management and to be able to see how that comes into play. So then you get down one layer deeper. So you started organizational challenges. Now you just talked about the flow at middle management, but we're on a project management show. So where do project and program delivery, how does that fit into all of this?
[00:35:26.070] - Sanjiv Augustine
Yes. So our solution to that question, and I'll zone in on the organizational construct that we typically know as a project management office and in fact the name of the shows, PMO. So one of the things that we are recommending and advocating is to figure out how does a PMO fit into this newer organizational landscape, a more business friendly landscape, a more agile landscape, a more resilient landscape. And so I want to put in front of you, in front of our listeners, viewers, a few things. I think I have about four over here that are part and parcel of making that transition. And we say it's transitioning from a project management office to a value management office. And again, we're not big on the labels. It's like how do you transition from managing projects to delivering value? So the first thing we have to do is to look at the model and say there's an older project model which still is useful for delivery, for strategy, for many, many things. The project model is still there. But if you look at many things within product delivery, product management, there is a newer product model. So transitioning from a project model to a product model is key.
[00:36:55.890] - Sanjiv Augustine
And so as we look at transitioning from a project management office to a value management office, the first thing we should do is say, okay, how do I get my hand around this idea of what a project was? Or what is? We say a project is something with a definitive star than a definite event. That's our classic project management definition. Well, what if once we have the definitive start, we don't have a definite event and things just need to be sustained. Our team needs to be sustained, our product needs to be sustained. Take a look at Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint, anything like that. There are probably people who have been on the team for the last 1520 years, right? So there are certain pieces of work, certain solutions, certain goods that we deliver that are better suited for product model. And so as we transition from a project management office to a VMO, we have to get our heads around that what is the project model? What's the product model? And then whatever the model is, whether it's this project or a product, there's something that comes to lean from lean that I think all of us should glam onto and pick up and that is moving from large batches to small batches.
[00:38:12.190] - Sanjiv Augustine
We have this tendency and it comes from a fear, I think. I think we sort of tend to fall into analysis, paralysis. Even when we're starting a project, a regular project, we say, well, what is everything that could ever happen? What is everything that we could ever need? And we're just going to spend three months planning this thing out. And then once we spend three months planning this out, we're going to spend one year building this thing out. Because we have this whole list of requirements that we came up with and the whole list of requirements and list of things that we have to deliver is driven by fear. It's driven by fear of will we get everything right? Do we have everything we need? And will my customers be happy? And so that's this large batch way of thinking. Now in today's world, because things are moving so much faster, it's much better to say what is the smallest piece of value that I can deliver to my customers as quickly as possible? And then I want to be able to validate that or invalidate that, figure out what is something the smallest piece of value.
[00:39:16.680] - Sanjiv Augustine
We call it a minimum marketable product or an MMP. And then we'll take it delivered to our customers and do validate it. Now, we still have a longer term plan, but we also have a short term plan. Remember that Rolling wave plan and the progressive collaboration we talked about? This is it. This is where we apply it. We say, well, if you have a longer term plan, but among that longer term plan, which is the large batch, I want to figure out the smallest batch of value that will make sense to my customers that would add value to them. So the second transition that we have to look at is this large batch to small batch. The third transition that we have to make sure that we go through is to track outcome, business outcome or business value, if you will, and not just outputs. Again, if you boil it down to Waterfall, Agile, Waterfall will say, well, I have requirements and Agile will say, Well, I have user stories. Doesn't matter. Set that to rest children, they'll stop fighting. What we need to do is to understand what are the outcomes that our customers want or what do we want?
[00:40:18.460] - Sanjiv Augustine
If you take a business and we're looking at customer outcomes, we're typically looking at increased revenue or increased profits, if you will. We're looking at lower costs, we're looking at customer satisfaction and we're looking at things like innovation. Those are customer outcomes. And the outcomes, whether we want to call them features or we want to call them user stories or we're delivering our service, we call them tickets. It doesn't matter. That's for those are for the teams. So the transition that we have to go through is to make sure that we're tracking outcomes and we're tracking the delivery of value to those outcomes, not just the outcomes. All right, firstly, the last transition, or in this thing, the fourth one I want to make sure we cover is to transition from command and control management, top down management, if you will, to leadership and collaboration. As individuals, as members of our team, as managers, as leaders, as executives. We live in a world where that resilience that we're seeking, both individual and organizational, comes to us by virtue of really good business focused collaboration. So how can we transition from a point of view where I'm the boss, you know, my way of the highway, thou shalt do, give me 50 soldier kind of thing to let's do this thing together.
[00:41:40.900] - Sanjiv Augustine
Here's the vision, even if that's coming from me, here's what the strategy and here's the direction that we need to move now. How can we work together to make sure that happens? And that's the leadership collaboration. So, in a nutshell, project to product mindset, change large batch to small batch, tracking outcomes towards value, delivery value, not just outputs. And then transitioning from command and control to leadership collaboration.
[00:42:08.170] - PMO Joe
I love it. It's weird because you can say so many different things, different ways, but have the same core context to it. For instance, with PMO squad, we've rebranded PMO to be purpose measure, optimize. So it's following almost the exact same tenants that you just talked about, but just a different path to follow to get there. Right? It doesn't matter if we're a project office or a program office or a portfolio office. In the old way of thinking, I should describe it, right, and move to product.
[00:42:42.100] - Sanjiv Augustine
Absolutely.
[00:42:42.500] - PMO Joe
If that makes sense for your organization, you should be doing that. But call that out, identifying and make sure everybody's on that same page and then get to ultimately down to the lowest level of work to be able to empower those people, to be able to go deliver. Because if they can't, then everybody suffers. And how do you know if they're delivering the outcomes you need? You have to measure them. Right? So you've laid this out, this mindset into this four stepped approach, which I think is pretty powerful to be able to capture if people can pick up on this. I think you mentioned before there was a book. Have you written a book on this for people who want to be able to go capture these thoughts after the show as well?
[00:43:26.290] - Sanjiv Augustine
Yes, absolutely. It's pretty simple. The name of the book is From PMO to VMO managing for Value Delivery. It's on Amazon. Or you can do the website lightspeed.com and there's a page that will take you there.
[00:43:39.820] - PMO Joe
All right, so here's the other part of this, right? So this has been a discussion in a lot of the circles I travel, the VMO, the SRO, the PMO. What's your thoughts on all of this? Right? How can an Agile value management office or a strategy realization office or a project management office, whatever something ending in O is, how do they help get that four step approach to be able to deliver value? Because ultimately that's what everybody wants to do, right, is deliver the value. How does that happen?
[00:44:15.810] - Sanjiv Augustine
So another resource, I'm assuming that a lot of the listeners and the viewers of this show are members of the PMI, correct project.
[00:44:23.670] - PMO Joe
Absolutely.
[00:44:24.610] - Sanjiv Augustine
So there's a great article, I want to say, like last year, written by Scott Ambler. He's one of the authors of the Disciplined Agile Methodology along with Mark Lines and worked for the last couple of years as part of the PMI. And he actually wrote an article, and maybe I'll dig it up and send it to you so that you can send it out to your viewers later. But he addressed this very topic, PMOs what's the future? BMOs SRO SROs. What is it? So I would direct folks to that article on the PMI website, this ProjectManagement.com, just search for Scott Ambler, PMO and it'll come up. And I want to come back to that middle way. It's not about the labels personally, I'm attached to the label with PMO. That's my personal preference. Other people might be still attached to the label, PMO or SRO. Let's look at these four things. What's the work to be done, the jobs to be done for any group, any middle management group, whether we call them an SRO, A, PMO, VMO. Are these four things the project to product mindset, transition large batch to small batches, tracking outcomes and not outputs, not just outputs.
[00:45:35.780] - Sanjiv Augustine
And moving from command and control to leadership collaboration. So, honestly, I think my personal opinion is that it's a waste of time for to argue or fight about labels and what we want to call this let's call it a team of teams. That's what General Stanley McCrystal calls it. Calls it a team of teams. People come together. You talk to the military analogy. People we're doing this stuff in the military for, again, a lot longer than we realize. The civilian industry, the Navy Seals, the Marines, Special Forces, they all work this way. And General Stanley McCrystal has a book out there. He calls it the team of teams. So call it the team of teams. If you're fighting over Lake, you had.
[00:46:15.850] - PMO Joe
Talked before about empowering people and middle management trying to move into different obstacles. There's a great case study organization out there. The Ritz Carlton, right, has an empowerment policy in place that any employee they call them ladies and gentlemen, as opposed to employees. But any employee for them is empowered to spend up to $2,000 without any approval to solve a customer issue. They've taken the executive mindset of customer service down to the lowest level. And you can be a front desk clerk, and you run into an issue, customer isn't happy, you don't have to go ask for that approval. Go deliver it. That's that team of teams concept. I'm empowering the smallest team within our organization to go deliver a solution that satisfies our customer. And often when we have these discussions and industry forums, we just came back from the PMI Global Summit, and people are talking about these things. What I loved about your four steps is it connected them. People want to have them individual discussions about them and don't put them into the context of all of them belong together. Right? If you're focused on outputs as opposed to outcomes, but you're not thinking about the team, you're not thinking about the smaller level of work, and you're not thinking about the value that you're delivering, it doesn't matter because they all have to go together.
[00:47:35.730] - PMO Joe
That's the whole point of what you're trying to say, right, is it's a continuum between them. It's not just one or the other. It's one. And and that gives you the output you're looking for or the outcome that you're looking for. We started with the challenges. We addressed middle layers. We then brought project delivery and managers into that. We talked about value Management office. But how do you build one? How do you get the organization to actually do right? If they recognize these challenges and recognize these opportunities to have solutions, how do we go about implementing and building to make sure that it's going to be possible to have longevity and success with it?
[00:48:18.160] - Sanjiv Augustine
Yeah, sure. Before I jump into the answer I want to pick up that example. If you just mentioned Joe, the Ritz Carlton $2,000, I can get something that's an example of taking decisions and delegating them down to the lowest level and the way of moving from command and control to leadership collaboration and a way to completely accelerate decision making velocity. I imagine the decision making at Ritz Carlton because of this one rule is maybe five times the speed of the competitors. So just want to point that out and think about how valuable that's a.
[00:48:49.310] - PMO Joe
Practical way on top of that. So what's the outcome that they get? I think it's five of the last six years they've been the number one luxury brand hotel for customer satisfaction. They're achieving what they want and they found to get there.
[00:49:04.480] - Sanjiv Augustine
All right, so how do we set up an Agile VM? If we're implementing Agile using a Scaled Agile methodology, there's Discipline Agile within the PMI, there's Scrum at scale, there's large scale Scrum. And largely here within the United States, we have something called scaled Agile or safe. Now all of these groups have some provision for an organizational construct. Safe, for example, would call it a lean, agile TMO. We call it the VMO. The Valley Management Office. Right? That's our term over there. And what we want to do is to set up a group of people that are one level above the teams but still includes team members. We call these folks linking pins. So we want to make sure that we get folks from our teams. This could be a project manager if it's an Agile method Scrum, it could be a Scrum Master, the business focus person, like a product owner, a lease manager, in test, lead and lead engineer. But whoever's down and making a difference at a team and needs to be pulled in when it comes to dependency management. So if we start to put that lens of dependency management on across teams, I want to make sure that I can pull into my team of teams at least one or two key people who can help create the visibility of what's happening on their team to other teams.
[00:50:30.140] - Sanjiv Augustine
So we have these linking pins, one or two people from each team and then we say just like we've pulled in folks from the team level, we also want to pull in people from the executive level. Remember we talked about linking strategy to execution? Well, I want to get a stakeholder or sponsor a business sponsor and it sponsor. Typically there's a senior vice president, maybe MC level if we can get them and both business and It, and maybe they don't have a lot of time, but at least once a month can we get with them and bring them into our meetings? And then to run our Value Management office, we have a value Management a VMO director, Tvmo sponsor, somebody who's setting direction for that. So these are specific roles on that well, whatever it is, let's pull this group of people and let's focus them on two things. And I'm going to move to a tactical way of speaking, if you will, and maybe put in some agile and project management terms. But the main part of work, or main parts of work that has to happen are the two big charters of work.
[00:51:34.050] - Sanjiv Augustine
One is something that we call lean portfolio management and the other is adaptive governance. Some people might think that governance is a four letter word context. No, you can't be successful. We cannot be successful unless we incorporate lighter forms of governance that keep us out of the papers, that reduce our risk, that keep us secure. And so I want to start there with the governance piece. And I'm going to leave or share something over here. It's a five letter acronym. It's Carla. C-A-R-L-A. Just like the name. Compliance, Audit, Risk, Legal and Architecture. Compliance audit risk, legal and architecture. These are all elements of adaptive governance. We need to bring all these people in, make it part of our VMO. We need to look at all of our governance regulatory constraints and we need to figure out how to incorporate those things in our progressive, elaboration Iterative mindset incremental release type delivery. That's the adaptive governance side. And then bringing it back to the project, to product. Delivering the value. There is a fairly well established or growing discipline that's called lean portfolio management. Again, taking the lean practices and techniques and applying them to our portfolio work.
[00:52:59.510] - Sanjiv Augustine
Because once we get above the TV level, we're talking about a portfolio work that has to be linked to business outcomes, has to be measured by financial performance. And we want to focus those small batches of work, we call them MMPs, right? Minimum marketable products. We want to get them as quickly as possible from start to finish, from idea to deliver to outcome. And we want to be able to measure the value that we deliver with those. So if we're talking about figuring out all the work that we need to do, and this could be across multiple teams, multiple programs, and sometimes multiple portfolios, we need a very structured and disciplined way of managing that portfolio. So let's make the work in the portfolio visible. Let's make sure that we can prioritize that, and our sponsors and stakeholders are going to help us do that and then chunk those pieces of value that we have to deliver in that portfolio. Rather than keeping it at the project level, let's bring it down to a smaller incremental level into smaller pieces like we call MMPs or product increments. Prioritize those, deliver those, measure those, all of that element, that discipline, if you will, are all parts of lean portfolio management.
[00:54:13.550] - Sanjiv Augustine
So our group of people, if I want to just kind of reiterate, we want this cross functional, cross silo, cross hierarchy, group of people, team of teams. We want team members in that group, we want executive members in that group, we want business folks in that group, we want it folks in that group, and then we want to focus them on adaptive governance and lean portfolio management.
[00:54:35.910] - PMO Joe
So we have covered a lot in this show and we're coming up on our our time here at the hour. And and certainly this is this is like a five hour discussion if we really wanted to keep going, but unfortunately we're we're bound by time a little bit. But a great introduction, I think, to the concepts that you and the organization bring to your clients in the mindset that you have when you get there. And I think what's important that you had said before is the labels aren't as important as to what you're doing, right, how you're doing that work. So for me, it's been great to be able to get your perspective on this. Even though your organization has a slightly different mindset and purpose than we do at the PMO squad, we both are actually going after the same thing. This is what I like about this show is we can bring in these different thoughts but really have common beliefs on how to get there and what to do. So it's really been fun to listen to all that before we wind down. Sanji, anything else we didn't get to that you'd like to COVID or how can folks get in touch with you if they want to kind of continue the discussion with you and learn more about your mindset approach and what your organization does?
[00:55:47.890] - Sanjiv Augustine
Well, the easiest way to get in touch with me is Google. Google is all of our friends, so if you can just Google Sanjiv Augustine, it'll pull to our website lightspeed.com. Of course, there's the book and all that out there, but I just want to make sure that I thank you, Joe, and it is somewhat bittersweet. It was a little surprised when you told me that you're wrapping up everything and finish it. So I feel honored and privileged. I think you've had an illustrious run, a great run over here, so thank you. I just feel extraordinarily privileged to be this last live guest on the show and hopefully capture a lot of this stuff for posterity. Awesome.
[00:56:23.720] - PMO Joe
Well, thank you so much, Sanjiv. It's been great to have you and I think our audience really is going to enjoy the show because you brought so much good quality content to it. Encourage everybody to reach out to Sanjiv, either out on social media or within life speed as the organization as well. Certainly want to say thank you to all of our listeners. Right. After five years and 40 plus million people who've downloaded or played shows, I know it's been fantastic for some folks to be able to have this as a go to show to listen to. I was just mentioning before the show to our producer, Darryl. Yesterday, somebody had reached out and said, hey, I'd like to be a guest on your show and let them know we weren't having any more guests. And then another individual had said he had heard I was canceling the show, and he's like, no, I listen to that show all the time. You can't cancel. I don't think we're canceling. Right. We're just moving on to the next adventure. So certainly thank you to all of our listeners over the years. Thank you to everybody who has supported the podcast.
[00:57:22.660] - PMO Joe
I may be the person that's out in front of the microphone, but the team of teams right there is a team behind us that makes all of this possible. So Darryl and Karen and everybody back in Atlanta, Tom and Angie and all those folks and everybody who has stepped in over the years to assist all of our guests, thank you to everyone. It's been fantastic. All the shows are recorded as podcasts, so they're out there forever. They're not going anywhere. Certainly welcome and invite everybody to subscribe to Project Management Office Hours on your favorite podcast platform. And thank you to the PMO squad and the PMO leader for the sponsorship over the years. Without their support would not be possible. And for the final time, that's it for now. Office Hours are closed until next time or not. I'm PMO Joe, and you've been listening to Project Management office hours.
[00:58:18.090] - Announcer
Thanks for listening to another episode of Project Management office Hours with PMO. Joe. You're not alone in your project management journey. We're here to help you achieve your goals. Subscribe to Project Management Office Hours on your favorite podcast platform to catch all of our episodes and hear industry leaders share their story and secrets to success.