Leading Successful Transformations with Distributed Teams
Transcript
foreign [Music] [Applause] thanks for joining in I am Katina Ross coming to you today to talk to you a little bit about project management the three areas that I want to cover today will be mature your project management office establishing a data-driven project management office and the increasing demand for project managers with soft skills so project management is something I love I've been doing it for a little over 20 years now and it is the one field and the one area where you get the complete
satisfaction of starting a project ending a project and doing it in a way that allows you to be effective and bring value to the company so let's just Dive Right In the first area I want to talk to you about is maturing your pmo there are so many articles out there and so many things to read and I believe it all to be true but I just want to talk to you about it from my perspective over the last 20 years I've had the privilege of
making mistakes and the privilege of having some victories on how to properly mature a PML office there are three areas that I love to tap into just a little bit on this call and I'm sure there are many more that apply but the first one is building strategic relationships I know many people focus a lot on aligning to the company's initiatives which I think is also very important but building those strategic relationships are going to be extremely important in maturing that pmo office why I believe
wholeheartedly that you know managing projects is the easy part working with people and the skills it takes to build relationships is where it's very difficult and a pmo office has to be very strategic in building relationships some of the most important things that I do when I first come in is understand the Departments that I'm working with and how they operate understanding your clients and customers and how they operate brings a level of trust to your pmo office and trust me as a project manager and
I know many of you project managers can relate to this you want to build trust after you've established those relationships is going to allow you to be able to effectively run projects and lead your teams the second thing that's really important is coming in to understand how do they operate today A lot of times we may have situations where people are eager to get in and make change and change is good but change is difficult for most people and in order for you to be effective
in that change you want to make sure you understand how they currently operate today so that you can effectively look for your quick wins and then build on that to be able to establish new processes what I find is that most people are afraid to change and they push back on change which then in turn put project managers in a position where when they're trying to put policy and procedure in place and establish governance they get a lot of pushback you'll probably get less pushback if
you go into it with a little empathy and compassion because people have been operating and running from day to day and if we're coming in trying to now establish something new we got to make sure we have contacts and understand where people are coming from the third thing that's really important is to align your pmo to some form of change management or organizational change management some may ask why is this important goes back to what I said earlier change is hard change is hard for anyone
while I am a person who Embraces change it does not change the fact that it's also hard for me and what I mean by that is that when you are establishing new processes and procedures not only are you dealing with people's emotion raw emotions about that change but you also have to make sure that you're communicating effectively across the organization and a lot of times the reason why pmo offices are not as effective as they can be is because they're not joined together with a team
of people who are really good at breaking down that change training people and my most important one is helping people to adopt to change adapting to change is really critical why because a lot of times you'll find that individuals understand what you're asking them to do but we haven't put anything in place to measure their ability to adapt to that change and that's really important from that you get a lot of critical data and feedback that'll help you to be more effective so leading right into
my second point which is how to establish or build a data-driven pmo office we all know that data is moving fast and one of the things that I think is going to help us to be able to establish our value as a project management office is to really make sure that we're using data to make really good solid decisions and what I mean by that is one of my favorite sayings when I'm running the pmo office is let's don't make an emotional response let's make a
data-driven response how do you do that glad you asked well one you need to identify your company's data sources this is really important a lot of times companies have data everywhere and it's usually data that they don't know is important to the rest of the company their data pockets all throughout an organization a good project manager will come in they will interview their customers and clients they will understand exactly where that data is coming from and then they will establish the tool sets required to be
able to dig into that data and what I mean by that is joining together with your it team or your it professionals or your data governance team to be able to come in and say here are the data sources how do we bring this data together to be able to create some type of insights that will allow us to be able to go out and make really good decisions as a company if you ever want to get a CEO on a speed or happy about what
you're doing presenting data in a way that will tell the story I think that's so important because we don't want to just say hey I think we need this or hey this is how people are feeling or hey here's where I think the company needs to be able to move we want to have the dashboards the insights the in the data intelligence to be able to communicate effectively to our c-suite and to our managers so after you've been able to identify the sources of that data
next thing you want to do is explore it and analyze it data will tell you a lot of information data will provide you a lot of opportunities to open up other doors and to create other avenues for change because at the end of the day for your project to be effective for you to be able to move as a project manager you have to make sure that you're understanding how the company is really performing how the company is really doing and the only way to do
that is through data and then I think one of the other and critical things is making sure that we got the right Tools in place to be able to tell the story project management tools are going far beyond just being able to manage a project and find a critical task and determine who the owners and due dates are we need tools that will provide us dashboards and and insights into exactly what it is that we're trying to move from point A to point Z so data
driven pmos are becoming extremely critical to the organization and it's something that we should be highly focused on as we begin to move throughout this year and the years to come and the last thing that I want to talk to you about is soft skills project managers and soft skills and then I'm going to tie all these together right now we have our Market is flooded with project managers and I think it's awesome I am able to find many project managers in the field who are
certified with their PMP who have all the technical skills I mean we're starting to see engineers and Technical folks who are turning to PMS but one of the areas as a manager that I get concerned with is I don't have people who have good leadership skills all the time and presentation skills and negotiation skills these are three critical soft skills that are going to help a project manager to move quickly in their career and also to help project managers lead their teams effectively let's talk about
leadership skills that is a term that is can mean a lot but what I mean when I say leadership skills I'm talking about those servant leaders the ones that come in they're looking to help they have empathy they have compassion for all the work that's happening around them and I think that is a really good thing to have not to the point where it's crippling but to the point where it's helping those around us to know we understand we empathize with you and we're able to
come together with you and collaborate to complete the task the second thing is presentation skills more and more I am starting to see the value of PowerPoint presentations and being able to tell your story and this goes back to point two they kind of go hand in hand when you have all that data when you have all that information flowing you need to be able to tell the story and a lot of times you're telling that story through the art of presentation being able to get
in front of a c-suite in front of your managers and your leaders within the company and present to them what you've learned presented to them how a project is moving and how effective it is these presentation skills are extremely important but I'm finding that it's something that's very difficult for a lot of PMS and then the third one this was really big for me um is the negotiation skills just a quick story at one of my previous companies um I had become good friends with one
of the sales guys and I loved the way he moved about the company and how he handled our customers he wasn't a slick salesman or anything like that the thing that I appreciated about him is he was able to come in and help the customers to understand what they didn't know they needed and I thought that was really cool he also was really good at give and take hey I understand that this is what you want to do but in order for us to get there
how about we do this as well he was really skillful at his negotiation and it helped me to see it was a skill set that I've never learned it was a skill set that I just didn't have as a project manager I thought my skill set was this is what we need to do and let's get it done while that's true I also have to understand not every department is going to be able to march to that order so to speak so being able to negotiate
and and use that as an art form to move a project along its path is super critical it was a skill set that I quickly picked up on by no means am I a salesperson and I know how to go in and negotiate deals but I have picked up on skill sets that will allow me to be a little bit softer in my finesse and my approach to working with different clients and helping them um to get what they need to get done so I say
all that to say hey you want to mature your pmo you want to get it to where it needs to be start being more data driven focus on those soft skills and you will build a stellar project management office thank you guys for tuning in I'm Katina Ross I look forward to talking to you more in the comments have a great day [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
