GSD Podcast - Project Management as an Art with Randy Cox
We cover Project Management in depth - when to use what methodology, best metrics to track project health, Agile vs Waterfall, and lots more!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/randy-cox-ms-pmp-pmi-acp-csm/
Transcript:
Jeff 00:11
All right, this is Jeff Kushmerek here and I'm here with Randy rain, watch introduce. The funniest thing here is that you're the first person that I didn't like work with for like 10 years on the podcast, which is exactly what I wanted. Because I you know, everybody's been in this like insular Boston community thing. And, and we have a lot of the same shared experiences, and I'm sure people are like, Endeca. Again, really listen to your podcasts.
Randy Cox 01:31
I'm like, he knows everybody back there.
Jeff 01:38
So why don't you tell me? You know, the reason? You know why. So anyways, we've we met because we sort of part of a mutual sort of a mastermind thing, which we won't talk about here, anybody can reach out to me, but met really lots of great, powerful and hardworking people through that. And, and we had a mutual friend that was connected on LinkedIn, and he liked one of your podcast episodes. And I checked it out. I'm like, Yes, this is exactly what I'm talking about. This is an expert in project management. And through through the real, you know, I'll prep it and sort of hand it over to you. But the thing that really attracted me to want to chat with you, is that you cover the realm of project management, sort of ways of doing things. I'm no, I'm missing terms here. But you know, some people got the PMP license, and they're like, I'm PMP, right? And some people are like, everything's a pendulum, swing, right? Shift. And it's like, no, no, I'm Scrum, real project plans and everything like that. So. So without making it sound like a job interview, I'd love for you to take me sort of through those phases. Because I think back in the day, we all were I was I didn't do PMP. But I was I was like one notch below that. My classic joke was like, Well, I'm not playing the space shuttle watch. So I don't need to be a PM. Versus being lazy.
Randy Cox 03:04
You have to put together so yeah. I'm reading Seth Godin book right now. And he suggests that we try to describe ourselves in a horizontal and a vertical axis. In a diagram, kind of, you know, he's big on finding your niche niche and trying to trying to go after a particular segment, not that not the first segment of the bell curve, but you know, like, go out to the tail and then own a piece of the tail. And so if I had to do that, I think what I would do, my horizontal axis would be probably what you describe, which is, first of all, I started out in business analysis. So I was a business analyst, classic. And I think that's a fantastic place. You want to go into project space. So I started back in the back in the day when agile didn't exist. So if you're looking at a horizontal axis, the going left to right, the left side of that might be you're a single dimensional project manager, meaning you are like you just said you're absolutely a scrum person or an agile person or a PMP or waterfall or critical chain or whatever. You're you have one dimension. Yep, maybe a black belt in karate, right? But you just teach karate. Right? Then the right side of that horizontal axis might be you're a mixed martial artists. You got karate you got Muay Thai, you got jujitsu, you got the whole game, right? And that's kind of what I've tried to do. I've got six certifications in this I've tried to do. I've covered the edge. I've learned something from every single one of them, you know? Yeah, I understand the Agile stuff. I understand the PMP though old school stuff I understand how PMP tried to mold the Agile stuff in which I like the critical chain the and and base Typically, what is interesting is at the end of that you get this kind of Gestalt, you get this mosaic of? Where are the similarities? Where are the differences, and there's value in all of us. So I like to think that the artistry of what we do is to come to a situation with a very big toolkit and see what that situation needs. And then bring out the right tool for that situation or that right setup. situation. Yep, what I often see is that people are newly minted, whatever. And, and they, what's happening is they do their thing, on that, on whatever situation they're in, they're gonna roll out Agile, they're gonna roll out the 10 knowledge areas, they're gonna roll out, they're gonna do this thing that they've learned, and not taking advantage of, you know, that might not be appropriate for this situation, there might be another or there might be some hybrid kind of a thing. So I definitely see myself on the horizontal axis, I'm on the far right, I'm, I'm not a single dimensional, I'm multi dimensional, like I can, I can do it this way, that way, the other way and combine them and Malia
Jeff 06:13
that's, that's, that's super helpful. And the funny story I tell on that is, we started getting into a little bit and I was like, Oh, well, I'll just, I'll just save it for the pocket where I went off and got my scrum certification and then convinced our group leader to switch our professional services methodology over to to Scrum. And then we got Scrum works as this nice tool, and just remembered, you know, showing it off, and I think it was Ford, where will I go, and then we manage the backlog. And we drag this into here. And if you ever want something, we measure the points out and they're like, hey, that's cute. I need a project plan. I was like, you gotta project blank.
Randy Cox 06:53
Yeah, there's I, I also teach. And if, if there was a vertical axis on my chart, the bottom of the axis might be people who are in the certification prep world, okay. That's where most of the that's where most of that's coming from is like most of the people in this space that are trainers are teaching you how to pass a test. And it's basically you come to them, and they teach you how to pass an exam. And I remember when I was preparing for some of these certs, I was sitting, and he was throwing out scenarios. And he's like, What would you do? And I was telling what I would do another guy would tell what he was doing. And he's like, okay, timeout, he goes in the real world. That's exactly what you would do all good answers. But we're here to learn what is the pin box that you should do in this scenario, you're not here to talk about what you would really do. We're here to say, What's in that book, you're here to learn what's in them. And that was a big realization for me that, okay, it's, it's useful, and it's, these frameworks are good, but it's not necessarily that if you get a certification, you're prepared for the real world, right? I think it does help you because every legs every time I have 60, so I found value in all of them. But it's, it's not like it's, you can be a newly minted whatever, and not have the common sense to be able to just put it into into practice. Yep. If there was a vertical axis, the bottom of that axis might be people who you come to them to get trained on certification. And I've gone to the top of the axis and said, I come to you, and I help you customize your solution. And I train you in this whole breadth of stuff, based on what you mean. You know,
Jeff 08:33
that's, that's 100% Perfect. And matter of fact, that Ken swaybar, I believe the guy who wrote the original number came to our company, because we were having issues with with Scrum implementing in the sort of real world. And when we were walking him through some of the things, he was held up the book, and he at the time, he said, This is 10 years old, right? It's a good book. But in order to make this correct, you need to mold this to your organization. And you know, you just can't say, well, Scrum says we can meet today, we've already met and like, but it's like, shits on fire everywhere. Like, you're gonna have a meeting about it. And I might talk even though I have a check him, right, so, so he was really, you know, the guy who wrote the book said that and I was like, gotcha, it's a template, but you need to begin.
Randy Cox 09:25
We get religious, yeah, about a methodology and people fight over. You know, should I use Scrum? You know, should they use points or ideal days or all these things and then the people who are just there's so much ego investment in some of these things, but if you talk to the like, the founders like Alistair Coburn is here in Salt Lake City and actually, I'm pointing out to my right here but the the manifesto was written here. That's always a really Oh my God. Number is gears are just right down the road. And there's Alistair talks about Shu ha ri in his book, which is a Japanese Japanese terms, and basically talks about when you are, like, I'll use karate because I did that as a kid, like when you start out and whatever it is, whether it's karate or, or with project management processes or whatever. The thing is, you just got to learn the exact tell me exactly what a horse stance is, and how am I supposed to move my hand and just tell me what to do. And you're trying to get your awkward body to fit into how they want you to move and all that you have no idea of why you're doing what they're saying, Do what's being told, that's kind of the shoe, if I'm interpreting him, right. And then the HA, the middle layer is kind of like, okay, I've got some of that, that muscle memory down. I'm starting to understand why do we? why did why did we rotate our fists when we punch? Why do we punch with the first two knuckles and not the last year, you start to understand some of the meaning behind it. And then the last level, is when you get to this highest level is now you start to you've got a level of mastery. And I can't remember what book it was. But it's called the adjacent possible there's this idea of this adjacent possible that when you get from the top of this mountain, you now see the adjacent parts of you now see what you now see that that mountain to the left, and that mountain to the right, and you start to have this Venn diagram start to go on. And you start to see how similar we are in so many different ways. And then you start to see the important differences. And then you start to be able to combine and blend, right? I that was impossible if you were down at the bottom of the metal layer. And you can't, you can't even have those thoughts on your way up. Because you're just so overwhelmed with memorization. And yeah.
Jeff 11:55
Am I correct in saying that, it seems like through the training, and then eventually the application, you start gaining this perspective. And you're able to then merge,
Randy Cox 12:06
you start to arrive at a place where you're like, Okay, I know what the books, all the books say? Yeah. Now I know why they say that. And I now even understand the first principles is where were they coming from? When they made that decision? Right, would have made this other decision, but they chose over here or two people were on different sides of the planner, having the same thought and they came up with two different solutions, but they're really trying to solve the same problem. And, and then you start to see, at the end of the day, the CEO, they just want to get the project done.
Jeff 12:40
Absolutely. You just want to talk in my life,
Randy Cox 12:44
on scope, on schedule on budget, I'm happy, I really don't care. If I'm a C level, if you follow it, I don't care your methodology. Right. We in and I have to get that project done. Because it's a means to an end, I have some business, you know, goal that I have to be absolutely, absolutely. That's what I think the rest like my I've kind of gotten to a point in my career now where I've, I'm turning around now. And instead of me directly managing everything, which you know, I've managed a project and then I manage five projects, and I manage a portfolio and then a program and write on the wall. And then finally, it's now well there's a whole lot of millennials coming up. And there are people in their mid 20s and 30s actually who like they are they want to learn how to manage projects. And so now I'm turning my attention to my career to being a coach. Yeah, then, and then also an advisor and then a consultant and a trainer to kind of basically teach. So
Jeff 13:49
we're gonna we're so let's take that off. And by the way, you just made a question pop up into my head, which I have a little bit we touched on the agenda, but you really made me think because for some reason I keep getting tagged and Cora as like you, somebody wants you to answer this question. And it's like, how would you know, I'm sure they tag a bunch of people. And it's sort of like, what's the first step in becoming a project manager and I'm like, Oh, my God, I don't even know what it's like. And now having that conversation, and originally I was like, well go become a business analyst. But it's not really that. I am trying to do that larger thinking that you're sort of talking about right here. Is that what you're doing now? Or like you're talking to people and you're trying to define the situation? And then you put in what you think is the best situation? Are you giving them sort of this foundational layer for them to choose from?
Randy Cox 14:42
It's a variety of things. There's, there's scenarios I'm brought in where they have somebody who's their designated project manager or scrum master, whatever, none of them have got a certification, some of them don't. And yet, they still don't necessarily know how to apply it. In their particular weird You know, dynamics and they and people don't like you said earlier, it was really a student that people don't necessarily feel like they can mold this. And like, basically what you have are principles. And that's the whole idea of the retrospective is take, right, what didn't work, work, what didn't work. And the idea is like, if, if you if you take a retrospective seriously, and you say you take the feedback in you modify your operating system to accommodate it, you try it, you experiment, some things work, some things don't, then what will happen is over time, your particular flavor of Scrum or whatever you're using will become unique to your organization. But it will work. Right? So like, what I've done here, we had to modify, like, for example, the whole daily stand up thing, I tried to do it, the vanilla way just to see what happened failed miserably. Modified and now it's like, awesome. It'd be in a textbook anywhere, right? I've even thought about
Jeff 16:00
I don't know if I'm just curious, how did it fail miserably. Like, I haven't seen standards fail too bad, except for when people just don't want to talk. But
Randy Cox 16:07
there's a there's a culture here of I think we had to first adopt a culture of accountability and transparency. That wasn't in play. There was the folks here were used to working in their own little bubble. Yep. And they were very, very good technicians. And they were very good about being accurate. But there was some challenges with being on time. And so what we've, you know, like, people don't just need what they need, they need it within a Utility window, that will solve some problem. And if they get the result, but they get it late, it's like, sometimes they don't need it, right. And so I had to I was bringing along this idea of account of getting like the timeliness factor. And to do that, I believe in making things transparent, making like Visual Project Management, and coming together, and then opening the kimono to say, this is what I'm working on, what are you working on, I'm about to have a handoff for me to you, or whatever you wear that all that kind of stuff that facilitates getting things done. And that was very, very new here. Like everything if it was a whole different culture. I was I wasn't as my spidey senses hadn't been calibrated yet, of to that. So I was trying to implement a set of practices that assume a certain cultural, some cultural mores that didn't exist.
Jeff 17:34
So you're kind of like you're running a project, you assume people get assigned five points, they're gonna get that five points and before the end of the sprint, but as I've seen, if people aren't used to that, they're like, Oh, it'll just slide but I'll just get it done on the next sprint. Right? Yeah. I mean, I've seen that so much. And it's funny, because none of the people I've talked to before, would ever say that was like a services versus product thing. But it's more of a personality and more of a culture thing. Our only difference, I think, in professional services versus you know, everything else is that your customer will just like, just yell and scream at you and not pay you. If you don't if you don't do things on time and on budget and everything like that, which by the way, if I'll share out to you, I don't know if you saw that hurts Accenture. thing they have backup. I'll send it to you. And maybe it's funny, I might do a little roundtable on this later, but Accenture is being sued by $30 million. By hurts for like, as I would say, number of projects six ways to Sunday. But yeah, I will always say that the client, if it gets that bad, the clients get some ownership in that as well, too. But for another time, but yeah, it's it's a fascinating read. So
Randy Cox 18:51
I thought about like doing a podcast of real world application, like interviewing people and saying how does okay, you say you're an agile shop? How does it really work? Yeah, in your shop, and have somebody else and how does it really and find out that it really does work? But it works different? Like it's, it's Yeah,
Jeff 19:12
different you know, good. I was thinking of hoping again into some of that was it was some of these but yeah, it's worked on different things. So let's let's um, switch into one of the things I brought up, which was the personality types for PMS. And do and this might be just based on the different industries that you're in, for example, I'll just help spur thought along. When I was at a company called Bright Cove, I had to have a variety of different types of project managers. I needed to have the PMP person because we will occasionally get these big ass multimillion dollar projects and I had to have the What's everybody loves this person because she's just great to be around more look, you know more of a client You know, manager and things like that and, and things like, you know, your super technical pm like in just in you just you do the pre sales you're like, Okay, Kate's gonna be on this project, and Adrian is gonna be on this one, you know, I mean, and so but we're just doing digital types of projects smash and grab jobs, most of the things, you know, three, three to four months. But you're on some pretty hairy you know, healthcare and government things as well. So I'd love to sort of see your perspective on personality types and those types of projects. And if see if a Venn diagram kind of comes up the conversation between those two things.
Randy Cox 20:44
Yeah, often I've, I don't know if it's not a personality trait, but often the project manager that emerges is the most organized person in the room. Yeah. Regardless of whether they're an introvert, extrovert, bubbly, personable, not personable. I've seen I've seen people be very successful with a whole spectrum of personality types. But there are some I don't know if it's personality, but it's more of like a characteristic. That's probably a better word. There are some things that you have to be able to do to be successful. And I have, I've noticed, like just being very organized as one, being able to keep a whole lot of stuff straight. Yeah, a whole lot of moving,
Jeff 21:33
not fuzzy. No, like reading back in conversation, like a court stenographer. Like no, actually, you said,
Randy Cox 21:42
we just go through the librarian, right, your part like keeping track your butt. One of the things that I think is most overlooked, is there's there several, and I this is part of the stuff I try to document on my podcast, one of them is just being able to have a crucial conversation. It was so hard for me that was like impossible, really, for me when I was a 20. Something. Yeah. Starting out, I couldn't. Like you have to you have to be able to have the conversation. Have you said you were going to get x done last Thursday? And it's, you know, it's now Monday. And we have a bunch of other stuff that has like, when is it going to hit like being able to have a conversation around accountability and without emotion, right? Yes. And you have to, you know, and coffee taught us, you don't want to just get the golden egg, which is get the result done, but then kill the goose while you're doing it so that they might not want to work for you ever again. The way that you keep the goose healthy, and you get the result? And that requires some tricky.
Jeff 22:57
Yeah, no, that's, I think that right there. That's in my mind, like you just, I've been going over this a lot for like 15 years, but you just kind of characterized it right there. Because there are some people that will grind their team down in the thing will get built and then and then hey, why did everybody quit? Or how come nobody wants? How come in staffing? They say, Well, nobody's going to work for that pm anymore. And it's that I love that analogy of the golden goose that
Randy Cox 23:24
you can create, get the result for one project ticking everybody off? Yep. Or, or you can. I've also seen people who would basically just rather do the work themselves, then have a crucial conversation with somebody, yep, you can just run around, and they would really make themselves sick because they are doing their job and somebody else's job is somebody else's job,
Jeff 23:46
then the project manager is gonna start like doing like database schema, annotations, because nobody else is doing in the org and ADF
Randy Cox 23:54
come up through the technical ranks and they know, like, it's a technical problem, and they want to just jump in. So you have to be able to there's, there's a, there's an emotional intelligence that goes along with being a project manager that I think is much a much bigger deal than that learning a particular methodology. Like, if you can learn the scrum methodology and you know, you can go to XO sauce video and in 10 minutes, you've got the whole thing. Yeah. And like so well done. But applying it with different personality types and different dynamics and and the you used to be peers and now you've been promoted, and now you've
Jeff 24:38
been there. Yeah, all that
Randy Cox 24:39
stuff. That stuff is what it's, that is the sticky part of it. It's a people business at the end of the day, it's like you we get it's easy to sell a book I think often, often from the methodology but I've talked to senior Pm is that I really We respect. And I said, Look, what if you had newly minted somebody that's newly minted with whatever approach you want to say. Versus you put a bunch of people in a white and a room with a whiteboard that are very good communicators? Which would you choose? You know, like, which which approach and they're all like, you know, at the end of the day, we will choose the good communicators who can collaborate? Well, right? Look at the company Basecamp used to be called 37 singles live in a way because it's all the way back to the beginning. Yep, have a completely unique six week thing. Like it's, it doesn't fit into any bucket, right? Yep, yeah, they kill it. Like they're just. So
Jeff 25:44
that's my default, like, need to get something up and running small organization, like, let's start with Basecamp. Like, here's some templates. Actually.
Randy Cox 25:53
When I was with the Redskins, I used it when I was with in graduate school, Hopkins, I use it like we could stand up, we would have a meeting with a big fortune 500 company, about some deal they wanted to do in the stadium. And then, like, literally within 20 minutes after the meeting being over, we'd have a collaboration website up and running and emails out and talked about and they look like they thought you built all that
Jeff 26:17
I wanted to and then I remembered pulling that up and like discovery meeting or you know, the first one and like, Hey, I'm gonna assign a task to you. And by the way, like, everybody will see that you're doing your task. So it's got this like, built in cya and everything like that. But
Randy Cox 26:33
I think from a personality, I think there are times like I'm, I'm more, I'm more introverted, I'm more stoic. I'm more. Like, I'm not the bubbly, like, I don't know how to, like, you know, bring the doughnuts in every week. No, I'm not that kind of like most of the projects I would manage, were for a big consulting firm, and we would have government contracts that we would be in three or four different time zones. At the same time, they all had to be in the US because our client was the VA, but we would, we would be in three or four different time zones, we'd be collaborating online, you know, we would never physically meet all of us, either. There'd be like, maybe half a dozen of Serbia in Salt Lake City area. But I don't think that the like, if you're, if you can work with people, I don't think that you have to have a certain, you know, you see somebody that super bubbly to agree with me like, Oh, that's not me. And I can't be a project manager. I think there's hope for everybody. And if one has that book is just, there was a book about introverts and leaders, how many like senior senior leaders are introverts? So you don't have to fit this prototype? Right. But you do have to have certain skills that you have to be able to certain things that you have to do. Yeah, no,
Jeff 27:50
I think that's a good point uncovered the organized. And that's that's the key point of it, too. It's funny, because I remember doing some hiring for a new group, I didn't have that much budget. And I found a mom coming back to the workforce who had to juggle, like dropping their kids off at school, get into the office, getting things done and everything. And she was doing it all great. And I was like, you're hired, like, I could just see it like, you're super organized. You live in Evernote, like, I get it, like everything's a checkbox, like, Absolutely, it's a great point, but didn't know any methodology, that stuff that we're discussing. So. So let's sum this is great. And you touched on it with running some of those really big projects, you know, for you as the project manager, not the reporting up stuff, right, just for you to know, how a project is doing and how it's running operational efficiency, basically wise, what are the things that you're looking at it a daily basis or teaching people to look at a daily basis to know things are on track? Or, or I gotta hit the Oh shit, but
Randy Cox 28:53
yeah. There's a there's such a big spectrum. And this is another mistake that I see new project managers making. There's there's such you can start with you know, a simple five step plan on a whiteboard. And then you can go all the way up to a super complex Gantt chart. Yeah, and I'm burned down and all and I work I literally work with both every day. You don't the principles you don't break if you all you need is a hammer. Don't bring a Tomahawk missile to the prop to the party.
Jeff 29:34
Absolutely. I always say don't, don't go to go bring a battleship to Tule Lake to go canoeing.
Randy Cox 29:44
So like I always start with the simplest way that we can picture the the whole problem and and then generally what happens is is as we go into this and we get deeper and deeper, we find out the is not just five things, but there's like swim lanes, and, and then there's dependencies across the swim lanes. And then this has not been for this. And this is a totally an external dependency. So the plan has to reflect the, the nuance and the detail of the reality. And so sometimes we try to put, we tried to go the other way, it really requires a Tomahawk missile, like a fully blown Gantt chart. Yep. You're trying to do it with some simple tool, and it's just not going to cut it because you don't have enough information. Yeah, so like, for
Jeff 30:35
example, anybody listening like for me, that's, that's when I don't use Basecamp. When I have to start tying dependencies to everything and seeing how it shifts and everything, that's when Yeah, let's, let's spend the time and put this all together. And yeah, I'm
Randy Cox 30:46
back. Same way I start simple. But there's a point where it starts to like, Okay, I've got dependency here, here, here, here. And, and I've, I've, you know, I've got the safe certification and stuff. And I've seen how they do this with the strings. And I'm like, it's nothing that beats a Gantt chart in a certain scenario, when you pull it off. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. And, and so, I think though, I think most situations, my experience Kanban is the best way to go. And if you have, here's, here's how I describe it. I, if you and I were friends, and we live next to each other, and we have another two or three friends. And our all of our couples, let's say for couples are gonna get together and it's Friday, Saturday night, we're going to have dinner. And then we're going to play a board game. Let's say we like to play Monopoly. Yep. So we all get together for dinner and meal is cleared away, we now put the board, we now put the box of monopoly box in the middle of the table. And now, rather than trying to get the get the board out and distribute the money and distribute the cards, and who gets what pieces, we just leave it all in the box. And we just try to mentally just say we try to mentally keep track of who was the last person that rolled in what piece where what property were you on when you last row and what's what would be six from that. And then it's impossible. Like we couldn't play the game like that. And so we have to get the board out, we have to get the pieces out, we have to get the money out. And we have to visit it regularly. SFP, where are we on the board and not try to remember anything, just let the board tell us where we're at. I'm a huge proponent of making everything visual. And the best way I've seen for most scenarios, not all but for most scenarios, is you create a Kanban board, I call it a whip board for working process board because that's that's the terminology comes out of theory of constraints, which is my other passion. And basically every step in the process gets its own column. And then every card that's moving across is like a unit of work that has to travel from the left side of the board to the right side of the board. And so the game is we've got a bunch of pieces over here on the left, they need to all get to the right by this date. And you can put, you know, ownership on there. And then I use labels so we can have color coding red, yellow. And I have found Are there limitations with that? Yeah, and I could go into that. But for most cases, like if a manager just needs to swoop in, and you've got 50, you got a 30 minute meeting plan. And then she walks them through it. Yeah, I've only got 30 seconds. Sorry, I gotta be out of here. And you just need to like bank, what does she need to know? Yep, you filter the board on the reg, you say we need these escalating. ended? I mean, walk out, we got the point across and people can see visually. Are the pieces stuck? Are they moving? Yep. I do a whole course on that. But like,
Jeff 34:02
I can actually play a quick question. Oh, sorry. Question that before I forget. In that, in those comp, I haven't used Kanban. And so when you lay those swimlanes out there are the colors, the interdependencies because for me, of the types of projects that I work on, or we work on here, so injured the pipe injured dependencies on things, so is that you're able to track that with that process.
Randy Cox 34:30
The fact that you asked that question tells me you know exactly what's going on there. So that's, I tend to think that this falls apart a little bit when there's so many dependencies, although they'll say that with a big caveat. Usually every swimmer, every vertical column is a different job that needs to happen. And that's often a different role. So for example, when I was managing a company or another company was managing projects at the VA we had The VA has a website called my healthy that. And it's this veteran facing way to get your electronic medical record. Download your charts, order your prescriptions and all this. Okay, so this is the most deserving group on the planet. And, and this website was like 10 years old. So it was it was like, you know, that's like 100 years old and well, yeah. To keep this one up and running, yep, I'm gonna have to rebuild it. Wow, this one's up and running. And I was I was on the rebuild at one and then switch everybody over? Oh, yeah, we had, like, 500 some web pages in there. And then we had like, 30 Something portlets that set on those pages and portlets?
Jeff 35:44
Like a little app? Oh, yeah. By the way, we just, um, like, if you see me getting sick in front of you. So we just finished off one of these days projects. And it was so painful, okay,
Randy Cox 35:53
so yes. When you have something that like has to go through, like you have a bunch of stuff, we have 30, something portlets I'll have to travel through this same process, you have to have an analysis, you have to have a design. So you have this little thing. So every one of those columns is a different step. And then you can, you can basically line off, all 30 of those portlets will be a little their own little card, and then they travel across. And usually every one of those columns is like a different person, it's usually not the same person that goes every you know, sometimes the Configuration Manager is not the developer who's not the SQL who's not the business analyst, right. And so what it does is it as a, as a manager, everything starts green, which means it's on track. And we know the next step in the process, we know the next column that's going to go to, which is often another person. And I can see if stuff is just not moving. If I'm meeting daily on this, I can see if stuff is stuck, I can find out why isn't stuck, I can see if there's a bottleneck building in my organization. That's where a Theory of Constraints really comes in. And then there's also I can see if, if there's, you can put yellows and reds so our green is on track yellows a concern red, as we call it, Houston, we have a problem. And that means there's, it's already you know, we have an issue. So the colors when I the way I do it is sometimes we'll put a color on there. That's like a super high priority of like a certain stakeholder has submitted this one, we have a choice of which one do we throw overboard, we would not throw the one overboard, that's from this super high stakeholder, we would maybe throw something else over. But you know, in the four disciplines of execution, that is from Covey, Franklin Covey, they talked about just making they just generically say, our work should be visible, visible. And the whole team should see that they talked about creating a winnable game, so that people can come to work and know, what am I supposed to do? And are we winning or losing? Right? And it's very hard to do that when everybody has their own work on their own hard drive. And they nobody else knows what anyone else's? Well, nobody knows dependency, and they're just
Jeff 38:18
staring right at the problem, right? I know exactly what you're talking about. I, I apologize to people if they've heard this one before. But I remember when I was at Virgin, I was an exec staff. And they were talking about how we were going to do this, you know, new merging of these two systems. And it was going to provide, let's just say a feature that nobody else had on the market. And it was also super beneficial for people that needed to improve their health. I just tried to be generic on this one. And everybody's super jazzed, like, Oh, my God, this is great. Like the marketing teams go in, and they're like, very excited to talk about it. And a week later, we have later, I'm getting my coffee. And there's two developers in front of me, and they're like, Hey, what are you working on this week? Or in this sprint? He's like, I don't know, I got some bullshit XML processor that I'm doing. And I'm like, Hey, XYZ, he's like, Yeah, and I'm like, let me just tell you, like, what, that's what that's doing. And even know, in those two, they're like, we're gonna do this. And we're gonna combine that together, and people are gonna log into the application, and it's going to tell them, you know, X, Y, and Z and, and it was like, Oh, my God, that's so cool. Because he didn't even know what he was gonna be bubbling up to the applicant to the visual where everybody just gets through, you're talking about right? If people don't know the why of what they're working on, it's just a gag, and they're not going to dig it, you know, but if they, if they know these wise, and hopefully they chose this company to work for because they're passionate, like, you know, oh, that seems like a good place to work. I like to work on that problem. Then just tell them the whys of what they're doing things and, and it's such an issue when people become so task focused, that they're not seeing that big picture. The other thing I was gonna ask you or maybe say when when we do that sort of Kanban type thing we do in Scrum or agile based tools here? I think the answer for me that will work if the architect is is in the one who designed the pattern and you know, created, how the project's supposed to go. If they're, if they're in on the project, where the whoever's being the tech lead, if they have that vision of everything, and they're not too scattered, they should be able to identify the dependencies and everything like that they, they've taken the epics, They've broken them down, they've assigned them out. And they know that if this story in this story are missing them, this whole epics not gonna get done.
Randy Cox 40:38
Right. So going back to your, your original question, you said, you know, how does that work? When there's a bunch of dependencies? Yeah. If the dependencies are just following these columns, they're just following this flow, then that works fine. The Kanban works fine. But if it's not like that, then I will go to a Gantt chart. And I because to me, there's nothing. And if you, I've seen this with younger project managers, they'll go to somebody, they'll say, Hey, Sally, I need this one task done. Right? When can you have that done, and that's a very different conversation, then you lay out the whole, well, things that have to happen, they see this, see number five, right here, and they gotta get back to you. All these other things that have to happen, they can't happen until you're done. Yeah. And that this one way over here, this has to happen by June 1. Yeah. And this one has to happen by May 15. And
Jeff 41:37
in the expand button.
Randy Cox 41:41
It's a very different conversation. And, and you know what, it's, it's our fault. As managers, it's not their fault. Because what we tend to do is we, we, we flow downward, without context. And the very first module I teach when I teach a class is a context diagram, I want everybody to understand what you were saying before, I want everybody understand what are we trying to do? What's the ecosystem that we're inside of? Can? What's our piece of it? And then how does what you're doing connect to the piece, which connects to the bigger ecosystem. And I see too often that people know what they do. They know one step to their left, they know one step to the right. But they don't know A to Z. Right? They don't know the whole flow, they really honestly don't know that all these other people are depending on them, or, or, you know, if they do a good job, and then it just means frees up all this work or whatever. So to me, that's another whether you use again to your use of Kanban board with what I call it, whatever. When you lay it all out visually, and you tell everybody this is the whole game. And this is your piece, no, this is your piece. And this is your piece Senate, a lot of the accountability stuff. And those conversations just have they didn't they don't have to have
Jeff 43:02
that. And that's amazing. I'm so glad you said that. And I hadn't thought about that. That's something great to teach her. I'm so glad you teach that because I know I haven't taught people that I always teach them the why. But what you're saying there is like, show them the whole puzzle. And then they realize, because there's the community aspect, right. And the like the whole Microsoft and Carter versus Wikipedia study where people feel like they're adding to the community, more invested into it and things like that. And and people don't want to be the weak link in the chain, right? You don't want to be letting your team down. And that essentially, if you're not holding up your bargain, you're letting the team down. And but they might not even know they're when they're team down because they just have this task and they need to get this task go and they don't realize that you're number five can't share. And number 12 is waiting for you. Which by the way, I've kept my own Gantt charts, even on scrum projects just for me. Like nobody else sees the Gantt chart for myself, but
Randy Cox 43:59
there's a lot of up and comers I've taught a lot of millennials who didn't come that Agile is all they know. Yeah, they're up and comer they go into a.com kind of a technical company. They run Scrum. They've That's it. That's the only you know, and what I what I am scared about a little bit is when you when you manage every two weeks at a time, and you don't have an overarching plan. Yep. Then the bridge like like the way I described as the bridge has to start on this side of the river. It has to end on that side of the river. And because it has to end on that specific point on the other side of the river because they're building a road right there. And you can't it can't be six feet this way or six feet down. It has to end at that spot.
Jeff 44:51
They don't dam build bridges and sprints, right. No.
Randy Cox 44:55
And that is something to learn there. Right so like what I think PMI tried to do away with it. And I think it was a good move. I just think too often we go into a project, and we're just thinking, What do you want me to do for the next two weeks. And the bridge starts to be like this crooked line, because there's no and I think it really makes senior senior managers very nervous. When they think, Oh, my God, you're telling me that I can like, the team could spin this way and spin that way. So so you're nimble, great. But you, you need to be like heading towards a long range.
Jeff 45:32
And I tell you, and you know, so try not to talk too much about my business. But like, what we do is we build these enterprise architecture, these things with really big architecture and these big enterprise applications. And there's two things we bumped into. First of all, the science projects that started off in these sprints, and maybe they'll get successful suddenly become hugely successful. And since they were built in Sprint's at a time there was none of that over, not over architect because there's no that underlying architectural vision of how it should be built. There's no scalability, there's no none of that stuff, there's, you know, so we wind up coming in and having to do exactly what you said, where you're holding up the foundation on one end, and then you're rebuilding on the other end. And what I've just consistently found, whether it's, you know, working at a product company, or working at a services company, if you're building enterprise software, right, you're building something that, that customers are using a lot of, there needs to be a plant, then you need to spend a few weeks to two months and so much. So our, I would say there are risk adverse customers, they don't do any work with us, unless we do at least eight weeks of discovery upfront and basically do a whole waterfall thing. This is what it's gonna be like, because that's all that's the stuff that we're building. And the CIOs and chief architects, if you just walk in and say, Hey, we're just gonna do sprints, they're gonna be like, turn around and walk away. Like, that's not how you build enterprise software. I mean, there is a place point in time to get together and break stuff out and do stuff fast. But I prefer to like, so my methodology is, do a little bit of that waterfall stuff upfront, and then get to a point where you can run fast in these sprints. And people aren't trying to define the architecture every day, and basically let them code during the day not sitting in meetings, wondering if they should do something in a certain way. So yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get on the soapbox. But this continually comes up where in I hadn't made the connection in my brain that I didn't even realize that they only the millennials only this is an anti millennial thing, but the millennials only know agile, and in AI, so I just like to do a little pre agile, as I say, we're just gonna, we're just gonna get our stuff straightened out here. So that when the developers you know, create their environment, they can just crank and it's all been kind of figured out and were like two Sprint's ahead planning and then all of that stuff. So
Randy Cox 48:02
that's, that's why I'm, that's why I'm like multi dimensional on that horizontal axis. Because I came from a world I was doing projects for T Rowe Price, where we would spend six months just in requirements analysis, building, three ring binders that are literally three inches thick,
Jeff 48:20
whole rational rose going on at the time.
Randy Cox 48:23
Yes, and, and then we would turn that over to the technical Bas, who would convert those into technical specs. And that's another two, three months, and then the developers and this whole thing. And so by the from the time that the customers started talking to us the BAS until the time that they got something demo was two years.
Jeff 48:41
Yeah, I remember those days. Yeah. It was completely out of
Randy Cox 48:45
it was it was not usable wasn't what they wanted. It wasn't, blah, blah, blah, right. So I think what's happened is we said, oh, that didn't work so well. We just kind of like, yep, threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Jeff 48:57
Yep. pendulum swing. So yep.
Randy Cox 49:00
So I think there's a part of what I'm, what I'm learning is is like, trying to take the best of like, like this really worked like this solve a problem. Yes. Well, it's really just as useful today as it ever was. And how do we use that in our practice?
Jeff 49:19
It's funny because I, you know, looking at the initial agenda, I was going like point specific questions, but I think they're better. I think we've answered a lot of what I was looking for, in a philosophical type of a thing, right? It's not the tool, you're just saying, show something visually, right? Put in something that works. You know, if it doesn't work, go down to the next level of granularity that you need. This is fantastic. I know I've taken a bunch of your time up to so I think we should probably have a phase two or something or even maybe like a roundtable with some of my other friends because this has been awesome and I'd love to See some of the applications and maybe, you know, horror story or something like that, but I'm gonna make sure and we'll go back and forth a little bit on chat to make sure that I put some links to some of these tools that you're talking about. You went over a lot of great stuff that I want to check out personally. And this is all up in about like a week or two because I have a fiber person who's like cranking out the transcripts and everything like that. So I'd love to have some of those links to link to so I'll. Yeah, so So I always try and get people now that we've gotten like, this is more in depth, which I've wanted than most of them to like, pull up out of that and say, Okay, let's put the pm stuff aside. Yeah. Why What are you looking forward to this weekend?
Randy Cox 50:50
I am not looking forward to this weekend. We, we had a my wife had this vision of knocking down the wall between our dining room and our kitchen. So we have a huge kitchen, but no dining room, which we only use that like twice a year anyway. So we took a bunch of stuff and we took everything from that level and down to our basement. And so now that construction is done, yep. Oh, it's just you gotta clean and bring it's gonna be a working weekend that
Jeff 51:20
I hear Yeah, I think men in this is not a misogynist conversation. But I think a lot of men would be happier if the if the House website wasn't around anymore for all these inspiration.
Randy Cox 51:35
Pinterest is not necessarily a good thing.
Jeff 51:37
Exactly. I hope you have fun with that and at least get to relax and I'm sure the weather's getting great out there. How close you two to the lake and everything. Yeah, it's
Randy Cox 51:49
Salt Lake City is just spectacular. Right now I'm looking out the window. And it's just, it's it's such an amazing place to live because you have to, you know, we just came out of skiing and snowboarding season and then go into this outdoor season with hiking and fly fishing.
Jeff 52:06
Beautiful anytime you can be outside but it's fantastic. So what's ready, it's been awesome. I was a pleasure to meet you and go through some of this stuff. And we'll definitely do this again. And I'm gonna press stop here and then we'll just chat for a quick second. Okay.