Member of the Month: Meet Braden Kelley

 

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist and an active contributor to the ProjectManagement.com community. He utilized our Contribute Content page and has since authored several articles here on our site.

He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change coming in January 2016.

1. How did you get involved in project management?

I first got involved in project management when I volunteered to build Symantec’s first web-based technical support and customer service capabilities back when support was provided on AOL, Compuserve, and BBS. This required me to scope, schedule, and sequence the appropriate activities and execute a series of organized releases utilizing Lean Startup and Agile type approaches before someone had given names to these types of collaborative, iterative approaches to building things. My approach to project management has continued to be somewhat non-traditional on the dozens of business projects I’ve managed over the years.

2. Who or what inspires you to be the best project manager you can be?

My clients (internal, external) inspire me to be the best project manager I can be because I want to help them change the world. We all change the world every day whether we realize it or not, and so I firmly believe that every day we choose to change the world for better or worse. I try to remain laser focused on the desired outcomes and achieving them as efficiently as possible.

3. What is one thing you wished you'd known when you first started out in project management?

In my early days as a project manager, I wish I’d learned about the concept of ‘fit for purpose’ sooner. ‘Fit for purpose’, ‘minimum viable progress’ (helps maintain a focus on momentum), ‘value source identification’ and ‘minimum viable product’ now guide my approach in nearly everything I do. Too often we don’t spend enough time defining what success will look like and figuring out where the value truly comes from. As a result we spend a lot of time on things that don’t make a proportional contribution to success.

4. You come in Monday morning to find that your most productive project team member is no longer with the company. You have been working together on a project for six months. What are your next steps?

First I would cry, scream and maybe throw something (preferably at the person who let them go). Hey, good people are hard to find, and sometimes the first to be let go! Then I’d probably go for a walk and get a hot chocolate. As I sat and sipped my hot cocoa (no whip and no foam – I live in Seattle after all), I would think about who else I have on my team, who’s not on my team that I wish were a member of the team, the tasks this valuable team member was working on, and which tasks are likely to deliver the most value and contribute the most to successful outcomes. Then I would start making a plan to replace that team member, and in the interim to redistribute the most value adding responsibilities to other people on the team.

5. You get a call from your project’s sponsor. You've been working on the project for a year and the two of you have a good business relationship. You're 2 months away from the project deadline and she wants the deadline bumped up by 3 weeks and indicates that this is a critical need. What do you do?

The first thing I would do is take a deep breath. Then I’d explore with the sponsor what changed. Perhaps this is a critical need, perhaps it’s a knee jerk reaction instead that we can talk through (trying to crash a project this late in the game often introduces a huge amount of risk). The result will be either a realization that this change isn’t as critical as the sponsor suddenly thought it was, or if not, we will have to look at a number of different elements of the project. These of course include:

1. What the sponsor is willing to do to help make this happen
2. Risks of crashing
3. Critical path
4. Available resources
5. Whether or not additional resources can accelerate remaining tasks
6. Whether there is budget for additional resources
7. Whether the scope can change
8. Etc.

Put my dinner in the refrigerator, I think I’m going to be home late tonight.

Please introduce yourself to Braden below in the comments and add him to your network.

Is there a community member who you think deserves some recognition for their contributions to the community? Let us know! Email the member’s name and a brief explanation as to why you think he/she should be featured in our Member of the Month to [email protected].