Posted
by 
Posted
by 
Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Viewing Posts by Lawrence Cooper
Making a difference: Let me count the ways
|
Staying with this years conference theme, I'd though I have a go at ways we can make a difference in our lives and profession. This is my list of things that I have done at different times - and am mostly still doing. What's on your list? Caveat emptor - I have a very distinct bias towards agility and adaptability so my comments are tilted in that direction. Doing The most obvious way to make a difference is by doing. If you are a Project Manager, Portfolio Manager, etc. or a team member working in active projects you have an opportunity to make a huge difference by helping everyone develop and shared understanding of WHY a project is being done before jumping into WHAT, HOW, WHO, WHEN and WHERE. Knowing WHY matters because it means everyone can have a much better foundation for making all of the choices that have to made during a project. For example, is that new feature really necessary for the WHY? Does the WHY need to be adjusted based on what we now know that we did not know previously? Depending on the organization you are in, asking the WHY questions may be not be popular. Why? (see what I did there..) Well, some projects, especially software development ones, have as their goal to replace existing things with newer technologies or a newer platform. As a result, there is a tendency to assume that the reasons for the original software are still valid. But are they? I mean what could possibly have changed in the 10 years since we originally built the software we are replacing? When we ask the WHY questions we are driving to "why does it matter and to whom does it matter?" See some earlier articles I write related to that question:
When we know WHY we can make better choices of WHAT to do, and HOW to do things, on WHO we need to do them for, and WHEN should they be done (sequence) as well as WHERE they could be done. Leading As a PMP you have a Code of Ethics that covers fairness, honesty, and respect. Making a difference can mean being willing to call out or address circumstances where those values are not being followed. Creating a safe environment for the team is everyone's responsibility. Being willing to speak out for those who are vulnerable, such as new people on the team who may feel uncomfortable speaking, or who feel their jobs may be at stake if they say anything, is a PMP's duty. We need to lead by our example. By leading to our code of ethics you will make a difference. Coaching/Mentoring This is an interesting one to me as I think there are many more opportunities for coaching/mentoring that many of us may realize. When we use the terms coach or mentor, the first instinct most of us have is that this is an exalted role to which only the most experienced among us can aspire. So let me dispel that a bit. I'll use my son again (see my previous article). He's 15. He's in high school. When he started high school he was assigned a mentor - she was 16. Outside of school he has volunteered the past three years to coach hockey players aged 5-10 during the off season. The first two years he and his buddy ran the entire thing on their own - developing the drill plans and running the ice times. They were 13 at the time. My point is simply this - it's not an age thing. It's a "do you have something to offer to someone else from your experience that they may find useful" question. Yes? Then you can be a coach/mentor. Maybe it's someone new to your team and organization and you can pair up with them to help them navigate things. Maybe they want to learn why you passed your PMP on the first try with the highest score ever. Maybe you are that experienced person and you want to start giving back to the profession. Maybe you have expertise beyond the PM role that can be shared with the team. It's not like we woke up one morning and we were PMs - we did other things before that that we were good at. Well, OK, I already confessed I was a lousy developer and switched over to managing/ PM because of it, but you on the other hand are not me - because you were good at something else before doing this, right? Well then, share that to make a difference. Maybe you're into agile in a big way and want to help others understand it better. Maybe you want to bring agile into your organization by convincing them to let you run a project with it and develop the experience necessary in your group to do all your projects that way. Coaching and mentoring can be a real joy and the more you do the better you get at it. I have been fortunate enough to get to do this as part of my daily work for the past number of years. Volunteering/Giving Your local PMI Chapter as well as many other local organizations can use your help as a volunteer. Maybe, because you, like me, are fortunate to make a decent living doing what they feel they waited all their lives to be able to do, you are doing well enough to share some of that good fortune with others less fortunate than you. For me it's my local food bank. Amazingly, they are able to turn every $1 I give them into $5 worth of food. Two thirds of the cost of what I used to spend on buying lunch every day is now making a difference in the lives of numerous families every month. I feel privileged and honored that I am able to do that. Maybe for you it's the victims of recent catastrophic storms or earthquakes. Or it's your neighbor who has lost their job. Making a difference doesn't have to be entirely about work. It can simply be about being a good human. Writing Who knew that one would be on my list? The first time I was published was over twenty years ago because someone asked me to write two chapters for a book - you know the hard cover things that used to take two years+ to get into print. I had never written for publication before. So it was scary and exciting all at once. I actually thought I did a pretty good job for a first effort (thought it was mostly technical so that did make it easier). I'd be happy to bring the book to Chicago for you to see :). I'm sure it didn't sell millions, but I'm sure (hope?) it was useful to someone. These days literally anyone can write - blogs are everywhere. The neat thing about blogs is that they don't have to be profound, or be the next Great Gatsby (and no I was not around when that was written!). It can be about things you find useful in your work - a technique or practice. Or some idea you have been kicking around and you'd like to get the input of others. Did you know that most authors these days started out by blogging first? I went from author to blogger and now to author/blogger. My first full book on my own was the result of writing it in blogs first. It can be addictive and fun once you get over the initial fright of thinking you have nothing to say. I am happy if I get one comment per post where someone found what I wrote useful - I have a low threshold on what makes me feel like I am making a difference. Which makes it easy to feel my writing makes a difference. To find out about how I go about The Agility Series of books I am facilitating, head on over to here. It's not the typical book writing exercise. There are many different ways and forums available for writing to make a difference. Speaking/Webinars One of my pals on the Experts team, Karen Chovan, is speaking at the Congress on the 29th at 4:45. Guess how I got my start speaking? By volunteering to speak at a local PMI chapter luncheon, and then putting in a proposal for the local symposium the following fall. Speaking is another way to make a difference. You can also combine your speaking with your writing by writing first and then creating a talk about what you wrote. A double hit on making a difference. I've done that a few times and you get to reuse content - which is kind of nice. Speaking engagements can be live or through webinars. They can also be paid engagements which is an added bonus. I've actually managed to be paid for a couple of mine - so all goodness. Most of us aren't very good at anything the first time. Some of the greatest speakers in recent history weren't very good when they got started either. Steve Jobs, the master of "and one more thing", even at the height of his speaking ability, practiced for days in the lead up to those events - as good as he was by then. Most of us aren't Steve Jobs or TED speakers (certainly not me) - nor are most of the people who speak at events. So what have you got to loose? The second time will be better - it always is. Oh, and most people are pretty understanding when you are starting out. So what haven't you done yet to make a difference that you'd like to try? If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:
|
Making a Difference: Learning How to Learn
Categories:
Social Responsibility,
Agile,
Mentoring,
Career Development,
Innovation,
Leadership,
Education
Categories: Social Responsibility, Agile, Mentoring, Career Development, Innovation, Leadership, Education
|
This past summer my 15-year old son was doing a course on careers. For his last assignment, he had to interview someone about how they chose their career and how it had progressed over time, so he decided to interview me. His last question was “what single piece of advice would you give someone starting out in life and career?” I thought about it for a bit, and realizing what I said could really make a difference in how he looked at his life ahead, I gave him a simple four-word answer – learn how to learn. My answer was based on a few realizations that I had based on my own career as well as the great job market uncertainties and opportunities that face today’s youth due to IoT, AI, robotics, climate change, social upheaval, an aging population – the list goes on. I’ve probably changed directions in my IT/PM career a dozen times or more. It is highly probable that most people under the age of forty (and even those above) will need to change career directions multiple times in their working life. As I noted in my previous post, my career changes were sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes for fun. I believe that one of the reasons that it was possible for me to keep reinventing myself, was because I like to learn new things. Truth be told, at times I’m probably a bit too obsessed with it, but I do think it is what has kept me relevant, engaged, worthwhile to others, and most of all, worthwhile to myself. I am fascinated to read people who get things at a different level and then see if it can be applied at a practical level. I like to find out where some of the great ideas of our time came from and how they have morphed over time. It’s part curiosity, part sheer joy in finding out things I never knew. Another reason I gave my son those four words as my advice is because we can never know everything. As soon as we can accept that reality, we can also accept the need to always be ready to learn. We won't know where those opportunities are until they are in front of us. Knowing that we can be ready to learn at any moment, is actually quite liberating. We don't need to be afraid of what we don't know. We also no longer feel the urge to hide not knowing something - it becomes just another thing we pick up along the way as we need it. There has been much talk over the years about "the learning organization". Organizations are made up of flesh and blood people (at least for now they mostly are). It is the people who learn. So my take is that to say organizations learn is to accord them anthropomorphistic qualities. We shouldn't. It's just people trying to find their way. Uncertainty and ambiguity is the new reality. Knowing how to learn, and always being ready to learn, equips us for that reality - no matter our age. As I approach sixty, I am in awe of people like Russel Ackoff, who at eighty is still learning and making a difference. Search for “A Lifetime of Systems Thinking” and have a read of a brilliant mind (hey, you gotta do some work here and show you are least a little bit curious!). Over the course of the 2017 PMI Global Congress, you’ll have a chance to learn from some other bright minds and from each other. Bright minds like my friend and fellow Expert Karen Chovan who will be talking about The Necessary Culture for Soaring Performance on October 29th at 4:45PM . Learning how to learn is also becoming a "thing" that itself can be studied. One of the most popular courses on Coursera is Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects which I intend to take before Global Congress. I'll let you know in a future post how it went. The world of projects is also undergoing significant change and this trend will continue. What is valuable today may be less so tomorrow. What is mere idea or not even known today, may be the thing of tomorrow. Reinventing ourselves can be scary or enjoyable. It's a choice that most people will have to make at some point if they want to continue to make a difference. Knowing how to learn can make it not only enjoyable, but gives us options and choice. As long we as are willing and ready to learn, we get to continue to make a difference. I'd be interested to hear the community's thoughts on learning and reinventing ourselves so we can continue to make a difference. If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:
|
Who's coming to Chicago?
Categories:
Portfolio Management,
Social Responsibility,
Agile,
Human Resources,
Nontraditional Project Management,
Human Aspects of PM,
Generational PM,
Facilitation,
Project Delivery,
Strategy,
Mentoring,
Procurement Management,
Career Development,
Stakeholder Management,
Innovation,
Leadership,
Program Management,
Complexity,
Government,
Teams,
Education,
Communications Management
Categories: Portfolio Management, Social Responsibility, Agile, Human Resources, Nontraditional Project Management, Human Aspects of PM, Generational PM, Facilitation, Project Delivery, Strategy, Mentoring, Procurement Management, Career Development, Stakeholder Management, Innovation, Leadership, Program Management, Complexity, Government, Teams, Education, Communications Management
| I can’t believe it’s been a year since I had the privilege of attending PMI Global Congress 2016 in San Diego as part of the Ask the Experts cadre. I once again have been afforded the privilege of attending, this time in Chicago from October 28-30, 2017! The Ask the Experts sessions are designed for attendees like you to have access to your peers in the profession who may have been there, done that, but also more than likely have a few scars to show for it. The point to scars is that while they may hurt at the time of the injury, you tend not to forget their lessons, well most of them anyway. In the lead up to this year’s event I thought I’d provide a little insight for attendees for who I am (besides the scars side of it), where I came from, where I’ve been, where I’m going, and what drives me. In so doing, I’m hoping that it will resonate with a few of you who will be attending, and that’ll cause you to want to come share a bit about yourself with me. And while doing that, feel free to off-load some of your challenges with me and I’ll see if I can offer some insights that you might find helpful. So who is Larry anyway? I was born on a dark and stormy night in the middle of the north Atlantic (closer to reality than you may believe as my house was less than 50 feet from the ocean) on March 5, 1958, in a very small town in Newfoundland, Canada. I graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Science in 1977. I started university at 16 and graduated at 19 – it wasn’t because I was that smart, it’s because we only went to grade 11 back then. Another factoid – the year I started my B.Sc., 1974, was also the year the first graduating class in Computer Science were finishing their degrees at my university! When I turned fifty, my then 5-year old looked up and said (instead of Happy Birthday) “daddy, you’re old!” So I just saved you the trouble – I’ve been told that already. I did my entire B.Sc. on punched cards – the PC did not come along until a couple of years after I finished my degree. What’s interesting is that in my first job with the provincial government I did everything – requirements, analysis, design (such as it was), developing, testing and deployments. Sounds a lot like the self-organizing, cross-functional teams in Scrum, doesn’t it? (if one person can be a team, but you get the idea – you had to have multiple competencies). Starting in the late 1980’s and 1990’s and into the 2000’s I watched the IT industry turn these competencies into roles, and eventually into entire org structures – honestly I never got that, so I mostly ignored It. I was lucky enough to be in small enough size places to get away with ignoring the trend. Along the way I also picked up an M.A in Public Administration and 20+ industry certifications on project management, Agile and ITIL. That degree is when I had to learn how to write – I was a lousy English student. Then again, I was a lousy software developer too, so lucky for me I learned how to write. So I was clearly not a NASA scientist calibre fellow like David Maynard, another of our gang of experts. But I do have talents – we all do. We all have those moments that we feel define us in some way. Mine was a little more than a moment – more like three years to be exact. In the early 1990’s I worked as the Operations Manager for Ice Forecasting Services at Environment Canada in Ottawa as we faced an enormous challenge. The gist of it is that we would be replacing aircraft that flew around the Arctic and “iceberg alley” off my childhood home of Newfoundland, taking radar images of the ice floes and bergs, with a satellite that would provide full imagery for all of Canada in a single day – 7.5 GB of new data/day in an era when our largest disc drive was 424mb. That was a lotta data! This meant a wire-up replacement – networks, all hardware (mini computes, the workstations, etc.), and all of our software. Oh, and we had roughly three years in which to do all of it. Some things that were pretty obvious pretty quickly:
Necessity as they say is the mother of invention. We went to see the vendors for hardware and some of the software options that might fit. For example, we wanted four-foot wide screens to display the imagery. The response was, “you guys are about ten years too early” (we heard that a lot). We decided to go object-oriented for any software we had to build – and none of us knew not an iota of how to code in it. We decided to assemble two small development teams that would remain intact with all the tools they needed. We set targets for having useful things delivered every three to four months. We decided to look at what capabilities were common across our applications and build those before we did any application development - we called them Global Services; This was 1992 and a good ten years before Service-Oriented Architecture was a thing. Eighteen months after we had made the decision, the Object Management Group came out with the CORBA Specification and called some of what we had done Common Facilities. Who knew? Once the services were built, we able to rebuild our applications at a rate one per team every 3-5 months. And in the midst of all that, we also managed to implement automated event and incident management, as well as automated capacity management – also ten years or so before ITIL really became a thing on this side of the pond. We had to – we only had three system administrators and over 30 servers and a dozen high-end workstations to manage that had limited capacity in a 24x7 operation. It was the most influential three years in my professional career. Near the end of the projects we had started, I was asked by Auerbach Publishers in NY to write a couple of chapters for the 1996 edition of their Manager’s Handbook of Local Area Networks (the book talked about almost everything but!) on the design approaches we had used (never did find out how they found me). That was my introduction to writing beyond project documents. I left the government after nearly eighteen years in 1995 and went over the private sector as a consultant which I have mostly done since (except for a two year stint as an employee at a telcom company 1999-2001) My time at Ice had a tremendous influence on everything I did afterwards, especially in how I viewed the project and the software development worlds:
(My new friend David from the 2016 congress used a similar approach at NASA before we did it). As a result of what I learned during that period, I ended up leading teams that applied the same design principles to business process as we did for software design, taking an outcomes-based approach to figure out what we needed to do based on where we wanted to go, creating an incremental release strategy for what became the world’s largest web-enabled supply chain, and fell almost naturally into an agile way of working before the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was released in 2001 (truth be told, I never came across the Manifesto until 2009). All of that led me to doing more writing as part of a book series I have labeled The Agility Series (www.TheAgilitySeries.com). You can read more about the series here. The newest book I am working on is called Cultural Agility: Changing our Stories . In fact I’ll be meeting one of my contributing authors to this book for the first time during the conference. Can’t wait! Besides writing, I am a strategic portfolio executive and trainer, with a decided emphasis on organizational adaptability and agility in all its forms. I am also involved with www.NFPPC.org where we are trying to distill all of the industry frameworks, standards, and methodologies down to their essential WHATs. Why would we do that? Because so many of them overlap with one another and at times create as much confusion as they do clarity. And with all the talk about Agile it would be kind of nice to know which parts of what we already know still has value in helping us do things in a more agile way. Why do I still work? Besides the obvious reason of having a 15-year old who won’t be leaving home for a while and then has university ahead, it’s because I genuinely like what I do. It’s fun. I have changed careers multiple times within the IT/PM profession over the years. Sometimes out of necessity. Sometimes for fun. I find the more I know, the more I realize how much I really don’t know. It’s fun learning new things and meeting new people and feeling like I am still making a difference. The feeling of making a difference is a very human emotion. Everyone wants to make a difference and everyone does so in their own way. There also no one way to do that successfully. If you’d like to talk strategic intent, adaptive strategy, back-casting over forecasting, outcomes over outputs, any of the agilities, or pretty much anything you think I may be able to help you with in making a difference in your world, here is my availability during the conference:
Oh, and as much as you think we may be able to help you make a difference, I am guessing that by the end of the conference some of you will help us see things differently and change how we make a difference. So, let’s meet up in Chicago and make a difference together!
|
Transitioning to Agility Thinking
| This week I launched a TED-style set of talks on agility with one of my clients. The inaugural talk was on the history of agility thinking which goes back decades if not centuries before The Manifesto for Agile Software Development. As part of the talk I highlighted some of the drivers that are forcing us to move that way as well as some things we need to do and/or recognize as we transition to being more agile, and some basic guidelines to follow to keep us learning to be more agile. So here here are my thoughts on transitioning to agility thinking. The Drivers So what`s behind the move to agility? Simply put, the modern world. The issues facing modern organizations are shifting from discrete problems to what are known as “holistic messes.” Traditional hierarchies are intrinsically ineffective for the speed of decision-making that is needed to manage at the pace of change we now face; the very speed that is needed to solve these holistic messes. So what are holistic messes? Traditional management and its accompanying models are premised on the notion that we can use the past to predict the future. This was the era of 3-5 year business plans where change was slow and at times imperceptible. But the world is no longer like that. We need to recognize, as Rod Collins like to say, that attempting linear extrapolations from past successes—which may have been a successful formula in recent times—is no longer a practical guide for managers or workers in a post digital world. Simply stated, the digital revolution has thrust us suddenly and rapidly into in a new world with new rules. These messes exist at the problem, product, organizational, and societal levels. Some of the other phrases and words used you may have seen to describe this new reality include:
Mindset matters There is a great book by Dr. Carol Dweck called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success on the two primary mindsets, a Fixed Mindset versus a Growth Mindset as shown below:
Learning new things may mean needing to unlearn some old things
Categories: Agile
|