Building Effective Project Management Teams, with Steve Curry

Project management always has and always will be a crucial function in any organization. In life sciences, that function is changing. Project Managers need to adapt to ensure their teams continue to deliver successful projects in the face of a shifting technology and methodology landscape, while still ensuring compliance. Join us this episode for a fantastic interview with Project Manager extraordinaire, and Founder and CEO of MustardSeed, Steve Curry!

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MustardSeed's LinkedIn
MustardSeed's Website

Steve Curry, PMP has a passion and calling to help lead projects, programs, teams, and businesses to tremendous success by increasing their maximum potential of operating efficiency through the utilization of program management best practices. He is equally passionate about communicating with clients when project risks and issues arise. It comes from Steve’s extensive experience and background in managing projects and programs of all sizes and his experience in finance, sales, business analysis, and management. Steve has had the benefit of working in PMOs in four different industries. Having spent nearly 20 years in the field, he has dedicated himself to collecting, organizing, compiling, and implementing today's best PM practices. Today Steve leads MustardSeed as Founder and CEO. MustardSeed provides project management services to life science companies.

*Disclaimer: Podcast guest participated in the podcast as an individual subject matter expert and contributor. The views and opinions they share are not necessarily shared by their employer. Nor should any reference to specific products or services be interpreted as commercial endorsements by their current employer.

This is a production of ProcellaRX

Transcript

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 0:02

Well, welcome, Steve. Thanks for joining me on an episode of software quality today.

Steve Curry: 0:07

Of course, it's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for taking the time.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 0:10

Yeah, well, everyone, we have Steve curry today from Mustard Seed CEO and founder and, Steven, I've been working together for a couple almost a year. Now I'm helping source some projects, and project management roles that I've led. And I'm happy to have him here today to give a good talk with you about some basic principles and project management, some trends and things that are going on in the industry. And I thought it'd be really interesting to chat with. So with that, I would like to welcome Steve, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Steve Curry: 0:43

Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks, Tori. So I'm a professional project and program manager, I've spent my entire career nearly 20 years managing projects in four different industries, and five different companies now. So I founded mustard seed a little over a year ago with the idea that project management needs to be elevated within the life sciences. Some of the program management best practices that are common in aerospace attack, and construction, really aren't universally applied within the scientific community. Given the global pandemic, it seemed like the right time to start the company and help out the scientific community with something that, in my view was was desperately needed. So it's a really exciting time to be in the scientific community. And we just try and help where we can. So it's great to be on the podcast today and share some knowledge and, and be a part of this community. Great. You know,

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 1:41

one of the things that really drew, draw me to you, when we started thinking about working together, was that your business model, right, and really, the added value of bringing PMS that had broader experience than, than others that I've seen in the in the community. So can you tell me a little bit about how you recruit for that?

Steve Curry: 2:02

Yeah, yeah, great point. So, you know, when I hire project managers, it's really all about leadership, it starts and ends with that. So I'm laser focused on finding people that can get things done, and that others like to, to be a part of their teams. And so I found when I worked, I spent about six years prior to starting mustardseed, working in the life sciences, supporting big pharmaceutical companies, particularly around their lab operations. And what I found was that it's very difficult to break into a life science company if you don't have a scientific background. And I think that's a common mistake that a lot of companies make when they're hiring project managers, because, you know, lifelong learners want to learn, you know, their their subject, they want to learn their new job. And if you find the right person who's always leaning forward, who's a leader, who is easy to get along with people like them, they're smart, it's very easy for them to pick up the subject matter within your company, and with your client base. And so oftentimes, there's an assumption that that takes, you know, too long, it takes years, it might take years to master it, certainly. But to be quite proficient, it may take much less time than that, that same time, you've, you've opened yourself up to a tirely, more broad base of project management professionals.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 3:36

So what do you see as the role of a pm or program management?

Steve Curry: 3:42

Yeah, I see the role is, is kind of a few things. One, you need to be a leader and be constantly trying to accomplish things, right. Your goal is to deliver upon the scope of work. And so leadership is certainly number one, but communication, need to communicate out, both out to your team, the individuals who are the subject matter experts getting the work done, we need to be able to communicate out to peers and up through leadership and executive management. So how you communicate, not just like you and me are talking through their words, but also how do you structure emails and how often you send those emails? And do you do give two sentences? Or do you give five slides in a PowerPoint presentation? You know, as humans, we're really visual creatures. So I've always been a big believer that the more visuals you can show to kind of paint that picture, the better. So metrics and KPIs really become super important.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 4:43

Yeah, so I'm shaking and nodding my head as you say that because one of the things I struggle with as a pm and program management for many years is getting my customer to remember what they've agreed to. Right. You And so one of the I know, one of my gaps is is those emails that you were talking about, right really being articulate with them. I can articulate verbally, really well. But articulating via email is hard for me. So I can see how, you know, when when the things that you're saying is the combination of all those things, right, in conjunction together paints a bigger picture, right? A fuller picture?

Steve Curry: 5:26

Absolutely, absolutely. And you bring up a great point about making sure everyone's on the same page, in an electronic fashion. When I started my career, we it was in the construction industry, and, and we used to send faxes, because you had to have some sort of paper trail, and the folks we dealt with didn't always have email. So yeah, yeah, however, you can get it down on paper electronically, is very important, because you always have that in your back pocket that you can go back to it.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 6:01

And then I also find learning styles is really different for different people, right. And so it's interesting when you were saying about, when you were, when you're starting, when I started, I started a manufacturing floor, I was a chemical process engineer, right. And every shift change, we have to shift changes, because we did 12 hour shifts, right, every shift chain, we would all sit together. And we would go through the list of everything that was running, right. And for me, that's just kind of how I was brought up in this industry, right. And so that's kind of normal. And when I think about some of the, we'll get into, like, the scrum principles and stuff like that, like, but that's just the way I'm wired, right? Like, I'm used to verbal, you know, sit downs talk through and move on through my day, I know my day, right? Not the same for everybody.

Steve Curry: 6:50

That's very true. And, and, you know, those, those early jobs you have in your career really influence how you see the problems to deal with at work. I'm influenced in much the same way where I'd much rather have a conversation about it, because you and I can solve something in about four minutes, that we can solve an email in four days, with probably a combination of 90 minutes of email time between the two of us. And the five minute conversation is much more pleasant. Because we saw cost

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 7:25

effective. Like when I think about all the the dollars that go into back and forth and emailing, it drives me a little bit crazy. Because, yeah, that two minute conversation, we can get a lot done. And also, I know through COVID It's been hard in this virtual world, right? Where many folks have had to do this now, you know, in a different way that they're not normally used to. And, and that also posed a lot of challenges. All opportunities, right? But but at the same time you learning for everybody?

Steve Curry: 7:59

Yeah, and, and picking up the phone or just, you know, scheduling 10 minutes on Zoom, whatever you prefer. It's, you know, the the phone call these days, it's almost like a lost art. It's kind of like a handwritten note, right? Just you just

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 8:15

texting. So I get, you know, individual texts from customers to now right. So now it's like they have another avenue to to get in first it was the email they can get me now it's through to my personal cell phone, which is challenging, I can't even communicate with my husband over text. I don't think I do very well with the customer.

Steve Curry: 8:36

That's right. That's right. Yeah, so So you're right, the communication method is is super critical, and the cadence as well. So your your meetings in the factory where every day or twice daily, that was super critical for you to do and, and so some people might say, well, that's a lot of meetings. You know, people get bogged down by that. But what it does is, it makes sure that if you have a thought that pops in your head that you need to communicate with people, you don't send an email away to 510 individuals, you save it for that meeting, and you can get it answered like that, right. So it, you know, there are meetings, that and other lines of communication, and I find those meetings to be the most impactful. So, weekly project management meetings, for instance, if everyone takes them seriously and brings to the meeting items that have come up throughout the week, you know, that's a really valuable use of everyone's time. Is is that that hour, that two hours, whatever it says,

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 9:40

yeah. So if we switch to the methodologies here, because I think one of the things I'd like to talk to you a little bit about and we've talked about in the past around moving to an agile PM, sort of way of being as a methodology as a philosophy and I'm kind of getting out of the traditional waterfall ways of running projects. We all know in life sciences, that's been very historic, right in a very waterfall way of either CSP or other things, right. But it's just a very transactional sort of way of being and moving into more agile fashion of project management and program management. What is your experience been? exploring this?

Steve Curry: 10:28

Yeah, yeah, great question. And, and it's, it's one that a lot of people are asking now, especially with the different software tools available for project managers, it used to be 15 years ago, it's Microsoft Project. And that's about all it is, unless you work at a company that has 1000s of lines to schedule, and then you might get into something like premier errors, P six, but even that is very similar to, to Microsoft Project, and, and all those have traditionally come with a waterfall approach. So you know, in the last 10 years or so there's been this movement towards Agile projects, tradition, particularly around software development. And I think for software development projects, and agile approaches is really something that folks should consider, because of the nature of the work. If you have fixed deliverables, over a fixed period of time, I'm always more of a traditionalist or I would lean towards a waterfall approach, we have to be open to the agile approach as well. And just because you're managing it as a waterfall, doesn't mean you can't also look at it in an agile. So software tools day smartsheet.com. And there's, there's so many others, you can with a click of a button toggle between your waterfall schedule to a Kanban board or planning board with dates. And I think those visuals are really important for folks to realize, you know, because it's, it's not always a beautiful visual, if it's a Gantt chart, right. And so it's critical for folks to, to look at all options with that respect, and, and then scrum meetings. So Scrum and Agile kind of get mixed together sometimes, but scrum meetings to me are let's just meet really often. That's, that's what it is, and used to have those meetings in your factory. And we used to call them daily stand ups. But scrum meetings are all about getting the team together every day, generally, sometimes twice a day, three times a day. And working out details in a really fast format. The alternative will be occasional meetings or figure it out via email. But those are much, much slower. So the scrum approach, I'm a huge fan of in the sense that we need to get folks together and get them talking.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 12:54

I like what you're saying, because it actually circles back to your original points around leadership, right? So leadership communication, and that constant feedback loop, right. And if we're not meeting regularly, if we're not all talking the same language, doesn't matter what approach we're using, whether it be waterfall or agile, like the tasks that need to get done, or need to be understood or prioritized, or not getting that constant attention. I know, that is one of the things that working with complex teams, if we have customers, and we have external parties, and sometimes we have teams that you know, could be at least you know, three or four different organizations working together, right, that you have to synchronize across lots of different demands and needs, and how to do that effectively, is hard. So while I think agile in the software development space, that's kind of like the Easy win, right? Using a more of an agile program management perspective, in more complex programs, I think, can add a lot of value.

Steve Curry: 14:09

Absolutely. And, and there's, you know, a significant number of life science organizations that are moving towards agile, it's just critical for what they do. So it's important to build a team of project management professionals that have different experiences, right? Because if you have an entire organization that's just done waterfall, project management before, they're not going to be open to the suggestion, they may not be open to suggestions for an agile approach. So I'd encourage those that are a part of project management organizations or hiring project managers to get folks with varying skills and varying experienced because it really is critical to look at it from every angle. And just because 1pm hasn't been able to successfully manage Agile project in that way doesn't mean it can't be done. So it's always good to share ideas and best practices in that way.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 15:06

Yeah, so it's almost like having a scrum of scrums, right, like you want to. You also want to manage your PMS in such a way that they know that they have access to other ways of thinking. Right. I also often see in life science, the big, the big ones, where they're so siloed, right. PMS are off by themselves, right? Working on a year long project or more right, and no access to others within the PMO office, because they're just so overburdened with whatever. In the task lists are long for them. And could be lonesome.

Steve Curry: 15:49

Absolutely, and, and that, that becomes problematic, right? Because that individual isn't staying current with the rest of the team and some of the best practices and that they're involved with, in some of the tools they're utilizing. And they just become laser focused on on supporting the team and their, their client, which is super important. But it's also nice to take a step back and to share ideas, best practices. industry does change.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 16:21

It does. It really does. And I think that, you know, COVID has illustrated that, and it's whether or not we want as an industry to capitalize on on the lessons of COVID. Right. I mean, one of the things we've all had to done is pivot and learn how to pivot well, and prioritize, look at risks. One of the things I've talked about a lot on this podcast is about folks not not understanding risk enough and and really being willing to have those nuanced conversations about risk, anything around risk management that you give as, as best practices for your PMS.

Steve Curry: 16:59

Yeah, it's a great point, because risk management is so often overlooks within the industry, right? We talk so much about the schedule, and how are we meeting the schedule? And can you show me, you know, a KPI that matters, too, but risk management is critical to managing projects that you have to do it. So the question is just how often, and how detailed. My experience, you know, depending on the type of project, project manager should be at least capturing those risks in Excel, you could do something basic like Excel, but a lot of the project management tools today have risk management options. And, and it's best to look not just at the risks, but the issues and opportunities. So issues are realized risks, and opportunities are the inverse of, of risks, and that they're positive, right, you have an opportunity to do something really good. So in terms of risk management, I think you have to really quantify it, and manage it on a weekly basis. So you may meet less frequent than me than weekly. But the project manager needs to constantly be asking those questions. And in those scrum meetings, and weekly project management meetings, what are our risks here, or there's a conversation going on on the side, that sounds like a risk. Let's capture that. You don't have to give me all the details, but we're going to note it and we'll talk about it on Thursday at a risk meeting. Those are the sorts of things that they don't make. They don't cost that much time. But they make a huge difference over the period of a project. And I'm sure you've seen that time and time again, throughout your career, that in the last thing I'll say about risks that isn't generally well done, but it's fairly simple to do is to communicate them and communicate them to leadership because you can't manage secrets. And so executive leadership is always looking to the project management team to manage the project, but also to escalate those risks, because so often, they may exist in more than one location. So those risks, although they may seem simple to an individual project manager, if there are a team of project managers with the same risk, you may have more luck, and success, mitigating those risks, because you get the executive sponsorship to do that.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 19:25

So part of what you're saying is also as you're assessing that risk and escalating that, at some point, there has to be a decision made based on that risk. Any tips or our thoughts about that? How to get an actual decision made based off of the risks that you guys have evaluated?

Steve Curry: 19:47

Yeah, what I've seen work well is once a risk is identified, the risk owner should be able to put a plan together to mitigate the risk. Right and you If they can't mitigate the risk, then it becomes an issue because it's on mitigate double, or it can just go into the category of accepted risk, right. But generally speaking, you should be able to mitigate those risks so that they're not as severe if they do issues. So a detailed plan is really important. And it doesn't have to be anything elaborate. But something as simple as these are the five steps, I'm going to take in here, the dates, I'm going to meet those deadlines to, to mitigate that risk, and to eliminate it or reduce it. And then the project manager can decide those risks for the project those steps, the steps to mitigate the risks should go into the schedule, or we're going to manage them separately, but either way, there should be a tracker in place for risks and the dates. As you step those down from a, maybe it's this risk severity five, and once I complete this milestone, next Friday, that reduces that severity from a five down to a four, and I do the next step and reduce it to three. So really, it's it's that it's a common misconception to lay out those steps in such a detailed way. But if you think about it, that's what has to get done. Either way, whether you write it down formally or not. The only way to mitigate the risk is to have some leadership and actively mitigate it.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 21:30

One other point when you were saying that, I thought interesting, so. So also what you're prescribing is a metric formula to meet to to measure risk. And I don't see that often in a lot of the customers that I work with, right. So can you tell me a little bit about that? Because I think metrics are important part here.

Steve Curry: 21:52

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Generally, its severity and impact. So you go on a scale of one to five, what's the severity, what's the impact. And so, you know, the worst case risk would have a severity of a five and an impact of a five. And so that total risk would be five times 525, if you were to exercise it, but also, you could see it in in a grid format. So if you summarize fewer large projects, you might want to put something like this together, and there's templates online, you could find in Excel, it's basically a five by five matrix that is kind of green in the bottom left and red in the top right and in yellow in between where it's, you know, severity and impact on the X and Y axis. And you would, you know, have a dot for each risks, risk in that category. And so, at a summary level, you'd be able to see, okay, this project doesn't have any really bad risks that we need to worry about today. Or, yeah, it does. And on an individual project level, that's important as a project manager, but if you're leading a project management organization, if you're leading IT organization, if you're leading a company, you may want to think about that sort of a roll up and format for your organization, because it really provides the visibility in a simplistic way to all the different risks that are going on within a program.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 23:18

Great, thanks for that. Um, that also comes back around to KPIs, I guess, as one of the things that I did want to talk to you about, because I was listening to another podcast this weekend, and someone was saying about their work. They had came in and it was like 30 KPIs. And they're like, What does this even mean, you know, and it's like, that's great question like. So what are some of your recommendations around KPIs around project management?

Steve Curry: 23:46

Yeah, KPIs, I find are really important. But they're really important if people understand what they mean, just like you said, and I could show you a whole bunch of KPIs that mean a lot to me and not much to you. So it's really, it's really taking a bottoms up approach to the organization and the KPIs that you utilize. So you have an internal project management office, what are the KPIs we've always used to people understand them? If they do, we should try and refine them a little bit, maybe. But that's a good place to start. What doesn't really work well is parachuting in a new approach that no one's seen before. And you rip the old one out, put the new one in and say, these are your new KPIs. Hope you like them. That generally does not work. So I would say, you know, the KPIs that that are really most effective are the ones that people understand. And you can start small say, Look, we want to build our KPIs. Here are the first five we're going to introduce, let's get buy in on them. Let's tweak them as needed. But let's start small and get agreement and once we're all comfortable with these, we can introduce some more. But so it's really about gaining momentum.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 24:56

But But I think the part of the key I wonder if you Think about this is, is the bottom up versus the top down approach to what those even mean? Right? So getting the buy in from the people that do the day to day work, right? I think is, in my opinion, more critical than what an upper management folks think that should be measured. And this needing to be a more transparent or leavin listening to the day to day worker to understand the true pain points. I'm a firm believer in gamble walks and right really like walking in the shoes and understanding as a leader, because if you don't, I don't know what we're really trying to accomplish. And at the end of the day, there are people doing this, right.

Steve Curry: 25:48

Yeah, it's a great point. And sometimes there's a lot, there's a few layers between the subject matter experts that are doing the work and have to provide status that feeds those KPIs. And those individuals who are looking at at those KPIs and metrics and so I, I totally agree with your sentiment, you know, gimble, walks, having executive leadership sit with subject matter experts. While we collectively agree on KPIs, that's certainly a best practice that that is recommended.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 26:23

So I know that there's a lot of new tools out there. Are there things that you look for in setting up a program? More or less tools even come into play? Or do you think about other things first, how do you think about setting up a PMO?

Steve Curry: 26:41

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think within a PMO, the tools are important, but I'd probably put them third, you know, that the right people, I've always found is most important. And then it's really the the processes that you put in place. So we're talking about risks, just agreeing that risks are important for your organization, to manage, I think is an important step. And once you have those people and you agree on what's important with your processes, I would look at the software to kind of help with the communication and the management of all of that. And it's easier now than it ever has been to get lost in which project management software to use. I'm glad you're laughing because I went down this, I went down this deep dive to find the perfect project management solution. And 47 software packages later, I was still scratching my head. So

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 27:44

there's a big pet peeve of me on all tool front, right, like tools or tools or tools, right? It's what you want to do with them and whether or not you use them, right? I was just doing internal training on my team for Agile. And, you know, Microsoft Excel has 40 Plus features. 40,000 sorry, 40,000 Plus features, right? How many do we use on an average day to day basis? Right? Seriously? And so it is only as good as what we do. I love that there's lots of tools out there. No one, you have to find the right one that's works for you. Right?

Steve Curry: 28:28

That's right. And so you have to really define what it is you want out of your project management software. Or else you will get lost very quickly in the in the sea of options that you have. And the

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 28:45

really big learning just just I want to just hone in on this for one second. Because understanding what you want. I think that's the fundamental message if anything we can ever get out on this podcast is you need to understand what you want out of a tool in order to be able to use a tool. It's really important. None of us spend time thinking about that. It's a painful conversation. I think for some people.

Steve Curry: 29:12

It's very true that I bet if you were to go back to your first job, you had rudimentary tools might have been a pen and paper. If my first project management role, it was pencil and paper. And the team did a great job with that as long as it was the right people and the right price, the whiteboard.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 29:29

That's all we had. We had a whiteboard, we do for you know, 10 reactor trains on the whiteboard, and we track them every day. That was, you know, it, it worked because that's the goal. We just needed to know that information. Right. So what is the goal? What is the actual intended use of what you want to do? A lot of these tools gotten really powerful, right?

Steve Curry: 29:53

Yeah, they're really powerful. And they're, they, when you first start to look at them, they're all kind of similar But then you start to realize that there are many that are quite different. And the price points are different too. But yeah, listing the requirements as specifically as you can, really is critical, I went into looking at the software packages with what I thought was a pretty defined list of requirements. And then I realized it needed to be even more detailed, because of how many options there are. So I would just encourage folks to understand that the journey to find the right software for your projects may take a while if you're going to look at so many options. But there's a lot of good project management tools out there and, you know, find out what's important to you Is it is it, I need to manage a schedule. But I also want to manage risks, I need to communicate out to my team. So we need to share information, share status, also communicate up through leadership, really list out what those are, it also really matters how big your schedules are. So I would say if your schedules are going to be over 1000 line items long 95% of those schedule, project management software packages probably aren't for you. But most people manage schedules that are 1000 lines or less. So the majority of the project management software packages would generally be acceptable. So really is critical to understand specifically your your use case for your company. And that you also may need more than one software package depending on how complex your work is.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 31:42

Let's talk about that detailed work breakdown structure you're just talking about. I cringe when when you said 1000 lines. I personally like to do more on the milestone basis and leave more flexibility within the team to be able to manage their day to day task. That's just mine. I don't like to micromanage I try my best not to. But I'm sure I've been accused of as well, on both sides. But so what is that balance? How much should you really get into your project plans?

Steve Curry: 32:17

Yeah, great question. The general guidance on duration, and hours for a task or a line item, as it just referenced would be, you know, two weeks or less, and generally eight hours or more. So I think you could still accomplish what you're describing not micromanaging someone's work. If you gave them a 10 day 10 working day project task, right, you wouldn't be in the day to day details. But you know, at the end, they would accomplish x. And so how they do it is up to them. And so there are a lot of companies, you know, drug development, perhaps may have a three year program with three year program is likely to have a couple of 1000 lines if you detail it down to the one to two week work package. level. And so at one point in my career, I had a 50,000 line schedule that I was managing. And every single week, I'd run a critical path chart, you know, top five top 10 critical paths to each of those milestones. And so that level of detailed schedule requires specific software. But these days, it's much more of a collaborative work environment, I would encourage every one to think about the role the project, right? A lot of the software packages today, make project management, a team sport. And we have project managers. So that subject matter experts don't have to project manage. And so when you're picking your software package when you're developing your project management team, think about that. Do I want my lead scientists or my IT person really spending their time in monday.com, updating status and moving things around? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe you want the project manager to own that schedule. And the only thing they rely on the subject matter experts for is status. How did you do today? How did you do this week? And that's what I've seen work really well as the role of the project manager gives back time to those on the team? Because that's a large part of of their roll.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 34:32

Yeah, I find that when that's done well, it works really, really well. And I think that takes a lot more time than one thinks. I think this is part of the mindset that I'd like to see shift is, you know, PM 2pm. And the way that you've described it, have a more central role in a team and not just thought of as, oh, just 10% or 20% of The total time, it's actually a full time job. And keeping up on that when you're utilizing your sneeze in that way. Because there's a lot of other background stuff that you have to go and put together and piece together and make sense of and you might have to reach out to five different people in order to understand everything that's going on together. And oh, when then do the communication and make sure that everyone's aware of all of that, right? Like, there's a lot of maintenance that goes behind the scenes that I think is underappreciated undervalued and often shortchanged in life sciences.

Steve Curry: 35:37

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's it, sometimes we get into the situation where we have these project managers who aren't trained as project managers, they're very good at their, you know, their SME role. And they are excellent communicators, so they get put into a pm role. So all of a sudden, they're an accidental PM, and if that's what they want to do with their career, that's terrific. You know, and they can go down the career path of of training and things like that. But so often, those folks are uncomfortable in those situations and, and actually really liked the subject matter expert role that they were in before. So it is critical to make sure that, that you're intentional about who's fulfilling those project management duties, because if it's pm by committee, if it's 10% of the total SME hours, and everyone does it, or if it's the project manager, but still everybody does it, that can lead to some culture issues, and some folks that are not as happy in their role as they could be if they were just left to do their work. So I think of large part of what makes a pm successful is, you know, kind of like an iceberg, you see on top five 10%. But the majority of it is below the sea. And that's what a good pm does is take the information in that meeting. But then you spend an hour or two digesting it, disseminating it to the team communicating in and out, really, a lot of that work is done on an individual basis. Because you're not taking the time others will be doing.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 37:16

I also think that there's there needs to be the authority that goes with that. Right. And what I mean by that is, I often also see PMs in a variety of roles and organizations not have influence or the ability to influence direction that is needed, even though the collective may be saying, oh, yeah, this is a risk over here. But then there's a bigger risk over here, and the PM, for whatever variety of reasons not necessarily have the authority to then say, okay, we need to shift and move over here. And I'm wondering how this plays into with an agile framework where there's, if we do agile project management, right, there's a product owner, if you will, right, that should call the shots and should provide the direction of the roadmap. Right? But what is the role of a pm and an agile framework?

Steve Curry: 38:19

Yeah, yeah, it's great question, when you have those product owners, it's, it's critical for the P, the project manager to work closely with them. And it's a matrix organization, most likely, that's how most organizations are now and, and so the project manager is responsible for delivering without the authority or the direct employees underneath him or her. And so I think it is it is critical to have a structure within your company so that a project manager can operate within a more matrix organization. But the culture is such that a project manager can raise their hand and say, I need help. Product Manager, executive leadership, I have something here that I can't solve myself. And that needs to be looked at as a strength rather than weakness, right? An organization that has people raising their hands for help, is a very healthy organization. And so I would just encourage folks to, to, you know, it's not easy to do, it's easy to say, but, but to continue to have project managers who are comfortable raising their hands to ask for help. And product managers, executive leaders that are always looking for those hands to be raised that they can jump in and assist.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 39:37

It's really important and I completely agree with you and it's hard to get everyone to be on the same page, especially when you have multiple organizations all playing those those roles sometimes. One of the things when you were talking also, maybe think of the in terms of how, how many projects should a Single PM, kind of manage versus the size of the project? Is there a way in which you balance that? How do you think about that?

Steve Curry: 40:09

Yeah, it really depends on the type of project I've seen as many SMEs to project manager, as, you know, maybe 20, to 130 to 130, SMEs to 1pm. But I've seen some projects that require those daily scrum meetings, and they're, they're super fast in nature, maybe they're on the it and that are probably closer to five to one or six to one, SMEs project manager. So it depends largely on what you're focused on what your deliverables are, your scope of work. And then how autonomous the team is. So the structure that project manager, is it project management by committee, but you have a PM, or is it project manager is, is really managing quite a bit. And so all those factors play into it. But I'd also encourage folks to think about project management in a non binary way, oftentimes, within your organization, you can find a partial project manager. And so it's not all or nothing. And the earlier you get a project manager involved, the less you may need them over time, a lot of times project managers bring in, brought in to rescue a project. But if there's a project manager who properly scopes it upfront for contracts assigned before the project is kicked off, a lot of times you can mitigate the need to project rescue. And so your your overall pm hours will be less.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 41:43

So when you look towards the next couple years, are there any trends or things that you see in the industry that that you guys, you guys are prepping for or in terms of like, you know, maybe changing how you do things from a pan perspective?

Steve Curry: 42:00

Yeah, I think the the evolution of Agile is certainly going to continue, I think you bring up a great topic there. And so the next few years, I think the majority of of the change will be in that area, but also the software that accompanies that, I don't think the software packages that are available today are done. Those are SAS based businesses that are always going to continue to, you know, look to improve. So you probably will see some consolidation in that, in that industry. You know, I mentioned 47 Different software options today, I think that'll be less in five years, but there'll be some clear winners there. But I would like the industry to get, you know more back to basics, more back to the best practices, you brought up risk management. But, you know, a complete integrated master schedule, change management, change control, that is so often overlooked, maybe not in your world as much as I've seen elsewhere, but it's very often overlooked. And then we don't do a whole lot of Earned Value Management in life sciences. But for large programs, you know, EVM, or EVM light is, as it's sometimes referred to, if you kind of do EVM tell me more about can really be beneficial. Yeah, or value management basically just, you know, keeping track of time of each SME, and making that time they spent, you know, better cost accounting with that, but also gives you a percent complete, you can measure and roll up quite easily. Those are things that that are infrastructure changes for a lot of organizations to implement that, I'm not going to say it's easy to do. But for larger organizations are ones that you really need to keep track of your costs. And knowing the exact percent complete, might be important to you. Those sorts of things should should certainly be considered. Yeah,

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 43:52

it's interesting, because one of the things I get asked a lot of when I'm engaging with someone was, how much time is my team really gonna have to spend with you? Right? It's almost like, trying to, and, you know, it's not like, they're not spending a lot of money. They're spending money for something that they say that they want. And then it's like, how much do I really have to get away with? Like, is it 5% of my time, but you know, like, and it leads me to think, you know, one is I know, we're, a lot of us are short on time and resources, right. And so everyone's trying to do with what they have. But it also I see that tied intimately to the quality and the output of things that they want to produce, right. And so if you're wanting to engage in a program and do a true transformation and agile, right, software testing, for example, there's a lot of things that have to go into that transformation, other than a hiring a consultant or a company to come in and give you the tools to do that, right? And so, when I look at agile pm ng right, I look at it at a much broader level to things that you've pointed out, like the change management and how do we how do we do that? How do we continuously adjust and look for that added value? But if the companies organizations aren't on board, full wholeheartedly with that, that a transformation means an investment in their people in their processes and their technologies? And the whole thing? I don't know what what we're really doing together, right? Because it will always then only be superficial, right? It will be, oh, we get this nice, fancy tool. Right. But it doesn't go anywhere with it, or the adoption doesn't get there. And they don't get their their ROI that they they even think about even when you're talking about these 47, you know, the new tools out there. We see that a lot to them implementing these some of these new project management tools, which are great, but it's everything that comes after implementation, I guess, is my point. Right. And typically, the role of a pm is doing some implementation. Right. And I think of it a little bit more holistically, and I suspect you do as well, right? There's an ongoing program associated to those tools that are getting implemented. And it's not just a discrete task.

Steve Curry: 46:29

Yeah, absolutely. Right, and, and how it fits within the organization's critical. Know, I'm sure you've seen some of your clients, they've implemented a project or program. But another group within the organization would benefit as well, they either didn't know or didn't have the funding, and there wasn't the sponsorship, at a high level to make that dream become a reality. I think project management within the industry is what you put into it. And you know, another best practice, it's so often overlooked is the lessons learned review. So we did all this great work project, it's done, let's spend 90 minutes talking about what went well, what didn't go well, what we would change moving forward, and how valuable it is for the executive sponsor or the CEO. You know, whoever's in charge at the organization to have a repository of lessons learned from the last 12 months, or the last five years, I think that's invaluable as an organization grows, to kind of keep a history. But also, just to get better for the next project. I did a lessons learned a few weeks ago, and the team had never done one and they were thrilled. This is great. We're going to pull this out on you know, right, it

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 47:43

doesn't have to be fancy at all. It's just literally what you said, what went well, what didn't work. Well, what are we going to do moving forward? That's it three questions to ask everyone. I do get some input more than others. But it also gives folks a chance to articulate you know, that, again, back to our beginning of our conversation, learning styles are different, right? Not everything works the same way for everyone. And if they don't have a chance to communicate that back in a feedback loop, there is no chance for change.

Steve Curry: 48:17

Exactly, right. That's exactly right. And that upfront, upfront planning is, is critical. And, you know, one aspect that haven't seen a whole lot of recently is the formal Gate Review process, right? When when there's funding in place for these large initiatives, a gate review, either technical or financial, or both to say, let's make sure that before we proceed with this money, this time, is effort that the VP of this area plus his supporting functions all sit down in a room and approve it. And that gate reviews on our schedule. And so we're tracking to it, and we're getting all those things done to it. And so it's really taken a comprehensive overall, look at, you know, the company's approach to managing projects and programs. That I think is critical. Project management, to me isn't just someone that you hire for an individual group. It's how do you how do you manage the company from a programmatic standpoint? Because a lot of the principles that make sense for a simple $10,000 project that last three weeks, really do apply for a company that is, you know, could be a multi billion dollar.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 49:38

Yeah. Well, Steve, it's been a pleasure chatting with you. Can you leave our audience with like, one or two key nuggets that you wanted to make sure that we reiterate what's important?

Steve Curry: 49:53

Yeah, yeah, I would say, you know, if you're in a role to hire project managers, please think outside the box folks from other indies STS may be really looking to get into the life sciences and may have a unique perspective on project management that can really add value to your organization. I was one of those individuals about 10 years ago, I caught a break and landed a role at a life science company. And, and I've been the beneficiary of that, and hopefully my clients have as well. So I'd say if you're in a hiring role, please think outside the box for for those resumes that come in from other industries. And if you're standing up a project management organization, I'd say, you know, think big, make sure it's, it's the best practices that you're going to apply to your organization are going to, you know, transmit throughout the organization and think if you're going to be in a functional role versus, you know, delivering the projects, all that is critical as you set up the team. So, hopefully, that is useful to all of you listening today.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 50:55

Great. Well tell us how can we find you?

Steve Curry: 50:59

Yeah, yeah, thanks for asking company that I lead is mustard seed. We have a website, www dot Mustard Seed pmo.com. And you can always reach out to me at Steve at Mustard Seed pmo.com.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 51:15

Awesome. Great, Steve. Well, thanks so much for a lovely conversation today.

Steve Curry: 51:20

Thanks, Tori. Appreciate the time. All right.

Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo: 51:23

Take care.