Welcome to The Dashboard Effect Podcast. I'm Brick Thompson, and today with me, I've got Jennie Swenson, who's our director, the director of our PMO. She manages our Project Management Group. Hey, Jenny.
Jennie Swenson:Hey, Bick.
Brick Thompson:So what I was hoping we could talk about today is what it takes to run a successful BI project, which you do so well, you and your group do so well, every day.
Jennie Swenson:Thank you. Yeah, looking forward to discussing
Brick Thompson:All right, great. And I think, you know, for the purposes of this podcast, let's just focus on how we do it at Blue Margin. And then we might think about for a later podcast, if we were advising some other group that wasn't us, what are the things they might think about and how to go at it, we could do that another time. But let's just talk about our methodology to sort of get a baseline here. So when you think about running a successful BI project, what are the, first of all, what do you think the role of the PM, the project manager, and the PMO is? And what are the primary things that you're thinking about?
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, so here at Blue Margin, and it's probably common in a lot of organizations, but we really serve as the center of gravity for the project, and really the delivery team as a whole. So we really serve to ensure that everyone's informed and aligned and that we deliver what we promised per the scope of the engagement.
Brick Thompson:Okay, perfect. Yeah, that's how I see you guys, too. You are the center of gravity. It all sort of revolves around you. And it's an interesting position, because you don't actually directly manage the engineers, and yet, you kind of do. So, it takes it takes a deft touch for sure. What what are the primary functions that you guys bring into play in a project?
Jennie Swenson:Sure. Yeah, I think it's, you know, three key categories, starting with planning. Really what we're doing, the activities that we're doing to lead into a project. And then once we get into executing, how we're monitoring the project, and making sure we're staying on track. And then communication, as I noted, you know, making sure everyone's informed and staying aligned throughout the project.
Brick Thompson:Okay. That's a great framework for the discussion. So let's just talk about at Blue Margin, what does a project look like? So the first area you mentioned is planning. And let's assume we're starting the discussion at when it gets to the project manager. What does planning look like for you?
Jennie Swenson:Sure. So generally, we're coming into a project with an approach and a solution defined. So something that we do here is we work very closely with our clients to design a solution that's going to fit their needs prior to get into executing,
Brick Thompson:Okay, so the project manager is not doing the design as part of the project, but rather, taking a fully formed project that already has a design and then executing .And actually, that probably gives a little bit of the wrong impression, because I know project managers are involved in design. But at the point, you get a project to execute, it's defined, it's sort of buttoned up and signed off on and you know what the scope is, and sort of generally no, well, not generally, you know, specifically what the goals are.
Jennie Swenson:Yes, exactly. So that helps a lot. So one of the first things we do, and we actually do this, in the scoping activity, so sort of in design, is we're really looking to plan the resources for the project.
Brick Thompson:And by plan resources, does that mean who you're assigning to what work?
Jennie Swenson:Exactly. So what will, who will the team be that's going to execute on the project? So that's really our engineers, and also the project manager. So really assessing overall capacity. So we've got a view on the organization, what projects we have planned, and who's available when. We're looking at really skill-to-scope. So what are we trying to accomplish? And who has the skills to do that?
Brick Thompson:Well, right, because because different people may have experience that lends itself well to the current scope.
Jennie Swenson:Exactly. Yup. We're also looking at the client relationships. So we try to keep our project teams intact. We work with our clients for quite a while, years at a time in some cases. So we try and keep the project team similar or the same, since we have that that relationship.
Brick Thompson:Okay, I love that. And it's true, we do have clients for years. I want to make clear our projects don't take years. [laughs]
Jennie Swenson:Oh, that's a good distinction. Yeah.
Brick Thompson:More like weeks.
Jennie Swenson:But yeah, our projects are very fast.
Brick Thompson:But we tend to have clients coming back to us to keep doing projects.
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, exactly.
Brick Thompson:So all right, so that client relationship, so the client knows the engineers. They've already been working with them. The engineer knows the client, has the context of the business and so on.
Jennie Swenson:Right. They know the data, they know the people, they know the operations, and things just tend to go much more smoothly when we can keep that team with a client.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, great. And if it's a new client, I'm sure you're looking at, you're looking for resources that have worked in that industry or worked on the type of maybe the type of data source that we're dealing with, that type of thing
Jennie Swenson:Right? Yep. We're looking for the topic area, we're looking at the data source, we're looking at the industry and just seeing who has experienc in those.
Brick Thompson:Okay. So once you've done that resource planning, what else is left in planning?
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, so then we're really getting into project initiation. So we're really setting out to try to clear a path for execution. We generally know at a high level, we've mapped out our deliverables. So we know at a high level what we're going to do and when. So we're really looking at when we're going to do the ETL work, when we're going to do the data warehouse build, and subsequent reporting. But once we get into execution with the project team, we start to plan what are, at Blue Margin, week long sprints. Wo we do our work in five-day blocks, if you will. And we plan those two-weeks at a time. That's about as far out as our engineers can confidently see, as far as that very detailed work underneath the deliverable.
Brick Thompson:Okay, so, week long sprints, but you always sort of know what the, not sort of, you always know what the next two weeks looks like.
Jennie Swenson:Right.
Brick Thompson:Got it. And then even above that, you've already mapped out what the deliverables are, and when those are likely to hit.
Jennie Swenson:Exactly, yep. So we know the high-level work, we know at least two-weeks at a time, what the more granular tasks are going to look like. We're also identifying key handoff points between resources. So between our architecture team and our visualization team, what the handoff points need to be, as well as when we need the client to come into play. So looking at client inputs, if we need their input on something, if we need feedback, we identify though that as proactively as possible, so the client understands that.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, okay. And I've seen the Gantt charts that you guys produce that show sort of all the pieces that are happening, what's happening in parallel, what's happening serially, what the touch points are, all of that. And I think next, we're going to talk about the second bucket you mentioned, which is monitoring. And maybe we can talk about how you build that and keep track of that there. Anything else on project planning?
Jennie Swenson:I think that covers it. Really I guess what we've learned in our transition... So we've recently transitioned from time-and-materials to a fixed model. And in that transition, we found that it's actually easier for us to stay pretty short-term. As far as granular planning goes. We used to plan our entire project down to the task level, budget timeline, all of that. But we often found that that fell apart pretty quick.
Brick Thompson:Well, yeah, I mean, I remember those project plans. Actually, when we were, you know, many years ago, I would manage projects. And we would have project plans with hundreds of tasks and tasks that were 0.2 hours. And those, yeah, those didn't survive actual live fire often. So what do you do now instead?
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, so as I noted, we just transition to just shorter term planning, just using that deliverable Gantt view as our North star. So we always know, at a high level what we're up against, but keeping very granular planning to the short term.
Brick Thompson:Okay, great. Well, let's shift to the second bucket, you mentioned up front, which is monitoring. So monitoring is basically making sure the project execution is going well. But what are the what are the big pieces? What are the activities? What are the things you're thinking about there?
Jennie Swenson:Sure. So really are the ultimate goal is for us to deliver the value to the client on time or early. You know, we used to have this notion of of budget management, and we still do manage budgets to a degree, but not the same way that we did under a time and materials model.
Brick Thompson:Well yeah, I mean, that we've given the client a price, right? So any budget management is really sort of internal. We're really trying to hit the goal. We know how many people we plan to work on the project, and that really is the budget then right? If we have to add an engineer that's sort of more budget internally. It doesn't change the price for the client. So really, you're managing to that and date.
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, it's very much about timeline now.
Brick Thompson:Sorry to interrupt. But I love that about fixed price projects, because it really aligns our incentives with the client's incentives. Where as in time and materials work, if a project runs long, the client pays for that. It almost seems unethical. And you know, we have service providers that do time and materials for us and now that we do fixed price for our clients, I can barely stand it. You know, when you're actually working on a fixed price going for a particular date, if you know, if we as the service provider, as the partner, Blue Margin, if we deliver early, potentially we make more profit on that project because we had, we have people that can now work on a new project sooner. At the same time, the client pays the same amount and also gets their, gets their goal gets their product that they wanted earlier. And presumably, they hired us to build that product or that project so that they can get a return on the investment. And so the clock on that return starts sooner. And I just love how those align so much better than time and materials, where we're almost at odds.
Jennie Swenson:Oh, yeah, it's really fantastic. It's nice to have, it just really simplifies things. For us, as project managers, and again, really just focusing on getting the value to the client early, no matter what it takes. It's just been great.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay. So our ultimate goal is to deliver, I think you said on time or early, I love early, everybody loves early. How do you make that happen?
Jennie Swenson:Sure. So we meet two times a week as a project team, intentionally. So we have two fifteen minute blocks on the calendar where we meet as a project team. And really, the goal of that is similar to a stand up in an in an agile environment, where you're really reviewing progress, discussing challenges, changes, risks, issues, things like that. Really staying aligned on key handoff points and things that are coming up, when we may need the client to engage. We're also planning the next two weeks of work. So as I discussed, really looking to the upcoming weeks and making sure we have all of our tasks planned. And then we're discussing any changes and potential cascading impact of of those changes which I'm sure we'll talk about.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. Okay, so two of those stand ups a week. That all sounds like pretty standard, project management, almost agile. I know, we're not working in a true agile environment. But we're taking pieces of that. How do you track what people are working on? You know, previously.... Previously, we used a project management tool called Smartsheet. It's sort of a web-based tool, kind of like Microsoft Project. As I was talking about, or you mentioned, you know, we'd have all our tasks in there tracking down to the tenth of an hour, hundreds of tasks. We're not doing that now. So tell us tell us how we do it now.
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, I laugh because I was reminded this morning of my life not so long ago, where I, I spend most of my day in Smartsheet, just managing completion percentages at the task level for our tasks that were budgeted for one hour. And things have changed so much. Now, we use DevOps as our planning tool. And we have a hierarchy setup in there that supports sprint level planning. So we understand what work is occurring on what dates. The engineers are really responsible for managing the task, the tasks really they're for them. It's nice as a project manager to be able to view what's going on. But we're most interested in more of that milestone and deliverable level, kind of staying out of the weeds of the work and letting the engineers manage the tasks.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I love that. And for listeners who aren't familiar, DevOps is a Microsoft tool, also web-based, that is primarily used in Agile environments, but is very customizable. And we've done a bunch of customization to make it work well for our project processes.
Jennie Swenson:Yeah it works really well for us. It's been, it's been really great.
Brick Thompson:So it sounds like it gives the the project team members more autonomy, to sort of manage their own time. I guess they're responsible for completing the work they committed to at the beginning of that week's sprint. And I'm sure you're talking about that at those two weekly check ins, but really, they have some autonomy to figure out how to get that done, pull in the resources they need, and so on.
Jennie Swenson:Exactly. Yeah. And that's been one of the best things is not feeling like we have to manage at that task level. But instead, allow the engineer, as you said, the autonomy to really chart the path to get to where they need to get to to meet that goal with the deliverable. And ultimately, the timeline.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, and under the time of materials model, that was harder. It was harder to have sort of the autonomy to be able to collaborate and pull people in when you need them. Because you were always worried about hitting the budget for that task, and then having to sort of pause the project and figure out if you could move hours from some other task, or do you need a change order. That all went away.
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, it has gone away. And one of the biggest things I think I've noticed in the, in the shift that this is a little off topic, but is just that we've seen such an increase in collaboration with the team, because they're not worrying about that budget. They don't have the project manager breathing down their neck, about the budget and the timeline so much. They really have the ability to leverage their peers and other team members within the organization to get the work done.
Brick Thompson:And in a sense, though, they are worried about the timeline and that's it. It's not the budget so much, as okay, I need to finish this work. We're scheduled to finish this project, you know, two weeks from tomorrow. What do we need to do to make that happen? Yeah, that's great. I love it. All right. The third bucket you mentioned at the beginning was Communication. So I'm assuming this is, this includes the communication with the team, but probably also with the stakeholders at the client. So how do we do that?
Jennie Swenson:Yeah. So I noted as far as the team communication goes, we have to intentional touchpoints as a project team. It's also worth noting that we all work in the office together, so we can just stop by each other's desks anytime to stay in sync. But as far as the client team goes, we hold weekly development reviews generally toward the end of the week, that aligns with our week sprints, or our five day kind of blocks of time that we work on. And we're allowed to, we are enabled to show progress to the client at the end of that sprint, and kind of discuss validation progress and challenges. We can align on logic. We really use that time, not only to check in on progress, and show them what we've been working on, but also to work through issues, and answer, you know, ask questions and have them ask questions of us just to stay in sync throughout the week.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I love those meetings. So that meeting, typically is on Microsoft Teams. It's a video call. We typically have all of our engineers who are working on the project on that. We may not have some ancillary engineers who are maybe like, sort of just providing a little advice here or there. But all the people that are working on a day-to-day, project manager, and then the the stakeholders from the client. And those are great calls. I just love it.
Jennie Swenson:That's right. Yeah, it is the core, yeah the core project team for us, and then any stakeholders, project sponsors, occasionally even end users, particularly when we get into the report, development review part of the project, which is generally their favorite part. And this is sort of a new thing for us. You know, previously, we'd go away for weeks without... we would meet with the stakeholder team on a weekly basis. But really, our status update was focused on timeline and budget updates, usually quite focused on budget updates. And now we are really allowed to use that time to show progress. And I think they appreciate that week-over-week, understanding what's being worked on, they can see tangible, a tangible product starting to develop, and it's been really beneficial.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, that's great. So when we get near the end of a project, we go into a user acceptance testing phase, a UAT phase. How does communication work during that period?
Jennie Swenson:Sure, yeah. So for you UAT, we generally deploy the reports to the end-user group... It's generally a pretty focused group of folks. We give them a really simple Excel document that they can populate over the course of the five days when they're interacting with report. Or occasionally, it's a little bit shorter or longer depending on how much time they want.
Brick Thompson:And that document is for recording potential issues or tweaks to the reports or to the data, underlying data, something like that,
Jennie Swenson:Generally, yeah, it's generally focused a little bit more on enhancements. We do request that anything that appears to be incorrect, or not functioning as they would expect, actually comes to us immediately so we can correct it.
Brick Thompson:Okay. Right. Because you want it to be working well through UAT. You don't want to wait til the end. Yeah, got it. Okay. And so are there regular touchpoints, during that UAT? Or do you sort of hand it off, get notified of any significant problems that we can fix immediately, and then wait for a meeting at the end of UAT?
Jennie Swenson:Right, exactly. So generally, it's aligned with those weekly development reviews that I discussed. So we may have our final report review on a Friday, we'll deploy to UAT. Allow the client through the following Friday to collect the feedback. We'll get back together, review what they've submitted to us, and then make a plan for the final iteration and subsequent deployment.
Brick Thompson:Okay, that's great. You make this sound really easy. [both laugh] Is it actually that easy?
Jennie Swenson:I would say it's easier than it used to be. I think I give a lot of credit to the folks that we have working here for sure, and the project management team generally. But I would say under the fixed-model, things have just become a lot more smooth, allowing for a lot more collaboration, both with our client teams, and internally, and really just staying focused on the value and the goals of the objectives of the project just as what we're tracking against, and letting concerns like budget and stuff really fall away.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, I love that. And almost an unexpected byproduct for me was that our productivity went way up. I don't know why it was unexpected. I just didn't expect it to change. I you know, I figured everybody's working hard every day under time and materials or fixed. But I feel like we get a lot more done. The projects get done more quickly. They're home runs every time, you know, not that they weren't under time and materials, but they're just sort of, there's there's very few bumps in the road. They just seem to go so well.
Jennie Swenson:Exactly. Well we don't have... although change orders are still something that exists in our world, they're a lot less frequent than they were under time and materials. Any change under time and materials inspired the need for a change order. And that created a lot of friction and really interrupted our momentum as we had to realign with a client, help them understand the cost of their request. They would oftentimes have to go back for additional budget approval if they decided to move forward. So now that we can just absorb change, as long as it's aligned with the goals and objectives of a project, and it's not, you know, too unreasonable, we can just roll with it.
Brick Thompson:Right? Yeah. So, so we were very careful not to get ahead of approved expenditures with clients. And that's why when we had to get a change order, sometimes it would actually pause the whole project, if we were on a critical path item, whereas now, you know, we'll just work through it. Yeah. I'm sure you get changes that look like something that's, you know, it's a different design or, or a large change to the design or an addition. How do we handle that now?
Jennie Swenson:Sure. Yeah, the few times that that's happened up to this point, we're really talking to the client and getting a really strong understanding of how that request ties back to the goals and objectives that we originally outlined for the project. Things definitely come up. We can't know everything at the beginning. But we really just help the client help us understand and then we'll commit to getting it done if it ties back to that goal and objective.
Brick Thompson:Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And, gosh, we have such good relationships with our clients. I just can't imagine we wouldn't get in sync on that. Okay, well, this has been great. I'm gonna want to have you back soon to talk about how you might advise a company who's doing this internally to manage their projects. Hopefully, they've got a project management team, but there may be things that are a little different. And so I'll maybe ask you to think about that, and we'll schedule another time. I think this discussion, I've really enjoyed it, it fallows right on the heels of Caleb and I discussing moving from time and materials to fixed price. And I actually think project execution was one of the things that was affected most by it. And I really have to credit you for making that transition. That was a lot of change, and you and your team have managed it well. And congratulations. It's it's going great.
Jennie Swenson:Yeah, thanks. It's been it's been fun. It's been a journey and I'm really thrilled with where we've, where we've landed.
Brick Thompson:All right. Well, I'm gonna get you back in here soon. Thanks. Thanks for sitting down today. It's been great
Jennie Swenson:Thanks Brick