Innovation with Practicality

Steve West has seen project management evolve from the days when building an extranet to share files felt revolutionary to today’s era of AI-driven collaboration. As Product Manager at Project Insight, he’s witnessed every major shift—from desktop tools to browser-based systems to intelligent automation.

In this episode of Wear Your Cape to Work, Trina, Mathew, and Steve talk about the early days of project management software, how teams learned to collaborate online, and why the leap from desktop to browser was such a defining moment for the industry. They explore how the PMP framework and artificial intelligence continue to shape the way Project Insight builds features that empower people—not just projects.

Steve’s story is one of innovation, persistence, and belief in connecting people through technology.

Episode Highlights

• What project management looked like before the cloud—and why extranets were considered cutting-edge
• The leap from desktop tools to browser-based platforms and why many resisted at first
• How collaboration and visibility ultimately triumphed over siloed software
• The evolution of Project Insight and how its product philosophy grew from those early challenges
• How the PMP framework continues to guide modern PM practices
• The impact of artificial intelligence on portfolio and resource management
• Why Steve believes project management has always been about people first, technology second
• Reflections on what’s next for project management and AI

🔗 Connect with Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-west-cali/
 

Project Insight Website 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to Wear Your Cape to Work, a podcast hosted by Project Insight. We believe that project and program managers are the real superheroes of every organization. They wear their capes to work every day, and we want to celebrate them. Our guests on the podcast are project professionals who have poured their superpowers into driving successful projects across different industries. We want you to hear their stories so you can be inspired to wear your own cape to work. This week on Wear Your Cape to Work, Project Insight's own product manager, Steve West, shares about the early days of project management when extranets were the cutting edge and building a place to share files felt revolutionary. He's going to talk about the leap from desktop tools to the browser and why many resisted at first and how project collaboration ultimately beat out siloed software. We'll dip into the PMP and artificial intelligence and a number of other topics and why Project Insight has developed the features that they have over the years. Hey, thanks for joining us, Steve. We're so glad you could take time out from work to be on the podcast with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Yeah, thanks. It's great to be on here. Wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Well, I want to do a little rewind here, Steve. You know, Project Insight has been an organization for two plus decades. Looking back at when you started the organization, what problem did you set out to solve with the tool?

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Well, that's a great question. You know, many people probably don't realize, but Project Insights, the company that owns Project Insights started as a software development firm for, you know, dot-com startups and actually also just regular corporations in and around Southern California and even worldwide and nationwide. We had some projects outside the area. And around that time, collaboration was not that easy. Our team was in the California, then a client would be where they are. And we just like a lot of people, like a lot of companies, we started building what they were calling extranets and places to share documents instead of sending them back and forth via email. So it all kind of started organically out of just the pure need to be able to collaborate better and run the business more efficiently. And that's how it kind of got started in the beginning. What was the first version able to do? Well, that's a great question. So we did have a product that was mostly about, you know, file sharing. And then later on, we added scheduling. And we were again, it was kind of an internal tool right after 9-11, really. Around then, we added the scheduling. We added all, you know, we had our file sharing and document management and all that start at first. And then we started adding scheduling and Gantt chart and all of that. And that's when we decided, oh, this is we have a product here, and this is something we can make for other people as well. So it was really, I don't remember if we did time tracking right out of the gate or not, but we certainly had scheduling and task management and that and all the fundamental basics of project management working.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

Help me with like offices at that time because I wasn't working in a corporate setting at that moment. So when you say internal, you're talking about managing just documents between people, like where things were kept. And then what was the challenge that made you think, oh, we got to do some scheduling? We got to add that piece.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Well, a part of it was that was driven by customers asking asking us to do the same kinds of things over and over again. Like there were a lot of jobs that we would do that weren't necessarily like just e-commerce. We were doing a lot of things like I think the term was extranet at the time, where a company like Hilton was one of our customers at the time, would need to have a place to go where their dealers could get data or those kinds of things. So we're like, hey, we need this for us because any project we do, we don't want to have to have a meeting. And the video conferencing wasn't as good in the beginning. I mean, I remember it was WebEx or whatever. I mean, it was okay, but you needed a place for documents to go and for everything to be in one spot so you could actually like conduct a project. And that's where why we were doing those things, not just for us, but for clients, we're asking for the same kinds of things. So it's really the fact that the same thing was being asked for. And this is before we had Dropbox and all those kinds of tools out there.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yeah, you almost have to set the stage. We have so many people in our audience that have never lived without any of those tools. In fact, for our audience, if you want to go back to the dark ages a little bit more, listen to our episode with our NASA project manager. They were building the space station before there was even the internet. Like documents were couriered between buildings and all meetings were in person. I mean, this stuff is a really different way of working.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

Yeah. And Project Insider, you know, the main company that owns that MetaFuse, we were not the front-end people for the web development. We had a lot of partners with ad agencies in the area, and we were generally called in to do to make the programming, to make things work. And we had obviously some design capabilities here, but we most of the time we were collaborating with the agency, with the artists, with copywriters, with our own development team. And everyone wasn't in one office. So that's where all this really started to come from.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

So, really, I have in my head this kind of Venn diagram, right, Steve, of these offerings and these offerings, and you're doing all this dev, and then you realize that there's such an overlap that you're doing for everybody. That let's turn this into a product and run with it, then, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the goal of the company was always to make products, it was not it was never to just be a service company. That was just the means to an end because we are an organic company and our talent was here where we tapped it to do work for hire, and then we used obviously any excess that was really our funding mechanism to build the product in the first place, was the fact that we were making things for clients, they're paying us, they're getting value, we're taking that value and building a product, and then you know, we had a fairly long transition between where most of the revenue came from just doing services to actually the product kind of taking over. And of course, there were all these doubts too at the time. Like, I mean, web browsers weren't that great at the time. So there was a lot of well, desktop versus online. Obviously, the browsers have improved so much that has gone all away. But in, you know, when you're sitting there in 2002, 2003, you know, why would you use a scheduling engine on a browser when the browser is not as rich as the desktop is? Even today, Excel is still more rich than Google. Well, I guess Google Sheets is close, but the browser just has limitations that the desktop doesn't.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Right.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Well, pre-Chrome, right? I mean, you're talking about you know, times before Chrome. Again, talking about envision this world where Chrome doesn't exist is maybe hard for people to do.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Yeah, I mean, not even Google yet, although I guess Google right around the turn of the century. But yeah, I mean, a lot of what people used to say, like it was a big concept to say, oh, I'm gonna actually run a business application in a web browser. That was a challenge for us in the beginning. It, you know, the pitch would be like, well, it's your like your desktop tool, but in a browser. Like we had to literally explain to people what it was, you know. And I think that Facebook and really the explosion of social media like trained the rest of the world to be able to do this.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

Right. I mean, just set the stage. Your software was sent to you on a disc and you wouldn't still that often. And then that's it.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

We weren't quite that old, but I mean, I did start my career in a company that did that, but it by then it was delivered. Our company never delivered anything on a disc, but I did work in a company that did do that on a DVD or CD.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

That's a lot of technological transformation throughout the tenure of the organization. Does anything stand out to you as having the most profound impact as to how where we are now compared to where we were then?

SPEAKER_01 8:22

The most profound. I mean, maybe we were about to enter that with the AI. I'm not sure. It's really hard to pin it down to any one thing because the technology really did evolve. Again, probably the advent of social media made a biggest difference because it turned like, I mean, maybe Amazon too. It's kind of the convergence of all of that technology did allow for the world to be trained on doing things online and trusting that and going with that. That was real key and was pivotal because again, before in the beginning, it was just early adopters. You know, it was hard to wrestle away someone's desktop Microsoft project into a browser when the experience for that project manager was negative compared to like if you're an individual and you're like, oh, well, why would I want to use this online tool? It's harder for me to do my thing myself. Well, right, if you can look beyond yourself and say, well, now I have my schedule online and all my people are updating their tasks, and I no longer have to go ask them one by one by one and keep the schedule by myself, I can collaborate on my schedule. Well, now it doesn't matter that the desktop experience is richer because I'm saving time for me by having collaboration. So the fact that people got trained on using browsers and phones and like, you know, again, this predates the phones, but using just even your desktop browser to do business, that was something kind of transformational. And we didn't have to do anything about it. It just happened organically because the industry moved it.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

We need another audience pause here. I really think there's a lot of people that have never really even considered that work didn't involve necessarily a computer for you or browser or the internet, that project work happened much differently. It would almost be like just think about doing anything project-wise without your computer right now.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yeah. I mean, when I got out of college, I remember I interviewed for places, and you'd go physically for the interview always at that time. And if you saw no computers in the office, I'm like, I'm out of here.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

This is not gonna work here. This is not gonna work. Yeah, right. I like what you just said. These guys are done. Yeah, these guys are done, right? You know, it's kind of like the topic that we're talking about AI right now. Like if you don't have AI at all in your platform, you're done. I mean, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

I actually think this is a this transformation is less extreme than that one because everybody already has on your computer, and it's not like it takes you can just load up Chat GPT tomorrow and start using it, and now you're quote unquote using AI. But literally, people from 1990 to 2000 went from I don't need a computer because I can just fax and call, like do things without a computer, door to door. That shift from 1990 to 2000, I think, was more than even what we're seeing with the AI. I know there's a lot of hype around the AI, but you know, we're talking about people not using computers at all to now we're using computers. Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

Right. Oh, yeah. I remember when we got our first kind of desktop in the house, and my dad had no idea what to do with it. And I was glued to it immediately, right? Because it was very clear what you know what that is. So it may be this may be the answer, all of the AI talk, but where do you see technology taking project management and really work execution over the next 10, 20 years, Steve?

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Well, I don't know that it fundamentally changes project management because as quote unquote smart as AI can be, it it's not going to make decisions for you. It's not going to handle the nuances of dealing with your team and getting things done and managing your bus and all that. It's just the AI is a tool, just like having Gantt charts on paper in the 60s, 70s, and 80s to Microsoft desktop scheduling tools to online scheduling and management and tools and collaboration. So I think it's really going to enhance your job by making it more efficient, but it doesn't really fundamentally change what project management is.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

That's an interesting point. You know, like project management as a practice, you know, is that going to change due to AI, like how that actually transpires? I think, you know, we've talked about how our tool at Project Insight is was built with the consultation with project management professionals, you know, and the whole idea of PINBOC principles and how those are employed in project management and how there's a foundational choreography of how project work just happens. That's an interesting twist on how that piece doesn't necessarily change.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

No, I mean, you still have to, you know, have a charter, bring your project online. What are you trying to do? What are the goals? What are we supposed to do? You might ask Chat GPT for common goals for a type of project, things like that, but you still have to make a decision that this is what we're gonna do, this is the scope, this is the budget, this is the risks, this is what we're who the stakeholders are and the customers of the output. And who's here's my team. I'm gonna can assemble a team. I mean, uh AI isn't gonna go out there and can motivate your team. You know, there's a lot to do in project management that's not just a computer.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

No, I think that's fair. I just listened to a TED talk, and that's kind of what the principle of it was, right? The humanness of being a human is still gonna need to be there regardless of the other enhancements that you can make. But I think what I'm hearing, at least, Steve, is that there's still enhancements that can be made by these platforms, right? Kind of and uh help me build my WBS or help me identify what potential risks are, but it's not gonna eliminate the practice or kind of dramatically change a lot of that is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Spoiler alert, those are on our roadmap, by the way, for Project Institute. Everybody who's listening, just hold your breath, it's almost here.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Yeah, just more tools in the tool chest. And you know, obviously, as a product maker, our goal is to build really useful AI things, not just here's something that doesn't really work that well, you know, because we all know that AI is a very imprecise tool. It's powerful, but really imprecise. And a lot of what people want the project management tool to do is precision, like budget needs to be precise, down to the penny with some of our customers. That's you're not gonna be able to get AI to really help with those things, but having it analyze your data, having it look at the data and analyze it, or give you a summary of what this data says, those kinds of things for sure are coming and you know, they're here and coming and gonna improve as the tools mature.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

Yeah, that makes me think of this idea of often project managers have so much data that's thrown at them, right? How would you recommend a project manager to not feel like they're drowning in all of these numbers and pieces and kind of make sense of what they need to focus on?

SPEAKER_01 15:31

Yeah, that's a really good question or point. You know, having worked with a lot of customers trying to onboard them, sometimes people do get caught up in the minutiae of what they're trying to do, like building a schedule, for example. There's a fine balance between too little as far as your work breakdown structure and too much. And maybe the AI can help with that and see, oh, this looks like it may be too detailed. But it's again, like, I don't know that the AI can tell you what you really need. It's just gonna help speed things along, is the way I see it. The tools, like for us as a manufacturer of a software company or product, we have to package that data in a way that the AI models can understand it and it can provide value to customers that are using our tool, which that's the real big thing. Anybody can just throw up a form and have AI do some stuff, and then you're gonna get some stuff back out. How useful is stuff? You need to figure out exactly what the output's gonna be, and that's maybe why we're trying to take a real thoughtful approach when it comes to putting that into our tool.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

And it comes down to the project manager too. I mean, I just like to nod to that superhero group, but the whole reason we have this podcast, you know, you are as a project manager or listener, you're being taxed to bring your C-suite or leadership or business leaders some of this information, translating data into informative strategy for you, right? And you need to know what it is that you want to measure. That typically comes from someone, you know, on high telling you this is what we want to know about our project work. And the project manager has always been in that pickle of, okay, I've got to run around, even pre-browser version of project management. I've got to amass these data points, this information, and somehow translate it into the picture, you know, for the organization. And Project Insights have been trying to make that process easier for project managers all along so that they can quickly, real-time, dynamically interact with data points that match what their leaders want to see and present it. So that's a cool goal that you guys have had.

SPEAKER_02 17:47

I like the how that also combines with what Steve just mentioned, Trina, on the thoughtfulness of not just throwing a chat bot on there, right? Like anybody could copy and paste what GPT is doing and say, ask it anything you want. And is that actually going to be relevant with the data sets that you're looking to do? Steve, as you're thinking of the product of Project Insight as a whole, do you have any non-negotiables or any golden rules that you set as far as like our product strategy?

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Nice. You know, I mean, the number one thing is that we have to have a tool that works for our customers and works for real project managers. That's when our vision the whole time. Our company happens to be probably more specialized in addressing the professional project managers' needs versus some of the other tools that raised a bunch of money and got a lot of hype. You know, we're not actually trying to sell to like every single business in the world, like real estate offices and whatnot. You know, our customers tend to be a little need it more sophistication in what they're trying to accomplish, as far as maybe it's the capacity planning has to be the way our tool does it or the budgeting, you know, the way that we're doing the finances, like CapEx OpEx and all of that. So when it comes to any feature in Project Insight, it's really trying to find the what's most useful for customers that actually helps them do their job better versus like, you know, having, I know some of the other tools do like a llama farm or whatever else like that. And that's fun, but at the end of the day, that doesn't really help a business move forward sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

Yeah. And you hear now you're helping a project manager, but every project manager and every organization has a little different twist on how this has to happen. We all know that you have a unique workflow in your company, right? So I think that would be one of the other non-negotiables that I've seen at Project Insight is that everything is typically really configurable to what your unique process might be at your organization. And we're committed to helping you get that aligned to what your goals are rather than just a cookie cutter model.

SPEAKER_01 19:56

Well, definitely. I mean, every client that comes on, if we look at the current reports or the reports they want to provide, they're never the same. They're close sometimes, but they're not exactly the same. And that is one of the reasons why we have made Project Insight very configurable. So obviously, we'll take that same approach with the AI, like whether, and we have customers that say we don't want anything to do with AI because our data is super private. So you don't have to use it, it can be totally not involved in your workspace, or you can say, yeah, we're we're all gung-ho, we want all the AI, and you can have it. So we're gonna do the same thing that we do with all our features, which is you have to turn it on and you can get to configure it. I just don't see a change. You know, it to me, it's not like this is much different than what we've been doing, other than the fact that it's wow, we have a new powerful tool in the background that we can use to be more creative in the way we're gonna do some of these features.

SPEAKER_02 20:51

No, that makes sense. I mean, uh to Trina's point, I feel that too, right? We're working with the real serious project managers who are delivering on these large-scale projects or programs or portfolios, you know, throughout the world and working within their nuances, right? I mean, you and I, Steve, just had a conversation on the way that even tasks can auto-split the hours or the effort, you know, for them, which is something that most applications don't have and it's a configurable setting within Project Insight.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

So, yeah, definitely. We spent a lot of time making sure that we had those things because they get asked, you know, they like what you said, if if I add resources to a project, how should the existing hours that are on that task be split? Do I add more? Do I divide it? That's just again, just taking being mindful and careful of the fact that one client wants to do it one way and another client wants to do it another way. I mean, literally, you get all kinds of different ways for almost everything and it comes to collaboration.

SPEAKER_02 21:53

Yeah. I mean, and we've worked with so many different customers over the years. Are there any stories of success? Or their results that stand out to you as like, um, you know, oh, that was a wonderful engagement or something that even surprised you?

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yes. There's a lot of customers that are very I think sometimes we hear people say that we've saved them like a week's worth of work with like a push of a button. Like I'm I'm thinking, I don't know if I should name names, but I'm thinking of a specific client where they to do the reporting output for the executives just was taking people like a ton of time. And now they hit a button and in five seconds they get their PowerPoint or I guess it's a Word doc all output in the format that they need it to. The fact that it's just so dramatic, I think, is the issue. I'm not surprised that people find a value in going online. And it depends too if they're coming from you know, no tool to uh big tool, but this one was coming from a tool to a tool. So it wasn't like I'm going from no tool to a tool. If a customer is going from you know Excel, then that can be huge. Another specific example is a 30 projects, a team member would have to go into 30 different Excel files to update status. Now they can just go right off their work list, dun, dun, dun, dun, and they're done. So that was a case where when they were looking at our tool, then all the team members saw how much easier their life was going to be. The team members demanded the tool, which sometimes that's not the case. You know, a lot of times the project managers are driving that hey, we need this tool and we need the team members to collaborate with us. Well, the other flip side of that was the team members saw how easy their life would be from what they have to do because they didn't have much of a tool.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Then they're the ones that force them to proceed forward.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

And those sophistications that you have in the tool are actually what make you not have to revert to those spreadsheets. Like it's great. Most project management tools automate a lot of things, but if you can't automate all of it, you know, or take out the manual part for all of it, you still have those little ticky tacks: a post-it note here, an Excel sheet there, an envelope or a folder on SharePoint. But the goal of Project Insight is to make sure we can get everything customized so that the least amount of manual work can happen.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

Yeah. I mean, we're trying to pull in, and our tool does connect with other project management tools like Jure and DevOps and Trello and those types of tools. We want to get all the projects into one view for your customer. But at the same time, you don't, we're not just the reporting engine. We have our own scheduling engine built in too. So just trying to pull all that together is just a huge savings. And it's something that we see a lot as we onboard people because our job here is to make sure that every customer is successful. Not to sound like a sales pitch too much.

SPEAKER_02 24:46

No, Steve, that's great. I think what you just said that surprised me was this idea that people are coming to the project managers to say, I want access, right? Like a change management, you know, agent just got their wings, I think, because often you're dragging people in there.

SPEAKER_01 25:03

So yeah, and that's the difference between when we first started this conversation, you know, here we are, 2002, 2003, 2004, whatever. We're a brand new tool, bringing online project management online. Most people weren't using computers, and it was like the project managers got the vision, maybe, but then the team members were like, What? You mean I have to go log in and be accountable to something? I mean, the world has changed and people see that and do that. So that's a lot easier now. If people get it, like, hey, I'm gonna use a system for project management. People, people by then were used to using a system for CRM, you know, and there's been a million billion CRMs over the years, and people understood that, and they also knew, oh, well, wait, we're not gonna do our accounting on a piece of paper, you know. People knew that by 2000. But people didn't know that collaboration on projects shouldn't be done on paper. They just were it was much more resistant, I think. And now you've seen the last 20 years, people are like catching on with collaboration and all that, that that's computerized. But again, I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that people literally they're given a computer in their hands, and they that's all they do now, you know. Like the young people, it's like they're just entrenched at two years old in front of an iPad, you know. So it's a little different world.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

For better or worse on that one. I agree though, Steve, right? The first thing I got from the organization, here's your laptop, here you go, plug it in. You get it running with it, right? So are there any, you know, we're talking about project management, we're talking about PIMBOK, you know, that hardcore project management, project management book of knowledge that comes from PMI. You know, are there any principles within that or just general project management that you have seen often ignored by customers that we bring on?

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Well, yeah, a lot of it, you know, I think has to do with being under-resourced, meaning everybody's stretched these days to do things. So a lot of times people will, I'm not gonna spend time like doing figuring out exactly what I'm trying to like my schedule, even just the schedule sometimes. You know, I'm not gonna figure out my schedule up front, I'm not gonna know my budget or put a project plan together. So, and these are things we talk about in those webinars all the time is just sometimes it seems like you can't do them, but you really should just do something cursory or quickly to establish like what is our goal, what is the outcome we want to do. Even if you're using agile, I mean, every sprint is literally a tiny project that you have here's what we want to accomplish, this is how long it's gonna take us to do, this is what we want to see when we're done. Stepping back and kind of looking at that and spending the time to do that is something that people skip all the time.

SPEAKER_02 27:51

So, and there's a real cost to doing that, right? I mean, you're still gonna have to do those check-in points if you just front-loaded that work. I think project management would say, get that planning, get that initiation in order to deliver right.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Yeah, I mean, many of our clients already have a lot of discipline, so it's not really an issue. I'm just thinking that sometimes I think maybe smaller companies or um people new to project management, they just worry about like what I what's two or three feet a couple days ahead of themselves, and they're not really looking at what are you trying to do like as well as they could be if they would just have more discipline for some of the I don't want to use the word rigor, but the best practices, following the best practices should actually save you the time. And it seems like it won't.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

I'm gonna drop a link to our PDU webinars that people might want to see. I'll put that in the show notes in case you're looking for some more best practices or guidelines. And then tune in to one of our episodes from season one with Jeremiah Hammond, who is a PINBOC master and really makes a great case for why to know what those structures should be and how you can use them without it being a burden or, like you said, too rigorous or too confining.

SPEAKER_01 29:05

And I think if people are intimidated, they should just do some of the basics, you know, keep it simple, just write down your goals before you start, write down who the stakeholders are, write down like three objectives, and then you can measure that at the end, even for a small project, you know.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

Yeah, I think that actually leads well into maybe the starting part of this other question I have for you, Steve, which is what is healthy portfolio governance look like to you? Is that starting, you know, there at kind of first things first of documenting what you're planning on doing, or what do you think on that?

SPEAKER_01 29:39

From a portfolio standpoint, I mean, I guess you'd need to be doing that across your whole organization to deal with that at a portfolio level. I think trying to standardize, and this is where the tools might help you, because if everyone's using the tool, then you can get common language, common statuses. Again, if you're not using any kind of tool, you're probably cobbling together report and Excel. Like here's what we're doing across the board for the whole company or the whole you said portfolios. So having that discipline across the entire organization through from if you have a PMO office, having that PMO office able to train even the non-project managers who run projects, because there's a lot of people out there that are running projects and are not professional project managers, just teaching them the couple of the basics and getting your arms around the reality of what you're what you're trying to accomplish across the board is a really good first step, you know, getting it all in one place or close to one place as possible. When I say getting it all like all of your projects entered, what are the dates? What are the goals? What's the health of these projects? So that you're being honest with yourself because if you don't do that, then what happens is you may or your organization might be focusing on the wrong priorities, which is not as not an ideal outcome.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

Oh, that makes complete sense. This is a little bit of a transition to you as opposed to general speaking, Steve. But do you have any daily habits that help you make clear decisions for not only our organization, but then as you're guiding our customers with best practices?

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Well, I don't know that I have like a daily habit, but I uh I do work out to keep my mental sanity, which everybody should have hobbies, but I try to balance the physical life with the mental life. But I do probably every morning, I do take a look at like what are we trying to do today, set a couple of goals, not just for myself, but what are we trying to do as a company? And then reminding everybody in the company, like these are the priorities. Not every day, but you know, I'll often look at at what's going on there. And you know, we're a smaller organization, so it's a lot more complicated for companies that have lots of divisions doing lots of different products and and all of that. We we're like very focused on delivering a software tool for our customers. So it's a I think it's luckily for me, it's easier for us because we are focused so much on that aspect and we don't have like some other product I'm worried about off on the side.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

You've met a ton of superhero project managers over the course of these many, many years working with Project Insight. Is there some common denominator, you know, something that you think each of them does, you know, that you might say to our audience, you should try to adopt this in your project management career and your journey? I've met a lot of great PMs. What is that commonality?

SPEAKER_01 32:43

Oh my goodness. That's a hard question. I mean, is there one common that like their superpowers are all over the map? You know, you have some that are very great with their people. Then there's some that are really great with keeping things organized. Is there a common thread among them? I mean, I guess the one common thread I would say among all the superhero project managers is that they're all passionate about what they're doing and they're dedicated to their job. You know, I would say that's probably, I mean, if you're not really into what you're doing, it's hard for you to be motivated, it's hard for you to motivate other people. So, and that could be a superhero in and of itself, but I think even if it's not your strength, everybody should strive to being motivated, self-motivated and motivated for their company, and then motivated to help motivate their team. That that's probably the most important thing, I would say.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

And you have to know those initiatives of the company. I mean, what's your company trying to do? If you can get behind that, you know, not only you'll be motivated, but you'll also be able to translate that to the team. Like, this is what we're trying to accomplish. These are the initiatives we're trying to tie all this project work to. Let's get there together.

SPEAKER_01 33:54

Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 33:55

One of those PDUs Trina's gonna drop in the you know notes here is exactly that the start with why, making sure that everybody's aligned. But I think that that's a really good centerpiece in that Venn diagram, Steve, of this is, you know, everybody feels passionate about what they're doing, they're organized and being able to say this is what we're going toward, and then you know, gets their teams to be doing that.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Yeah, for sure. I mean, like our vision is that we are here to automate the project manager's job using obviously all the technology. We've been doing it the whole time, you know, not just because AI is here, but we've been self-driving project management from the beginning, and we're here to do that and make everybody's life easier. When I say everybody, make their work life easier. We're not gonna make everything in your life easier, but we can make your life easier by making the tool actually help you do things that take you a lot of time. And that's where and most software is that's what it is. But if you remember what the vision is and why am I even here this morning, like I'm here to make this product better, even if it's helped just one customer, and that's uh something I think that you want your whole organization to like exude that. And if you're running a project, that's what you want to exude. Like, hey, we're here to make whatever it is we're trying to do, you know, put a rocket into space, open a health facility, implement a computer system or big build a software product, like all of that is about helping somebody else. And if you think about it that way, it's a lot easier to be motivated because that's you know why I'm here. I'm here to help, you know.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

Oh, I love that. I think those are wonderful parting words as far as that's concerned, as far as advice. Steve West, thank you so much for taking a little bit of time out of your very busy day to spend it with Trina and I. We really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

Well, thanks. You know, obviously, you know, we've had a lot of great people on here. I'm just hopefully a reflect able to reflect the what the other, you know, the real PMs. I'm not really just the PM person, but you know, those you out there are the superheroes, and we're just here to help you guys.

SPEAKER_00 35:58

We're so glad you could join us today. Thanks so much, Steve. Thank you for joining us today on the Where Your Cape to Work podcast, hosted by Project Insight. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, follow, or leave us a comment. If you subscribe to our YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or other favorite podcast channels, you'll receive notifications of all of our new episodes. We'd also love it if you would share Where Your Cape to Work with your network of PMPs or anyone else who might enjoy the show. Project Insight is an online project and portfolio management software that helps companies connect project data from across all of their teams and software tools so that they can make confident decisions about their business. Our website is ProjectInsight.com, and there you can find many resources for project professionals, including free PDU webinars, as well as a place to register for a demonstration or a consultation with one of our success teams. Thank you once again for joining today's conversation, and most importantly, thanks for wearing your cape to work.