EP8: Getting Work and Projects Done in Your Business | Jeffrey Lambert | Blue Fusion Partners

In this episode, Tony talks with Jeffrey Lambert, founder of Blue Fusion Partners. Jeffrey Lambert shares expert insights on project management, resource allocation, and effective communication strategies for businesses of all sizes on how to get their work and projects done efficiently and effectively. Learn how to evaluate projects for ROI, implement structured processes, and leverage the right tools to drive success.

TAKEAWAYS

• Evaluate projects through ROI and cost-benefit analysis.
• Implement simple, scalable project management frameworks.
• Maintain regular communication cadences at all organizational levels.
• Use the right tools for project tracking and resource management.
• Prioritize projects that save or generate revenue.

RESOURCES

• Blue Fusion Partners
• FusionPro-PM.com/FAQS
• Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People
• The Fusion Pro PM Toolkit

CONNECT WITH JEFF LAMBERT AT bluefusionpartners.com

Get Business Smart Coaching helps entrepreneurs and leaders build better businesses and better lives on purpose with purpose.

Learn more about Get Business Smart Coaching at TonyBradshaw.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Way.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hey, welcome back to the Get Business Smart Podcast. And I've just had a great time opening the show, doing the pre-show, talking to Mr. Jeffrey Lambert, and he's a founder and principal consultant of Blue Fusion Partners. Now, what we're going to talk about today is getting stuff done. Jeff runs a consulting practice and uh helps get projects done, things done within an organization. Now, one of the things I learned during my time with Dave Ramsey's, Jeff, is a lot of businesses, especially entrepreneurs, they don't want to do a lot of project planning. They want to just do a lot of getting things done. And because of that, maybe they don't use their resources the best way that they can or they don't take certain considerations on projects. And one of the things I learned as a small business owner is just because you can do things doesn't mean you should do things, certain things, right? So you have a limited amount of resources, you have a limited amount of money, and you have to be sure that that money is going towards the right projects if you want your business to be successful. So welcome to the show, Jeffrey.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

It's good seeing you, Tony. Thank you for having me on. It's a privilege to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah, yeah. I really enjoyed our pre-show just talking about, you know, some of the things you've gotten into, uh, you know, your life story and where you've come from. So why don't you share just a little bit of that with the audience, you know, some of your background that got you to where you are today.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

First third of my career, I started pulling cable and um doing uh everything that people do in tech support, then crossed over into the software side, writing apps, doing database work, and all of that in the arena of Washington, D.C. and the defense contractors, military intelligence, and federal governments. Uh saw a lot, learned a lot, and really uh enjoyed my time there. My wife had a company, she sold it to a company in Chicago. We moved, and the plan was to stay for 10 years, and that was in 1993. So uh we're still in Chicago and enjoying the Midwest. Got into the commercial side, progressive roles into executive leadership and IT, and um about halfway through uh so early 2000s, over started overseeing and doing project management, working with software development teams and data teams, and then in the past uh 10, 12 years, really got heavily into being a leader in the project management office space or PMOs, and uh overseeing as well in in dual roles as a program manager of uh large-scale enterprise software implementations, uh also known as software as a service or SaaS.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

Oh, that's great. Now, now the interesting thing when you're talking about project management office or PMO, as we say, we didn't really have one of those where I worked. You know, I was with Dave Ramsey for 15 years. We went from 33 employees and about$3 million a year up to$125 million a year and about$550 employees. And we were just starting to really implement a project management office when we were, you know, right around the$110,$115 million level. And uh it's hard, man. It's hard to get in there when you got a bunch of young, hot-blooded entrepreneurs trying to sell things, which is really what entrepreneurs do. They're like, how can I sell more stuff to go and hey, we need to structure, we have all these resources. You know, at that point, I think we had about$15 million in labor resources that we were trying to manage and do projects with. And, you know, we had gotten to the size where you know you're doing these, you know, million-dollar projects annually, or you know, some of them were even a little bit more than that if you included all the labor that was included. But that process of sitting down and going, here's how much labor we have available, here's our prioritization of projects, you know, what's the most important stuff we have to get done? And then do we need more resources? Do we not need more resources? How do you allocate all this stuff? And it's it was very taxing on us as an organization because we didn't have just one business vertical, we had like 12. Absolutely. Very challenging. So, yeah. So when you're doing that with these companies, are you seeing some of the same stuff, or what size companies are you actually working with? Are you working more with uh small business? Are you working more with uh you know middle-tier business sizes?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

So, from a consulting perspective, I'll be brought in at times to be the senior level program manager or director to either right size and correct a large program that has gone off the rails, or when you're lucky, maybe you get there on day one and and it's a green field, it's a it's a fresh start. And that typically is to take a look at a single program and and understand what is out of alignment, what do we need to take a look at from a triage perspective and what do we need to fix. The other uh scenario is where I'll go into companies and focus specifically on the PMO function. And so it'll be companies that range from 20 million up to 50 billion. Uh so a wide range of experiences that I've had. In the in the space that you're talking of, it's it's not unusual that uh companies in the 20 million to a couple hundred million may not have a PMO, and they may not have project managers that have been formally trained. And so what I really focus in on is you know, what what's the inventory of projects you have right now? What's uh what what are some of the common themes that we're seeing where things are running behind or there's miscommunications? And I developed that short list of action items, the low-hanging fruit, if you will, so that we can get some small victories and I can start winning uh some confidence and have them have confidence in themselves. But oftentimes they're running it from a simple checklist, and it's a person who has uh their day job too, but they got tapped because they knew Excel or something to all right, you gotta help organize this. And uh and so you go from there and you take baby steps, you know, much like Dave's baby steps.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Yeah, very much so. Yeah, you know, the interesting thing, just going through that phase of going from a small business, you know, I I worked for an engineering firm before I went to work for Dave, and uh, we had project management because we were engineers. And so there was project management going on in that organization, even though it was small. I think uh we maxed out around$10 million in revenue. But that company had been around for man, probably at least 30 years, maybe 40. And they had been in manufacturing, they had been in production, so they had a uh project management kind of mindset for what they were doing. Uh so uh I brought that with me into Ramsey's organization. And so we st we started out in technology with a project management mindset, you know, from our angle, but we were really the only ones doing that, like in the entire company. Everything else was like you just said, hey, it's an Excel spreadsheet, it's a checklist, it's like, oh, how do you do this? You know, we got an event. What does that look like? It wasn't like true project management processes. And uh, you know, that's what I'd say to you guys listening to the show if you're a small business, you tend to be more on the sales side of things at the top or the idea side, you know, you're trying to make things happen. But you need to exercise some process around what you're doing, you know, structure, a little bit of structure. It doesn't have to be too much, it does have to be a little bit though, so that you can be more efficient. And uh, you know, one of the biggest things, uh, Jeff, is uh I think the evaluation of projects, let's talk about that a little bit because not all projects are created equally. They don't all develop the same ROI. A lot of things that we do as business owners don't even deliver an ROI. It's just a big money hole. We think we've got this great idea, we think this thing is gonna produce some income, it's gonna be good, but in fact, it's just a waste of time. And so let's talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Aaron Ross Powell Well, so I mean you could you can have projects that might be something that's an improv it's a capital improvement. It's it's maybe it's moving equipment around to retool a factory floor, or maybe it's even going in and and retrofitting and painting out a warehouse and building in shelves. Okay. So that's that project still has to get done. All right. And and so you want to keep it as simple as possible. You still want people to understand what the objectives are, and then you take it to the other side of the uh the gamut, if you will, is you might be doing a software implementation and you you know that this is going to take uh six months, let's say. So you want to write up a statement and have a scope statement. You want to understand, okay, what's the burning platform? What is it that we're trying to solve? What's our and from there that's the mission and you you establish the objectives. But you can put all this on a single page. It doesn't have to be a 30 or 40 page project charter as it's known, okay? Because things just get lost. You can do a single page or a couple pages, and it's known as a Six Sigma Eight Pack, and and it's a template that I can provide, folks. Um and the point is that you're getting the the important information out in front of everybody. Also, who's on the team, okay? And do we have a couple of executive leaders or management who is overseeing it? So you establish a structure from the standpoint of, you know, picture a triangle and you divide it in three horizontal slices, okay? The bottom is your execution team, the middle is your tactical managers, and your project manager fits in there. And then up top would be executive leadership of who would be the stakeholders, okay? And you may just have one or two people at each level, okay? And then you can have larger programs where of course it gets populated more. The point is just establishing that structure so that then if something happens at the lower level and they can't, the team can't get something sorted out, you can escalate up to the project manager and then up to the CIO, let's say. It's like you go out to your garage to work on your car and you got your toolbox and you got 15 tools in the toolbox. You don't pull them all out and start wailing on the motor. Okay, you take out what you need uh to get the job done. And it's to your point earlier, okay? It doesn't need to be complicated. There's just there's some key things that you absolutely have to have on a project that you want to start tracking. You know, you need to have that project charter with a scope statement, you need to have a communications model, which is the triangle, the governance that I spoke to, and you need to have a timeline that that keeps track of the task, and then a weekly or bi-weekly cadence where people meet so that you make sure that things are being progressing. And if not, okay, what are the issues and how can I help? And that really is the core to get things started at a small company.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yeah, and when you were talking about that, your your triangle executive leadership, middle-tier tactical management, and then uh what was that third level you had made?

SPEAKER_00 11:08

So your top level is your senior leadership, and typically so that you can be called a stakeholder committee. Sometimes people will flip it and the top will be steering committee and the middle stakeholder. It's it's used interchangeably in many models, but the point is it's strategic, it's tactical, it's operational.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Yeah. And uh, you know, it's interesting you say that because I think one of the things when we were rolling out ours out, we had some of that going on. I wouldn't say it was as clear as what you just laid out, but you know, the total clarity of the communications channel is one thing that really affected the projects that we had. I was amazed at this. This really registered with me when we were rolling out a uh a new website design for Dave Ramsey. I mean, we were doing, man, 60, 70, 80 million dollars a year through our website, and we had to put out a new website. It was just dated. The thing was old, it was structured, so we had to first do analytics and then kind of understand the website, like what's working, what's not working, what do we want to do, where do we want to go, and then change it. But what got me was the team that we had working on that, and as we were going through that process, because it was about a year-long process to do this project, and how much the communications drifted over like a 30-day period, how you could have a meeting, you could be clear, and then we weren't doing like a daily cadence at that point when we first started it, but you go 30 days, and I'm like, how did we drift from where we were 30 days ago to where we are today, you know, 30 days later? We were all in the same room, we all came to the same conclusion, and then here we are, we're off on different pages again 30 days later. And that was probably the most shining uh example I can think of of where communications just really resonated. It's like, oh, this this mo this communications model we're using is not working. We need a new and different communications model, we need to go to weekly or we need to go to daily, kind of like, hey, what's going on? And that's where we really started adjusting how we manage projects, because that was that was the biggest project by far we had ever worked on, was something rebuilding this$80 million website to so that it could continue to move forward and grow. Right. But uh yeah, give me some secrets on maybe some of the things you've seen in communications as far as on projects like these.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

Sure. So from a from a team perspective, the team you want to be meeting usually it's you want to meet twice a week at a minimum, all right. And and so you also don't want to have people's calendars filled up with meetings. So there needs to be a distinct and communicated agenda that remains the same, consistent. You're gonna have an update meeting once a week, and that's where in advance people have uh emailed in or utilized the tool to update the task that they were assigned for that week. Okay, and what's the status? And the project manager updates the timeline, you do a quick review of the team. Then you're gonna have a status meeting with your middle level, your tactical managers, who would be peers and working peers with the the project manager so that they're brought up to date. And that may actually only be bi-weekly. And then you have the executive leadership uh and do a report out with them. It could be bi-weekly, it could be monthly. I've been on them where it was weekly because things were on fire and they wanted to know every single week. But once you get past that fire and get things in a good place, it can slow down. The point is is having cadences. So dev teams, especially who are running a hybrid or an agile, a pure agile type environment, they're gonna do their own daily stand-ups within the team. Project manager and a product manager may drop in on those occasionally, but for the most part, those run independently and of themselves. And then thirdly, what I would bring in is is on projects of a significant size that are gonna impact the organization, whether it's one or two verticals or the entire organization, you need to include organizational change management. And so you bring in an OCM manager who conducts a readiness assessment and analyzes, okay, these processes are gonna change because of this solution, and this is gonna impact these people's jobs. And so a matrix is built, it's scored out, and then you identify, okay, where are we gonna have gaps in education? So therefore, this drives your your training plan. The communication uh plan for the masses, for all the the users, okay. Do they want to know what's happening? They've heard about this project, you put out proactive and positive uh messages, you give you establish forums where people can come and ask questions. They don't necessarily have a vote, but they can come in and ask questions. And you keep people informed during the the entire timeline of this implementation so that then they have confidence in the in the team and every and everyone who's involved and working on it, they have confidence that voices have been heard and they have confidence that should this thing go sideways that it's with a good team that's gonna get things straightened out at go live, okay? Because if you if everyone's not on board and feeling warm and fuzzy and and drinking the same Kool-Aid and you go sideways and it it's difficult to then get things corrected, it's pretty much irretrievable. It's the statistics show that if it goes into the tank, it's hard to recover. And so, therefore, to your point about communications, you have cadences within the team, you have cadences that are for the user group and the larger population. And you give people opportunities to give feedback and also if you can do early demos, you do that as well.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

Yeah, that's it's good. I think uh the communications thing is so key. I think a lot of business owners uh don't understand that. They get so task focused that they're just communicating about their tasks, they're not doing like real communication within an organization, real communication within the projects, they don't understand it because you know you're growing up. You're you're learning how to run a small business, you're learning how to all these different things. So many hats you gotta wear. It's pretty, pretty wild. Now, when you're doing all this work, you're doing this project evaluation. I want to hit two more things for sure. Um, I want to talk about uh just project evaluation, some of the processes you might use for that to go, hey, is this a viable project? Is this a a project that monetizes it? We'll see ROI from it. I think the other thing I want to talk about first, though, is uh some of the tools that you're using to actually go, hey, what is good project management? What are some of these processes? As you mentioned before, some people are using post-it notes and checklists, right? Some people are using Excel spreadsheets. But there's a lot of really good tools out there now to help people do that. And I'm sure with all your clients that you use, you may have like 10 different tools you have to use based on what the client's needs are.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

So we'll start with the tools piece. And and yes, so there's there's a huge number of project management tools that are out there. When you deal in larger organizations, especially manufacturing and engineering, where it's involved, they may be using something like Clarity or uh Primavera, which are very detailed all the way down to the most minuscule task as far as how how deep you want to embed it and and build it out. And you you can track really down to the day as far as if things move out and even the hour if you want to set it up that way. Quite involved. And typically on something like that, it would be a very large scale pro I ran a several projects that were programs that were, you know, sixty to eighty million dollars and a hundred to two hundred people. And so in that type of an instance, I had four different project managers who would be taking care of different regions or different uh categories of the work, and then we just bring it all together. You also have things that are web-based. So ServiceNow has uh a project portfolio management utility in it. Then there's Confluence that ties in with Jira. There's some others that are geared more towards uh smaller companies and and shall we say lower half of mid-market that are popular. And actually I've seen companies up into the lower Fortune 1000 use it, but you've got Asana, you've got Monday.com. The clickup is becoming very popular. Notion is another one. So those are all uh SaaS or web-based. And I think most, we were talking about this before uh we went live. And uh yeah, a lot of a lot of things that used to be locally installed client server have moved to the web and and are SaaS-based. As far as tools in working day-to-day, so there are risk and issues tracking tools. The ones that I still stick with, though, are it's it's one of the few spreadsheets I'll use, but it's one that I've built and I've had for years, and it just I can do weighting in it and scoring, and it works really well. Action item lists. So there's trackers for that as well as uh people just doing the regular spreadsheets. When it comes to doing the triage, if you will, or or evaluation of a an existing project or program, I covered that uh a little bit earlier, but really I I go and look and see, okay, is there a project charter in place? If so, let me let me take a look at it. Is there any documentation that outlined how this project was established? You know, what's the budget look like, what's the current state, and where are you having problems? And those are the things that I really take a look at. If I'm going to triage and try to right size and fix one. And then you asked about so if we're looking at a pipeline of projects, and so this is when, you know, everybody in in the different groups probably starts in August or September and then continues all the way around, but they want to get this in before the budget time of October, November planning. People raise their hand and I've got this idea. Okay, well, all right, so you you'll keep a log of ideas or concepts, and some of the work is put on them. Okay, well, you need to write a business case for this, and here's our formula for for the ROI as how the finance department wants it done. And you need to check off a few boxes and then submit it as a formal type application. And so then it's scored. Well, so so if a committee reviews it and says, all right, this one looks good, let's move it forward to the next uh evaluation stage, you're sizing it. So common is to do t-shirt sizes, small, medium, large, and extra large. And um, and and there is a value equated to that. It and it depends on the company, but you know, it could be that it's something fifty thousand dollars, could be a million dollars, could be five million, and so forth. You get the idea. And so from there, then depending on the sides, there'll be a list of questions that have to do with, you know, getting into the details, all right, and really starting to estimate it out. You need a DBA for a couple months, I'm gonna need an architect for a month, I'm gonna need, you know, three business analysts, and I'm gonna need some people from the finance department. Well, you gotta talk to the finance manager and say, all right, okay, these people have their day jobs. How can we schedule this out? Can I get them, you know, six hours a week? And and so there then you put it into a resource log, a resource management log, of which a number of the tools I already mentioned have that, as well as like Microsoft Project, which now has been switched to a new platform, which they've got three names for it. But um Yeah, th they have one which actually is pretty good. Um and and so that is how you you start getting it narrowed down in your funnel and taking a look, okay, what are the resources involved, the money, et cetera. And then you have to evaluate where is this going to impact and really help the company from an operational standpoint and a revenue model.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Yeah, I love what you're saying there. And we did a lot of that when we started implementing PMO at DAES, that same process. So it's funny to hear you say that where you go like small, medium, large, extra large, and then just evaluating that, you know, navigating our way through that introduction of that process. And uh, you business owners listening to this, the thing I want you to hear the most is that, you know, uh it's so easy to spin up work as a business owner. Like you can you can have an idea and then you just tell somebody to go do it. And what happens though is the more you do that without proper evaluation of the projects that you're spinning up or the work that you're spinning up, you're actually tearing down your resources or misallocating your resources a lot of times. So because it is so easy as a business owner to actually create work, and it's not necessarily the best way to do it. You really need to have some of these formalized processes in place to go, hey, is this idea that I thought was the greatest thing since sliced bread actually going to produce revenue? Or am I biting off more than I can chew and it's gonna cost more to get it done? And so really sitting down and going, hey, what is my process to evaluate these projects before I spin them up, before I take, you know, these these people that I have, these finite resources and allocate them out to something that may not produce any revenue. And I think that's one of when you look at the statistics, I think it's something like 90% of small businesses don't exist within 10 years. They all die. And uh so only really about 10% or so of businesses actually succeed past the 10-year mark. And part of that is this misallocation of resources where you're going, hey, I got you know a$10,000, where am I gonna put this$10,000? And what's how's it gonna create ROI for me and bring it back to me? That's a question I think a lot of small business owners don't necessarily uh do the due diligence on to actually produce that work and go, hey, this this money's going here, these these man hours are going here. Um is that how's that gonna produce ROI back into the company? Now, do you have a framework for that kind of system, or is that more the business guys that you rely on to do that, Jeff?

SPEAKER_00 25:45

So when you speak of a framework for the system, so I uh so I have a framework that I utilize for digital transformation initiatives, but we also have a framework or a system, if you will, that's called a f it's a five-stage system and it's called uh the Fusion Pro PM toolkit. And um and so that starts it, so it's aligned with Project Management Institute and the and the five phases there. We have five stages, okay, and it's driving out the clarity, so getting the scope. And and you mentioned that earlier. It's it's hugely important that companies, business owners take the time to really scope out a project and and and truly understand, you know, what what is our burning platform? What is it that we're looking to solve, and then what what are the inputs to that and what are the outputs? And are those outputs going to save us money? They may not actually produce revenue, but they could save money, and it could be significant money to where, okay, this could be justified, even if it's just taking care of, you know, the folks in finance or the folks in AHR. Ideally, you want something that's really going to, you know, help everybody across the enterprise. But if if it's a huge benefit, and so then from establishing your scope and clarity in the first phase is then you go into your planning, and then you have execution, you have monitor and control, and then you have closing. And so we have a 40-page um little freebie we're we're going to give out for folks. And then I also have a uh frequently asked questions uh sheet that I can um uh give folks uh a little link on that as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

All right. So uh let me just go back to what you were saying there, because I don't think I said that very clearly the way you said it kind of bring back some memories of my time with Dave. And that is your projects either need to make you money or save you money. So when you evaluate your projects through those lenses, you're gonna invest in the right places. Some projects are going to save you a little money, some are gonna save you a lot of money, some are gonna make you a little money, some are gonna make you a lot of money. And so you need to evaluate that through that. You just don't need to spin up work for the sake of doing work, you know, and not evaluate it through those lenses of saving money or making money. That just brings you a lot more clarity on where your resources are going, where you're spending your money as a business owner. And uh keeps you more focused, you know. If you want to be successful as a business owner, that's what you got to do. You gotta evaluate these things through a uh a critical lens and not just flavor of the week, you know, or idea of the week where you're spending up all this stuff just because you got people working for you. And you got to give them something to do, right? So you need to make sure it's the right things that you're giving them to do. So uh with that said, uh Jeff, one of the things I like to do is uh ask people what's their favorite business books, or maybe you're two. I like to get two uh different business books that maybe you've read that would be useful to the guys listening to the show.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

Okay. Two business books. Well uh my my fallback that I continue to go back to from early days is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Fli Friends and Influence People. And then um one of my more recent ones that I'm reading, actually it's up on a shelf up here, is How to How to Get Back Time and Dan Martell. And so in today's world of AI advancements, you know, you spoke earlier about projects getting out of hand. One of the one of the spaces where it's really taking place a lot right now is uh companies are diving into rolling out AI without really having a true strategic uh plan and objectives of what is it that we want to accomplish with this for our company? And you can get head over heels into that. And there's also things that just have to do with the infrastructure and how you build that out to keep it private and keep all of your data safe too, because people if people are uploading not just prompts but files, etc. So smaller companies, businesses may not recognize that you really need to take into consideration of building out your own private AI environment behind your own firewall versus utilizing the LLMs that are out there externally, even though you can get private instances. And that's a whole nother conversation. But that's something where you could you could go in and really spend thousands, tens of thousands of dollars and even get into the the hundreds, and next thing you know, you still haven't really accomplished anything. Productivity is being seen in pockets through AI and people are doing the prompts, but really where you want to be moving towards is establishing agents, automated workflow, and agentic type uh workflow.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you 100%. And I really haven't considered the security, but yeah, because I'm not working uh, you know, I'm a solopreneur now, but if you've got an organization, you really don't know what your team is uploading into this cloud-based model to go, hey, read this document for me, this legal you know, contract, and you know, and all of a sudden that's in the cloud. You know, that's in the cloud and it's got access, and and that may not be the best thing. So I do agree with you, uh, you know, taking more time, uh the overall security implications, especially for AI and how they're implemented. So, Jeff, how people find out about you? They want to you know come in, get you to look at their systems, get you look at how they're evaluating their projects. What do they got to do?

SPEAKER_00 31:05

So I'm on LinkedIn, Jeffrey K. Lambert, and also Blue Fusion Partners.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

And you you mentioned uh your framework or something that you have available, like a 40-page document that was kind of like a gift you want to go together.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

We're launching a training portal. So uh the timing of being able to meet you and talk about that has been fun as well. So Fusion Pro PM, fusionpro dash PM.com slash F A Q S.

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Awesome. Well, Jeff man, I appreciate you coming on. Uh sharing a little bit of light on some of the things I did wrong at Dave Ramsey's when I was in project management.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

I uh certainly enjoyed uh our our telling of war stories and enjoyed the time here. Uh again, a privilege to be on your show. I appreciate it, Tony.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Yeah, thank you, Jeff.