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Helping Project Managers grow and master their project management skills while sharing the stories of other project management professionals.
PM-Mastery
Communication for Project Managers - A LinkedIn Live Event Recording
This is an audio recording of my First LinkedIn live where I pulled together a group of talented Project Management professionals to do a quarterly series called "PM Knights and Ladies of the Round Table".
This is the only episode of this series to date but I promise there will be more. The topic for this Live was "Communication for Project Managers" - If you would like to see the live recording, see the link below as well as links to the panelists LinkedIn Profiles.
Link to video Recording of the event
Links to Guest Panel Participants LinkedIn Profiles:
Supporting Links:
Welcome to the PM Mastery Podcast. This podcast is all about helping you master your project management skills by sharing tips, tricks, tools and training to get you to the next level, while sharing the stories of other project managers on their journey in project management. And now here's your host, walt Sparling.
Walt Sparling:This episode is a recording of my first ever LinkedIn Live, where I pulled together a group of talented project management professionals with a plan to do a quarterly series called PM Nights and Ladies of the Roundtable. Although, honestly, this is the only episode of this series to date, I promise there will be more. The topic for this live was communication for project managers. If you'd like to see the live recording, I'll post a link in the show notes along with the links to the other panelists. Enjoy the episode. So this is my first time, so we'll see John. Feel free to jump in at any point and point out anything.
John Connoly:That's great, we're live, so I hope we get a lot of people joining us this evening.
Walt Sparling:I think we had 254 sign up, so if we can, get a few of those.
John Connoly:All right. So, walt, I'm going to defer to you, though, in terms of our agenda for the evening, and I don't know if you can explain to us, kind of, how you see the conversation unfolding for everyone this evening.
Walt Sparling:So I sent out kind of an agenda on the group and I'm basically going to do a welcome, do introductions. Everyone here is going to get a minute or so, go around, say who you are, what you do, where you're from, and then we'll jump into like a brief overview what it's about. And then I figure for the first hour or so we're going to primarily talk amongst ourselves and if we see something interesting pop up we'll answer it. But once we kind of go through then we'll open it up to questions from the audience, which two hours is a long time. I'm thinking about taking a break.
John Connoly:Yes, partway through, but we are live, so folks are watching us right now and I could see like lots of folks commenting, so I'm really looking forward to hearing. Yeah, I'm hoping that we'll get a lot of good questions later on.
Walt Sparling:So, John, how can I tell how many are on? Because, like I said first time, it says 34. Okay, 701.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So far, Canada is standing the strongest. So, Joe, you've got to keep them occupied. I don't know how to do that.
Joseph Phillips:Canadians, you know, get some bacon and crullers, some Bob and Doug McKenzie. That may show my age a little bit.
Walt Sparling:Hey Kelly. So where are you seeing the numbers? And I apologize once again.
John Connoly:You have to look on LinkedIn to see them. Streamyard does not have access to that. Who wants to be my number guy? See them. Streamyard does not have access to that yeah, all right.
Walt Sparling:Who wants to be my number guy?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:38. I got it up on a side screen.
Walt Sparling:Let's wait until 50. We'll banter a little bit and we hit 50. We'll get moving.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:All these poor folks.
Patrick Shrewsbury:That number.
John Connoly:Walt is concurrent. It's just however many people are watching all at once. Yeah, bigger breakdown later on. I'm sure as to who all is here, but I'm really excited to see a lot of new names popping up here to me, like a lot of people that I'm just not familiar with, and hoping that everyone will connect so we can talk and, you know, help everyone learn together.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Agreed the furthest one so far from Bosnia stayed awake. Saw that To see this live, so welcome, selma Wow.
Walt Sparling:All right 47. Oh, three more. We've got to have a threshold. Hey, Logan Joseph.
Jeff Plumbee:Oh, got somebody from.
Walt Sparling:Turkey, there's a good one. Wow, yeah, I see a lot of familiar names 51 all right, all right I'm gonna move or is lauren?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:beat me to it. She said 50 yeah, all right.
Walt Sparling:So welcome everyone to the first PM Nights and Ladies of the Roundtable discussion, and the plan is to do this quarterly. Tonight we're going to be talking about communication for project managers and I have an excellent panel on here this evening and what I'd like to do is kind of go down I'm going to do this in an alphabetical order and do a quick intro of yourself, where you're from, what you do, and we'll start with Brooks.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Appreciate it Clinton, brooks, herman, and you can see my name on the screen. I do have three first names, so usually that's how I start off conversations, because it can get confusing and I go by all three. But typically, as Walt said, I go by Brooks. I'm in the Houston, texas area. It is nice and warm here, as I think most of the world is feeling too. I actually work for a contract PM firm and am contracted out to a large healthcare facility. It out to a large healthcare facility.
Walt Sparling:Healthcare group within the Houston region.
Jeff Plumbee:All right, thanks, jeff. All right, hey guys and everybody else. I'm Jeff Plumlee. I live in Charleston, South Carolina. No-transcript. I taught project management to undergrad and grad students at the university level as a tenure track. Faculty for a while Hosted a project management podcast, had a couple of you on. I've hosted a community of practice with that as well. I, in the past year or so, started my own consulting company, which I've been doing full-time. I spend a lot of time now helping early stage companies develop the project management structure they need to succeed. I've currently got some pretty fun projects with Clemson University, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the National Renewable Energy Lab. So, yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for getting us set up.
Walt Sparling:All right, thanks, jeff Joseph.
Joseph Phillips:Hey, thank you all. Joe, phillips, or Joseph, if I'm in trouble I teach project management. The director of education at instructingcom and probably one of the top project management trainers on Udemy just broaching 750,000 people in my classes there. So not how I thought my life would turn out, but happy that it has. I'm in Michigan in the summer and in Sarasota, florida, in the winter months and Alt and I have connected. He's just up the street from me, so happy to be here with this group. A lot of great talent on this call.
Walt Sparling:All right, thanks, joe and John.
John Connoly:Yeah, I'm John Connolly. I am a project manager, been managing projects for about a decade. I spent 16 years as a librarian. I am really passionate about community and the exchange of information between individuals with lots of experience and people who are just getting started Really love to connect with people on LinkedIn. I've been active on LinkedIn for about a year plus now and met so many wonderful people, so I'm just very happy to be here alongside this group, this panel. I think it's going to be a fun time.
Walt Sparling:All right, thanks, john Patrick.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, I'm Patrick Shrewsbury. I have been in project management of some form for 20 years. It's kind of scary when you say that number. It may start showing your age at this point, but it's been that long. It may start showing your age at this point, but it's been that long. I actually currently work for Jones Ling LaSalle for a large financial institution, so doing a lot of projects of ground ups. We do infrastructure and a lot of interior renovations, so tons of project management experience from a construction background. Previously to that, I've held a lot of leadership roles, some with Family Dollar, also previous to that with Freedom Group, which was a vendor for AT&T's engineering here in the US, especially Southeast, and along with that I'd say that probably the biggest strength I have in those roles is people management. So I love to manage people and see them succeed.
Walt Sparling:Thanks, Patrick. All right, so last but not least, Walt Sparling. I have been doing project management for about 15, 16 years now, Started out in the design world, moved into an owner's rep position with Jones Lang Nassau. Same as Patrick, Serve as an owner's rep for a large utility company across the US. I am the current PDS lead for the state of Florida, so I manage a small team of PMs in Florida and then a big fan of project management in general. So I started a podcast a few years ago called PM Mastery, and every one of these fine gentlemen has been interviewed on that podcast, as well as a lot of the audience that I see signing in. So it's good to see you all, lot of the audience that I see signing in. So it's good to see you all and I've helped. I've learned a lot and hopefully shared a lot with some of the guests that we've had on, with other people that have listened to the podcast.
Walt Sparling:All right, so now that we're all here, let's talk about communication. So the topic of communication I think is very common in project management, in the project management world. I think is very common in project management. In the project management world. I think there's a few skills that project managers are most known for, and the better they are at these key skills, the better they are or more likely they are to succeed. And communication in my book is pretty much number one.
Walt Sparling:So we're going to talk a little bit about different aspects of communication and then get some input from experiences on the different people on the panel, and then we're going to go into some questions and hopefully answer some questions that the audience has. So, Joe, you teach a lot on project management, so you've covered communication a lot. Everyone here has been through you know that, certifications and teaching and, Jeff, you've done podcasts on this stuff. I've heard some of your guests, so a lot of experience on the topic of communication. So where do we start, Joe? I'm going to let you kick us off with something on what you would teach your students on communication and then we'll all jump in on it.
Joseph Phillips:Well, I always tell project managers that if you want to do one thing to make your project better, just one thing is to communicate more. I think that it's so easy to make assumptions what other people know because we're in the middle of it as PMs and you know you have to look at it from other people's perspective and all the things that they have going on and that your project is in that mix. But it's kind of this separate entity and people don't always know what you know. And it's easy to make that assumption and then to communicate on a regular cadence, whether it's weekly or every couple of days, but keep people posted. I think that all goes back to requirements gathering is understanding what our stakeholders want from us, what's important to them. That's what we have to listen. It's a big part of communication, of course, is listening what's important to those stakeholders and that tells us what we need to communicate. So if you miss that step at the beginning, then you've got some work cut out for you.
Joseph Phillips:I think new PMs sometimes get a little timid and they're like a waiter taking down orders rather than asking questions. You have to consider the stakeholder. They want you to be interested. They want you to ask questions for clarity. Everybody wants to get the project requirements right up front but you know some of that's going to come with experience of you know be able to look into and understand what people are really saying. But anybody can ask questions and be curious about what your stakeholders are asking for and to really listen and have them tell the story and to not be the person that's talking through the whole conversation, but let them communicate to you and take that in and really pay attention, really get involved and focus on what that person's telling you. I think that is fundamental to any role if you want to be successful.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, and communication is a conversation. It's not a one-way street, unless you're married.
Joseph Phillips:I'm joking.
Jeff Plumbee:I think you know just to kind of pile onto this, joe makes a great point here that you know, when we're project managers, like other people, are generally the subject matter experts. Right, we know what we know, but we're not necessarily going to be subject matter experts in everything we do, and we shouldn't be. But that's, that's fine, that's perfect we are. We can be idiots in some circumstances, right, we just have to be able to ask the questions and don't be afraid to ask those questions. You only come across as an idiot if you don't ask the questions and three months later it comes up.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, and one of the first things on the agenda was communication management. And it's because, during the entire project, there is no phase that requires communication. Every phase requires communication, from start to end. And it's true, you may know how to manage a project and that's why project managers can go from industry to industry. They might do better in certain ones, especially with background, but it's knowing the process, knowing how to communicate, gather that information and then lead the people through the project is what's going to make you successful.
John Connoly:And a lot of people on this panel have some great experience, I think, working with stakeholders, working with gathering requirements. But I'm curious what everyone on the panel would say. Those questions need to be right. I think a lot of times our advice is really general. You know, get in there, ask questions and listen actively. It's like great, got it. But getting true insight out of people is not easy in my experience. And I just ask them what do you need? Like 90% of the time, I think. A lot of times those stakeholders they either don't know what they need or they don't realize that they don't know what they think they need. And, um, so like when we're getting in there, we, it's good, get in the room, have the conversations, but are there any questions that you all ask? That would be like practical application just to get in people's minds and start getting them thinking about what the requirements need to be I think at the get-go you should start start off with who, what, where, when, how.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:And the biggest one is when. When do you need this by Right, because that makes a huge difference. It may stop a project right then, and there, if you say, well, this is probably a 12-month process, not a two-month.
Walt Sparling:Hopefully one of my most important questions is asked before we get to the table is why? Why are we doing this project?
Joseph Phillips:I like to ask what does done look like? You'll paint me a picture of what this looks like and you're going to be happy when we're done. So show me the vision, and then John to your point. We're done, so, show me the vision, and then the John to your point. Sometimes they don't know what that vision is, so then it's like well, back to like okay. Well, why are we doing this? What's the pain that we're trying to resolve? So let me see that pain from your perspective, from your, your LOBs perspective. And that leads me to what the resolution should be, because oftentimes you're right, they don't know what they want. I don't know what I want, but it's not this. You get into that circle, yeah, dangerous.
John Connoly:Yeah, for sure. And something that I've leaned on a little bit too, that I've found helpful, is asking you know you ask probing questions for sure. Try to listen, make sure you're following those up right. Follow the thread back if you can, but at the end of the conversation, something that I usually will ask a key stakeholder when we're doing requirements gathering is what you know. Do you have questions for me? Sure, check Got it, and is there anything I didn't ask that you think I should have asked?
Joseph Phillips:Oh yeah, that's good.
John Connoly:It's like hey, I don't know what, I don't know, I need to broadcast on all frequencies that I'm not the subject matter expert and I'm trying to get in. I need to work with them to get in their head.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I need to work with them to get in their head Going off the SME subject matter expert. I mean, our job as project managers is to drive. We are driving the ship to the end result of whatever the client is requesting. So if we're not driving them, then that's where we're not going to be the subject matter expert. If you want to know everything, you might be in the wrong boat. Being a project manager, maybe you need to focus in on a smaller scale, but we have to make sure all the three ring circus gets to present to everybody.
Joseph Phillips:So that's true, yeah, and just one thing also to add is so that's true.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, and just one thing also to add is it and I see it a lot because we have a lot of new project managers that come through and the first thing that happens is they're assigned a project there. There usually is a scope that's attached to that. This is kind of what you're going to do on this project, and before they do anything, they want to hit the ground running and so immediately they start trying to get the stakeholders involved, project and you're doing well, but you've never really talked and see exactly what that end user really does want. And that's something that we coach and practice often, because it's very often missed from someone new, really just trying to please and get in there and just jump into that scope that they just learned.
Jeff Plumbee:I think, to build on what John mentioned with the we don't know what we don't know when we think about that, when we ask who else should I be talking to, sometimes we end up going two or three levels down with that too. So it's kind of like the five whys exercise, except for it ends up being the five whos right. Our stakeholder analysis isn't complete until we ask our stakeholders who else we should be talking to. If we miss an important stakeholder, we've completely lost track of what we're doing. You know, we need to be talking to our SMEs about that. We need to ask them what other constraints or risks we might be missing.
Walt Sparling:I mean like you said, john, we don't know what we don't know, right, yeah? So this kind of leads to one of the other items on the agenda, which is a communication plan. So you can't just willy-nilly go out there and say, well, I'm going to call some guys, I'm going to do a kickoff. Sometimes we'll do multiple kickoffs an internal kickoff with just a core team, and then we'll do a project kickoff with all the ISPs and all the SMEs and bring all of those in.
Walt Sparling:But you have to have a plan to how you're going to get there and you have to have. How are you going to communicate with high-level stakeholders and with everyday stakeholders and with SMEs? And when are you going to do your updates? How often? In what format Are they going to be visual? When are you going to do your updates? How often? In what format are they going to be visual? Are they going to be email? Are they going to be in person? So you have to put a plan together to. You have to have a communication plan. What do you guys? Anything on that?
Joseph Phillips:I'm a big fan of. I'm not a very smart person, so I like things simple. So I need a communication matrix of our stakeholders and what do they want and who talks to whom is something that I do in every project. And then you know, then you coordinate that Are these two people talking? Are these folks getting the right information at the right time in the right modality? So it kind of I use that as a guide every week of you know like a checklist, you know following through who's talking to whom and when. What's the information that they want and they should be receiving on that regular cadence, and then what's the the right modality? Then where does that information go? That's just not lost in email, that they've got a folder for that project or a SharePoint for that project. That it's centralized. We can get it when we need it quickly.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I err on the side of over-communicating and involving most of the parties. I mean there might be specific situations, if it's involving the O&M group, where I may just reach out to them directly because if I have the end user involved, but otherwise the end users tend to enjoy the fact that they're being kept in the loop even if they're oblivious to what's being discussed, and that may open the door where they end up calling me and asking questions and then we can adjust scope because it might need, obviously, avoiding scope creep, but it might adjust scope where we need to focus in a little closer because we were missing a step.
Jeff Plumbee:I want to highlight something, though, with the overcommunication piece, because I had a conversation with actually somebody who's in the audience earlier this week about a problem with a junior member of their team over-communicating with an external stakeholder, and they ended up airing out some dirty laundry that really didn't need to be aired out. So it's important to know what is and isn't acceptable to communicate to a client, and I think for a new project manager it's important to realize what is and isn't. But even as a veteran project manager understanding which of your staff may be new or not, know that and laying that out up front, because you know transparency is great, but at the same time, you don't want your client or customer worrying about something that they don't need to be worried about because you, as a project manager, already have a contingency or solution in place.
Walt Sparling:That's a very good point, Jeff have a contingency or solution in place. That's a very good point, jeff. Yeah, I've seen that with new PMs and we want to be open and as transparent as we can be. But there's certain things that the client doesn't need to see, because we need to put that in a format that it covers all costs, all details, and if you don't deliver it in the right way, it just creates more questions and more delays. So, as a PM a new PM I would ask what can I share? What should I share?
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, going back to the communication plan as well, I think another thing that kind of popped in my head was one, I think, like you guys said, is who's the role players, who's the stakeholders? Do we need to have an in-person, do you need to have a phone call? Does it need to be a web, a virtual? But also what kind of I was thinking about was the frequency. A lot of times the folks will want to have a weekly meeting, biweekly meeting, monthly meeting, and what's the right cadence for the type of project that you have? I mean, we will have some projects sometimes that are very long and you're in a design phase for several weeks and maybe it doesn't warrant to have a meeting every single week with that client, and so you would want to stretch those out. But let's have a monthly touch base until we kind of get into that construction phase or as you start to get into that execution phase, and so it's something else to think about. Is really that frequency?
Jeff Plumbee:And I think that leads to. What are the other tools that we can use besides meetings? Right, can you set up a dashboard for them where they can visit it at any time, not waste an hour of your entire team's week to be sitting on a call where you know maybe there's one or two updates, but you've got an hour booked for it and of course you're going to have, you know, the intro to the meeting and the waiting on everybody to show up and then, yeah, so you end up taking five or 10 hours of staff time for what could be a 30-second look at the dashboard and see what the update is, and then we'll talk monthly, right?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So I noticed one of our members stated some of the stakeholders prefer text, and that kind of opens up an interesting caveat that came up with my firm, my full-time employer. Apparently, texts are becoming the manner that if a project or whatever is going to be investigated, they can go and take your phone and download everything. Now, granted, this is United States-based. I can't speak for some of our foreign countries that are here, but they can take your phone, download everything. Now, granted, this is United States based. I can't speak for some of our foreign countries that are here, but they can take your phone, download everything, and then the person you're communicating with via text and they will download everything on your phone, along with whoever you are communicating with too. So just keep that in mind. On the text piece, I know the simplicity that it has, but definitely try to stay within the confines of what is covered underneath your employer. Now, if you have a specific cell phone provided by your employer, that's a different story.
Walt Sparling:But it's also the. There's certain communications that might be able to be done through text. You know a quick hey, I heard there was an issue over there at the site or on something. Can you get back with me? Maybe call me or email me some more detail? But I wouldn't be doing broad communications through text.
John Connoly:I mean it's going to depend on the nature of the project as well, right, you know, a tiny project that's only taking you a couple of months, maybe it's something that you can communicate safely a little bit more informally, I think it does. It varies so much project to project.
John Connoly:I think you know I'm here in the Washington DC area, so like 50% of the people I work with in project management, they are on government contracts and it's easy to forget that if you're working with the government in particular, all your communications could be a matter of public record under FOIA and that's just something you need to keep in mind, right, that's, if you're planning for your communications, that needs to be front and center. If that's a constraint on the communications that you have and I'm really interested in communication management plans when I'm putting them together to approach them from a constraints point of view, because for me it's a matter of eliminating points of failure, because the failure of the communication is really what's going to hurt your project in the long term. So for me it's not about, like, facilitate or optimize communication I mean, that's great if you can, but it's to minimize the risks of communication going wrong.
John Connoly:I had a PM I talked to a couple of months ago and she was working in the medical field and they're constructing things and you know they had a doctor on their team, key stakeholder. He's 85 years old, he didn't have a cell phone, he didn't get texts, he did not have a pager, he did not have a fax machine, he had a landline phone with no answering machine attached and the plan was if you need me, you will call that number until someone answers. There was no backup plan, and that's the kind of thing you need to identify early and create workarounds for, because that can kill your project If you have a key stakeholder, critical stakeholder, that you might need very quickly. All of those things are going to have to be accounted for in the plan and it's a thought exercise for me to start getting ahead of those things that could throw a monkey wrench in the works.
Jeff Plumbee:Okay, I just mind if we circle back really quick to dashboards. We've got a couple of comments in the chat about what to use dashboards for, so I just want to make one quick comment here. I think dashboards are really good for certain things. They're terrible for other things. I think dashboards are really good for certain things. They're terrible for other things. Dashboards are really good for, like task status or budget status or any sort of like quantitative or binary, yes-no information. Dashboards are really good at giving data, but not necessarily information. It'll tell us the what, but not necessarily the why. So to I think it was Patrick's point. Like you know, when we have, if we have the, if we have a dashboard, we still need to have some sort of status update meetings to explain why things might look out of whack or why things might be the case that they are. But it just kind of gives a quick pulse check to maybe avoid those daily or weekly meetings if they're at too often of a frequency.
Walt Sparling:And depending on how often they update those dashboards. It's a point in time and, like you said, there's no real detail there. It's great for leadership if they're overseeing a bunch of projects and they want to know the success rate or the current phase in a project or how many projects we're doing, how much money we're spending, but if you really want to know the details, you need to have a meeting or send out a more detailed report that covers that data.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Yeah.
Joseph Phillips:Back to John's point for a moment. Like the text thing we're talking about and I agree a lot with what you say, john or the trim, the possibility of failure or breakdown. So I was consulting at a really big insurance company in the Midwest and had people, they had contractors, they had people internally and just the if you needed something printed out and you're a contractor, you'd have to email it to yourself as the workaround because we didn't have printers. So you email it to yourself to hit print and then some of those contractors could text. Other people couldn't, you know, couldn't text, you know, so they had to get their personal phone to text. And then, you know, somebody created a Facebook group in one of their projects. It was just such a mess. There were all these different avenues to circumvent the rules.
Joseph Phillips:And to some extent, like my role was to standardize, so there weren't a lot of rules and that's how we uncovered a lot of that mess, but to have that communication up front as to how we communicate, the schedule of communication, what we're going to communicate. And I totally agree with what Jeff was saying with dashboards. You know there's that concept of an information radiator. It's dreamy, but if it's not updated then it's old, it's outdated, it's not fresh. So yeah, I hate meetings, I hate what I call WOT meetings, a wasted time meeting. So you get 12 people on a call for an hour. That's 12 hours lost, for you know something that might be an email, but I agree, you've got to have meetings, but to have the agenda for that and then to guard that agenda closely. If it's a 30-minute meeting, then 30 minutes or less, less, not to carve out an hour, and then we've got to sit here for an hour because that's what we have slated.
Walt Sparling:Uh, so I, meetings are my nemesis, I, I hate meetings and I think that that all gets spelled out in your communication plan is it exactly just how often, what method? And for me, I, I, I don't mind meetings, but if it it's half an hour and we can do it in 20, I'm good as long as we covered everything.
Jeff Plumbee:And just speaking of text, one more thing to just kind of warn the audience of that. I was looking at some news article in the past week or so about a ruling I think it was in Canada, over an agreement that was made via text and the response was a thumbs up. The thumbs up was actually deemed, I believe, legally binding as a yes to move forward with something. So you know, we're moving into this weird gray area of you know an emoji is basically a sign off, a, a formal sign-off for moving forward on something. So yeah, just something for everybody to be aware of that. You know that may come into play at some point.
Walt Sparling:So it was an LOL. No way Right.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Then going through that, I had a personal experience where I sent Walt an LOL to a client and it was something. There was a hiccup that occurred and it was just oh goodness, why did this happen? It's the same contractor and they went and cut through a particular line. Well, the end user took that and ended up causing me some fun hiccups with HR and getting to do a little bit of extra training, but there was no improper use. It was maybe a little unprofessional, but lesson learned.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, for me. I was just thinking about just personally, if I had to communicate in text and make agreements, how hard that would be for me to go back and look for something that I said two months ago or even a year ago in my text. I have a hard enough time keeping up with yesterday's text text. But if I were going to do it or give the advice, if you did make some sort of agreement through text which I feel is probably a scary thing I would go back and send an email. It's easily findable, something that you also kind of have a tracking system through email to where you can keep track of that and not have to thumb through everything in text or use that search feature to try to figure out where something may be, and you can call out the fact that it was originated in a text per the text message, just like I don't know how many live conversations I'll have and they go.
Walt Sparling:yeah, I think that's a great idea. Let's do it per the conversation that we had yesterday afternoon about this. We are going to proceed with that direction now I've done screenshots with just that.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:And then uh, but to patrick, to add on to that point is any phone calls you have. Follow it up with an email as well, documentation of everything and even your meetings. I have one notes up on every meeting that I am.
Walt Sparling:I'm in, even if it's just to take attendance so that kind of rolls into the next point, which is tracking communication. So email, you can track Meeting minutes, one of the things with communication a verbal communication, a visual communication, an email they're all forms of communication. So when you have a meeting, you're sitting around and you're talking to a bunch of people Maybe you have a slide deck, maybe you don't Questions come up, answers are given. That's got to go in minutes. It's got to be then shared with everyone. Otherwise what did you accomplish? You know you set an agenda but you didn't come back with any answers. So you have to track that meeting and you need to send out an update. I mean any thoughts on that?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I mean you definitely need to keep up with meeting minutes and, like I said, even if it's to an extent of just making sure you know who's at the meetings, I've gotten to the point recently just having it's not a concern, it's being state entities, occasionally projects get audited and making sure that we've even covered in-person communications with some of the meetings. Sometimes you have meetings that are in-person and you need to make sure you've documented who was actually there at that particular walkthrough and then cover a few of the notes in case you ever get questioned on what came of that meeting or why didn't you have any in-person meetings. Well, actually we did, it's just not documented.
Jeff Plumbee:Yeah, I've worked with some folks in the past who have been Google platform users, and so setting up a running Google Doc with my team for meeting minutes has been really, really nice. You go ahead and throw in the agenda, pre-populate it. Everybody knows what to come in talking about. You put the attendees to your point, brooks, put the attendees up at the top of the the day that you're meeting with them and and, yeah, then you just build out the minutes based off the agenda. It's really easy to keep everybody on topic because everybody's looking at the same document. You know it's a great way to keep it stored. Everybody has access to it and then if you ever need to go back and look at it, it's easily searchable.
Joseph Phillips:That's exactly what I've done, jeff, and not Google Docs just in Word is just keep a running Word doc of our meetings and same thing who's there. You know our agenda, who's there, key points, what was discussed or promised. And then that's so easy too for email, because I've got you know what was done, that I can, or what do people promise. I can pull that right out of that document and follow up as per our meeting with Walt's language and get people to commit, and then if we go to the next week it's just depend to that. And there's our next meeting. It's so easy to search too, and I know somebody promised something and then I've got evidence of it from our kind of a running minutes per project, per meeting yeah, one thing that I've noticed too, and going back to just experience of folks having, you know, 20, 30 projects going at one time and really up against it.
Patrick Shrewsbury:The last thing you want to do after a meeting is jump in and do meeting minutes, but it's very key to do it quickly, also as detailed as possible. Even if you're trying to get it done quickly, folks have the tendency to be vague. These are things that you're trying to get it done quickly. Folks have the tendency to be vague. These are things that you're going to go back to it. You know, for lack of better word, it's, it's the CYA, so you're going to go back to that at some point where someone's going to call out something that came up in a meeting, where you're going to have to go back and and retrace your steps, and leaving those breadcrumbs along the way is basically what that meeting minutes is for, and it's key to be detailed and timely.
Walt Sparling:I agree 100% there, and it does depend on your workload because you might be jumping from one to the other. Some days. I have meetings that I have lucky if I have five minutes in between, and that's only because I've scheduled it with a five-minute window. But calendar blocking is one of the things I recommend for PMs is like you're going to have a meeting from 2 to 3, and hopefully on my team it's 2.05 to 3 on Wednesday. Did you allocate a half hour before and a half hour after to prep and post? You know, do your meeting minutes, because the rest of your day looks pretty packed. When are you going to do them? Our standard is within 24 hours of the meeting. So you got to plan to do your minutes because they are very important and you want them when they're fresh on your mind.
Walt Sparling:If you're doing something in OneNote, some people get a little nervous. I'm a terrible speller. Sometimes I don't like having OneNote up on a shared screen and typing because I'm backspacing and doing stuff, but the quicker you get them in. If you're on a tight schedule, you can get them in. Like you said, people see it happening, they go no, it's not what I said. This, okay, let me fix that, and then you're done. And then you send them out when you're complete and then save them to your project folder and now you have a record.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Well, I think, having the time, one of our viewers called it out, but they're asking the thoughts on AI in relation to transcribing and summarizing meetings. I just wish that I could put the software on because I want to play with it. I've been doing a lot of training on AI and seeing how it can assist project managers to better themselves, take away some of the mundane pieces and repetitive pieces, and to an extent it's by no means AI, but I have Outlook Calendar invites. Click a button on there to open up OneNote. It pulls up my attendees and my links and cuts down half the battle. And if you can create Joe, you sound like you have some word templates. If you could somehow put that into OneNote, you'll be able to speed up the process because at the end of that I click email all attendees and move on and keep going.
Jeff Plumbee:Yeah, I'm using AI algorithms generative AI pretty much on a daily basis at this point, but I'm not using it for transcribing and summarizing meetings. I just haven't had the need for it yet. However, I think just anybody working on any type of sensitive data or government contracts has to be aware of what the different policies are for using those types of tools and what the kind of data security is for the companies A lot of like chat GBT. If you plug them into chat GBT, I believe they have rights to access it and use it for their own data analysis and refining their tool and use it for their own data analysis and refining their tool. There's some others out there where I think if you have the ChatGPT API, they don't have access to that. So there's ways to get around it. It's just about being smart with it and understanding that something you're putting into an AI system may not necessarily be your data anymore. It may be either public data or belonging to whoever owns the AI you're throwing it into.
John Connoly:Yeah, the otter is like the big one I see out there in the streets. It's basically an AI bot that you can pop into a meeting invite and the bot goes and sits in the meeting for you and it transcribes everything it can do voice recording of the highlights and it'll package that all up and give it to you. Now I'm nervous about a future in which I call a meeting and all my stakeholders send Otterbots and sit there listening to me for 15 minutes and then just transcribe it and send it back to them. But just on this point, as long as we're talking about AI, I think on the PM Mastery podcast recently there was a guest who was talking about this feature in PowerPoint that will, if you present to the PowerPoint AI, it will transcribe you and then it will also analyze you for ands and uhs and ums and all the different like. It'll give you advice on how to present anything to your stakeholders.
John Connoly:There's a lot of really powerful tools out there that I hope will reduce kind of the friction. The time suck that getting good meeting minutes is there. Friction, the time suck that getting good meeting minutes is there. I just you know.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I have my own qualms and concerns with AI as well. Well, I think that'll, and by no means are any of us providing legal advice with my tech's comments earlier. But if AI is transcribing, if you're working for a government entity, If AI is transcribing if you're working for a government entity, that opens up the door again for discoverable. And then, when you were legitimately joking, it is there in the documentation, it has been recorded and there for interpretation later on. So there's some interesting aspects.
Jeff Plumbee:And I threw out that warning. But, like I said, I'm using this on a daily basis. I'm not one of the people who thinks it's going to come in and take all of our jobs, but I think it's going to make us better at our jobs and take away the tedious stuff. Like you mentioned, brooks, there doesn't necessarily need to be this level of just mundane tasks for a project manager. Let's bring back the value of the project manager being the primary communicator, building relationships and making sure that things are done right and putting out fires when there needs to be someone putting out fires rather than just sending emails all the time Right, let's make some value of project managers just sending emails all the time right, let's make some value of project managers and, yeah, maybe it means you end up managing more projects, but you're also bringing a lot more value to the company. So, yeah, I didn't say that to be negative on AI. I'm definitely a proponent, but it's got to be used the right way.
Walt Sparling:And not everything is about chat GDP. I mean, there's so many tools out there that have AI features in them. Like, I'm a huge fan of Grammarly. Like I said, my spelling is atrocious and my grammar sometimes I mean usually I'm pretty good, but it's nice to be able to write and it says did you really mean this? Well, yeah, I did. That sounds much better.
Joseph Phillips:Well, I'm a big proponent of 80-20. And if it's, you know 80% of your value, 20% of your work, and if it's, I do a lot of consulting for a German manufacturer and our creed is if it's not adding value, then it's non-value add. Let's get rid of it, it's a waste, it's a time suck and yeah. So we go back and forth on meeting minutes Is that value or not? And there's a threshold there, I think, where we get lost in the weeds, because it's the PMI PMBOK way and not to bash the PMI PMBOK way. But that's the largest scope of possible project management activities. That doesn't mean that you have to do all of that stuff. So you have to do what's smartest and of most value. And if we're getting into writing minutes and documenting email on email and documenting every conversation and I'm not saying it's bad, Certainly there's projects you have to do that. But if it's not adding value, it's just overhead and get rid of it. And I'm a big proponent of let's streamline and get to the good stuff as quick as possible.
Walt Sparling:Agreed. So one of the things that we talked about internally a little bit, or at least in our agenda notes, was know your audience. So a lot of these things that we're talking about will vary depending on your project but also on your audience, how you communicate, how often you communicate, the level of communication A couple terms that I like to use a lot is executive summaries and bluff. Bluff is something I learned from a military guy which stands for bottom line up front. Get me the meat. That's what I want to know, and if I want to know about the details, I'll read on, but just give me where we're at. So, on any large projects that I do where there's high-level stakeholders, every meeting minute starts with an executive summary, and sometimes it's two or three sentences, sometimes it's a paragraph, but it gives them. They can read that real quick and go okay, that's all I need to know. I don't need to know specifics or whatever, but if I want to know something more, I can read in. So that's important. And then some. You just need bullet points.
Walt Sparling:We talked about this, this and this. This is the answers. Move on, we'll see you next week. So what are you guys' thoughts on? You know, knowing your audience, how you do your communication. I mean we all in agreement on that.
Jeff Plumbee:Totally agree. I hate getting what would be a three-page email and having a request buried in the middle of page two. It's one thing if I'm not familiar with the project, but if I'm intimately familiar with the project it's great to have the context in there for somebody else. But bottom line, up, front, right Like. Give me that on the front end, tell me what you need and then give me the context if you want, or at least put it in bold, right Like. Give me some way of picking out what your point of the email is, rather than having me read a mini novel and having to figure out what you're trying to say.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I think I was sitting there thinking, Walt, you're saying the executive summary, oh, that'd be great to add in. And then, Jeff, when you were speaking, it made me think about it. When I send out my notes to everybody, I usually, if there is something I need from somebody, at the very top of that email it'll say I need this from so-and-so. So it's a low-level executive summary where I'm seeking it from the particular members that are receiving the notes.
Walt Sparling:So for us, oh sorry, John.
John Connoly:No, it's okay, Sorry To be of email. Something that I've used to good effect has been to make use of that subject line for exactly what Brooks is talking about. Right To say oh hey, I'm sending this to Bob and I'll say whatever the subject is and in brackets I'll say whatever feedback requested or decision required by whatever it is that's needed. So that way they know which ones to skip over the email inbox and which ones not to. Because I've worked with people who, straight up, they say I don't answer email. If they really want to talk to me, after three emails they'll call me. Um, you know, it's just again. It's part of that communication management plan up front. But yes, if you can help categorize it and get people as up front as possible before you've even opened the email, here is what I need from you. I found that that helps with a lot of high-powered stakeholders who have a lot of emails coming to their inbox to their inbox.
Walt Sparling:So, yeah, sometimes on larger projects you have the executive summary, but right ahead of that, a really short agenda list. There's going to be an executive summary, there's going to be a bullet list, there's going to be a two-week look ahead and there's going to be an action items. So hey, take a real quick peek down at the bottom. Is there anything assigned to you in the action items? So those are common. Most of my notes will start out with an attendance list, a summary, a bullet list of discussion topics, and then it ends with an action items list with the person's name at the front of it in bold and then what they have. And if you're going to do an action items list, the one thing you need to do is include a due date.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, I think, in addition to emails and the action item list, another thing that was going through my mind was just agendas in general. I know in presentations even like to client presentations a lot of times those aren't succinct to where you're presenting to the client, kind of giving an update of where things are. It can just be a lot of garbage of words kind of just sputtered throughout the page and it really just needs to be the succinct bullet points, maybe a photo or something of the project going on or some sort of table or chart. But you can see those get cluttered too very easily a lot of times and having to correct folks of trying to go back and make those more succinct.
Joseph Phillips:I'm a big fan of in reports as pictures, exactly what you're saying, patrick. So I do my reports in excel. We use spark notes or the uh, the little spark lines, so it's little mini graphs next to things, and then speedometers. You know red, amber, green. I can look at it. If I see a lot of red, I better pay attention to it. If it's green, then okay, then okay, because I you know stakeholders busy, so I want to know what they want and then with my team it's I do. What Walt says is you know the action items at a date, but I also do red, amber, green for the team, like what's imminent is red, and then that's you know part of where are you on this right now and you know how far away are you being done and is this a good date or not. So those types of questions, so two types of communication, I think there so I saw someone mentioned marking items as urgent or important.
Walt Sparling:So I have. I have some pet peeves and that's one of them. Some people get in the habit of doing that too often. So you can use that, but use it sparingly. I actually have a filter in Outlook. My Outlook opens every morning in the priority box and that priority box is my manager, my co-leads in other regions, my team and items marked as important and items marked as important. So when I start the day, I'll start out with anywhere from 5 to 87 emails on that priority list which kind of tells you what the day is going to be like, and I don't want to read through something that's got an exclamation point on it and it's just an email. It's just that could have been in my regular inbox. I would have got to that eventually. So use it when it's really important, but use it sparingly. All right.
Walt Sparling:So tracking communications, do's and don'ts. We've kind of covered a little bit as we've gone along, as we've covered different topics, do's and don'ts, and then the next one was influence versus authority. So people have touched on that a little bit. Some people may look at PMs in one of the two roles. I kind of think you're kind of a mix, but who wants to touch on influence versus authority?
John Connoly:All right. So I have thoughts. I think that there's always a temptation to err too far to one side of this road or the other. It's both and it's not either, or it's both and it's not either or. And I have seen project managers who they fail because they're obsessed with their authority at the expense of influence. And I've also seen project managers fail because they are not exerting themselves in the way that they need to to guide the project across the finish line. So it's a two-edged sword here. I think that you need to have influence with other people. You need to always have your eyes on the horizon. I tell people all the time diplomacy is a hugely underrated project management skill. You know, people think of project management. They think of processes, process groups, inputs, tools, techniques, outputs. They're thinking about the technical stuff, right, which is important and it is good. But if you can't get different people with different perspectives to all pull the rope at the same time in the same direction, you're really going to have a hard time getting your project across the finish line.
Jeff Plumbee:I want to take it in a little bit different direction for my thoughts on this, and this is a conversation with someone else I had who's in the audience as well within the past two weeks, and they were running into a situation where they had someone from another team that they needed something from and the person was just dragging their feet, dragging their feet, dragging their feet.
Jeff Plumbee:They had no authority over the person and, realistically, it wasn't a priority for that person to get this work done. There was no incentive for it to get it done. So one thing just for younger project managers to be aware of is that it can be a worst case scenario in having someone you need something from and having no authority over them or no way to get that from them. It was literally pushing this project back by months because and it wasn't a priority project for the company, but it was something that this person needed to get done, but it was a short task, but the person wasn't doing it and the project manager had no authority over them to get it done. And so it's just something to be aware of when you're looking at your stakeholders who do you have authority over or who do you have influence over, and if you don't have either, you're going to have a really hard time working with that person.
Walt Sparling:And that's where relationships come in. And if this is a one-off, it may not work. But we work with different groups, business units, no authority, minimal influence, but we work with them on every project. So the only way we're going to get them to work with us is to build a relationship with them. Explain the why work with them when they need something, so that it becomes a two-way street.
Jeff Plumbee:And you could argue that that relationship is some level of influence, right, because it is a two-way street.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:at that point, I almost recognized a two-week delay, but utilized my influence to call someone and work with them to see how we could speed this up and instead of it delaying the project two weeks, which in the grand scheme of things is minor, but it all adds up. They helped me out and we're going to be doing what we need to do this week instead of in two weeks. So it's always good to know people around the campus or institution that you're working with.
Joseph Phillips:I like to call out people, not in a bad way, but in my status reports who's working on what. When I have that individual that doesn't want to play ball, that's okay. I just continue to put them in the status report of the tasks they're working on and put their name out there and then I give credit. When people are done and they did it, I put a little kudos to that person for going out of the way to help the project. But I don't let people steamroll me. I'll do what leverage I can, even though I don't have any authority over them. These are the people working on what task and I put that person's name on there and I send that out to all the stakeholders every Friday or every Thursday and I make sure that person gets a copy too, and sometimes that gets people moving. Sometimes not Sometimes you have morons you have to deal with, but that's life everywhere you do.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Technical term right. Yeah, I'm sorry. Technical term right.
Joseph Phillips:Yeah, I'm sorry, technical term, right Technical term. Sometimes they call those project sponsors, not true, yeah, so Sorry Walt.
Walt Sparling:Go ahead, that's calling out people. I mean that's sometimes it's. Some people are like, oh my God, I can't believe you just did that. And I mean I have pet peeves as well with like meetings. You know you don't pay attention. You know my team knows that someone's on their laptop doing something. This was, like you know, pre-covid. It's like laptops and phones are off. We're having a meeting here and I'll just stop the meeting and everybody will eventually turn and just stare at the person who's got the laptop open and then they'll sigh and close it and say, all right, or we'll ask questions to the person who's not paying attention. But there's different ways and different situations of how you do that. You had mentioned Clinton about influence, and influence is good to have. Once again, it's like that exclamation point. Be careful how often you use it, because then it's going to get old at some point.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Yeah, you don't always want to be calling in a favor, what's the book? You Don't Always Want to Cry Wolf in a favor, you want it's the what's the book? Um, you don't always want to cry wolf, um, and if you constantly are crying wolf, eventually people are going to stop listening and stop helping. So, um, now, if you're returning the favor and able to help them in some way or fashion, then you kind of will start to even things out. But you don't know if that'll ever come up.
Walt Sparling:So All right. So next one is communication methods. Once again know your audience. So we've talked a little bit about texting, we've talked about email, we've talked about in-person meetings, phone calls, so probably the most common is going to be email. I think by far Some communication is done through dashboards, where maybe the dashboards also include downloadable data or links to status updates that they can download. But emails, from what I see, see is by far the most common, and Teams is another one I keep seeing pop up in the chat as well. Teams is a very common way to share communications. What do you guys have to say about that?
Jeff Plumbee:Yeah, I was going to mention Teams and Slack. I'm using Slack on a lot of my projects now as well as Teams. Personally, I like the interface of Slack a little bit better, but I think Teams has more integrated functionality for those that are using the Microsoft platform primarily. So, you know, it's kind of a. Those are more real-time chats versus, you know, text, as we talked about. You know we still leads to the question of what can be used in discovery and I'm sure Slack obviously can you know, because most of it's done on the kind of internal platform of whatever company you're working with. You know I've heard of HR using it quite a bit for different things. So, yeah, I definitely lean towards Slack. I like the ability to pin different activities or different documents at the top for easy access for the different groups I'm in, and even Discord, I think, is used a bit now. I don't particularly like using Discord for work purposes, but I'm hearing more and more of folks going in that direction as well.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So where I'm at, they utilize obviously the Microsoft platforms, but with Outlook, teams, teams and Skype for Business and I like how Teams works it definitely has functions. That's what I do all my meetings through pretty much. But Skype for Business they have not integrated Teams into the way that Skype for Business does. If I have an email chain or thread that I can go into, I can click on the particular email contact that I want to talk to. It will then put the email title within that Skype subject block and then I can have communications with that and then it actually saves within my chain of emails that we're having the discussion on. So then it allows me to have records of some of those communications. But again, that goes into, jeff, just like you said, the discoverable piece. It's definitely discoverable. So you want to close out, if you're done, having discussions that aren't related to the project within that particular chat, because it'll come up later on.
John Connoly:So one of my favorite communication methods, it's a dying art. It is the art of picking up the phone and calling someone. I think a lot of people in my generation and younger are starting to trend further and further and further away from that. You know, I spoke to a project manager a couple months ago and her project was two weeks late because, you know again as the example we were talking about, right, someone else had the project deliverable and needed to cough up some key information and email after email after email keeps getting fired at this person and there's no response. And I said, well, have you picked up the phone and called her? And this person was like no, I haven't. I'm like, well, that's your next move, right? You're two weeks late. This other person doesn't care.
John Connoly:And I think we tend to focus a lot on the written record, and that's really important. I'm not advocating we go on the written record and that's really important. I'm not advocating we go without a written record. But I think that a lot of times that touch of the interpersonal, even in a phone call, can dislodge something much more quickly than the written word ever could.
Walt Sparling:Agree, and it is something that is going away. I mean, I know youths that have, uh, no voicemail. They they don't want. So it automatically just says this this person has not set up their voicemail or this person's voicemail is full. It's like do you ever empty it? No, I don't want people leaving me voicemails. So I ask a lot why? Why do we not have an answer on this? I've emailed them four times. They will not get back with me. Have you called them? Well, no, we'll want to try that, and sometimes that may be the only time they don't have time to answer an email. They're like oh, I want to get to that, or they may miss it because 100 emails came through. They're like oh, I want to get to that, or they miss it because 100 emails came through. They're like if I'd have seen it, I would have responded Let me find it. Oh, okay, I see it. All right, give me a minute, I'll respond to you right now.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Thanks for calling, maybe we'll see some improvements on communications and calling people with the new FaceTime voicemails coming up with iOS 17 for all the Apple users.
Joseph Phillips:I had that client. I was talking about the manufacturing company standardizing. He had a similar problem. They had not received a response. Four or five times, no response, no response. And it was like she's here at this facility. It's a big campus, but she's here, we need it. Why don't we walk over to her office and say hi. He goes. I don't know where she is, this big campus, turns out she was 100 yards from this guy, didn't know who the lady was. Walk over and say hi, and then all of a sudden she's like oh yeah, I know, I'm just buried in this and I'll have it today. And she was almost embarrassed that we're in her cube. Asking for this easy piece of information is like that face-to-face communication, I think, is, you know, part of that lost art and it's. It's really hard to be rude to someone face-to-face. Uh, we're an email, you can kind of ignore it, you know I think a lot of that got lost in the pandemic.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Oh, absolutely yeah, work from home and I know in a construction field even getting folks to go on site to look at a site or meet for a punch walk. It's pulling teeth at times just to get folks all around together to take a look at different things like that, and it was sometimes a struggle before but it's definitely a struggle now and I think that's also seen kind of going through another Pandora's box of being in the office versus virtually Right, yeah, I think that's affected everyone's business, no doubt, but the communication and projects, I think, has become more.
Joseph Phillips:We've never been more technologically connected but at the same time disconnected. It is a constant struggle, I think. But we've got all these different ways to communicate. But here we are still talking about the challenges of communication.
John Connoly:I think too and this is still very connected in my mind too as we've eschewed interpersonal communication, live communication, in favor of texting or emails or whatever, that the meaning starts to degrade over time. I remember, you know, 10 years ago or so, there was a big controversy about having periods at the end of your text messages where all the millennials and Gen Zs said that means you're angry. Everyone else is like no, it just means I have good grammar. Z's said that means you're angry. Everyone else is like no, it just means I have good grammar. And you know these things.
John Connoly:As soon as it's written down and we tend to think written down is the most solid form of communication but as soon as it's written down, it's subject to interpretation. Right, as someone had said on the call, right as soon as you. If you said something joking in a meeting and it's transcribed now, then someone could misinterpret that as something that was serious. That's again immediately something subject to interpretation, and I see this all the time, and I think the biggest example of once something is written down, it's not clear is we have a court system for a reason, right, everything that gets written down is subject to interpretation and litigation if things go wrong. So, um, there's always that element as well. I think we risk a lot by de-emphasizing the phone call or the the walk down to the office, for example. Um, and I do worry about that in the future.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I think Zoom and similar to what we're doing now, or kind of. What I think you're leaning towards, john, and it was called out by one of our viewers too, is body language. Sometimes your body language says everything and there's actually a call out of who utilizes cameras and who does not. Um, I think it's a mixed bag, I, I know with my uh contracted leadership, I am always on camera, uh, but maybe with the projects, if it's a more low-key discussion or recurring discussion, it may not have the camera on. So, and as the PM that goes to, most are probably going to follow whatever the project manager does, because we should be the end-all, be-all for the project.
Walt Sparling:That is definitely something that varies greatly and we pretty much know in our meetings who's going to be on camera and who's not, because, like we're, when we deal with leadership or our team's meetings amongst our local team, we're on video and it's like I want to see that you're engaged and you're interactive. You're, you're, you're asking questions, I, I know you're there. It's frustrating, frustrating if all I see is a black screen. But we have people we work with that never go on camera and there's some that do that shouldn't be on camera, you know. So it varies by. You know the situation that you're in and sometimes I catch myself. I'll be on a call with a bunch of people and someone will say something. I'll roll my eyes and I go oh God, I'm a camera. That's no different than if you're in the room with them, but so that is something that varies quite a bit.
Jeff Plumbee:But I think, you know, we're in some ways, I think, downplaying the benefits that this technology has enabled for us. I mean, most of my projects right now are international. I'm communicating with people in eight or 10 different time zones that I wouldn't be able to have a nine to five meeting with otherwise, and I'm able to do it via email, via WhatsApp in some circumstances. I've got some of these folks that can't use Zoom because they don't get good enough cell reception, and their field workers in Tanzania or Ivory Coast, but I'm still able to work on a project with them because we have this type of technology.
Jeff Plumbee:But to that point, the culture still comes in. The misinterpretation still comes in. And understanding what are the cultural norms, from where they're at, and walking the line of what's acceptable here, what's acceptable there and how do we find that middle ground, the misinterpretation still comes in. Having them face-to-face on Zoom is great, but a joke will land flat and you can't have it land too flat, otherwise you've offended somebody right? So all of this still applies. But I think it's just up to us as project managers, if we're planning on working in a global context, to learn and adapt.
John Connoly:Yeah, I, I agree, I agree a hundred percent. I'm not saying that you know we need to, we need to. You know, give up on email or anything like that. I, I and you're correct 100% that there are things we're able to do with the technology we've got, are correct 100 that there are things we're able to do with the technology we've got that we never would have been able to do before, and that there's huge value in that. I just also, I, I put more of an emphasis on the, the, the interpersonal levels of the communication, because I see them at risk of fading a little bit and and as pushing back, because I think they're underappreciated. But the live component is valuable as well. But you're right, there are ways of working that you can accomplish a great deal without having that element.
Walt Sparling:All right. Any other thoughts on that?
Jeff Plumbee:I think one thing I just since we're talking, I kind of brought the international piece. I'd love to hear anybody else's experience with international work or even the audience. I mean, I think this is something that was a bit of a learning curve for me. One of my first projects, starting out, was working in rural Haiti and you know it's just very different culturally. And you know I learned one of the first things in a meeting if you didn't ask about the kind of the person you're meeting with, family first thing, that was immediately going to be offensive, right Like you started off the meeting on the wrong foot. If you don't ask about their family first thing. One of the things I also learned is, if it's in the rainy season, you don't plan a meeting in the afternoon because if it's raining, 90 percent of participants aren't going to show up. So there's certain little things you learn and work in different places and I'd love to hear from other people if they've got kind of little little nuggets that they've picked up.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So I haven't had a personal experience getting to work internationally, but I have traveled internationally I think I'm somewhere around 24 countries so far and I always try to do a little investigation to what are the norms there. So I'm a Texas A&M Aggie graduate and so one of the things that we do and of course I will get call outs if there are any Aggies on here, but we do a gig them, and I do not have my ring on, I do have one is like telling them and giving them the bird or telling them they're number one, but not in the correct way, the way that us Americans might show out there in the local highway system. So, knowing some of that and I think that's kind of what you called out, jeff, with the Haiti pieces knowing some of the differences than where we work and honestly it goes state by state, not just country to country Working in Texas is completely different than working in Louisiana. So just my two cents.
Joseph Phillips:I did some consulting in Belgium and in Germany and then even down into Rome, and the one common thread that immediately gained ground with each of these teams was I had a little cheat sheet of their language. So there's some Flemish words that I could try to say, or some German phrases or Italian, and they loved it. That's putting forth an effort. They all spoke English, but that I was putting forth a little bit of effort to try to, you know, not have this American superiority over that country. I'm working in their country, in their backyard, in their neighborhood, and to make that effort to respect where they are, and I gained so much I'm still friends with a lot of those folks in each one of those countries by just doing that little bit of effort.
Joseph Phillips:Of course now we could do the Google Translate or whatever. It's been a few years ago, but I had a little cheat sheet that I would have to say some words in immediate buy-in and mutual respect and just to show that I was trying some effort to communicate in their language, even though I was probably butchering it, but just the you know the making an effort. I didn't expect them to speak English, that I tried to speak. You know some of their language.
Patrick Shrewsbury:I actually worked with the UK a lot, with the Freedom Group, and they were out of the UK and I reported to the group out of there. So I actually went there several times as well. But one thing that they always said when they came to the US kind of just about our culture but working with us is that we are too serious, we need to lighten up. And I could see that with the way that and they were very successful. I could see with that, the way that they just kind of interacted with each other. Although they could get the job done, they were lighthearted about it. They also were very serious about making sure they took their holiday and they had a lot of them. But one thing I do keep in mind and it comes comes across my mind at times is are we being too serious? Are we trying to do too much? And that came from that just kind of learning from that United Kingdom background.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:We have stressful jobs. Laugh it off a little bit, that's right. Throw some humor out there.
Joseph Phillips:Totally, totally agree. I love that, patrick. I think that we get too caught up and too serious. As you know, the project manager and there's a lot of stress in the PM I mean, you are the monkey in the middle between management and your team. But I just believe we live once and you may as well enjoy everything you do and you know to be a good influence and a good attitude, and that goes such a long way. People like to work with people that are fun to work with. So unfortunately that's not me, but people do. People do like that you got to have fun. If you're not, why are you here?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So enjoy what you do with all your heart. You made people laugh with the technical terms, so keep it up.
Joseph Phillips:Hey, moron, that's the term of the day, yeah.
Walt Sparling:Yes, humor is good. So, for all the users that sit in meetings with me, remember that Humor is good, all right. So I think this next topic is something that we've touched on in various ways, which is soft skills. So humor is is soft skills, so humor is a soft skill.
Joseph Phillips:You know how you approach people, how you deal with people, so what can we cover when it comes to soft skills related to communications? Do you mean power skills as PMI?
Walt Sparling:calls it now.
Joseph Phillips:Yes, yes, okay, good. Well, I think so much of what we talked about. You know, communication is everything. It's everything we do. You know you've got to interact with people and I think you have to be, you know, likable and have a good personality. And sometimes people aren't going to like you, but that doesn't mean you can't work together, you can't respect that person and get the job done.
Joseph Phillips:It's called project management, not project leadership or project like. It's about getting things done, but it's, I think it comes with experience. I think that in in my experience, younger pms and I'm not saying we all start somewhere, but they're so nervous that they come across as being really stiff and, you know, awkward and bossy because they want to do a good job, they want to get it done. But then as you gain experience, you get a little bit more relaxed. It's the nuances of you know back to what we started, knowing your audience and knowing how you communicate like just the mindset, having that PMA back to what we started, knowing your audience and knowing how you communicate like just the mindset, having that PMA. As I say, a lot, that positive mental attitude affects everything that you do. I'm a big believer of that.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, empathy is a big word when it comes to managing and making sure that we have a million different personality types really, and some introvert, extrovert, emotional, some want to kind of keep to themselves and being empathetic to each personality. And that goes even further than someone that you're managing. It's even the stakeholders you're dealing with and trying to learn who they are and just make sure that you can get your point across with those soft skills and develop a relationship.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:You're muted, walt, you're muted Walt.
Walt Sparling:Some people like that. So empathy is definitely. I was going to use the same word and I'm noticing in the chat a lot of people are bringing it up too. It's. It's so important to be able to put yourself in the shoes or as close as you can get, understand the problem and you know it's not necessarily your problem, but it could be your problem on the project.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:You've got to listen and understand the best you can, and that's why you need empathy. So what else? Just because your leadership is calling out something that you may need to work on, don't take it personally. Just try and take it and grow with it. As PMs, we go through lessons learned. We constantly need to improve ourselves. That's part of Walt's whole thought process with PM Mastery, PM Mastery, and if you have PMP doing continuing education or any other certification that's out there, those do require it as well, but always being open to hearing it. Now, understandably, somebody may not present it the best of ways. Patrick, I think you need to know are you working with an introvert? Are you working with somebody that can take the heat you throw at them? You completely screwed the pooch on this one, or we might need to work on that a little bit better next time.
Jeff Plumbee:Yeah, I think somebody threw in the chat. How do you lead in a kind manner that doesn't make you appear as a pushover? And I think for me, holding people to a high standard is a sign of respect, and I try to make it clear to everyone who works for me and with me that if I'm expecting something of them, it's because I trust them and because they're part of my team and we're working on this together. But I think how you convey that to them goes back to everything that everyone just said. It's about empathy and understanding their motivation and perspectives, Because you don't necessarily you don't throw somebody under the bus in front of their peers, especially if they're new, right?
Jeff Plumbee:You don't want to break them down that far because you don't know what that's going to do to them, right? Want to break them down that far because you don't know what that's going to do to them, right? There's a way to handle everyone, but it's very nuanced and very situation specific and you have to learn about the person to be able to understand what motivates them and what's going to get them to do what you need them to do.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, a lot of large corporations have different models of personality traits and labeling people and ours, patrick, I'm sure you've been through this with the owl and the eagle and the teddy bear and I can't remember the other one and some of them sound like I don't want to be a teddy bear, but actually teddy bear is pretty cool when you read through the specifics. But it helps when you understand other people's personality type. Not everybody likes to to get information shared with them the same way, like how, if you award someone some, someone might say you know, you can just come to my desk and tell me thank you and I'm good. Or some might say, well, that's fine, I'll take a raise for that. And others are like well, could you share that with the whole team? So everybody knows how awesome I am. It varies by person.
Joseph Phillips:One of the things that I do is thank you cards. I love to send people thank you cards, vital cards, all the time, and I was. I was consulting at a place years ago, like 20 years ago, and I sent this person a thank you card. Hadn't been back in that place in 10, 15 years and I stopped by to see if this guy was still there. He was still there and he still had the card hanging up in his cubicle and he's like you're, like one of the only people that ever and it costs nothing to do you know very little and just write, you know a thank you and people remember that.
Joseph Phillips:As part of building that relationship and I have a big proponent on my team you know we've got a very small team that work with me. One of them is on the call that I, unfortunately, but I send her, you know, flowers and little gifts and it's just so important to do that. That's something you're not required to do, but it's that you're invested in their time and their success and that you appreciate what they've done and it's so important.
Walt Sparling:And I want to put a thank you out there for that team member of yours, joe, because I mean the fact that she's dealt with you for so long and that she actually volunteered to do all the graphics for this event, so thank you.
Joseph Phillips:I didn't even know. That's how, that's how great she is. So, yeah, and she does have to put up with that.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So well, no joe, uh, sometimes, uh, those little gifts or acknowledgments, uh, just to a random text thanks for doing that, or appreciate you saying hi today, or just minor things, may save you dividends later on. You may not be working with that person right now, but, heck, I beat the executive VP to a conversation that I had first met him at and I sent him an email and he was like how'd you beat me to it? And now he sees me in the hallways and we have further communications that way. So keeping the open open for everybody.
Joseph Phillips:It's so true, it's so easy to do and you have to be genuine. I think when you do it and you're doing it expecting something in return, but you're so right, clinton, that this will come back in dividends, maybe in ways you don't even know that. You know people talk about us as the PM and they're like yeah, you know that Jeff's a good guy, you know he sent me a card, looked out for me or whatever it comes back, you just part of developing your, you know your attitude and you get people in your community where you work or you're consulting, that are going to go to bat for you because they know you're a good person. I really think that's so important.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, call-outs are something that is a culture in our account where when we start every meeting, it's like, okay, does anyone have any acknowledgements that they want to share with someone? Because we have multiple teams, multiple regions and you want to call anyone out in this group and how they helped your group or anything that you've seen, and they share that. And then we do our quarterly all-hands and they'll do an employee of the quarter based on kudos that they've received during the quarter through the uh recognition system and sometimes they uh I think the quarterly one they actually get a uh pretty large uh credit card for going to dinner. I'm gonna say not pretty large, 150 bucks, but they go to, they can go to dinner on it and it's like wow, recognition.
John Connoly:I, they can go to dinner on it and it's like wow, recognition. I think that nothing beats genuinely caring, right? Joe says the genuine word, right? That's the really big deal I think, for all of this is people can figure out pretty quickly if you're insincere and if you can find it in you to care about your team and to care about those you're trying to communicate with. Like it just makes a world of difference in terms of the effectiveness, um, the building of transparency, the building of trust, um it. It starts there, I think what else do we have?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I like the call out thank you is sometimes even more important to say thank you for a try, even if it failed. It motivates the person to try again. I completely agree with that with that.
Joseph Phillips:That's so good. We want people to be innovative and to take some risk and to not have this fear of retribution if they're not successful in that attempt. We teach the wrong lessons sometimes, or some managers do, and they get punished for trying some innovation, but it's so important, it's like it's all right. You've heard the phrase that you fail early, fail fast, so you make a mistake, but do it little. Do it little, but learn from that and then work and improve upon that. Yeah, it's an opportunity for improvement, as Blake said here. It's so true. No failure If you learn from it. It's an opportunity for improvement. As Blake said here. It's so true. No failure If you learn from it. It's true. In every project there are going to be issues that come up and if you learn from it now, that's part of your education.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Joe, I love that you said issues. That's a great communicating point. I don't like to say problems. Yeah, throws negative connotations and everybody heads back to grade school math class. It is not a problem.
Joseph Phillips:It's an issue, it can be solved I had a manager a long time ago say we don't have problems, we have issues and that's. It's just a risk that's come to fruition. So how are we going to manage this issue? And it's that framework of how are we going to do it, not how are you going to do it too. Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, I've removed that from my vocabulary as a problem, because that means this when an issue is, let's confront it, let's work together to get this thing out of our way and keep moving forward.
Walt Sparling:Well, it's an opportunity as well to do something different and creative. Yeah, true.
Walt Sparling:All right. So we've covered pretty much everything on our core list. I've seen some questions come up. If you guys want to just throw some questions out there, by all means do so. I also want to recommend I have put together a little list of books. Maybe some of you guys have seen them already and I will post these in comments later.
Walt Sparling:One is by John Maxwell, called the 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication. There are three or four laws in there that are more of my favorites. There's a project management for the unofficial project manager, the surprising science of meetings. This is where I got my five-minute-after-the-hour starting meetings five minutes after the hour. There's a bunch of different options in there walking meetings, time slots. I get laughed at a lot for that, but the people then appreciate the fact that they were able to go to the restroom and get a coffee before they got to my meeting. Harvard Business Review has 10 must reads on communication. Crucial Conversations is one of my favorites by Carrie Patterson, and then I know that there are a few authors here on the panel. Joe has written a handful of books, haven't you, joe, over the years.
Joseph Phillips:I've been fortunate enough to write a few books. Yeah, I've written about 30 books on management, so it's a lot, of, a lot of words.
Walt Sparling:John's got one out there and he's working on another one.
John Connoly:It's true. I have a tiny little self-published book last year and a bigger project moving forward right now and hopefully more details on that to come soon.
Walt Sparling:Good deal, all right, let's see what on that to come soon. Good deal, all right, let's see what we've got out here. What?
Jeff Plumbee:is the major cause of lack of feedback by project team members. So I can take a stab at what we're getting at with this, but this reminds me of what one of my podcast guests said one time that just really stuck with me, that managing your team members or contractors is a lot like dealing with a toddler in a different room. If things get too quiet, you need to start worrying. So the lack of feedback may mean that something's wrong. It means you need to check in one way or the other.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:They may not understand what you're seeking.
Walt Sparling:Yes, I was going to say clarity, and I think that Jeff, that's exactly where you're headed too.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I mean, it's just an understanding, a lack of clarity, walt.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, if they don't understand, they're not even sure what question to ask sometimes.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So why respond?
Joseph Phillips:My experience probably you guys are too. You go in as the new guy, You're the consultant, or you're the PM, and everybody there knows each other but they don't know you. Or you're the PM and everybody there knows each other but they don't know you. And so there's this a lot of fear and doubt. That is a wall sometimes. I think that goes up between your team and your role as the PM that you have to overcome and take time and some assurance. And back to that empathy conversation and to understand why people have fear and doubt. You know, what do they have in their mind of why you're there versus why you may truly be there? That perception is reality for people sometimes.
Walt Sparling:So this was an earlier question For us wanting to transition into PM world. Do most PMs have a comm plan template or just utilize a basic comp matrix? I think that varies.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Go ahead Walt.
Walt Sparling:It varies greatly by where you work. Some corporations have specific templates and sometimes entire standards that you have to go through and follow their plan. Some have a matrix that you use. You fill out at the beginning of the project. There's other matrices too, like RACI, which talks a little bit more about responsibility, which could affect how you communicate as well. What do you guys got?
Joseph Phillips:I think just the bigger the project, the more detail you need. So if it's you know, if you're managing a small project, if you're new in the PM world, you're probably going to probably going to go with some smaller projects and you aren't going to need a war and peace project plan. You're going to need, you know, pretty bare bones, but you start there. There's some threshold you get over to with the budget size or the duration of that project, based on the scope, that now you need more detail, more stakeholders, more detail, and so it's just the size of the project is going to influence everything you do when it comes to communicating and documentation, communicating and documentation.
Walt Sparling:So this isn't a question. This was a statement that came up earlier and it kind of addresses the same thing. They agree in their kickoff meeting. Everyone aligns and agrees on communication methods as a team and they use Slack, zoom and email. So it's good to have a plan, no matter what. At the beginning, I've seen some communication plans that were basically just a bullet list of hey, this is how we're going to move forward. One of the big things that our team stresses is all communications flow through the PM. Contractors and vendors do not go directly to the client. They do not take direction from the client. The client may ultimately be paying the bill, but if we don't know what's going on, how do we control the budget and the schedule? So the PM is the point. So you've got to establish that up front.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I tell the contractor if they take any notes from the owner and they're not going through me, they're getting to flip the bill that day. So have fun. You have to stand strong as a PM and that goes into your authority piece that we were discussing earlier.
Walt Sparling:One of the funniest things we had happen is my boss, which was the top of the food chain at the time, went on to a site and asked a contractor why they were doing something. They said we already talked to the client, we don't need you. In fact, you need to leave. It's like I had to go back up and go. I don't think you know who that was. One more of that and you'll be leaving. What else let's see.
Jeff Plumbee:We got a question in the chat about communications plan in an agile environment. I'm not the best one to field that, but I think it's a good one to bring up.
Joseph Phillips:What was the question?
Jeff Plumbee:What would you say regarding a communication management plan in an Agile environment? A must or overdue, overdue, overdue.
Joseph Phillips:I'm sorry to jump ahead of you by there. That was pretty. Why I was pretty for my overdue. I don't think I was on Jeopardy for a moment. Agile we don't want to document. Agile is pretty averse to documentation. Documentation is one of our seven wastes Papa Dyke's seven wastes in Lean, in Agile. So Agile is to be shallow. So you have three roles. You have the scrum, master, product owner and your team and that's it. And your stakeholders are going to talk to the product owner. You may have liaisons or whatnot, but the communication plan is going to be. It's already baked into the approach is what I'm trying to say.
Walt Sparling:There's a good one. I see this come up a lot on linkedin. Who wants to tackle?
Jeff Plumbee:I think this is as simple as as not being afraid to ask the stupid questions. We're all still going. Every one of us on this call, I'm sure, still faces imposter syndrome in certain circumstances, where you jump into a project where you're like I'm in a way over my head. These guys know way more about this than I do, but the reality of it is you're not being paid to know everything about it, you're being paid to manage the project, and so I think, stepping back and remembering what your role is and not being afraid to ask questions and admit that you don't know things. But I think you have to admit that you don't know things, otherwise that's when it becomes this real barrier to success.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, if you actually act like an imposter and you try to do more than you know, it shows it's not good for you, not in the long term. And to your point this has been said multiple times you are not an SME. Most project managers are managing the scope, schedule, budget, but not the specifics. They just keep that project moving forward, right, joe, and they don't need to know every detail. Focus on doing the best you can as a PM in managing the project.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:The stupid question is the one that goes uh, unasked jeff yeah, admitting that you don't know is super powerful.
John Connoly:You know, I've been in circumstances where I made zero progress leading my team until I found it in me to be transparent to them when I just didn't know. I don't know is a key that unlocks certain doors.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, yeah, one thing I've talked to new project managers about is when you're setting these agendas on project calls and leading your client calls and things like that, that you're basically setting the agenda because you have other stakeholders that are those subject matter experts I know, jeff, you were talking a lot about that at the very beginning to lean on and so play the quarterback.
Patrick Shrewsbury:All you need to do is set up the conversation what's the project? Give that summary and then really at that point try to get the point across of what's this meeting about. What are you trying to get the W's we talked about earlier, the who, what, when, where's and then, as you get in with the folks on the agenda, your stakeholders pass the ball, each of those things. If you need to know something from technology or you need to know something from your general contractor or things like that, let them give the updates and you just take the information and mediate and kind of be that managing quarterback until you start to learn a little bit more about the project, until you start to learn a little bit more about the project.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I think we saw Jeff do that just a minute ago when he brought up the Agile piece and I immediately there was a few of us that were like oh heck, no, not happening, not going to go down that road, and Joe was like nope. I got the answer, at least in my own thoughts how you take. Agile.
Joseph Phillips:I love Agile because it just trims out the fat. Let's focus on value. That's one of the problems I have with the waterfall or the cinnamon roll. It's very top-heavy. I'm not saying it's not, You're in construction. So it's very appropriate in the construction where some things have to be done in a set order. Where agile is, you know, I always think of the office for like parkour, they're jumping around and everything that's agile. We get to go to whatever we want. What is most important. One thing I would add back to that imposter syndrome is stick with it, but we all start somewhere. I say that all the time. Everybody has to start somewhere and one of the best traits anybody can develop is the resilience and just to keep doing what you're doing and learn as you're being. The quarterback analogy there is listen, Listen and learn. That osmosis communication, that osmotic communication that just by being present you learn and soak it up.
Walt Sparling:So the one that's on the screen now asks about, you know, tips on how to improve your communication skills as a PM, and I think there's a lot of answers to this, because there's a lot of aspects of communication. So is it that you have trouble speaking in front of an audience? Is it where you have trouble, maybe, formalizing a meeting summary? Is it you're not good with email? You're not good with spelling? There's so many aspects of this.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:But I think it's a trial and error. Walt, you've got to learn and you should learn from your surrounding PMs Maybe not us on the call right now, but somebody that's sitting right next to you where you can ask them and call them and say, hey, this is what I'm thinking. Does this seem okay? But it's trial and error. And then develop your own way of communicating and you'll find out where people appreciate your communication skills. And if you don't get any feedback, it doesn't mean it's bad, but maybe you just try and alter it a little bit.
Walt Sparling:Again, trial and error a little bit Again, trial and error. One of our onboarding policies is that the new PMs are to shadow existing PMs, and not a single PM, but multiple. And I'll tell them just shadow all of these, and I'll tell the rest of the team. Invite him or her to as many meetings as you can, I don't care what they are. Invite them, let them see how they're ran, the different styles, the different types, and then I'll tell them you create your own style, take the good and bad or take the things that you like, except for that guy Don't, don't do what he does, but the rest of them, take from them and come up with a way that works for you. No, shadowing is a great way. Thanks, brooks, for bringing that out.
Jeff Plumbee:Yeah, I definitely love that idea. And from the tool standpoint, if we're talking like your grammar is terrible, leverage go back to what Walt mentioned about Grammarly. Right, like leverage the AI tools that are there, but learn from them. Don't rely on them solely. Have it rewrite something for you in a better way, but then take that and try to use it next time instead of just directly relying on Grammarly. So use it to build your vocabulary and build your sentence structure into something better. But then, if we're talking face-to-face communication, just do it right.
Jeff Plumbee:You've got to get out there. And if you're afraid of being in front of an audience, the best way to get over that is to be in front of an audience over and over and over. Start with a small audience and build it. You know you may still get some anxiety about it, which is natural, and for some people that helps them perform better, but you know the best way to do it is lead meetings, get in front of audiences, be willing to be the keynote speaker and then find instead of just shadowing people, really critically analyze what the people are doing. So it's not just about following them around and learning about what they're doing, but it's about how they're doing it. How does someone you look up to run the meeting? What does their agenda look like on the front end? And you've got to think critically about how to analyze those rather than just saying, yeah, they did a really good job, but why? Why did they do a good job? What made it good? And what does good even mean for you?
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Well, and that junior PM can help us out and think about in a newer aspect. Playing with AI may not be part of everybody's wheelhouse, but I'm trying to take a key effort because I don't want to be left behind by the Gen Zs. I don't want to lose out on the job just because I don't understand some method of using AI not necessarily how to build, but just as a point of reference.
Walt Sparling:Yeah, another aspect of that is like when we do our team meetings, one of the things in our client and our culture is safety.
Walt Sparling:So every meeting starts out with what they call a level one, where we establish where emergency equipment is, where the egress routes are, what we're going to do in case of an emergency. And I know when I first started that was like I've never done that before, but it was like this is required for every meeting. It doesn't matter if it's a five-minute meeting or a 20-minute meeting or a two-hour meeting. You've got to do this. So I kind of wrote my own script after following a bunch of other PMs around. But now when a new PM comes in, we have slides and we go read through that and in our team meeting it's like all right, you are now leading a meeting, walk us through it, and they stumble. And then, after doing that three or four times in a team meeting, they get in front of the client and they go through it because they've done it. And it's not practicing in front of a mirror, it's practicing in front of other people because that is so much harder.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:All right.
Joseph Phillips:When I first started teaching, I used to keep a mint in my pocket, and when that mint was dissolved I knew it was time to quit talking. And it worked great. And then one day I had a button in my pocket.
Walt Sparling:It's time, joe. It's time, all right. All right. So how do you deal with a PM? So this is obviously someone on the outside that deals with PMs that won't ask questions needed or go outside the box if need be. Well, I guess you could ask the questions.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:You ask the questions or kind of start. Yeah, I mean it's asking the questions and guiding and seeing where it goes, because maybe they're just not thinking that they need to ask any more questions. They think that they have all the answers, which right there, tells you it's most likely a junior PM. I mean, I'm sure there's some senior PMs out there that definitely think they know all, but if you're not constantly learning in this industry, then you're going to be behind very quickly.
Walt Sparling:Yeah so I'm going to assume this is someone who's on the outside trying to get information from a client and the PM isn't going to the client and asking the right questions, and the only way you can do that is ask the PM to ask the questions and eventually they'll learn the importance of that.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, I was going to say something similar, walt. I was thinking that it's really a situation of you don't know what you don't know. Something similar, walt. I was thinking that it's really a situation of you don't know what you don't know and really, as a manager of someone like that, whether they're experienced or not, that it's where the coaching is going to come into play and it's that crawl before you walk, walk before you run, and really trying to teach them, to ask the questions and kind of lead by example. I think, like you guys were saying, sometimes you have to yourself and kind of lead them and show them what some of the questions should be if they don't know.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Maybe that goes into the aspect too, that the PM doesn't know what they are trying to ask because they don't understand what's in front of them, and then again that's more so where you do need to ask the questions, or that PM needs to ask the questions to learn.
Walt Sparling:So for this one, get stuck in meeting minutes when there's a technical topic that is not my expertise. What are some tips to handle these notes without getting too into details, to avoid saying things that are not correct? Well, I'd be very careful about what I said and that might be an opportunity to reach out to the SME, because if that came up, hopefully there is an SME involved on the team. You can reach out to them and say this came up. How should I address this? Or can I refer them to you for a more detailed answer?
Jeff Plumbee:And there's also times where, if you're in front of a client, it's useful to have a back channel. So if you're on a Zoom meeting with a client, sometimes I'll be slacking with people that are part of the team, saying, hey, like what's the deal with this or can you feel this question or whatever else. There's a need in certain circumstances to have that back channel. So a lot of times I go ahead and get those set up ahead of time and let them know, like, hey, you know, be able to have your Slack open in a different window, just in case. We need to have a conversation about this. Because within Zoom, unless something's changed recently, you can only message one individual at a time and sometimes you need a small side group chat of what's going on to kind of get some support on that on the back end. So yeah, that's kind of a tangent to this, but I like having a back channel occasionally when the meeting needs it.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, we deal with engineers all the time and I have no idea what's going on on some of the electrical terms or HVAC when it gets into some of these different odd situations, and would hate to be the one to write the meeting minutes after a lot of those technical topics or technology topics come out. So if it's after the meeting's over you're trying to remember these things, there is nothing wrong with going back to that stakeholder and asking them again to repeat that or send you something in email explaining further what that is, so you can add that note to the meeting minutes as well.
Joseph Phillips:I think it's so important.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:sometimes it's not what you say, but what you don't say what you don't say when I use my notes sometimes just to support the AE firms that are hired in the construction industry, because normally they're the ones that are doing the CA and are responsible for putting together the meeting minutes, or it may even be the general contractor, so then they'll receive what I took notes on. Unless it's an internal. It does get a little difficult with our viewers' comment if it's internal team and not necessarily a third party that's also managing the project.
Walt Sparling:So that's a great point and we actually have had this discussion. We've got some new PMs and it was one of the topics of who delivers the minutes. So in the beginning of a project, when we do our internal and our initial project kickoff, the PM runs, that, creates the minutes, sends the minutes. When we go into the design phase, the PM does the initial design kickoff, introduces the team, then hands it over to the design professional and, through the rest of the design process, the design professional and through the rest of the design process, the design professional does all the minutes because they're the ones that are asking the design questions and giving the answers and they then send those notes to the PM who then does the distribution. And then when we move into construction, the PM takes over again for the pre-construction, introduces the team, talks about where we're at, hands it over to the contractor and then, through construction, the contractor then does the minutes and sends them to the PM and the PM then distributes them out to the audience.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:Is that similar in any other? Similar for me, other than I tend to have the AE or the contractor issue out the notes. Just I will be the last reviewer before they get officialed and sent out, but I try to let them hold that piece.
Walt Sparling:But otherwise everything's very very similar, and part of that is all the contacts that they need to go to those people. A lot of the, especially when you get on the GC side. They have systems where they track and if you're on the list you get the minutes. If you're not on the list, you don't. So with the PM doing it, and there may be emails that they don't want out in public. The PM knows who that is, but they don't want the vendors and other people being communicating with them directly. So that's why, for us, we just we have the PM do it, but each organization obviously is different. It's 8.58, so we're going to take one last one. This is the bonus round. So how do you maintain a solid work environment? With the rise of remote work, there are aspects of physical congregation that just cannot be replicated with a screen.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:So if this is just trying to learn the team and have some fun, I've shoot, I think, the whole time. Covid, my wife and I were prepping to get married and we played games with our different coworkers there's virtual games that are and we played games with our different co-workers. There's virtual games that are out there. I'm drawing a blank on the names. I'll have to find it and send it to you, walt, so you can put it out there, and we used those and it built huge relationships between our wedding party. That one was some of them were in Switzerland, some were in Nebraskaaska, california, texas, oklahoma, so all over and uh for just the wedding, but then also going to the work piece, we utilize that for work too. We would take an hour or two hours. Our boss would allow us to play those games and kind of maintain some of that.
Walt Sparling:So, and then one thing I would assume with this is you're talking more of a team type situation, so you don't always have to just have everybody on here like this as a big group. One of the things that personal interaction works is you actually spend time one-on-one with an individual and that's how you get to know them. So you can always do especially in a manager environment is do one-on-one virtual coffees or something with each member of the team to get to know them. Then you can still have your team meetings and encourage the team to do the same with the rest of their teammates. So now everybody does get to know each other and they start to find commonalities between them, hobbies and interests.
John Connoly:Yeah, during COVID I had a team that we would get everyone together on a group call like this, but it would be. The only agenda item is a 15-minute call. Only agenda item is you're not allowed to talk about work. We call them water cooler meetings and it's just like get everyone together. Some of us were in the office, Some of us were not in the office. Get on teams and just try to get the people who are not in the office to be part of our lives and what's going on.
Patrick Shrewsbury:Yeah, we did a lot of that too, especially throughout the pandemic. We still are remote where we are today, and so one thing that we've done to really try to keep a positive atmosphere is, even when we have team meetings whether small, but even as a full team, when we have a large, large team, when we're all together it's about 30, is starting to come up with the different ideas, and one is having our full team meetings at a coffee shop or somewhere like that. That's not in the office, but it's still somewhere that you can all get together and you're still doing work and those type of things. We've also talked about community service together, so you are laying down the laptop and you're actually going out and supporting the community and doing some things like that.
Joseph Phillips:Yeah, there are pros and cons to having that co-location and, obviously, working remote in the virtual teams. I think often we look at the negative, that we, especially those of us who are older, we think about being a one spot, one room, being able to walk over somebody's office and get the answer you want, um, and it's like this wave. This wave that's diminishing of older PMs and how we used to do things, and there's a wave that is increasing of PMs that this is their good old days of how things get done, and so we have this overlap, I think, of PMs that how we used to do it is how we liked it, and this overlap of the next generation of how they're doing it and how they like it. It's a culture between the generational gap between those two entities. I'm not saying just because you're older that you don't like remote work, but it's how we used to do things. It's a comfort level of how we used to do it and change is hard, even for PMs.
Clinton "Brooks" Herman:I do miss the practical jokes that you used to be able to play in person. We had somebody needed to be in northern Florida and flew to southern Florida and was closer to Cuba than they were the project they needed to be at, so we decorated it with a bunch of oranges in their office when they returned Nice. So we had some fun with that.
Walt Sparling:Well, you still can do a little bit of joking. We have a status meeting with the leadership of our client every Thursday and the person. We have a slide and then we send it up to the presenter to present. And one of my peers in the other region did his report and said well, you know, walt, he's going to have all kinds of balloons and all this fancy stuff, because you know how he is. So while he was talking, the guy went and added a bunch of balloons and stuff to my slide which were not on there when I sent it and then popped it up so everybody got a good laugh which were not on there when I sent it and then popped it up, so everybody got a good laugh.
Walt Sparling:All right, so I want to thank the panel for great job, great information. Thanks for sharing. I want to thank the audience. Lots of people joined, lots of good questions and comments, and so there's a lot of information shared out there beyond just the panel member. So that is appreciated. This will be available on LinkedIn as a recording. I will follow up, probably tomorrow, with some links to books and Clinton. If you'll send me your game ideas, we'll throw them in there as well. And then I am going to figure out how to do an audio only and put it out on the PM Mastery podcast so that it will be there and probably do some show notes on that with a little more detail. So thank you everyone, and this is a quarterly event so the panel may change, but we've got to work now on a new topic. If you guys have some ideas, throw them in the comments as they continue to grow on LinkedIn and we'll consider that for the next PM Nights and Ladies of the Roundtable. Thank you all.
Jeff Plumbee:Thanks everybody, Thank you, Thanks everyone.
Intro/Outro:Thanks for listening to the PM Mastery Podcast at wwwpm-masterycom. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player. Until next time, keep working on your craft.