The Art Of Delivery | Mark Werner | The Sean Trace Show

In this episode of The Sean Trace Show, I sit down with Mark Werner, a 15-plus-year veteran in project management and PMO consulting, to break down what it actually takes to build a team that delivers real results. Mark unpacks the difference between being busy and creating genuine value, why context switching is one of the deadliest productivity sins a team can fall into, and how the phrase stop starting and start finishing can completely transform the way you work.

We dig into the Ford Taurus story: a shocking real-world example of how measuring the wrong things can destroy a culture from the inside out, and explore why what you measure truly matters in any organization. Mark also shares the power of MVP thinking, lean startup cycles, and how both small businesses and large companies can test ideas faster, get closer to their customers, and make smarter decisions about when to persevere, when to pivot, and when to stop.

What is one thing in your work or life that you keep putting off that you know needs your full attention right now?

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Ford Motor Company, back in the early 80s, was on the ropes. They weren't doing uh you know well financially. The only thing keeping them afloat at the time was the Ford F 150, their truck business. So um they were you know really looking to come out with a new mid-sized sedan, which eventually was the the Ford Taurus and its and its twin, the Mercury Sable. Long story short, the program manager associated with with the effort was like, hey, you know what? We need six to eight more months. We need to delay the introduction of the Taurus because we can include a couple more features that really could be a game changer for us in the industry. Customers, you know, are you know, you know, testing with them, with our target audience. They seem to really like this. I think it's worth waiting. Let's do it. They did. The Taurus launched, it was a huge success. It was the best-selling car in America for three or four years in a row. It saved the company. And do you know what um happened to the program manager in charge of the effort? He was fired. He was fired, or she was fired. I think it was the A. He was fired because the project was quote unquote late. And therefore, according to internal Ford standards, the project was a failure.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

So what are you focusing on?

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Now, the other thing, along that, along those lines, individuals in the organization learned, oh, you know what, if I've got a critical effort here at Ford, I'm not gonna make that mistake. I who, you know, who wants to get fired? So when it came time for the redesign back in, let's say, the early 90s, the program manager uh basically met scope, schedule, and cost delivered you know on all those areas. And the Taurus was never quite the same. It was a redesign, didn't really resonate in the marketplace. Now, which one was a project failure? So to me, it always tracks back to what are you measuring? What meant what you measure matters?

SPEAKER_00 2:02

All right, welcome everybody back to the Sean Trey Show. I am your host, Sean, and I've got an awesome guest with me today and with us today. Uh, can you introduce yourself and tell people who you are and a little bit about what you do?

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Yeah, Sean, thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Um I am Mark Werner. I am currently in a consultant. Um, long story short, I've been in the project delivery space for a good 15 plus years and working with um either Direct for uh organizations for consulting with them with respect to uh PMO, project management office stand-up, or optimization. So again, really just around project delivery um standards, excellence of an organization.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

That's awesome. How did you get started down that path? What was it that started you down this path to see uh, you know, what what what it is that you wanted to do?

SPEAKER_02 2:57

That's yeah, it was a bit of a winding road. So I got after I got out of um my uh master's degree program, uh, was an analyst and long story short, started to um really kind of pick up on project management techniques and had an opportunity uh at Siemens Medical many, many years ago to lead a pilot scrum team, which is an agile team before we're you know project delivery, and really liked it and got a you know uh build-in passion for that. So uh I've I've uh really built up um you know expertise in both uh agile uh delivery as well as we'll say traditional waterfall delivery as well. So it's ever been it's since been 2006 that I've been in the project delivery space.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

That's awesome. It's interesting too because getting I I love project management because um working with projects is the art of getting things done. And I think a lot of people are not aware of what is required to actually get things done. Is so you're gonna clean your room. Well, you know, even that is kind of challenging at times. How are you gonna break it down? What are you gonna do first? Where are you gonna work it? Now, let's imagine that you need to clean two rooms, okay? A little bit harder, three rooms, and you're bringing other people in to help you, you know, are 25 rooms. Well, how are you, you know, doing 25 rooms? That's that gets really complicated, you know? And you have to deal with well, maybe something that's maybe you only have two, you only have two vacuums, you know, even two vacuum cleaners. Well, how are you gonna work that? You know, what room needs to get done first? Are you doing the bed sheets? You have all these different things, and so for people who don't understand that, there's a lot of pieces that go into any type of project that have things have to get done. And like like building a house. I'm always fascinated by that because you can't put the roof on until you have a foundation, you know, things have to go in a certain order. And if you do it wrong, you're gonna if you have your roof people there on day one, they're gonna be like, dude, what are we doing? And you're wasting money and you're wasting people's time.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Right, meters running, uh expenses add up. You do things like that. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

I I wanted to ask you about like like what does a PMO actually mean? Like, what do you really do day to day?

SPEAKER_02 5:25

So that's a great question. Um the P in the PMO can stand for one of three things project, program, or portfolio. So um the P always I always ask, you know, uh, what's the P stand for? Now typically you you can glean that uh a lot of times. So we'll start like uh if it's a portfolio, typically organizations will will write an ePMO, which is an enterprise portfolio management office. So governing the entire enterprise, right? Um, you know, really aligned uh to ensure that you know the strategy is embedded in the various programs and projects that align underneath or within the respective portfolios. Um, other organizations, they're fine with just a program management office. It really depends on the size of the uh organization uh and really what their intent is to from a project delivery standpoint. How are they going to drive those things? How large are their efforts? Um it also depends, you know, again, going back to the size of the organization, smaller organizations will have very, we'll say, um, loose project management offices. Maybe they're concerned if it's a smaller startup and they're getting to the point where, hey, they need uh, you know, some sort of formalized process, going back to your example with respect to, hey, we're um we're a cleaning company, we're going into office space, you know, or hotel or or or or houses. Um, how do we structure things? Right. So um they might just, you know, an organization that's IT related, here's a couple templates we'll use, what have you. As a company grows, they typically get more structured with their strict to their uh their PMOs and what is expected to the point where uh a lot of times you'll get more uh directive PMOs where they have project managers or if they're uh agile in nature, scrum masters or at least train engineers who uh are responsible or accountable for delivery success. So from a day-to-day perspective, it really depends. So if we take a project manager, uh, it could be you know working with stakeholders to what's the project charter? What is this thing about? Understanding that. Um to your point, um starting to align what are the resources we need? And it's not just human resources. It could be, hey, we're building a, you know, you know, an office space. Well, what are the you know, various resources from construction to um the various different uh tradesmen that are required, what have you, uh, that are involved in that. Um, an eye towards budget, right? Scope. What's the initial scope that was set? Do we have scope creep? You know, that that is extended out that's going to impact our delivery dates and and and uh an overall budget as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

I love that. Well, one of the things too, like I want to ask it, because you know, I I have I put together some questions that are kind of very focused, but also like real-world questions. Like when someone says they're busy all day, but nothing actually gets done, what's happening there, you know?

SPEAKER_02 8:33

Yeah, it's a bit of a bit of a black hole. So are you know, is it tasks that um you know aren't generating any value that aren't, you know, um visible to the customer? I mean, you really want to focus not so much on tasks, but on outcomes. You know, that's that's a big driver for for customers, right? And for organizations is um, you know, it's not enough just to say, hey, I've got X number of tasks. That's great. Is it driving any value? What's the value to the customer or the organization?

SPEAKER_00 9:07

I love that. I love that so much, man. And one of the other things, too, that I think that is important is um is figuring out what's essential. You know, what are the things that are most important to get the the whole process moving forward? And I want to ask you this too, because have you ever worked with someone where everything feels harder than it should? Like what's going on? Is that a company culture thing?

SPEAKER_02 9:33

So a lot of times that has to do with yes, it could be company culture, uh, could be the industry within. Maybe they're, you know, highly regulated, uh, you know, Department of Defense, what have you. So that could be a uh consideration. Or it's just they're an older company and uh a level of calcification has occurred, right? So a high degree of bureaucracy exists within the organization. So we were talking about earlier, like there's different, you know, from a broad level, traditional waterfall approach, uh, which is very structured. You you get your requirements, you plan, you know, you um, you know, you do design, you develop, you implement, and you know, 18 months later you release a product to the customer. Whereas uh agility is really focused on shorter, you know, shortening up those cycles. So it's when you get value into the hands of customers sooner. Right. So hopefully breaking down, you know, that whole uh we'll say calcification with that exists within organizations or some organizations, I'll say. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

It makes a lot of sense because you know, figuring out the ways those things work makes a lot of sense because you know it it one of the things that I think about is you know what you just said there, this calcification, but like I always wonder why do some companies move so slow? And that kind of looks at that same concept, you know.

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Yeah, I've been part of uh we'll say transformations, right? So literally being brought in to help to uh remove some of the processes that aren't adding value, right? So uh I was part of one organization where it was I was I was brought in to help optimize and streamline our PMO. And one of the uh existing leaders of the PML said, oh no, we we've got a checklist, and this checklist for would we get projects started um is just like you know how a pilot would use a checklist one before they're taking off a plane. And it was like a checklist of 75 things. And I'm I'm sitting there and looking like, that's nice. Can we lean this out? Do you really need to do this? And really, what that checklist of 75 things was was if ever there was any sort of issue in the past, it was okay, we need to account for that in the future and put this on this checklist, even though it might not be applicable to projects down the road. You know what, we we have a sense of security. Let's put it on this checklist so it never happens again. Well, there's maybe other ways to there's other ways to to track that is, you know, what's in your process? Was it was it a process issue that you need to account for this in a checklist? Was it a one-off? Was it the project manager that was leading the effort that maybe wasn't aware of things? You know, so there's multiple factors involved when doing that. And really it gets down to you know, train your people well. Um, trust, you know, if you get good people, trust them, give them the intent, and they're closest to the work. Let them, you know, how hold them accountable to drive results.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

I love that. Uh one of the parts that I love about that is that it's also simplifying things. You know, you train people, you have the the pieces in place, but like I was finding that when we make the the steps too complicated to do something for my teams, they don't get done or they don't get done correctly. And you have to simplify it, like, all right, guys, these are the essential test steps. This is what must get done first. And we worked through that, and it was able to like get people to kind of begin to iterate upon that, like, okay, we you know, we we we got our I I I've been trying to implement um Scrum into my video workflow where we have our you know our backlog and then we have our sprint, and this is what we're doing in our sprint. This is what we have to get through today. And it's interesting because it works a lot better when I have people focusing on one thing like this is we need to export these videos, these videos are our priority right now. But what about all these 12 other things? Not important. Today, one of the guys was like, Hey, what about these three videos? I said, We're working on this one right now. Did you finish these three things I asked you? Well, no, and I said, then don't even think about the other one yet, because if we get split between three different things, it's gonna cause a problem for us, and we were just really hammered away one at a time, and it was allowing us to kind of simplify and make things work, you know. But people sometimes people feel like these they need to be doing more, you know, and if they're not, they're wasting time. How how would you respond to someone who says that?

SPEAKER_02 14:16

Well, you hit the nail on the head. So that's that's a common thing that you know what uh in the agile transformation state space, you know, a deadly sin is context switching, right? Moving from one piece of work, not really finishing it, and then going off to another. Um, you know, task switching, context switching. And so what we find is that quality is lower as a result because you start to ramp up on one particular task, stop, go over to another, and then you have to ramp up on that one. Whereas if you take one task and finish to completion, you actually get it done faster. Right? So there's more quality involved in that. And it's the that old phrase is uh stop starting and start finishing. Right. So it's really vital. And so in order, if certain tasks and and if you you line them up, prioritize them, um, result in you know, some sort of uh, you know, whether it's a new a slightly different process, or in your case, uh, you know, some videos, that's value into the hands of your customers sooner. So that's why you want to stop starting and start finishing.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

100%. Yeah, it's like, and if you get too many things done, I remember as a kid, my mom would let us do one activity, one toy, one game at a time. If you open up 20 puzzles, that puzzle's not getting done. So we would finish one puzzle at a time, and she wouldn't let us open a new puzzle till the old puzzle was done. And, you know, we got puzzles done. I got a lot of puzzles done because I was able to kind of focus in like that. And I wanted to ask you then, because you know, puzzles are one thing, but what's the difference between a company that gets things done and ones that just talk about it? Companies that just say you know, but they're not getting things done. They're not delivering.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

For me, in my experience, that comes down to leadership.

unknown 16:04

Right.

SPEAKER_02 16:04

So in order, leadership sets, you know, what's the strategy over the course of the next three to five years? What are we gonna do with, you know, at within the next one to two years to start to realize that longer term strategy, right? Do they have a proper roadmap? Do they have um OKRs, objectives, and key results that are going to get in embedded into each of the, we'll say, you know, portfolios, areas within the organization that align up to the corporate strategy. Right? That that's key. Uh the other thing that I would say is companies that get things done is they're responsive from a marketplace perspective. So um they don't lose sight, you know, the more successful ones that that get things done don't lose sight of their entrepreneurial or or small startup um, you know, perspective, which is to stop, start, you know, stop or pivot or persevere. So if something's not working, they change. Maybe they change with respect to who are they going to sell to, um, change their product, you know. Um Tesla is a prime example of that, you know, currently um you know, did a phenomenal job with respect to bringing about electric vehicles that were more mainstreamed in the marketplace. They're at the point now though, they're retiring two of their, we'll say, uh, major vehicles. That's the Model S that was really inner, you know, it was huge in the scene uh back in 2012. Um, and the Model X. The Model S, you know, the the sports sedan has more competition from Lucid, from other manufacturers, as as you know, we'll say the uh legacy manufacturers as well. So um, you know, Elon and and Tesla are moving into Optimus robots. They're moving that, you know, they've already moved into, but they're also pushing the charger stations. So it's really, you know, pivoting when market conditions change. And it's being smart about it as well. That's so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

You know, because it you think that you just have to keep pushing and be good at one thing. But the reality is that sometimes you have to pivot, you have to see where things are going and to shift with that, you know. And maybe I was reading about some famous companies that started as one thing and became something completely different. And that's fascinating to me, you know.

SPEAKER_02 18:28

Oh, there's many of them, like Nokia, you you know, the Nokia phones of the early 2000s that everyone had. I think there were like a rubber manufacturer back in the day and they just transitioned. Um, you know, uh household uh lubricant, we know WD40. That started off as uh was used military uh purposes to keep rust off of Atlas rockets. Right? How do we pivot? How do we go into uh you know a different uh marketplace? Oh well, it's also great for lubrication for locks and and doors and stopping the squeaks. You know, so that's interesting. In fact, you know, WD-40, right? Do you know what WD40 stands for? No. WD40 is water deplacement 40th formula. So they finally got it right on a 40th try where it was, hey, this is this stuff is really good. They kept iterating, kept trying, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Right? I love that. That's that's awesome. I didn't know that about WD-40, but that's super interesting because man, 40 times they were sitting there like, did we get it yet? Nope. Yeah, number 38. Let's keep going. Well, you know, it leads me to my next question of like, why do projects fail, like even when smart people are working on them, and what should they do to succeed?

SPEAKER_02 19:51

So that's an interesting question. One of the yeah, and yes, right, a lot of projects fail. And the question I always have is what are the measures of failure? Right. And the reason I'll bring this up is you know, the traditional measure of of a project failing is the quote unquote the iron triangle, right? Scope, schedule, cost. Right? The project exceeded its its uh timelines in the form of the schedule, exceeded its budget. It's a failure. Uh, one of the things that I always, you know, uh think about when when somebody says project failures, what are you focusing on? What's the focus of the failure? So, like we were talking about before, um, tasks are just kind of outputs, right? But what about value? Um, and so how does this track back to you know, uh, project failure? Um one of the examples that I love to go back to, and it's a little bit data, but I think very applicable. Ford Motor Company back in the early 80s was on the ropes. They weren't doing uh, you know, well financially. The only thing keeping them afloat at the time was the Ford F-150, their truck business. So um they were you know really looking to come out with a new mid-sized sedan, which eventually was the the Ford Taurus and its and its twin, the Mercury Sable. Long story short, the program manager associated with with the effort was like, hey, you know what? We need six to eight more months. We need to delay the introduction of the Taurus because we can include a couple more features that really could be a game changer for us in the industry. Customers, you know, are are you know you know, testing with them, with our target audience, they seem to really like this. I think it's worth waiting. Let's do it. They did. The Taurus launched, it was a huge success. It was the best selling car in America for three or four years in a row. Yep. Uh it saved the company. And do you know what um happened to the program manager in charge of the effort? He was fired. He was fired. She was fired, I think it was the A. He was fired because the project was quote unquote late, and therefore, according to internal Ford standards, the project was a failure.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

So what are you focusing on?

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Now, the other thing along that, along those lines, individuals within the organization learned, oh, you know what, if I've got a critical effort here at Ford, I'm not going to make that mistake. I, you know, who wants to get fired? So when it came time for the redesign back in the early 90s, the program manager uh basically met scope, schedule, and cost delivered, you know, all on all those areas. And the Taurus was never quite the same. It was a redesign, didn't really resonate in the marketplace. No, which one was a project failure? So to me, it always tracks back to is what are you measuring? What meant what you measure matters.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

That's interesting. What you measure matters, it really is, you know, and like you know, and that that leads to my next question. Like, if if a company or even a person has too many projects going on, how do you decide what actually matters? Like you got 20 things to do on your twit to-do list as a as a as a parent, you know, or for as a business owner, what's what's the thing that you how do you identify what's actually gonna move the needle?

SPEAKER_02 23:16

So yeah, that's that's that's common, right? So uh to me, you know, when you have every you know, three different, four different areas that are number one, really? None of them are number. What's number one? So organizations uh that get around this have a clear delineation, and it's gives you know it's back to what you were talking about before is um objectives and key results. What's the strategy of the organization? Or do you know even take it from a portfolio perspective? Um from a portfolio perspective, we've got these particular objectives which align to the corporate strategy that should provide guidance with respect to what are the efforts priority lined up. Um I had this discussion actually earlier in the week, with respect to hey, we've got um competing priorities, which a lot of organizations do. Uh, how do we get to a number one? And so it it really comes down to you know the prioritization methodology you use and it should be focused on value. What's most valuable for the organization to have? Every organization has limited resources. So what's what you know, what do we deliver first? A lot of times it's what value can we get into the hands of our customers the fastest? Because if you do that, you're you you know, you're beating, hopefully beating your competition. So it really aligns to what's your overall strategy, objectives, and how can you get the value into the hands of the customers sooner? Getting that alignment is critical.

SPEAKER_00 24:43

I love that. I love the idea of alignment. Like what is you know, tonight I had three three things going down. I had to get my daughter into her tutor. I had some podcasts, and I needed to help my wife really quick. And I have kind of lined them up and I was like, well, let's get this one done first. I know my daughter's not gonna be able to get herself onto her call, so I'm gonna do that first, and then I knew if I didn't say go up and talk to my wife real quick, that I would be probably you know in deep trouble. So I did that, and then I came down into my podcast. That's not that's absolutely critical, right? Exactly. I don't need that drama in my life. No one does. But I want to, you know, sometimes what I see with my own teams with with stuff, one of the biggest challenges is that people have a hard time figuring out what good leadership looks like when they're running a team and projects. And in your mind, what does that good leadership look like? You know, how and how does a person run a good team?

SPEAKER_02 25:47

So I love to use the example uh set forth by uh L. David Marquette. Um, he's author of Turn the Ship Around, former subcommander of the USS Santa Fe. Uh interesting story. Took over one thing from the USS Oregon to the the Santa Fe, wasn't familiar with the with the new sub. And um he details it in the book Turn the Ship Around. He had to come up to speed. So, you know, as a getter, you know, be an expert in a manual for the sub that is, you know, yay, you know, yay big now. So one of the things that he preaches from a good leadership perspective is um, and it's also something that in the agile space we do as well, is um empowerment. The people closest to the work sh typically know uh how best to accomplish that work. And what L. David Marquette layers in is you need to make sure that there's clarity around you know roles and tasks and specifically intent. What is the intent of the project, of the effort, right? And then empower those people closest to the work to get it done. Right. That that is a game, a huge game changer. And he has a very interesting um, you know, or actually I should say there's a very interesting uh YouTube clip. It's about 10, 11 minutes long, where he details what his experience was. And it's about, okay, you know, we're, you know, he empowers his his bridge crew around to say, all right, you know, we're we're we're setting out, you know, uh, you know, is it is it safe to dive? And he goes, well, you know, and he he asks his people, you know, to, you know, all right, we're we're ready to dive, Captain. And he he sits there as a check to go, okay, is this done? Is this done? Do you feel it's safe to dive? Okay, we're ready to dive. Let's go. Um, you know, system, you know, in you know, maintenance on the engines. When's a good time to do that? Well, probably not when you're in silent running, right? So the engineer will know, well, hey, you know what? Now that we're come up, we're, you know, um, we're we're in a specific area of the sea, this is probably the best time to do it. It's about empowering and intent. That's what good leadership looks like.

SPEAKER_00 27:56

I love that. I really love that because it's like it's something that's tangible and you can see, you know. Um, but you know, I I've seen teams that are really interesting because you know, everyone's working hard, but it's still a mess. Why does that happen at times?

SPEAKER_02 28:13

So if it's a mess, that goes back to um what's the structure that's in place, right? Are they, you know, going back to what we were just talking about, uh, is everyone aware of the intent? Is there clarity and alignment around shared goals?

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Shared goals, man, is something that's needs to be talked about more.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

Like, well, is there alignment around those things? Um, you know, going back to L. David Marquette, um, he went uh from a new captain on the USS Santa Fe, where uh I think it was a year later, because he empowered his team with sheer calls and intent and and and and uh authority with respect to these people know their jobs better than I do, obviously, because they've been at it on this ship for longer. They had the best safety record maintenance record of the fleet. There's tangible evidence of that.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

Well, going back to what you said about the shared goals. Um I have all of my team members, and one of the core things that I try to do is to get people on the same page, you know, and realize that we're working together. And, you know, there's a lot of different ways to do that. One of the things that I was really happy about is that I've done my part at work, but seeing them begin to take the reins outside of work, you know, I've seen them starting to go out for for one of the guys as a two of the guys are in bands, and everyone starts going out to the music shows, you know, they start going out to, you know, celebrate each other, to be there for each other. And what struck me is that it's this culture thing. Like when you can kind of there's this culture of inclusivity of connectivity and like being able to see people at a deeper level. And I'm not saying that you have to do that, but you have to be able to kind of step beyond the self. And however you as a team leader do that, you know, I'm sure there's lots of different ways. I'm not an expert on that, but for me, you know, we try to find shared goals and shared fun activities, and that seems to work.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

And it does work, and it's also you hit the nail on the head too, there's a human component to all this as well. Yeah. Right. So, you know, how how do people work and interact? Um, you know, a lot of times teams have shared, you know, uh, team agreements. How are they gonna work? How are they gonna act um if conflicts arise? How if they can resolve those things? Right. Uh those are those are vitally important, right? Uh, you know, fostering a uh a team that has respect for, you know, ensuring that the team has respect for one another. Everyone doesn't always agree, but how do they, you know, find common ground and get past, we'll say, differences of views or opinions on how work should get accomplished. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

I love that. I wanted to ask you this other one because, like, you know, sometimes projects begin to fall apart. Uh, and if a project is falling apart, um what are the early warning signs most people miss? Because I mean, it doesn't just immediately blow up. I'm sure there's things along the way, but you know, maybe people haven't been taught how to look for those.

SPEAKER_02 31:21

Well, it's funny, you you mentioned Scrum teams. So in um Scrum, what are you know there's a colloquial saying is, oh, what's the scrum smell? Are people talking to one another? You know, are they collaborating? Are they, you know, doing pair development? You know, if it's an IT-related team, uh, what's the communication? What's the, you know, going back to the human element, what's the energy with respect to the teammates? You know, is it you know, is are they kind of checked out? You have people checking out, then you start to get a little cautious, like, well, you know, are they checking out? And if they're checking out, um am I as a project or team lead um up to date with respect to uh impediments or risks, you know, or people kind of just ignoring some things, that's usually, you know, uh, you know, we'll say the first indication that something's a mess. You know, whether it's scrum or even from a nutritional waterfall space, uh, what risks are getting floated? If you're seeing risks come up, you know, that's not a bad thing. I'd rather see risks because then it means people are paying attention on the project team and elevating, say, hey, you know what, this is something we need to account for. The fact that you don't have any risks, that's usually a bad sign. That means people aren't thinking or paying attention or elevating. So those are some of the early warning signs that I always look for.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

It's also something that you begin to feel, you know what I mean? You can start to feel that tension. Um, I I noticed that there's, and I had to, as a team leader, try to shut that down. There's one of the members of my team that is extremely hardworking, but he's different. He is a very different guy, and he's goofy. I love him to pieces, but he some of the other people like they're like he's just not normal. He rubs people the wrong way. Why? And you know, and I think that one of the things that I have to do is I have to give people context. And today I sat down and everyone was, you know, kind of getting ready to like kind of tease him a bit. And I was like, you know what? He works harder than almost everyone here, like he never slows down. And I promise you that to someone else out there, you might not be, you might be the odd one out, you might be the one that they see as different. So be slow to judge, you know, be slow to judge. And no, it worked because it it brought them together, and it brought them together to see that to a degree. And I'll still have to keep working on it, but you know, it's a step-by-step thing.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

Oh no, to yeah, and going back to the whole human element, um, I've seen cases where you have a high-performing team and somebody new comes on board. And to your point, maybe they work a little bit differently, right? And so teams go through progressions where even though you have a team that's well functioning and high performing, if somebody new comes in with a different work perspective uh or style, uh, that team literally reforms. And then they uh go through that process of uh, you know, forming, storming, where they're kind of at each other's throats, so to say, because you know, they're not used to this person's uh way of working. Uh, and then they norm. Okay, great. How you know, to your point, how are we going to get past this? We collectively need to get past this to make sure that we keep our eye on project delivery, on value delivery. And so there's working agreements that's that are in the team. Maybe people, you know, um step up, you know, side of the ring, so to speak, and say, hey, you know what? Um I when you do X, Y, and Z, this kind of great. Can you, you know, maybe change your style a little bit or your interaction and people come to agreements. I've had that in the past in Scrum teams where people just clash from a personality perspective. And, you know, I'll get involved. I would get involved and then say, listen, you two are grown adults. I need you two to talk as well. I can't be, you know, intermediating this like it's almost like it's kindergarten. Get them to talk. They they start to norm around how they're gonna work, both on an interpersonal and professional level, and then they start hopefully performing again.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

I love that. I want to ask you another question too, because you know if I if a person has a small business, what's one thing they can do to get better results faster? Oh, um, test and learn.

SPEAKER_02 35:43

So going back to you know, your earlier question about hey, you know, how can big companies get you know slow? It's that calcification and big companies, you know, they grow over time. They uh, you know, they move from a lean startup to they're very successful and they have different departments marketing, sales, IT, what have you. Uh, and then people stop communicating and things take longer to get out to customers. So small business is in a great position because they hopefully they can more easily test and learn, create a product or a service, get it out in the marketplace, stay close to the customer, get their feedback, their insights. One of the things in the agile community, specifically um around larger companies, is is that test and learn, uh, and what we call the MVP that large companies try to use to mimic what smaller lean startups have, and that MVP is a minimal viable product. We're gonna get we have a hypothesis that, hey, these series of features or functions or new product is gonna be a hit in the marketplace. We really don't know though. So we do just enough right to test that hypothesis that it's gonna increase sales by 10%. So we get it out in the marketplace, and either it's a hit with our target audience, it's it's meeting or exceeding our goals of increasing sales by 10, 20%, whatever the case may be. Or so we then in that case, we persevere, we keep adding on to that product, right? Because we're close to the customer, we're getting their feedback, we're testing and learning, uh, we're piloting, so to speak, or you persevere to or you pivot to say, you know what, it the product's doing well, but there's certain features that are far more uh utilized than others, and there's a different customer base than we thought. So you pivot, you get that information and say, okay, great, you know, our hypothesis was off a little bit. How do we adjust? Because we see some promise there. So again, it's getting as close as you can to the customer, uh, doing um, you know, really utilizing the MVP process and testing and learning. You know, kind of like um, you know, going back to the WD40. Oh, this formula is not right, keep going, right? We we're close to some things, but not quite.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

I love that. I I have um I was working through with my team some of the product offerings that we have for my company, and we were talking about it, and I was like, you know, is this right? No, is this right? No. And I kept going back to not what we thought was right, but I kept going back and reaching out to people and saying, hey, can I pick your brain? What do you think people actually need? And going to some of my guests and my podcast and going, Hey, if you were, you know, doing this and seeking out the service, what would you really like? And people were telling me these things, and my team and I were iterating and iterating and iterating, and finally we came up with a really good package, and people were like, love this, absolutely love this. But it took us having a a bunch of humility, b being willing to scrap everything that we thought we knew and just get back out there and start asking people about what was actually going around and what was actually being said was important, you know. It's one thing to think you know, it's another thing to actually find out, you know?

SPEAKER_02 39:02

Actually find out exactly. So that you know, again, that's how large companies get around that you know, bureaucracy is is instilling that MVP process, you know, getting a hypothesis, testing it, and then learning, and then either persevering for pivoting, or if it's a complete disaster, you stop and you stop because there's no resonance in the marketplace. So why are you going to continue to throw resources and time, money, uh people at it? Right. So, you know, just like you know, it's instilling that lean startup cycle with you know with larger companies.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

One of the things that I see is like sometimes I will get workers and team members that have a hard time making decisions. And when people start having a hard time making decisions, what do you tell them to do to try to get beyond that?

SPEAKER_02 39:52

Uh, one of the things that I I do is I'll I'll ask them, well, what do you think should be done first? What do you know? So, in other words, if they're at a crossroads, I want to find out what are they thinking? They might know something that I don't. Again, proceeding from the assumption that if they're closest to the work, they have knowledge that I might not have. So I'm gonna turn it back on them to say, What do you what would you do first and why? What's causing you to stop? You've got, you know, you you seem to be at crossroads. What's something that you know is causing that that I might not be seeing? Right. And, you know, if you ran the company, what would you do? You run this project, what are you gonna do and why? And then you could say, okay, great, let's go.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

I love that. It's empowering. It's putting the ball back in the court and and and like helping people understand that it's not the end of the world. If something happens, then we adapt, we pivot. And I I think that like when I've been working with my daughter, um, I'm a black belt and judo, and today uh my daughter found that out. She and I studied Muay Thai together, and she was trying to show me a takedown. And I I let her take me down. I knew what she was doing. It was a Muay Thai style takedown, and it was fun. And I was like, Okay. And she's like, See, you can't stop me. I was like, Oh, oh, okay, I'm gonna show you a little bit about what I am a black belt in. And like we started, I just started throwing all of the her and her friends around the room, and it was a lot of fun, but they were like, Oh my goodness. And then suddenly she was like, she came in and she was like a little bit scared. But one of the things that I've noticed is as we get more experiences, she's not afraid to try, she's not afraid to try something. You know, two years ago, she was terrified about even walking. I tried to show her some takedowns a couple years ago, and she's like, I'm so scared. Now she was like, Dad, I'm gonna try that on my friends. But it's because we've created this space where she feels safe to try things. And I think that we would like to think that us adults are so different from our younger selves, but where we're not really, you know, you need that degree of safety to help people feel, you know, safe to try something. And I want to ask you too, because you know, how how does a leader help create that feeling of safety for a team?

SPEAKER_02 42:13

So great point on a number of different fronts. So it's psychological safety. Right. To your point, hey, I'm gonna try something or I'm gonna do something. And if it doesn't work out, well, I'm gonna quickly learn from it. So having uh, you know, uh a growth mindset, right? So that you know, that mindset hopefully is fostered by the organization to say either there's two mindsets you can have: a fixed, where it's just, well, this is the way I've always been done, and it's not really not gonna get me better, versus a growth mindset to say, hey, you know what? I'm open to new ideas, new ways of doing things. It might be better, faster, uh, more economic, or whatever the case may be. Uh, but having that mindset and also fostering that psychological safety. I worked for an organization that was phenomenal at it. It was let's attack the problem, not the people. And it made a world of difference. It was if there was something wrong, it was okay, what went wrong? Why? Right? Let's fix it. And now it could have been, uh, in a couple of cases it was, someone didn't follow the process right where they weren't aware of it. But it wasn't, it was, it was, you know, the organization and leaders there didn't get the fingerball out where it was, okay, point the finger all over the place. No, no, work with the problem, resolve it as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And then what did we learn from us? You know, was it somebody trying something new or different? Okay, it didn't work out, or it was somebody who didn't know the process. But it was there was a lack of punishment for that. Now, if it, you know, the same person was doing the same thing over and over again, of course, a conversation would ensue, but it was there was a high degree of psychological safety in the organization. And going back to you know, points we were talking about before, that really fostered a familiar or you know, like a A collegial uh aspect among teammates. You know, let's let's try something new. And if you're willing to experiment, and you know, and that keeps an organization, you know, department, company, what have you, fresh and young, because then you are going to have that test and learn mindset. You're gonna have that growth uh perspective and mindset as well. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 44:19

Uh I want to ask one last question. What's one simple habit or system that helps teams move faster and get more done?

SPEAKER_02 44:29

One of the things that I was uh to get things done faster um is to really focus on your flow. What's your flow of work? You had mentioned before, hey, I've got all these priorities. Everything can't be number one. What are you going to work on first? So you're focused on your flow from your intake to your overall delivery. And one of the best ways you can do that is to visualize your work. Uh, and you visualize your work with respect to a Kanban board. Uh, it's basically just shows it's it's you know various vertical swim lanes to say intake, what's being worked on, um, you know, what's being delivered to the customer. There's obviously, you know, could be steps in between. Kanban boards are fantastic because they meet you, your department, where you are. It visualizes your current process and then shows you where the bottlenecks are. And so if you can resolve those bottlenecks, you get that flow more efficient, more effective, and you get, you know, products, services into the hands of your customers as quickly as possible. Uh, one of the big things that Kanban preaches is is is a pull system. You don't just push, you know, work into the next stage where it piles up. It's no, no, no, you know, a couple of individuals and implementing, for instance, uh, you know, their or quality assurance. Well, they can only do so much work at any any given time. So let's focus on the flow. You don't overload the system, you don't overload certain steps in the system. You keep that system view in its entirety. Again, focusing on the flow, um, moving bottlenecks and working with individuals um and processes to get that as efficient as possible. Huge proponent of Kanban. And it's applicable whether you're working at a team, a program, or even I've done that at a portfolio level to get you know senior vice presidents to um even C level executives insight into what work is into their teams and what's the status of it.

SPEAKER_00 46:33

It really breaks things down in a very simple way. And I I I use it, I use a lot of um, I use uh Monday.com for my team. Um, and it allows me just to visualize things that I can see and I show my team this is where we're at, this is what we're working on. Though I'm a huge lover of a giant big whiteboard with stickers on it. I that is one of my favorite things in the world.

SPEAKER_02 46:57

Super whiteboard, yeah. You just you just hope you you just hope that the the the sticky holds, right? You don't want them falling off. That's the only thing you gotta worry about sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

Yeah, a hundred percent. The stickiness isn't always a problem, and they end up all over my room. And I never, ever, ever have been able to succeed with those silly whiteboards, even though I love them.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Uh with you, no, con you know, Kanban boards are great uh information radiator. Um again, teams all the way up to executives. Yep, it's so true. Where can people go and find out more about you and what you do? Uh, my LinkedIn page, uh Mark Werner. So, you know, love to uh, you know, if you have any questions, comments, uh I'd appreciate it. You can, you know, uh, you know, message me on LinkedIn. Uh that'd be great. And Sean, before I forget, thank you again. It was it was a pleasure uh being here today.