Ep. 43: How Dr. Frank Harper Trained Project Managers to Become Better Leaders and Executives in Over 65 Countries – Part 2

Transcript

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Welcome to Scale Tales – the business storytelling podcast where entrepreneurs, executives and experts share firsthand accounts of those magical moments when they achieved something bigger than even they could have imagined.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and this episode is a continuation of a fascinating, energy inducing conversation with a world-renowned corporate educator and project management professional. You first met him in part 1 where you learned more about his background as a software engineer, his start as an entrepreneur, ascension into various C-suite positions, and ultimately earning his Ph.D. and becoming a professor.

Now, you’ll discover an alarming statistic about project management, why you should focus on frameworks instead of methodologies and why ignoring emotional intelligence will ultimately lead to your project or organization’s demise.

This is Ep. 43: How Dr. Frank Harper Trained Project Managers to Become Better Leaders and Executives in Over 65 Countries, Part 2.

We ended the first part of this interview with Dr. Harper saying that as the way we work and do business has evolved, so has the need for Project Management governance. Considering the scale and breadth of his background I asked him, What are some common things you’ve noticed in training PMs around the world?

Great question. There’s a focus on principles, policies and frameworks, which is a shift from methodologies. Statistics show that only 35% of projects worldwide according to PMI are executed successfully. Let me paint the picture for the audience. By the year 2027, 88 million people will be involved in project management work. And this is why we talk about the new project economy. 88 million people will be involved in project management work, worldwide.

Also during that time, over $20 trillion will be invested in projects. And so if you look at the numbers, only 35% of projects are successful. And that’s really abysmal because I’ve been a certified PMP now going over 30 years, and back when I first got in, the number was still around 30, 35%. And I had my reasons for that, okay, which PMIs is starting to address, and I may talk about that later. But what happens is this here.

When you start thinking about only 35% of projects are successful worldwide, that means there’s a whole lot of money that’s left on the table. That is a waste of people, money, methods, materials, all of the elements that are associated with a project. So PMI is saying we have to kind of pivot because when you talk about a methodology, people pick up a methodology and they follow it step by step.

Well, for at least over 30 years since I’ve been involved with PMI, that’s not working. So what do you do? You pivot and you say, okay, let’s focus on frameworks. Why? Because frameworks give you a consistent, coherent approach to accomplishing something. However, each situation is different, of course, each project is unique. So what happens in that framework has to be tailored.

If you look at PMI’s literature now, as matter of fact, I just taught a class not too long ago, Project Manager for Agile Certified Professionals, and they talked about the PMBOK as a framework. But there’s also a section in there talks about taking that framework and tailoring it.

And true to form, Dr. Harper tailors or customizes any course he teaches from the “traditional” curriculum, including this one on Project Management for Agile CertifiedProfessionals. In case you’re wondering, “Agile,” is a method for delivering a project in an iterative or incremental way by dividing the overall project into smaller, more manageable parts which are known as, “sprints.” So, it’s only fitting that he leverage his book (which was discussed in Part 1 of this interview.” It’s called A.G.I.L.E. L.E.A.D.E.R.S.H.I.P. with a G.R.I.P. As a reminder, the book’s title is one long acronym.

It identifies mindsets, skill sets and tool sets. In all the various universities that I’ve taught the  webinars, the challenge is to take one of those mindsets and customize it. How would you implement it in your organization? For example, let me paint a scenario for you. I’m teaching a leadership class. I have 10 students in my leadership class.

They’re remote, they’re from different countries, they’re from different organizations. One of the leadership concepts I teach for a leader is look to change and challenge the status quo. Everybody agrees that that’s what a leader should. But here’s the difference. If I live in Russia, if I live in Australia, if I live in, you know, if I’m in, in Africa, if I’m in the Caribbean, how I implement that is going to be different. That same truism applies to the frameworks.

PMBOK has a framework. Scrum has a framework. I teach certification course in enterprise IT governance that has a framework. So everybody has a framework because they’re starting to realize that we’ll give you something that’s consistent, it’s okay to change stuff. I’ve helped build at least 20 or more PMOs and center of Excellence worldwide. We start off with the PMO because that’s the most logical place if the PMO is strategic and it has that mandate.

Before Dr. Harper gets on a roll, for those of you who are new to the world of project management, it might be helpful to understand what all these acronyms stand for and what they mean. PMBOK stands for the Project Management Book of Knowledge. It is a publication produced by PMI, which is the Project Management Institute.

This book serves as the definitive guide for all certified project managers to follow. Scrum isn’t an acronym but it is the name of a particular type of Agile project management framework. The inspiration for its name comes from rugby. A COE or Center of Excellence is a dedicated team focused on driving innovation and establishing best practices across an entire organization through things like training and support.

And PMO stands for Project Management Office. This is also a dedicated team but their focus is on defining and maintaining project management standards, processes, and tools. It’s a team that you can (and should) set up even if your organization is small.

That PMO sits at the intersection of policies, procedures, your frameworks, processes, organizational structures, culture, ethics and behavior, your information systems, infrastructure, applications, and also people. And so that’s the most logical place where you can launch Center of Excellence. I’ve launched the banking industry’s first Center of Excellence in Business Process Management, robotics, process automation.

The key was I set the framework and then I let all of the brilliant minds within the organization flush out the details. And so that’s the biggest thing I see. I see a real push toward the soft skills. A good example is a PMI talent triangle. You have technical project management. But in today’s technical world with the technology stacks, if you are going tobe a project leader and you want to know all the technology stacks, you’re not going to be very successful in your project because it’s too much stuff to go along.

Remember what I said earlier when I talked about those eight disciplines that are involved with business transformation that you as the project leader have to orchestrate, manager and do all those kinds of things. It’s going to be impossible for you to try to understand all the details with writing code and designing and all of those kinds of things that a technical person would handle. And so I see more shifting to your soft skills. And also focus on the business.

So far, the changes Dr. Harper observed over the years in project management include a shift from methodologies to frameworks as well as a shift from purely technical skills to soft skills. He also mentioned noticing a shift in focus on the business. This, honestly, is a primary reason why we offer the Scale Tales podcast – to not only help entrepreneurs and executives, but to also bridge the gap with project managers so that they understand sharpen their “business acumen,” while also picking up some new “power skills,” and “ways of working.”

By the way, business acumen, power skills, and ways of working, are the three points of the PMI Talent Triangle Dr. Harper just mentioned. Being that we tend to have an emphasis on operations in our episodes, I asked Dr. Harper if he could explain what he meant by focusing more on the business. Does that mean focusing more on the financials as a project manager or the day-to-day operations of the business?

Great question, great question. When you look at the world of project management, there are two entities. There’s the organization which is involved with running the business, and then there’s project management which is involved with changing the business. That’s why I call the project manager the strategic enabler. Strategy is all about improving, making it better. I tell all my students, if you have a poor or immature project management capability.

The likelihood of you not executing your strategy is going to be very high. Why? Because again, project management ties the strategic objectives to the technical objectives. For over 30 years I’ve always asked this question. If you have a technical objective that’s not tied to supporting a strategic business objective, why are you spending the money?

I’m glad to hear that there’s becoming more and more of an emphasis not just here in the US but worldwide on those softer skills. I was just having a conversation with someone yesterday about the fact that for so long, those quote unquote soft skills have been slept on. But at the end of the day, you need people in order to be able to execute whatever the strategy is. And not everyone is going to follow someone who’s a bully.

But at the same time, it’s not about getting along to get along because you still have to get things done. But I think there is a very nice balance and I think a skill that I believe is becoming more and more valued for those of us who are considered to be quote, unquote, nice. Nice doesn’t mean that you don’t get things done.

That’s right, exactly.

So thank you for bringing that up. I do have another question.

Let me just interject something my daddy used to tell me. My father had a third grade education and he told me,

“You need to be able to step on somebody’s shoes and still leave a shine.”

And then let me just also interject something about the importance of, of, of soft skills emotional intelligence. If you go on LinkedIn, at least every article has some mention of emotional intelligence.

And let me just share with the audience the reason why emotional intelligence becoming so prevalent is that there was a 40-year study that was done by PhDs for the University of Berkeley and that study showed that emotional intelligence was 400% more powerful than intellectual intelligence when predicting the success of an individual. A lot of these courses talk about neuro this, neural, this. Well, neural focuses on the brain.

One of the keys to being a successful project manager who becomes a senior executive is understanding how important emotional intelligence is. Because let’s face it, you are not going to know all of the details. And again that tributes to the failure projects. You have a project leader or project manager developing the entire work breakdown structure, the entire schedule. It’s not going to happen.

So you have to have those SMEs, those other people who do have the deep knowledge and expertise.

Exactly.

I do have a follow up question for you regarding frameworks versus methodologies., I’m deeply entrenched in the Lean Six Sigma world and one of the things that I’ve noticed about why some of those projects and those initiatives also fail is because of the rigidity. You have some people who are very dogmatic in their approach to Lean Six Sigma. As an example, the methodology there is define, measure, analyze, improve and control.

When I go into many of these organizations, the resistance is because of their introduction or their previous experiences with folks who again were very dogmatic in their approach and it was very rigid. If I understand you correctly, the difference between a framework and a methodology is, let’s say we have the proverbial sandbox. So the framework says okay, this is the sandbox, but whatever you have going on inside of the box can change. The amount of sand depending on where you are in the world and what the climate conditions are and the political, the geopolitical. There are a number of factors, the framework is providing, I guess, those boundaries.

Yep.

Then the way the tools that you use, the people that you may tap to assist with the effort, those are the things that you might have to be a little bit more flexible on. But as long as it’s contained within that overall sandbox. Whereas the methodology is saying, no, this is the sandbox. And then you do this and then you do this and then you do this and then you do that.

Yep, exactly. And, and you bring up an interesting point. One of the dilemmas that project leaders have is understand that when you look at projects, it’s essentially two ways to do it. You have waterfall and you have agile. Now you have different types of approaches to agile. Okay, but those are the two major approaches to leading the project. Well, I’ve seen organizations become tribunal in the terms of, okay every project has to be waterfall.

Or every project has to be agile. Well, in reality the solution is going to be hybrid. Just think about the different types of transformations. Okay? And I make this a point because people talk about digital transformation, digital business transformation, and then a major reason why those projects fail because they forget about all the other transformations that have to take place. the umbrella term is business transformation. under that business transformation you have a strategic business transformation.

That is, we want to change our approach to the marketplace. Then you have operational business transformation. That is. If we’re going to approach the marketplace this way, we may have to think about streamlining our operations. Well, that won’t happen unless you have an organizational business transformation because organizational focus is on the people. I remember one project.

I worked on. It was the largest bank transformation in the US in the last 25 years. It was an international bank with locations here in the United States. The budget was close to $800 million. When I got hired, I got hired into a situation where the system was going to go live in 30 days. The group that was going to be using the system had no clue. They didn’t know what processes changed. They didn’t know what the screens look like. So they had no training. And so of course I come in.

Initially they were using a big six consulting firm. And if you work with big six consultant firms, they bring a whole bunch of people into the room and they have their approaches. Okay, they’re stuck in their approaches. I come in, I says now what we’re going to do is we’re going to apply an agile approach, in particular SCRUM.

How are we going to do that? Me as the business process strategist, I was the SCRUM Master. We had someone from the change group and then the product owner was either VP or senior VP for that particular area. And as we needed the expertise to develop the models and things of that nature, there he would pull the designated person. Well, to make a long story short, we were able to document over 250 processes within the 30-day window. Get those people trained so that they felt good about themselves.

In other words, said another way, we captured their heads, hearts and their hands to make the change successful. But again, I’m not a purist. I look at these approaches, these frameworks, these methodologies and see how can I bring the best out of each one of them together. And that’s what project leadership is all about going into the 21st century.

In other words, if you want your project or business for that matter to be successful in this age of digital transformation and rapid change, you must combine technical, business, and emotional intelligence skills to capture the heads, hearts, and hands of the people in your organization’s ecosystem. Not sure how to do this? Don’t worry, we won’t leave you wondering. Coming up after the break Dr. Harper will share more about his own framework to help you achieve this. We’ll even share details about how you can get a demo of his Project Managers as Senior Executives course.

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Welcome back! Before the break, Dr. Frank Harper, a corporate education professor, seasoned project management professional, and former CIO, picked up where he left off in part one of this interview. He explained some core reasons behind the global failure rate of projects and why entrepreneurs, executives, and project managers should all pay attention to this. After all, project management directly links to the implementation of business strategy. And some of the best resources to learn how to increase your chances of successfully implemented strategy via project management is through Dr. Harper’s books and courses.

You know, it’s kind of ironic because I did the first talk for PMI at the International Conference on Making the Transition to Project Manager. Now that I’ve gotten to, to become a project manager, now I want to talk to you about becoming a project leader. And so what I do is I focus on the mindsets, the skill sets and the tool sets.

And so, and this brings me to my book. The framework is called the Agile Leadership Framework. It’s a collaborative conceptual framework of leadership behaviors focused on creating a better digital world. In lieu of time, let me just talk about one aspect if that’s okay.

Oh, sure, sure.

Okay.

Earlier I mentioned there’s three parts – there’s the flexible part, there’s a collaborative part, and then there’s in control. Let’s talk about the flexible part because the flexible part is going to Be necessary to get through being collaborative and being in control. And so I take the term agile.

It identifies what I call five key mindsets. That is an adaptive mindset, a growth mindset, an intelligent mindset, a learning mindset and an effective and ethical mindset. In each one of those, I drill down and I talk about what does it mean to be adaptive? How do you develop a growth mindset? And so I talk about 10 goals to developing a growth mindset.

As a reminder, the title of Dr. Harper’s book is an acronym. Right now he is describing A.G.I.L.E. as an acronym. Again, A stands for “Adaptive,” and G stands for “Growth.”

As far as intelligent, I talk about the emotional side and the intellectual side through what I call the six lenses of being intelligent. And those six lenses are innovation, insight, initiative, influence, interpersonal skills and integrity. You’d be hard-pressed to look at anything that’s happening in this world, that doesn’t fall within one of six buckets.

The “L” in the A.G.I.L.E. acroynym stands for “Learning.”

Learning is important because in order to be an innovation driven enterprise, which is the highest maturity level, when you look at a modern enterprise, innovation driven enterprise, you have to start at the bottom, that is being, becoming a learning organization. And so when we look at learning organization, there’s five dimensions to that. You know, we’ve all heard about systems thinking, we’ve all learned about mental models, we learn about shared values.

Those are some of the things that are involved with that learning mindset. And then finally we talk about effective and ethical. I put ethical in there because our business schools worldwide, they created the monsters that we have right now. And what do I mean by that? We got to make money, we got to make money at all costs. And when you put regulations in, you put standards in. But now organizations are faced to look at the ethical aspects of it because of artificial intelligence. They have to look at it. And so when you take those mindsets, they apply to the collaborative skill sets and also being in control.

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough time for Dr. Harper to give us a summary of what the other acronyms in his book’s title mean, but you’re in luck because we’ll have a link to his book in this episode’s show notes. Another resource that we’ll provide is a demo of his Project Managers as Executive Leaders course. But, that requires membership to our podcast portal. More on that later, for now, here’s what Dr. Harper wants you to know about this course.

Yes, Project Managers as Senior Executives. I take the students through a journey through the Agile leadership framework. I’m pulling in all of the different disciplines. I take the same approach for those who may be familiar with enterprise performance management or corporate performance management. Whereas you’ve got all these different tools out there. What that discipline does, it pulls it all together. It makes it, it makes it integrated.

When I talk about adaptive mindset, there are some examples to that. And then also there’s some exercises. Now that I’ve told you this stuff, how would you implement change and challenge the status quo? Because in some industry, in some countries, they only look at leadership at the top. They don’t if you’re let’s say three levels of leadership. You have strategic level, you have the tactical mid-level and then you have the operational day to day level.

Okay, well there’s some countries, whereas all the leaders are at the organizational, strategic part. When you talk about leaders at the middle level and at a day-to-day level, they’re not leaders. They don’t look at them as being leaders. After taking my class, because I teach a very interactive class, they start to realize that the leader, there’s a difference between the leader and a leader

The leader is the one that takes all the heat. They’re at the strategic level. But if the leader is smart, they can minimize that heat that they have to take when they start to realize that. I need a leaders at the tactical level and also I need a leaders at the operational level. And that’s why I talk about the third part of the A.G.I.L.E. L.E.A.D.E.R.S.H.I.P. framework that is staying in control. And I call it G.R.I.P. management. Because when you think about gripping something, you’re grabbing it. You want to stay in control with it.

Yes, there’s an element of control that’s required, but don’t grip too tight because if you do, then you’ll find yourself out of control as you drive people away from you. Because this was a two-part episode, there’s so many lessons learned that those lessons could be covered in an episode by itself.

So, here’s what I’ll do. Rather than recap the lessons learned as I normally would, I’ll instead end with a strong encouragement that you go back and listen to these two episodes again. Take notes. Reach out to Dr. Harper with questions you have. And, sign up for a membership for our learning portal.

A very special thank you to Dr. Frank L. Harper! He showed up and he showed out, didn’t he? And his enthusiasm was, is real! If you are fortunate to have a conversation with him or be taught by him, you’re going to get the same level of energy. Guaranteed. As a reminder, you can access links to most of the resources mentioned in this episode’s show notes at ScaleTalesPodcast.com.

The one resource that will not be available in the show notes is Dr. Harper’s demo of Project Managers as Senior Executives. Access to that requires membership, which starts at $9.99 per month for unlimited access to extra content, special offers, and the ability to earn PDUs and continuous education credits. Click the link in the show notes to sign up for a membership today!

Thank you for Listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Hashim Tale.

You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.

Thank you for Listening! If you learned something valuable from this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and review wherever you’re listening.

I’m Alicia Butler Pierre and I produced and narrated this episode. Audio editing by Olanrewaju Adeyemo. That German male voiceover you heard earlier was also me. Additional male voiceover by Clarence Levy III. Music production and original score by Sabor! Music Enterprises. Video editing by Gladiola Films. Show notes by Hashim Tale.

You’ve been listening to Scale Tales, a podcast by Equilibria, Inc.