MIKE GOSS:  I believe that everything in life in one way or another is a project.  So if that’s true, how do I increase my chances of it being successful, and who can I help with it?

NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to talk about the ins and outs of project management and what matters to you as a professional in the field.  We’ll talk with some of the leaders in project management to find out what motivates them, what drives them to succeed, and to get some encouragement and inspiration from them.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the two main motivators around here, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Bill, today we have with us via Skype someone who has made it a life goal to inspire people.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And Mike, I’m excited about having you on this ‘cast because you’ve been entertaining our operations team for weeks and weeks and weeks.  I can always tell when they’re on the phone with you, so I’m looking forward to this.

NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s meet Mike.  He has held sales and leadership positions with four multinational companies, several small and mid-size businesses, and three of his own businesses.  He’s an accomplished sales trainer, a project management trainer, contract project manager, speaker, and author.  And one of Mike’s lifetime goals is to reach 10 million people with a message of hope and inspiration.  Today he’ll get a little closer to that goal right here in our studio.  Mike, via Skype from Portland, Oregon, it’s great to have you with us here on Manage This.

MIKE GOSS:  Well, I’m honored to be here.  I’m glad I was invited because this – Velociteach, Andy Crowe, Bill Yates – this is the big-time.  I got invited to the big-time.  Hallelujah.

NICK WALKER:  Well, you know, that goal of reaching 10 million people might seem unusual to a lot of people.  Why did you set that particular goal?

MIKE GOSS:  A few years ago I had open heart surgery.  I had chest pains and didn’t tell my wife.  And when she finally found out, things happened, and suddenly I’m having a five-way heart bypass.  When I woke up, I checked around, and I said, “I’m still alive.”  I wiggled my toes.  They’re still working.  I tried my fingers.  They’re still working.  I couldn’t talk because they had these huge things down my throat.  But I thought, you know, I must be here for a reason.  God must still not be done with me.

So I set a goal to see how many people I could enrich.  And if you’re going to make a goal, you might as well make a big one.  I didn’t set out to enrich 10 people.  I set out to enrich 10 million in one way or another.  And when I speak or when I create a course or when I’m teaching boot camps, it’s all about making the other person better off.  I want to be able to say I did something; I made my mark by helping others.

NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s go way back.  Way back, I guess, even when the first little seeds of your career began to be planted.  You had the nickname of “Otis” in junior high school and in high school.  Tell us why.

MIKE GOSS:  I lived in Pendleton, which had a total of four elevators – Pendleton, Oregon.  But I was always fascinated by the box moving up and down with people or materials in it, the counterweight behind it, all the mechanical and electronic things that had to happen to make it work.  I was fascinated with it, and I always talked about it.  My friends got very tired of listening to it.  I made scale model elevators and entered them in science fair projects.  It just went on and on.  And eventually I got to work for my dream company, Otis Elevator.

NICK WALKER:  As a matter of fact, I understand one of your usernames is ElevatorFan.  Would that be true of you?

MIKE GOSS:  Well, yes.  When I was setting up my account in Skype it said, “What handle do you want?”  And I, well, thinking Otis, somebody took Otis.  So I said ElevatorFan.  That will work fine.

NICK WALKER:  So you got to have your dream job.  Tell us a little bit about kind of how that started and what you were doing initially.

MIKE GOSS:  I started out as a helper in the field, Nick.  I was in Otis Elevator’s management training program.  They want you to get your hands dirty in the field and work on elevators.  I did that as I finished up my business degree at Portland State University.  Then I worked for them in San Francisco, and then in Phoenix.  And it was all about either managing the installation of the project, or managing a sales contract to win a sale over at a premium price.  I never won a sale ever by being low bid, but I did win it by being high value.  And it was a project behind that that let me do that.

ANDY CROWE:  I would far rather manage a sales process than manage the actual execution.  I’ve done both, and I’ve learned.  Presales engineer can be one of the greatest job titles there are.

BILL YATES:   That’s true.  You sell it, and you get out.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.

BILL YATES:  Somebody else has to implement that.

MIKE GOSS:   After I came back to Oregon from Otis, I was the salesperson, and then I was ramrodding the installation, working as project expediter, and had a lot of fun doing it.

NICK WALKER:  But you’ve had some challenging projects.  And one in particular that I’ve got a little inkling about.  Something having to do with having to make an old elevator fit into a new building?

MIKE GOSS:  That was exciting, Nick.  I was working for Otis Elevator’s San Francisco regional offices.  And in the fast-track management program you work a little bit in the sales department, a little bit in the engineering department, and so forth.  When I got to engineering, they said, “Have you ever done drafting?”  “Oh, yeah, I did drafting in high school.  I enjoyed it.”  And they said, “Well, we have a drafting project.  We’re taking an old elevator out of an old building, and your job is to cut it down on the drawings and make it fit into the new building.  And we’re not sure we have accurate measurements of the hoistway.  So take your best shot.”

And I took my best shot, and it seemed to work.  I got a letter from the job foreman, and he said, “Thank you.  It finally fit.  It did actually what the drawings would say it did.”  So it worked out well.  I don’t know whether we’ll call that a project or a phase, but it was successful.  Everything fit.

BILL YATES:  Mike, I want to ask a question about this.  You had a passion, even when you were a kid you had a passion for elevators.  And then you were able to pursue a career in that.  And I think about – can you speak to the idea of, as a project manager, you’re more effective if you happen to know a lot about the product or the service that you’re working with?  In your case you had a passion for elevators.  How did that help you in the role of project manager?

MIKE GOSS:  Bill, it helped me get in the door because I had the passion.  I took a three-ring binder to my interview with letters that went back, well, they went back to the 1950s.  And they said, “You’re insane, but we’re going to hire you because you have all this passion.”  So I translated that to working on either a sales project or an installation project by setting a goal.  And it was very simple.  I had not had any project management training.  I could say “project management,” but I wasn’t sure what went behind it.  So I would say, “What must be done?  What is the deliverable that everyone will measure?  And when is it due?  And what’s the budget allocated to it that I cannot spend more than?  And who’s the accountable person?”

Well, I was always the accountable person.  But at least I had a very basic, basic macro structure.  And I used it to get things done, and they always worked out well.  Even when we had surprises, I didn’t have a risk management plan.  I didn’t know there was such a thing as a risk management plan at the time.  But intuitively we said, okay, we’ve hit a roadblock.  What are we going to do about it?  And the answer was, well, we’re going to do this and this and this because this is the root cause of it.  And then later when I was sitting in, taking my own PMP training, I thought, hey, I know about that.  I can talk about that a little bit.  And they said, yes, but we wish you’d talk about it just a little because you can’t tell a short story.

NICK WALKER:  Well, at the risk of having you tell a long story, I’d like to hear a little bit more about some of your sales projects.  I understand there was one in Phoenix in particular where your objective was to increase the market share.  What was involved in that?

MIKE GOSS:  I built a project plan, without calling it a project plan, for Otis’s position in the Arizona market.  And I did this for a 400-level marketing course that I was attending at Arizona State University.  We made the plan, got the plan executed, and watched the sales rise.  We used some basic fundamentals of project management without calling them that.  One of the things that happened in Phoenix was that one of our customers was the Del Webb Corporation.  They owned half a dozen downtown office buildings.  And I was charged with winning back the maintenance contract that Del Webb had given to our competitor, who was charging 15 percent less.  My boss said, “I don’t care how you do it.  Just go get it.”  I was awfully glad that he said that because then there were, like, zero constraints.

ANDY CROWE:  Those are dangerous words.

MIKE GOSS:  Well, it was exciting.  I toured the building where our competitor was maintaining the elevator, had been for a year.  The building was filthy.  The machine room was filthy.  There was fuzz growing off switches in the hoistway.  But I went back to the building that Otis was maintaining, it was in immaculate condition.  So I went to my customer and said, “I’ll bet you that I can prove that you’re not getting a deal, even though you’re getting 15 percent off.”  And he said, “Prove it.”

So we went on a ride in his building, and everything is spotless.  We walked across the street, rode on the building across the street.  It was not spotless, and he became angry.  And he said, you know, “I have four guys who just graduated from Arizona State.  They’re managing four of my buildings.  This would be a good object lesson for them.  I want you to take them on a tour of the dirty building in the morning.”

When I met them the previous afternoon, they said, “I don’t care what Marv says.  I’m not going to ride on top of your silly elevator.”  However, he was their boss, and they suddenly decided they would ride on top of the elevator the next morning.   We went to the 28th floor.  I lowered the car.  I stood on top of the car.  We turned on the 40-watt light bulb on top of the car, and Marv said, “Get in.”  They walked in on top of the elevator.  Other elevators are going by on both sides.  It’s kind of freaking them out.

So they said, “Well, what can I told onto?”  I said, “Well, we don’t really have a railing.”  “Well, can I hold onto this cable?”  “No, because it goes around that shiv on top of the car.  And if you hold onto it, it’s going to cut your fingers off.  I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t do it, myself.”  “Well, but what can we hold onto?”  “I don’t know.  Each other?  Do you like each other a lot?”  And they said, “Well, I want to sit down.”  I said, “Be my guest.”  And they all are in suits, and they sat down on the grungiest, dirtiest car top ever.

BILL YATES:  Perfect, yeah.

MIKE GOSS:  And it made them angry, which was perfect for me.  So Marv said, “Take it down one floor on inspection speed, which is very slow.”  And at first they were yelling, and Marv said, “Don’t be yelling.  Our tenants are going up and down.”  So they said okay.  We went down one floor, and these guys are starting to get kind of macho.  “Oh, this is no big deal.  I can handle this.  This is not scary at all.”  And Marv looked at me and winked, and he said, “Cut her loose.”  So I flipped the switch, and it went to full operating mode, and our car got dispatched to the lobby.

We went down 27 floors at 800 feet per minute, and these guys were screaming all the way to the lobby.  If you’d been a tenant riding up to go for the morning, you would have been – you’d listen to Muzak on the speaker, and then you’d hear this “aaagh” as we went by.  I won the contract.  It was a project.  There was great risk involved, which I ignored, and I won the project.  When I told my boss, he reminded me of the great risk, and I said, “Do you want me to give them back the contract?”  “No, no, no, no.  We’ll take it.  It’s okay.”

ANDY CROWE:  That’s called “risk acceptance.”  We’re big fans of it.

MIKE GOSS:  Okay, well, we certain – I accepted it.  They had no idea what it was.  I accepted it on their behalf.  I did them a favor.

BILL YATES:  Yeah.  You know, Mike, I think you point out a good concept here of the better you know that area that you’re working in, in this case elevators, then the better you’re going to be able to sell your services, whether you’re in a sales role or in a project management role.  The better you know your customer, the better you’ve had experience with their product, then you’re going to be able to relate to them better.

ANDY CROWE:  But this is funny, Bill, because this is like one of the few controversies in project management.  So there’s kind of – and years ago it was practically speaking just a civil war within the project management community over whether you could be domain agnostic.  And a good project manager could manage any project, and that was a big push.  And I’ve always believed the more you know about a domain, the more effective you can be as a PM.  But still to this day you’ll find a lot of people, I mean, they’re zealots, right, but you’ll find a lot of people who are very, very intent that you can manage any project as a PM.  Just need a good business analyst who knows what’s going on.

BILL YATES:  There you go, yeah.

NICK WALKER:  Well, Mike, you have managed a variety of projects, not just elevators, but also working with the U.S. Air Force.  Tell us a little bit about your experience there.

MIKE GOSS:  I spent four years in the Air Force at the height of the Vietnam War.  In 1968 and 1969 I was stationed at a delightful place called Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base in Northern Thailand.  And my job was to repair the inertial navigation system aboard the F-4 fighter bomber.  And my job was every day I got several projects on my shift, and the projects were:  “This aircraft is down.  The navigation computer does not work.  We have no idea why, but it doesn’t work.  Go fix it because we need to turn that aircraft right back around and put it back in the sky.”

So I was part of a team of people who would be dispatched.  We’d get a job ticket.  That perhaps was our charter.  We would go to the aircraft, troubleshoot it based on our knowledge.  If we weren’t subject matter experts on this, we had no business being out there.  We would pull in the appropriate components because this was five black boxes in the front seat and the back seat, bring the offending computer into the shop, fix it, put it back on the aircraft, run an operational check, sign it off, and let it go.

One time, as it’s 8:00 o’clock in the morning, I’m ready to go off shift, someone from the autopilot shop came over, and they said, “Would you help me?  Nobody will help me.  We have this intermittent problem between autopilot and inertial nav, and I can’t get anybody to help me.  Everybody wants to go home.”  And I said, “Well, this is not really my home.  It is for a year.  But let’s go fix it.”  And some of my cohort said, “Oh, turn it over to dayshift.”  And I said, “No, this guy’s in trouble.  I’m going to help him fix it, whatever it is.”

We worked almost another shift.  We didn’t get done until the afternoon.  But it was well worth it because we found a problem that affected every F-4 flying in Asia, and it was a corrosion problem.  There was an electrical connector behind the backseat.  You had to go fishing for it.  And when you unplugged it, you would find two or three wires had corrosion on them.  And that made the signal through those wires intermittent.

So we troubleshot it, found the root cause, found the corrective action, had the electricians replace the plug, and then we wrote it up.  Well, it turns out this is happening with every F-4 flying in humid conditions.  As a result of what I turned in on the corrective action, every F-4 that came in for depot-level maintenance always had that complete plug and wiring assembly replaced.  It kept accidents from happening, it kept more planes in the air, and I was awarded the Air Force Commendation Medal for it.

NICK WALKER:  Wow.

MIKE GOSS:  That was a project.

BILL YATES:  That’s fantastic.  Mike, you’re hitting on some things that are interesting, so I’m just thinking of descriptors like you’re tenacious, you’re a problem solver, you get passionate about the task in front of you, and you kind of lock in and forget to eat.  I can just see that in your personality.  What are some other traits that you look for or you identify in other project managers that you think are really successful?

MIKE GOSS:  Project managers who are successful always know the general direction they’re traveling.  They always start out with something that they can at least verbalize in a sentence or two, saying this is where I’m going.  Every one of the successful project managers I know is driven to achieve something.  After they achieve it, they later work out the scope, time, and cost.  But upfront there’s this thing that they can see that they want to achieve.  Later when they define it it’s much easier to define.

ANDY CROWE:  The mission.

MIKE GOSS:  They’re always driven.  They always create some kind of a plan.

NICK WALKER:  You know, you mentioned something earlier that really piqued my interest.  You used the words, I believe, you were using the basic fundamentals of project management without really calling it that.  And I’m thinking there are probably listeners to this podcast who maybe have not really thought of themselves in terms of being a, quote, “project manager.”  But in fact, as they listen to you speak, they go, huh.  Well, I’ve done that.  I’ve done that.  I use those techniques.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s a slowly dawning nightmare.  They’re waking up to their real self.  This is who I am.

MIKE GOSS:  Oh, no.

ANDY CROWE:  This is Mickey Rourke in “Angel Heart.”  This is the bad moment.

MIKE GOSS:  It is.  You find out, if you are driven to accomplish something, then you are, in your mind, you’re formulating a project plan.  You may not use formal terms to do it.  When you do receive project management education, you have many epiphanies.  You say, “Oh, I do that.  Is that what that’s called?”  And that happens a lot.  But it has to start with you wanting to accomplish something.  If you’re just floating along, bouncing from thing to thing, you probably never have this happen.  But if you’re trying to accomplish something in life, which we should be, you will create some kind of a goal.  You will come up with some kind of a plan if you hit a wall and so forth.

ANDY CROWE:  Mike, I was managing a project and didn’t know that’s what I was doing, right around 1990.  And my boss asked me for a project plan.  And so I put together something.  And I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did the best I could come up with.  And he took me aside and very kindly, but very directly, said, “I want to show you what your colleague over here, Tom, does when I ask him for a project plan.  Here’s what I get.”  And he pulled out a binder.  And I was shocked and just saw, okay, there is another way to do this.  That was kind of the start of the journey for me.  I didn’t realize.  My title at that point in time was not project manager.  It would be soon, but it wasn’t at that point.  But I was doing project management; I just wasn’t doing it well.

MIKE GOSS:  Did you find, Andy, that you started out with a good idea, and then every single time made up a custom way to get there?

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah.  Maybe good intent more than good ideas; but, yeah.  It’s, you know, and the field was still developing.  A lot of the techniques that are out today weren’t as popular then, and weren’t out in kind of the common lexicon.  So a lot of the things that I learned came from my dad, who worked at Lockheed.  And he brought a lot of these concepts back to me.  Lockheed was doing a lot of amazing things, even back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, so that by the time I got interested in them in the ‘90s, I could learn a tremendous amount, and still can.

MIKE GOSS:  So you were getting the fundamentals of project management informally in conversation.

ANDY CROWE:  Well, and it was in conversation.  It was through work artifacts that he would bring home and talk to me about learning curves and talk to me about schedules, talk to me about logarithmic charts and why they worked and how they determined how production went.  And he was an estimator.  So he touched a tremendous amount of project work for Lockheed.

MIKE GOSS:  That’s excellent.  And you picked it up, and you picked up the terms.  When you got a term, did you look it up, what does this mean?  Or did he tell you at the time?

ANDY CROWE:  You know, it’s funny, Mike.  Both.  My dad had his own philosophy about a lot of this stuff that definitely soaked into the way I thought.  But here’s what it did.  It gave me pegs to hang these things on later.  So that later, as I would learn things, I had a framework sort of already sketched out in light pencil that made sense.  It wasn’t that I really learned project management through that as much as it just gave me some really useful pegs to hang these things on.

MIKE GOSS:  The thing that made my projects better was that structure or framework that you just described, when I transitioned from making it up every single time, reinventing the wheel every single time, to moving over to, “I have a process.  The process works.”  It even has a couple of places where I look around and say, is this thing on fire, or are we okay?

BILL YATES:  Right, right.

MIKE GOSS:  I did that in sales.  For 20 years I sold Sage MAS 90 accounting software.  Same thing.  First few years everything was its own unique enterprise.  But later I got a structure.  I applied the structure, and I started getting letters from satisfied clients when I did.

ANDY CROWE:  Yeah, yeah.  And you find, I mean, one of the things that we preach around here day and night is that superior processes yield superior outcomes over time.

MIKE GOSS:  Yes.  Yes, they do.  When you move from making it up as you go along to processes and refining them, then you get what I think you just described as “superior processes.”  You’re up there, and your chances of successful projects just went through the roof.

NICK WALKER:  Let me ask you, Mike.  Now that you know these project management principles and techniques and coach others in them, do you ever think, okay, if I only knew then what I know now, I would have done things differently?  Do you have any of those thoughts from time to time?

MIKE GOSS:  I have them from time to time.  It’s a mental exercise to quiet those voices.

ANDY CROWE:  Or you could be like Uncle Rico in “Napoleon Dynamite,” always kind of living out of those past memories.

BILL YATES:  “I could throw this football around.”  That’s right.

MIKE GOSS:  I have to always try to look forward.  When I look back, sometimes I don’t like what I see.  And when I look forward, and I say – I believe that everything in life in one way or another is a project.  So if that’s true, how do I increase my chances of it being successful, and who can I help with it?  And it all works.

BILL YATES:  Mike, I have a question about, when we’re improving processes, sometimes we see that as special knowledge that we’ve created, even within our organization.  And we’re reluctant to share it with other team members, or certainly outside of our project team.  And it’s almost, you know, it could be a pride thing.  It could be, well, I want to get the recognition or the promotion or the whatever the opportunity is.  But there’s such an emphasis on collaboration and on sharing these lessons learned within the organization these days.  What advice do you give to those who may be younger than you in their career about give up this information, make everyone better?  How do you get them to share?

MIKE GOSS:  Bill, I believe if you give the information out, I can’t see how it’s going to hurt you.  If you have what you think is personal proprietary processes, and you hold it to your chest, and you don’t want to share it with the world, the person three cubicles down is thinking of the same idea right then.  Would you like to be known as the guy who keeps everything close to the vest, or would you like to be known as the guy who shares everything to enrich everybody else?  That’s how to become the go-to guy.  Hiding it just makes people not trust you or not want to work with you.  Sharing it makes everyone come to you and say, “Would you be on my team because whatever you’re doing works?”  And, “Can you be on my team, and can we get going?”  So my answer is share it, by all means.

NICK WALKER:  One other project that you dealt with a while back had to do with bank sales.  And I’m curious about that. What project did you lead as a senior VP and sales manager of a bank?

MIKE GOSS:  I went to work for a bank that was over 80 years old.  The bank had never had a sales manager, and I wasn’t looking for a job.  But through a civic project I was working on, I learned that this position was open.  I decided to give it a shot.  I interviewed with my boss, and I said, “I’m not a really good employee, and I’d like to know what you’ll do when I mess something up.  And I promise you, I’ll mess something up, and it will be public.  What will you do?”  And he said, “First thing, I’ll defend you to the rest of the organization.  And then you and I will go and have a little chat, and I will ask you what you have learned, and I won’t expect you to ever do that particular thing again.”  And I said, “Let us proceed with the interview.”

And for four years I had a lot of fun.  I helped almost 350 bankers enrich the lives of depositors.  And when I first talked about that at a sales meeting, everyone looked at me like I’d lost my mind.  “What?  Enrich life?  What?  What is this about?”  And eventually I taught sales training classes for the customer service reps, for the branch managers.  And we were given a project by the CEO and the Board of Directors to increase net deposits by $30 million.  I said, “I need one representative from each functional department in the bank, and they will be my team.”  So the CEO made each of the functional department heads give me a member.

We worked on this.  And instead of 30 million, we increased net deposits by 58 million.  And that was in 2008, which you may recall was the depths of the Great Recession.  We did it by making a project.  I saw my role as project manager to be the visionary.  So I shared the vision, and it was a vision that no single person could do.  And then I invited all the kids to come along on the journey because we are going on a quest to achieve something special.

Our target was 30 million.  When we hit 58 million, everyone is doing back flips, including the Board of Directors.  The CEO said, “Come to a meeting, and I’ll have all the executives here, and the board members, and you explain how it’s done.”  I didn’t speak.  I introduced each team member.  They spoke.  We applauded them individually.  The CEO winked at me.  That was – I interpreted that – he was not an effusive person.  So I interpreted that to mean, “Good job.”

NICK WALKER:  Mike, it’s very probable that there’s somebody listening to this podcast who’s saying, you know, I could use some more of that expertise.  How can somebody get in touch with you in order to benefit from your coaching?

MIKE GOSS:  I have a website called GossConsulting.com.  My email address is mikeg@gossconsulting.com.  And I’m happy to help however I can.  If someone asked me about leadership, I would say become a “servant leader.”  Not only do you create – not only are you the leader, the organization gave you the slot; but you create a vision that no single person can achieve.  And then you invite all the kids to come along.  So create the vision; invite everybody to go; and then, to be a servant leader, help each one of them to deliver the best work of our lives.  I’ve only had one servant leader that I’ve worked for, and his name was Sgt. Hooper.  He was in Thailand.  And while he was my boss, I did the best work that I’d ever done.  And while he was our boss, our shop held the worldwide record for accuracy of the navigation computers on the F-4.

NICK WALKER:  I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve come a little bit closer together in getting you to your goal of reaching 10 million people with a message of hope and inspiration.

MIKE GOSS:  Well, I’m grateful for the opportunity.  And I’ve enjoyed talking with the three of you.  I just hope this touches someone’s heart, and they say, “I’m going to try something new.  I’m going to step outside the box.  I’m going to try to serve people better.  I’m going to try to apply a structure.”  If any or all of those things happen, that’s a win for all of us today.

ANDY CROWE:  Or maybe they’ll just wink at somebody in the boardroom.

MIKE GOSS:  Well, you know those winks.  Those winks can be powerful.

ANDY CROWE:  I agree.

NICK WALKER:  Well, we have a gift for you here, a little parting gift.  I hope you can see this.  It’s a big coffee mug with the Manage This logo on it.

ANDY CROWE:  It’s collectible.

NICK WALKER:  It is collectible.  It is collectible.  Although I wouldn’t recommend filling it up to the brim when you’re getting on an elevator, getting ready to go down 20 floors at 800 feet per second.

MIKE GOSS:  Yes, well…

ANDY CROWE:  Per minute.  Holy cow.

NICK WALKER:  Yeah, well, that would be a fast elevator, wouldn’t it.

MIKE GOSS:  It might depend on whether you’re in the elevator or on top of the elevator, Nick.  I don’t know.  I like either way.

NICK WALKER:  Well, thanks again, Mike, so much for being with us.  Andy and Bill, thank you for your expertise.

ANDY CROWE:  Thank you, Nick.

BILL YATES:  Thanks, Mike.

MIKE GOSS:  It’s been a pleasure.  Thank you.

NICK WALKER:  We want to remind our listeners here on Manage This that we are all about giving you something extra.  And one of the extras we supply takes the form of free PDUs – Professional Development Units – toward your recertifications.  And you’ve already earned them just by listening to this podcast. So to claim them, go to Velociteach.com and select Manage This Podcast from the top of the page.  Click the button that says Claim PDUs and just click through the steps.

That’s it for us here on Manage This.  We hope you’ll tune back in on June 5th for our next podcast.  In the meantime, you can visit us at Velociteach.com/managethis to subscribe to this podcast, to see a transcript of the show, or to contact us.  And tweet us at @manage_this if you have any questions about our podcasts or about project management certifications.  We are here for you.

That’s all for this episode.  Thanks for joining us.  Until next time, keep calm and Manage This.