Even the most complex challenges can be overcome when teams stay aligned, adaptable, and focused on a shared mission. Tammy Ashraf shares lessons from NASA Earth Science missions on leading complex, high-stakes projects. She discusses aligning diverse teams, spotting early warning signs, breaking down silos, and managing uncertainty, along with the evolving role of AI and the human skills still essential for project success.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
02:29 … Early Inspiration and Career Path
04:36 … High-Stakes Project Leadership at NASA
07:38 … Roles, Collaboration and Interdependencies
11:19 … Early Warning Signs and Underperforming Projects
15:10 … Leading Through Uncertainty
17:32 … Cross-Functional Collaboration
19:09 … Breaking Silos
23:03 … Stay in Touch
25:10 … Healthy Friction and Team Dynamics
27:34 … Ren Love’s Projects from the Past
30:46 … AI and The Future of Project Management
32:45 … Leadership Skills
34:46 … Struggling Projects and Strategic Leadership
37:42 … Governance, Complexity and Over-Engineering
39:24 … Early Career Memories
44:40 … Connect with Tammy
45:00 … Closing
Intro
TAMMY ASHRAF: if you want to be great, distinguishing great from good, is you have to understand how your work bridges into the strategy. And you have to understand the strategic priorities and the value outcomes for the organization and how your work is influencing that and understand the interdependencies between what you’re doing, what your team is doing, your deliverables and your output, and how that ties into the overall strategy.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and Bill Yates is here with me in the studio. For a decade, Manage This, brought to you by Velociteach, has been about supporting project managers with practical insights, honest conversations, and tools you can use. And that’s only been possible because of this amazing community of listeners. We value each one of you, and we would love to hear from you. If you have any comments, please reach out to us on our website, Velociteach.com.
Today we’re talking about what it takes to lead projects where the stakes are high, and the path forward isn’t always clear. How do you manage ambiguity, turn friction into momentum, and get stalled projects moving again? Our guest today is Tammy Ashraf, and she has spent more than 18 years working on some of the most complex and high stakes programs in aerospace.
She has a background in space systems engineering, and she has supported major NASA missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Roman Space Telescope. She’s worked across flight, ground, and data systems integration. Her experience spans everything from astrophysics and lunar exploration to climate-focused earth observation.
She’s also provided technical leadership on major earth science programs, including the Earth Observing System fleet of satellites; and has partnered with experts at NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab on applied systems engineering projects tied to active missions. Tammy is known for helping transform high stakes underperforming programs into energized high-impact successes by aligning people, systems, and vision. And we’re excited to talk to her today. Hi, Tammy. Thank you so much for being our guest today.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Early Inspiration and Career Path
WENDY GROUNDS: And I am so glad that we are finally having this conversation. I’ve been looking at a lot of the work that you do and have been so impressed by so much you’ve done in your career. So why don’t we jump in straight away, and you tell us a little bit about your current role, your career path, and how you got into aerospace complex mission work.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah, absolutely. So currently I’m working on the programmatic side supporting Earth Science-focused missions that are currently in operation at NASA. So those are the missions that are currently monitoring our climate, our weather, you know, all of the processes and complex systems and things that are happening here on planet earth. And how I got here was definitely not a straight path.
However, all jokes aside, I will say when I was five years old, I knew I wanted to be an astronaut. I saw my first shuttle launch in Cape Canaveral, Florida. My parents took me there when I was little. And I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I was completely mind blown. And I said to myself, oh, my gosh, I want to do that one day. I want to be on that rocket, and I want to go to the moon. I want to be an astronaut. And, you know, it sounds like a silly childhood passion, but I pursued that passion relentlessly. You know, was it a straight path? Of course not. Was it easy? Of course not. Am I an astronaut right now? No, I’m not.
But, you know, I pursued my passion, and I still continue to pursue my passion. And along the way, I always kept myself open to working in domains that I had no expertise in, so I was always open to coming outside of my comfort zone and being exposed to new teams, new domains of knowledge, new practices and, you know, new systems. And so that taught me a lot about the importance of understanding what types of skills you bring to the table that can help you be able to seamlessly integrate no matter where you go.
High-Stakes Project Leadership at NASA
BILL YATES: One of the differences with the types of projects that you work on, Tammy, is the stakes are so high. So, we’re thinking about space missions where failure really isn’t a good option. What does high-stakes project leadership look like in that type of environment, where the risks are just phenomenal? They’re so high.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah, I heard you say “Failure is not a good option.” And I will re-quote that quote because the famous quote from NASA is “Failure is not an option.” That is a famous quote. You’ve probably heard it in the movies and whatnot. Yeah, space is a very unforgiving environment, first of all. And it’s not like a car where, you know, you build a car, and something wrong is happening with the car, and you’re having issues with it. You can easily take it into a mechanic shop and get it repaired. If you have a spacecraft that’s operating in orbit, and there’s something malfunctioning, there is no mechanic shop in space or a spacecraft to just go and get serviced. It’s not easy.
And so, when you’re designing and building these systems, they’re oftentimes built with a lot of resilience. There, you know, there’s long mission development timelines. There’s a lot of public visibility and investment and politics involved in a lot of these processes. And so, managing that, as well; and having really good acumen for understanding how even the smallest pieces of hardware and components, if those fail, the whole system, the whole mission can be potentially compromised. So, there’s very little to no tolerance, you know, for failure once, especially once something is in orbit.
And it does happen, you know. If issues do occur, anomalies do occur, has your system been built in a way where you can troubleshoot those seamlessly? And do you have fault tolerance or redundancies built in your system where you can fall back on other options; right? There’s ways to build systems where there’s a lot of fault tolerance built in for harsh environments like space. The other thing, too, is that, you know, once these missions are launched into space – and I can, you know, speak to the earth missions – you have a global community of practice of, you know, science community. You have the academia community. You have so many different industries and commercial partners who are relying on that data for driving their business.
So, it’s critical to always have an uptime for your mission. And when there are blackouts or issues happening, you have to manage this global community that’s relying on the data. So, there’s that aspect of it, as well. It’s very critical to have decision disciplines in times of uncertainty.
Roles, Collaboration and Interdependencies
BILL YATES: That’s good. Tammy, just as you’re describing that environment, I’m thinking of the natural clash that I would expect with, like me as a project manager with the engineers that are speaking into these projects that are – they’re so vital. You know, the space missions bring together engineering, science, operations, and the project leadership. So, I’m a project leader. I’m trying to get things done. I want to – I want to get those engineers to tell me exactly when they’re going to be done with their piece. And then I want to communicate that.
And to your point, so much of the communication is publicly visible. So it’s kind of a high stakes, you know, highly public project that you’re doing. How do you get the systems engineers and the project managers to work together in an environment like NASA, where they’re not constantly clashing with each other, but actually working well and collaborating together?
TAMMY ASHRAF: So, one of the things that I love about where I work is that there are very defined roles and processes for these domains of practice. Not only is there, you know, the project management body of knowledge, which project managers study, you know, to pass the exam and get your PMP, you know, certification, and there’s other standards of practice, as well. But within the organization we have our own standards. You know, those are all published. You’re welcome to go online and find those. But very, very defined processes for project management.
There’s defined processes for systems engineering, you name it, any kind of engineering, actually. There’s a process, and there’s defined roles and responsibilities and very – right from the beginning of the project to the very end of a project. Each and every single phase along the way, there’s different decision points that need to be made. There’s integration points. All of those things are defined.
And so, you know, the role of an engineer, typically when you’re working with a technical team, is that they’re defining the architecture. They’re defining the requirements for that system. They’re doing a lot of the technical integration work.
As a project manager, you’re focused on the budget. That’s the key thing. Are we staying on budget? Are we on schedule? Are we managing our personnel and resources? Do we have all the right people for the team? You know, there’s also some level of risk management happening, as well, from a programmatic standpoint. And then aligning all the stakeholders. You’re herding the cats. And project managers are very interesting because you’re not really somebody’s line supervisor, but you’re still responsible for their outcome.
So, you have to lead with influence, and you have to talk to so many different people. So even though these sound like two very different disciplines, they’re actually very integrated together when you’re working on projects. And not necessarily just applied to aerospace industry. This is like every and any industry. They have to work together.
And the technical decisions that are made from the engineering team, they can impact the schedule and the cost, and then the program decisions can impact the technical risks. They’re interdependent on each other. So, you have to understand what those interdependencies are to successfully manage, you know, a project like that. And you have to understand how to have really good seamless communication constantly, on a frequent cadence, and collaboration across both of these domains.
BILL YATES: That’s helpful. I think some of our listeners are probably thinking right now, I want to go to work for NASA because they have – they’ve got well-defined sandboxes. People know their roles. That’s not always the case. So that’s a – it’s great to hear that.
Early Warning Signs and Underperforming Projects
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah. One of the things that I read in your bio, you had mentioned that you specialize in transforming high-stakes, underperforming efforts into high-impact successes. So, when you step into a program that is underperforming, what are some early signals that tell you a project’s heading toward some trouble?
TAMMY ASHRAF: You know, this happens for a project manager that’s been working in the field for some time. You know, you’ll get exposure to a wide variety of projects, and you’ll be able to start to tell the difference between what’s a great project and what’s a project that’s struggling; right? And so, there’s definitely common factors involved in terms of what’s influencing the outcome of a project. So, when a project is struggling, oftentimes the way I’ll approach it, from my personal opinion, is do a root cause analysis. And that’s what engineers do. It’s kind of like a technical process.
If you’re driving a car, and your engine’s making some weird sound, and you’re wondering, well, what is that sound? Where is it coming from? When does that sound start? When does it end? Does it happen certain times of the day? You know, where is it coming from, et cetera. So, you start to ask questions to hone in on what it is until you find out, oh, it’s this part here. What’s wrong with this part? Okay, I need to replace this part. So that’s a very technical thing; right? Easy to fix.
Now, when you’re working on projects, people are driving the outcome. The root cause of a lot of projects that are struggling involve the people aspect. You know, you can say it’s this technical thing not working or this and that. But yeah, but who is behind that? It’s the people driving it. So oftentimes, you know, the distinguishing factor between, from what I’ve seen, and there’s a lot of really good research-backed theory about team building on this topic, you know, that the teams that perform really well and have a high output are the teams that trust each other.
The foundation of any good team is a team where the members can trust each other. And when they trust each other, you create an environment where there’s conflict culture that’s constructive, where the teams feel safe to openly voice their differences of opinions in a forum where your egos are removed, and you’re just objectively focused on the idea or the topic being discussed.
And anyone, regardless of where you stand in the chain of hierarchy in the team has a voice and mechanism for them to voice and bring up these concerns; right? Regardless of if you’re a junior employee or you’re a senior employee, there is a mechanism for you to speak up; your ideas can be heard; your conflict can be discussed in a forum; and you can hash out the problem.
When you create an environment like that, what happens is that people start to feel a sense of ownership and commitment intrinsically to the work that they’re doing. And when they’re intrinsically motivated and committed to the work they’re doing, they’re going to start holding themselves accountable and each other accountable. And when you start holding each other accountable, then you start to have results.
And all of this cannot happen if you do not have good leadership managing the team. From my opinion, the leader sets the tone of the team. If the leader does not create this environment for the team to flourish, the team is not going to flourish. So, it’s important for the leader to understand how to create an environment where the team can function like this so that there can be a good outcome.
Leading Through Uncertainty
WENDY GROUNDS: In complex programs today, they operate with increasing velocity, uncertainty, interdependence. What have you learned about leading teams through ambiguity in those environments?
TAMMY ASHRAF: So, first thing I tell people is get used to the fact that uncertainty is a constant. Because I don’t know why, but people always get thrown aback and surprised when something uncertain comes across, and they’re like, what? I didn’t see this coming. What is this? I wasn’t planning for this. That was not in our plan. You know, I planned the project six months ago; and like, what is this thing that happened? I don’t know what to do.
And they’re just kind of caught off guard. And I tell people right from the beginning, plan to change your plan. Your plan is going to change. Plan for not constant. Get used to the fact that uncertainty is going to keep happening. That’s a constant.
And it’s very normal, especially when you’re managing complex projects, complex systems. Uncertainty is definitely going to be there. As a leader, you need to provide clarity around the mission, even as the plans continue to evolve. People need to be clear in terms of what their roles are and how those roles evolve. People need to have a steady decision cadence when these uncertainties do come up. You need to have a mechanism for understanding what needs to change and what decisions need to be made; you know?
Because sometimes I think the organizational structures are designed where people get held up in waiting and decision-making mode, and it gets held up for long periods of time, and that can push back the project schedule. So that’s important.
And transparency, you know, encourage your team to be open about when challenges happen. It’s very important for the team to feel comfortable coming to you as a project manager when there are problems. If your team does not feel safe and comfortable coming to you, talking about problems, that is a problem because then you don’t know what the problems are.
And those are getting hidden and tucked under the rug, per se, you know. And later on, those things are going to surface, and they’re going to surface at the worst time. So, you need to know early on. So, I would say create a culture of transparency.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
BILL YATES: It’s interesting. I’ve just been – I just finished up a book called “Skunk Works.” It’s about Skunk Works by Lockheed. And this is by Ben Rich, and it’s reflecting on, you know, his three-plus decades of leading that organization, the R&D branch called Skunk Works. You know, they dealt with uncertainty all the time. They’re building the world’s fastest, highest planes, you know, spy planes that can be used, or stealth technology that had never been developed before. And it’s like a thousand times more stealthy than anything that was out there at the time.
So huge breakthroughs. So, the uncertainty was just monumental. And for their, you know, just looking at the culture that they had with their team to take on this uncertainty and not be overwhelmed by it, to continue to have those conversations because they’re all very bright engineers, but they had to rely on each other and continue to research and research.
So much of what you’re saying, this resonates that, you know, that building the trust, making sure that it’s okay to fail; we’ll figure out another way; we’re all going to roll our sleeves up and overcome this uncertainty. And he also, he had some great quotes on prototyping, you know, just the value of using prototypes and building those out so that they could test them.
But yeah, so much of what you’re saying resonates with the stories and the examples they had at Skunk Works for years and years in developing new technology where there was uncertainty. You’d go to work one day, and you’d solve a problem, and then a new one would pop up. So being a resilient team that can handle that is a key.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Absolutely.
Breaking Silos
WENDY GROUNDS: Projects are becoming more integrated across disciplines. If leaders are helping teams move beyond those silos, to collaborate effectively, I’m sure you see a lot of that at NASA. You have your engineering. There’s science. There’s operations. And then there’s the business stakeholders, as well. How do you integrate all of that effectively?
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah, I mean, you know, regardless of if you’re working in aerospace, or you’re working in healthcare, everyone has a niche area that they’re focused on and they work in, you know, there are so many different departments, so many different teams, but all of them are part of a bigger ecosystem to drive the business.
And so as, what we’re finding now is many industries are realizing that very critical insights that weren’t able to be seen before when you’re working in your niche area can be found at the intersection of these boundaries between these disciplines. So, a lot of these important insights and even discoveries and innovation happens at the intersection of these disciplines.
So, more industries are starting to trend towards doing more interdisciplinary or what I like to call transdisciplinary, where, you know, you’re working outside of your silo. You’re not just working with your field of experts. You’re starting to collaborate and consult and work, you know, with people outside of your field of expertise, and you’re working on joint projects to accomplish some common goal or objective.
And so the critical point of making sure projects like that are successful is that the leader needs to create a shared mission understanding, an overall broader goal that, regardless of what discipline you came from or what your area of focus is, here is the bigger umbrella goal we’re trying to achieve. And creating an organizational system and processes that encourage cross-function amongst teams.
Because oftentimes a common problem you’ll find in organizations, regardless of what industry they’re in, is that the systems are designed, the processes are designed as such that people tend to work in their bubbles, and you become very comfortable working in your bubble.
The system is not designed where you can easily cross-collaborate with somebody outside of your department and your team. So, you’re not exposed to what they’re working on. You don’t understand what they’re doing. You don’t see their perspective. You don’t have a mechanism for meeting with them and having more face time and to do joint collaborations.
So, I think as leaders you need to create mechanisms for your teams to do that. You know, and then that creates more of that organic collaboration amongst teams. And that’s where I think innovations and ideas organically grow in really good teams.
You know, there’s a really good example of – I attended a keynote years ago. Somebody from the company Pixar Animation came and gave a talk about how, you know, some of their best movie ideas came from collaborations. They have certain times where all of their graphic artists and cartoonists and their, you know, sound specialists, and I don’t know all the different disciplines, but they all get together in a room. They all just showcase their ideas, and they all talk about and present what they’re working on. And that’s where some of the best movie ideas come from.
So, you know, you have to create a forum where people can be creative and to share what they’re working on with others and to be able to discuss those ideas. So that’s the critical aspect of it, as well.
Stay in Touch
BILL YATES: One of my favorite books is “Creativity, Inc.,” by Ed Catmull, the leader at Pixar for years and years. Yeah, he just, he talks about breaking down silos over and over and over. Even basic stuff that I think project managers can use. He was reflecting on some of his blind spots that, like, even in how they met, the conference room that they would meet in was kind of – it was almost like a hierarchy, you know, almost like an org chart, and he didn’t even realize it. It’s like, yeah, all the, you know, the higher ranked people sat in this area. And then the further out you got, the less seniority that those people had. And he’s like, I did not mean to do that. And someone made him aware. So, he mixed it up better and made it better. It’s interesting.
I mentioned Skunk Works, that one of Ben Rich’s mantras was to make the aerospace engineers be as close to the shop floor as possible. You know, when they designed something, he said they had to be able to take just a few steps to get to where it’s actually being built at that workstation so that they were constantly in contact with the people that were building out the things that they had designed. It’s such a good thing to do.
I think it was Robert Israel that we had on the podcast talking about a construction project in Manhattan, and he had this idea of an office space for the project team that was just a couple of blocks away from the construction site. And of course that’s expensive. It’s in Manhattan; right?
But he said, “I made it mandatory that all the different construction, all the subcontractors that they had, had to have a representative in that office at all times.” There were so many benefits that they had to that. And part of it is to what you’re speaking to, Tammy, where they would overhear conversations, and they would see the big picture and think, how can we contribute? Or how can we make our piece flow easier or be smoother?
You know, so there was so much additional information that they gather by being in that space together, very healthy.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Absolutely. Yeah. There’s, there’s definitely something very, I don’t know if “magical” is the right word. There’s just something different that happens when you start to bring all the people in the room together.
Healthy Friction and Team Dynamics
WENDY GROUNDS: Now, sometimes when you bring those people in the room together, there can be some really good, strong debate on a technical issue or even just running the project. But then there can also be friction, and there’s that slight difference between, no, we’re just having a really healthy debate and, no, it’s become a problem. So how can you turn that, turn that friction into something that really flows with the project?
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah. So, I know we talked about teams where they don’t feel safe bringing up differences of opinion; right? So, there’s not this culture of having healthy conflict. And this even – this even applies to relationships, to be honest, in any relationship, not just with your coworkers; right? Do you have a forum where you can bring up a conflict in a healthy way and have a constructive conversation about it and have a good outcome from that and have some sort of discussion and compromise and decision made from that difference of opinion or conflict?
If you have a place where everybody just nods their heads and says yes to the boss and whatever the boss says, I don’t think that’s the right place for having all of the best ideas come out and heard because everyone is just conforming to, well, we don’t want to make the boss angry so we’re too afraid to bring up differences of opinion or conflict.
Because there are sometimes teams where there’s a culture of that. And so, I think it’s critical to, again, if you want healthy friction, you’ve got to have a forum for creating healthy conflict, healthy dialogue and discussion; right? Remove the egos out of it. Remove the politics. Create a forum where even your junior employees can feel comfortable speaking up and talking about their ideas. And if they’re sitting silent in the meeting room, call on them and ask them, you know, hey, did you have an opinion, as well?
Oftentimes in meeting rooms, the one with the loudest voice or the one who talks the most tends to get their ideas heard. And oftentimes the folks that might have more introverted tendencies, or the quieter ones, you know, they have brilliant ideas too, but they’re not getting the forum to be heard. So, I think as a leader you have to understand the people dynamics involved in the room and to give a platform for everyone to be heard so that you can really make sure the best ideas are getting out there.
Ren Love’s Projects from the Past
REN LOVE: Ren Love here with a glimpse into Projects of the Past; where we take a look at historical projects through a modern lens.
Today’s project feature isn’t a building or a monument it’s a program, and honestly one of the most successful large-scale projects in the history of the U.S. government: the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the CCC.
The CCC was inspired by a perfect storm of problems during the Great Depression. By 1933, unemployment was hovering around 25%, young men being hit especially hard, and the country’s natural resources were in rough shape thanks to deforestation, soil erosion, and drought.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, he wanted a project that could tackle economic collapse and environmental damage at the same time. and the CCC was created. The CCC put unemployed young men to work, stabilizing families, and invested in the long-term health of America’s public lands.
The scope of the CCC was massive. Between 1933 and 1942, the program employed about 3 million men, primarily between the ages of 18 and 25. Workers built or improved over 800 parks, planted more than 3 billion trees, constructed 125,000 miles of road, and built thousands of bridges, trails, fire lookout towers, and campgrounds. They also worked on flood control, soil conservation, and wildfire prevention. This wasn’t just a jobs program — it fundamentally reshaped the U.S. landscape.
The CCC was proposed in March 1933, it had men enrolled and working within three months. Camps were set up across 48 states, staffed by the Army for logistics and run by civilian agencies for the actual work. At its peak, the program supported over 300,000 workers at one time, spread across roughly 2,600 camps. From a scheduling standpoint, this thing was a logistical miracle.
The total cost of the CCC over its nine-year lifespan was about $3 billion at the time. If you adjust that for today’s dollars, that’s roughly $60–70 billion. Enrollees were paid $30 per month, but were required to send $25 of that home to their families, which meant the project had an immediate economic impact far beyond the camps themselves.
So why feature the Civilian Conservation Corps? Because it’s a relatively rare example of a project that delivered on scope, on schedule, and with massive long-term value. It addressed unemployment, environmental conservation, infrastructure, and morale — all at once.
Was this project a success? Absolutely. The CCC left behind physical assets that are still in use nearly a century later, lifted millions of families out of crisis, and is still held up as a gold standard for public works and project execution during a national emergency.
Thank you for joining me for Projects of the Past, I’m Ren Love. See ya next time!
AI and The Future of Project Management
BILL YATES: So, let’s talk about AI just for a second, and machine learning. It’s impacting everybody’s work, and certainly it impacts how we get things done as project managers. Talk about how you see the project professional role evolving because of AI and automation, and then what human capabilities do you think still matter the most?
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah. Yeah. This is a very hot topic right now. I just came back from a Project Management Institute meeting where all of the volunteers were talking about where is the profession of project management going? What does our future look like? You know, and I’m part of the Thought Leadership Advisory Committee, and we do a lot of brainstorming and thinking about some of these provocative thoughts and ideas of where is the future headed? What does it mean?
You know, if, if AI can do all my spreadsheets for me now and create my workflows and my, you know, burndown charts and everything else, and automatically you have these systems and platforms that can send email reminders about deliverables and everything else, then what’s the point of me as a project manager? Am I even needed anymore? Where am I going to be in the future? What even is my job going to look like?
And so, I think right now, not only is the project management profession going through this, like, identity questioning phase I think every industry right now is going through – I don’t know if “identity crisis” is the right word. But this, it’s just this moment in time where you have this very disruptive technology that’s very intuitive, very intelligent, and it’s replacing a lot of the things humans did and that made us valuable. So as a human being, you’re trying to think about, well, what makes me valuable as a human? If, you know, an artificial intelligence can do all these things, then what is the point of me as a human?
Leadership Skills
So, I think what’s going to be really important here that’s going to distinguish humans from AI is leadership skills. I think that it’s really important to build leadership skills. It doesn’t matter if you just started in the company or you’re a senior employee. There’s always something you can learn about improving your leadership skills. It’s important to have a growth mindset.
Do not go into it thinking that, you know, I’ve been there, done that, seen it. I read all these books. I did these classes. I have all these degrees. Don’t tell me anything. You have to be willing to listen and learn and humble yourself and listen to your junior employees. That’s your future workforce. They grew up in a generation where they’ve been exposed to a lot of technology and a lot of new and different ways of doing work. So, listen to them. That’s where a lot of your new ideas are going to, you know, come from. Value those ideas.
The other thing, too, is that project managers will have to understand how to make best judgment when it comes to decision-making. And in my personal opinion, I think that technology should augment our decision-making as humans. It should not replace it. I think the final decision-maker, ultimate decision-maker that can potentially impact people should be made by a person, not AI.
I also think that another critical thing is that project leaders are going to have to learn how to adapt to, not only just managing a team of humans, but also a team of, like, AI bots doing your work for you, too. People are already doing it. They have, you know, set up bots to do a lot of these repetitive automated tasks. So, you’re going to have to manage not only a team of like AI agents, but you’re also going to have to manage your humans on the team and practicing best judgment. So, it’ll be very interesting where this is all going.
Struggling Projects and Strategic Leadership
WENDY GROUNDS: Really interesting, that. So, one of the things I wanted to ask you is about when you step into a program or a project that’s struggling, what do you focus on first? Do you focus first on the people, or the process, or the technical risks? What is the thing that you’ll first go to?
TAMMY ASHRAF: So, I think that the first thing I look at is to understand the politics. I think that’s critical. Politics oftentimes defines a lot of the undertone, the things that are happening in between the lines, I like to say. It’s the gray areas. Everything is not always black and white. There’s always the gray space and understanding how that impacts everything else. Oftentimes, from what I’ve been told even from senior leaders, is what distinguishes a good project manager and a great project manager is somebody who can read the room. You can sit in a room full of people, and you can read the room.
When I say “Read the room,” you can understand the political dynamics of that room, and you can understand how that’s influencing how decisions are being made, whose voices are being heard, where the influence is happening, where the technical decisions are or aren’t being made, you know. And from there you can determine where the challenges are happening.
And then from there you can make a decision. How do I navigate this? Once you understand the dynamics, then you have to make a decision on how do I navigate this? This is going to be challenging. How do I navigate this room? So having some sense of business acumen, having a sense of understanding strategy, political savviness.
Oftentimes project managers, we’re trained to, like, get the deliverables done, just get the deliverables done; right? Beat everybody over their head about status updates all the time and just get the deliverables done. So, then you can show on your status reports to upper management that, you know, we got all these tasks done. So oftentimes we’re focused with our boots on the ground, meaning that we’re just focused on a very task execution level of things.
And what we’re finding now in the profession, what’s very critical for project managers, especially if you want to be great, distinguishing great from good, is you have to understand how your work bridges into the strategy. And you have to understand the strategic priorities and the value outcomes for the organization and how your work is influencing that and understand the interdependencies between what you’re doing, what your team is doing, your deliverables and your output, and how that ties into the overall strategy.
Governance, Complexity and Over-Engineering
BILL YATES: Where do you see organizations over-complicating things when they’re managing complex projects?
TAMMY ASHRAF: Oh, my goodness. I would say a huge, huge problem is oftentimes excessive governance layers.
BILL YATES: Ah, okay.
TAMMY ASHRAF: One of the things you have to realize is when you have a project that’s complex – and by “complex” I mean there are so many integration points. There could be international partners, different stakeholders. They have their systems of governance. They have their policies. They have their own budgets.
And then, you know, you’re responsible for this massively complex thing that involves so many different integration points, systems, stakeholders, people; right? And if one thing goes off, it can impact everybody. So often we design our projects’ governance structure within our silos that we work in.
But what we’re realizing now and what more industries are moving towards are integrated projects where now you’re moving outside of your silos, and you’re integrating outside of your domain of expertise with other domains of expertise. And they have their governance layers, as well. So, you have to review all of those processes and governance layers and understand how do we streamline this process so that it serves a better outcome for this complex project where we’re not getting held up by that. So, I would say that’s definitely a big culprit.
BILL YATES: I can see that.
Early Career Memories
WENDY GROUNDS: What’s been one of your most memorable projects working with NASA?
TAMMY ASHRAF: I would say one of my first projects was I had recently graduated with my bachelor’s in mathematics, and I got my first research internship project working on an avionics system. And I had to build a whole component that could test different metrics on what a commercial cockpit for an airplane has and all of the different data points. And the idea was that we were going to create a prototype of this component.
The point of that system was to help pilots and air traffic controllers that are flying commercial aircraft with passengers on it, you know, 30,000 feet in the air or whatever. I don’t even know if it’s 30,000 feet. It could be whatever feet. But navigate more efficient trajectories through, like, weather anomalies, turbulence, and things like that.
So normally an air traffic controller will reach out to a pilot and give them directions in terms of here is change your course by this many degrees. There’s weather coming ahead. You need to navigate around it. And so, with that, you know, they can – they can do that. But if you have an algorithm doing that for you instead, the algorithm can potentially find more efficient paths. And each and every single mile translates to a lot of money and fuel. So, you save so much money, when you are efficiently navigating through turbulence and weather and things like that, when a computer can better determine that, you know, than a human.
We were testing some concepts. Here I am as a student who’s like, I have no idea what I’m doing. I was not trained for this. I do not have an aerospace background. Okay. I’m definitely out of my comfort zone. Sure. Like, do I have any coding experience? I’ve done some coding in, like, math simulation software. But other than that, no. So, I came in there completely knowing nothing about the domain of practice. No formal training in avionics. And here I was given an assignment to engineer an avionics system that was going to be tested in, like, a high-fidelity flight simulator and then eventually flown on, you know, aircraft with certain airlines and tested in real life.
So, I thought, oh, my goodness, this is very intense. I’m terrified. What did I get myself into? And honestly it was exciting at the same time because it was like, wow, this is really cool. This is very different. It’s exciting. It’s something I’ve never done before.
And I got to talk to so many different experts in the field, which was amazing, and just learn from them. I went out of my comfort zone and just would walk up and down the hallways and knock on doors and be like, hi, I’m new here, and I’m working on this project. And do you know anything about this, and do you have any books maybe you can refer me to, or websites? Or are there any, like, manuals or guides for designing this? And what are your thoughts, and how do I design this?
So, I was able to finish my project by the end of my research term, developing, you know, a first iteration prototype of what that system would look like. And I was just so proud of myself. You know, I did a poster presentation on it and talked about the process. And I was like, wow, this opened a whole new world for me I had no idea about. So, I would say that’s definitely a very memorable one for me because it was so out of my comfort zone.
And it’s so ironic because, when I finished my math degree at the time, I was talking to folks about like, well, what job can I do? They’re like, why did you get a math degree? You can’t do anything with that. You can maybe teach math to kids. Like, is that what you want to do? I was like, what are you talking about? I know I can do something with this degree.
So, when I was in school somebody said, well, NASA’s hiring research interns, and they’re doing all these great projects, and they love people with math backgrounds. Maybe you can apply your skills there.
WENDY GROUNDS: Wow.
TAMMY ASHRAF: And I never looked back.
BILL YATES: That’s super.
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s a good story.
BILL YATES: That’s such a great example. Thank you for sharing all this advice and taking the experiences that you’ve had in your industry and helping us to kind of step back and look at it big picture and go, as project leaders, what can we learn from this? Super helpful.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Thank you. No, I’m glad to share my experiences. And I hope that, for whoever’s listening, they can find some gems to help them in their journeys, as well.
Connect with Tammy
WENDY GROUNDS: For sure, yeah. Before we go, where can our listeners connect with you or follow your work? Where can they find out more about what you do?
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah. Find me on LinkedIn, Tammy Ashraf. Just look up my name, feel free to connect, send me a message. Happy to chat and take it from there.
WENDY GROUNDS: Okay, perfect.
BILL YATES: Thank you so much, Tammy.
TAMMY ASHRAF: Yeah, thank you.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s a wrap for us here on Manage This. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you’d like to learn more, head over to Velociteach.com. You can subscribe to the podcast and check out a full transcript of this episode.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and we’ll catch you on the next episode of Manage This.
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