Dave Garrett, Senior Advisor to the CEO, discusses the PMI Project Success Initiative, a 2023 research project by the Project Management Institute. The initiative redefines project success and offers actionable insights for project professionals. Dave describes shifting the focus and accountability beyond project management success to overall project success as he talks about the three key measurement factors crucial for project success and the Net Project Success Score, a tool used to evaluate a project’s success.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
02:22 … PMI Project Success Initiative
03:56 … MORE – Beyond Project Management Success
05:03 … Manage Perceptions
05:30 … Own Project Success
05:40 … Relentlessly Reassessing Project Parameters
06:00 … Expand Perspective
06:49 … Gathering Data
08:24 … Measuring Success
09:53 … Qualitative Interviews
11:42 … Definition of Success
13:31 … Examples of Projects with Lasting Value
19:01 … Net Project Success Score
20:55 … How to Use the NPSS
23:09 … Three Key Factors in Successful Projects
26:58 … Defining Success Criteria
28:47 … Managing NPSS Expectations
33:03 … Find Out More
34:13 … Closing
Intro
DAVE GARRETT: …our mission now is to maximize project success to elevate our world. So, we’re looking beyond project management success to the actual success of the projects. And that actually is bolder because it involves some uncertainty. It involves some ambiguity. It involves some things that may be beyond our control. But to the degree that we can, we want to focus on that, on the success of the projects themselves, because that is how we elevate our world. That’s how we make real progress.
WENDY GROUNDS: Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers, and anyone out there trying to keep their projects on track. We are so excited to have you joining us. I’m Wendy Grounds, and in the studio here with me is our expert in all things project management, Bill Yates. Don’t forget you can earn free professional development units from PMI just by listening to this episode. If you stick around until the end, we’ll tell you how to claim them.
Joining us today, we’re very excited to have Dave Garrett. He’s the senior advisor to the CEO of PMI, where he focuses on advancing key projects that drive PMI’s mission and impact. With an impressive tenure at PMI, Dave has held pivotal roles, including Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, VP of Corporate Development and Innovation, and VP of Transformation. He also co-founded ProjectManagement.com, originally Gantthead.com, in 2000, where he served as CEO for 17 years. Dave’s wealth of experience and innovative insights make him an exceptional guest for today’s conversation.
BILL YATES: We’re so fortunate to have this time with Dave. We really appreciate it. I know he’s a busy man. There’s an initiative that he worked on, a project called the PMI Project Success Initiative. We’re going to get into that in detail. It took place in 2023, and then they started to unpack and share more of the results in 2024. But Wendy, there’s some cool stuff that came out of this project. One of those, just to give a teaser to the listeners, if you want your project to be two times more likely to be successful, there are three key factors that you need to know about that should be present in your project. We’re going to go into those. Dave will describe them. But these could be game changers for you.
WENDY GROUNDS: Hi, Dave. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you for joining us.
DAVE GARRETT: Wonderful to be here, Wendy. Thank you.
PMI Project Success Initiative
WENDY GROUNDS: We are excited to talk with you. And I know our audience is going to enjoy this conversation, as well. The first thing I want to ask you is about the PMI Project Success initiative. Can you give us just a little bit of the background to this? Why did it start, and what was the purpose?
DAVE GARRETT: Sure, sure. Well, as you know, our mission as PMI has grown more expansive over the past year, year and a half. We have a new CEO in place, new direction. And I think it’s a lot bolder and more exciting than where we’ve been in the past. We’ve been very profession-focused, which is great. The profession has now matured. And we’re looking beyond that. And our mission now is to maximize project success to elevate our world. So, we’re looking beyond project management success to the actual success of the projects. And that actually is bolder because it involves some uncertainty. It involves some ambiguity. It involves some things that may be beyond our control.
But to the degree that we can, we want to focus on that, on the success of the projects themselves, because that is how we elevate our world. That’s how we make real progress. That’s how we align with what business leaders think, what customers think, et cetera. So that’s the large goal there, sort of, since we’re aiming at maximizing project success. How do we measure that? How do we quantify that in some way so we know we’re making progress against that goal? And how do we define project success? I mean, take one step back, you know, and say it’s not the triple constraint anymore, so what is it? So that’s definitely one of our goals. Understanding the drivers of success, what actually activates success?
MORE – Beyond Project Management Success
And something that wasn’t really our goal at the outset, but the findings sort of validated, was a new more expansive view of what project success is. We knew it had to be more expansive. We didn’t know exactly how much more expansive. But, you know, sort of who judges success and what project professionals need to do to create that success, was something that kind of fell out of that. There’s an acronym that Pierre, our CEO came up with, that I think is really useful in that regard. It’s called MORE, M-O-R-E.
The way that Pierre phrases this is he says MORE is a call to our profession, shifting its focus and accountability beyond project management success to project success. It represents a sweeping reconsideration of the role of our global project management community. Which is really cool. It’s like it’s transforming or evolving the profession as a whole to become something bigger. Something more aligned with the needs of project stakeholders. What we’re trying to do here is view success through their eyes, not through ours as project professionals. And I think that’ll create greater alignment and more value from individual project managers.
Manage Perceptions
So just to touch on MORE really quick, M stands for Manage Perceptions. So, think about, you know, all the different stakeholders you have, even out to executives, customers of the, you know, organization that you’re dealing with, that sort of thing.
Understand how they perceive success for the project, and look at it through their lens, and manage those perceptions over time. Have that be a more of a focus than just managing execution.
Own Project Success
O is for own project success beyond project management success. So again, sort of owning the big picture, not just owning the execution of the project itself.
Relentlessly Reassessing Project Parameters
R is for relentlessly reassessing project parameters. So, you know, you think of the Agile world, we talk about this an awful lot, but how do you iterate, how do you adapt, how do you move forward when you’re dealing with ambiguity? So, you need to make sure that you’ve got your eye on the ball, and you’re addressing intent, not just, yeah, sort of the spec.
BILL YATES: Yup.
Expand Perspective
DAVE GARRETT: And last is E, is Expand Perspective. So, your project not only has its own goals, its own objectives that you need to reach, but other projects, you know, are going to come into contact with your project. What impact is your project going to have on those other projects? What impact is your project going to have on the business itself, functions within the business, and really the world at large? And what is that perspective that you need to adopt that sort of takes in the whole landscape of impacts and implications and understands it a little better, adjusts for that?
And while you’re looking through all these stakeholders’ eyes, you know, what matters to them in that whole landscape? You know, understanding that versus just sort of your myopic perception of the deliverables you need to produce or even just outcomes within our project management space.
Gathering Data
BILL YATES: That makes sense. Seeing Pierre’s perspective on that is really helpful. I want to get into the specifics of this initiative, this project, because this was kind of your baby. So, tell us about your role in it and give us some feel for the survey and, you know, how you went about gathering this data from different stakeholders.
DAVE GARRETT: Yeah, yeah, it’s really a great research effort. I found it super, super interesting. I led the effort along with our head of – in partnership with, actually, our head of market research, Trish Cabrey. And just to kind of walk you through it, we began with a literature review. We wanted to look at all the different research that had been conducted so far. That’s always how you start these things out. You don’t want to do the same thing over again. You want to kind of build on what the world has to offer so far.
And that was a really extensive, I think it was like a 90-page literature review of, you know, everything that’s been done. You know, APM’s done some things that are interesting. We looked at a lot of things that were done commercially and academically.
A lot of people have looked at project success. And largely, much of that work, almost all of that work was confined to the project management space, meaning like the person that you’re pleasing, the person who’s judging success is more like the project sponsor, you know, that kind of thing, and not really going beyond that. It also largely represented a binary view of success, meaning yes or no; what percentage failures were there, or what percentage success, you know, were you achieving? And that’s kind of interesting, but it’s really more of an academic point. What good does that do you in the real world?
Measuring Success
So, I’ll talk a little bit more about how we measured it in this study as we go through this. And I think a lot of it was very triple-constraint-oriented, so it really looked at execution and what is easy to measure, what is easy to quantify, what are the things within our control. I think we tend to bias ourselves that way, not just project professionals, but people, you know, it’s human nature; right?
When you go looking at metrics and that sort of thing, you think, you’ve got that in the back of your head, what do I have control over? And you shy away from the things that may be more important, but they’re a little bit intangible. They’re a little bit hard to measure. How do you deal with that? It’s harder, you know, it’s harder to commit and own that kind of thing. But in order to really own success, you need to take a broader view.
So, the literature review is what you began with. We put into place a volunteer insight team of 17 people, many of which – we found all the people that had done prior research, as well, and tried to pick a lot of really informed people from that effort, you know, we had the folks that had done the research for APM. We had folks that worked for Oxford University as professors. And we had a lot of other academics, practitioners, people who are in the commercial space, people who were building AI tools to predict project success were part of the team as we wanted to kind of get that overlay, that perspective of technology exists today that didn’t exist before. What’s the impact? And their guidance, their input was really critical in all of this.
Qualitative Interviews
We began our actual work by conducting 90 qualitative interviews of project stakeholders of all stripes, you know, CEOs, customers, not just project people. We began by conducting 90 qualitative interviews with stakeholders, project stakeholders of all stripes, CEOs, customers, project sponsors, portfolio leaders, PMO directors, project managers, program managers. And the whole spectrum of stakeholders gave us a sense of how they viewed project management.
It was important to us to create a definition that was more in layman’s terms, not like in terms that are easily understood necessarily by project managers and just project managers, but what do executives get, or what do even customers get as, you know, a definition that makes sense to them because we wanted to ask a uniform question of all these stakeholders and get a perception check of to what degree is that project successful; right?
So not just a binary view, but more of a rating from zero to 10, of how successful a project was. And actually, part of those qualitative interviews helped us understand that the binary view was really not what we wanted. They said, you know, projects are not binary. They’re not either – not just successes or failures. They tend to lay along a spectrum. Many of them are mixed results, you know, they’re good in this way, bad in that way, you know, that sort of thing. And they wanted a way of expressing that, and that’s how we came up with a rating system that accommodated that.
So, we think we got a full 360 review of success, beyond those directly involved in the project, including customers. We got a perspective there that said, not only are projects not binary, but value almost universally came up as a term that was important, you know, as did effort and expense.
Definition of Success
So, what we did with that qualitative work was we were able to create six different candidate definitions of what success looked like, all the way down to sort of met requirements, and they were worth the effort and expense, that kind of thing, up to a stack. So, a 10,000-person survey that we conducted after the quantitative work, there’s nearly 10,000 people. And again, project stakeholders of all stripes, not just project folks were included. That was across 141 countries, 10 industry sectors, and five different categories of projects.
Category of projects might be like an infrastructure project or a software project. And through that quantitative exercise, you narrow it down, you know, we got down to a definition of project success. So, the definition was something that was born out of the research. It wasn’t something that PMI created. And it’s interesting, you see a lot of the LinkedIn comments, and people say, oh, it should be this, and it should be that. And from their perspective, I can understand, you know, like why they define it that way. But this is based on a huge number of people’s perspectives.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: And how they sort of came together to form a definition versus just my perspective or yours. The research was incredibly deep and thorough. In fact, it’s the largest research effort that PMI’s ever undertaken.
BILL YATES: Yeah. I want to jump in on one thing, that definition. As you described, you said you wanted to come up with something that was in layman’s terms. So, it wasn’t just somebody who was deep into project management that would understand it, but also team members or sponsors or other contributors. To quote it, “Successful projects deliver value that was worth the effort and expense.” You mentioned three words: value, effort, and expense. So that’s a very crisp definition of that project success. I like that.
Examples of Projects with Lasting Value
We had some follow-up questions that we wanted to ask about that. Can you share some examples? Because I can certainly think of some in my past or, you know, people that we’ve had conversations with on this podcast where you’ve had a project that looked like it was not successful when you look at certain maybe traditional standards. But then when you step back and look at it in a broader definition, similar to this one, yes, it was successful. Can you share some examples of those types of projects where they did create lasting value for the community or for the society, when all the dust settled?
DAVE GARRETT: Yeah, no, absolutely. I’ll start with the one that’s been beat to death. I think a lot of people talk about the Sydney Opera House, you know. Sydney Opera House was a failure for a very long time in the public’s eyes and through the eyes of politicians, through the eyes of the people who were actually building the Opera House. They were over time, over budget in a way that was really upsetting to everyone involved and everyone not involved in the effort. But when you look at Sydney Opera House today, the iconic Sydney Opera House that no one can forget, you think of Australia. You think of the Sydney Opera House.
And the value that it’s generated in terms of tourism, in terms of national pride, from every angle it’s a huge success now. And a lot of that success is based on somewhat intangible concepts and somewhat intangible value points that are difficult to get your head around. That’s something you have to relate to, when you begin with the end in mind as a project manager, you think about the intangibles as well as the tangibles and the things that are easy to measure. So that’s one that everyone knows about.
And I think there are projects that are the reverse of that. You know, if you think about if I’m developing a cancer drug, and I work for a pharmaceutical, and you’re developing a cancer drug for the same type of cancer, and we’re both sort of progressing as planned on our drugs, but your drug, you finish first, and you’re able to address the market first, your time to market is three months by design, my effort may be dead in the water because you’re already out there in market addressing the need in a way that I can’t because of the timing; right?
But I’ve done everything right on that project. I’ve created the thing I was supposed to create. It does what it’s supposed to do, but it’s too late. That’s one where you’re kind of doing the flip; right? You’re doing all the right things, and then it turns out to be not a success.
Another example of that would be you’ve got a lot of military jets being produced today, evolutions of fighter jets and that sort of thing. And they’re being introduced into a world where drones are key to, you know, air defense and, you know, combat in the air, that kind of thing. So, you could build this awesome jet that’s really fast and really wonderful for everybody and has incredible capabilities, but it’s manned. And maybe it’s needed less than a pack of drone planes that can go do whatever needs to be done without risking human life, et cetera.
And so, you could have done everything right on that jet project, and it could be dropped at the end because it’s not needed. You know, the world’s changed. The world has moved on, and you haven’t iterated, adapted to meet that change. That’s one of those MORE things we were talking about earlier; right? Those are three. There’s one more that I really like a lot, the Tesla Roadster.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: It’s actually more like the Opera House than it is the others.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: The idea was to launch the first mass market electric car in 2008. The production, you know, cost overruns were tremendous, delays, technical problems. As you would expect with something we are building that’s new and really insane at the time. You just, you know, you looked at that and thought, all right, how’s it going to work? Hasn’t worked in the past. Or there were electric cars. They fizzled out because of technical reasons. And only about 2,500 or 2,400 units were ever created.
Some of them, they shipped some of them that were stuck in second gear because they needed to ship them. And then they replaced the transmissions later because, you know, they were trying to get them out the door and, you know, say they were in production.
They actually, I mean, so many things were wrong about that project from a technical perspective. But had that project never been launched, had people not bought those cars, you know, early on, we wouldn’t have the Model 3 and, you know, all the other, Model X, Model Y, whatever, all the cars that are out there today. And this huge movement around EVs would never have happened. So, you know, to some degree, this is a really successful project, and it launched a whole sector. And, you know, hopefully there’s been some climate impact or will be at some point. And it’s just a really, really important project.
So, I think that’s a really cool example of a project that didn’t meet, you know, the specs from a technical perspective, was unsuccessful from an execution perspective, but very successful from an overall project success perspective.
BILL YATES: Velociteach is a community of hard-working team members, here to support your growth and success. InSite is our project management mobile learning platform where you can prepare for your PMP certification or get better at your job by choosing from over 70 high quality and engaging courses. These courses cover a variety of topics such as communication, leadership, status reporting, the work breakdown structure. Each course aligns with a PMI Talent Triangle, making earning PDUs easier than ever. Visit us at velociteach.com today to get started.
Net Project Success Score
WENDY GROUNDS: Can you walk us through the key question to the Net Project Success Score. And I’ll just read what the question is: “To what extent would you say this project is on track to deliver value that was worth the effort and expense?” Can you talk to us a bit about that?
DAVE GARRETT: Yeah, absolutely. NPSS is an interesting thing. It is a global score. So, it was done based on the results of these 10,000 surveys that I was talking about earlier. And people answered 55 questions in that survey. They’d spend anywhere from a half hour to an hour on it, this extensive survey. But this is one of those questions. And they had to rate their project.
You know, when we asked them, to what extent did you meet the definition of project success? To what extent is your project on track to deliver value that was worth the effort and expense? We asked them to think about their last completed project and say to what extent is it meeting these criteria? And part of that was they had to rate it from zero to 10, you know, so zero being completely disagree and 10 being completely agree that it did that.
We split that score up in the following way. Zero to six was failures. Seven to eight were considered mixed. And then nine and 10 were considered successes. And there’s a longer story around why we did it that way. It follows the basic structure of NPS, Net Promoter Score, if you’re familiar with that.
So, the score that we got at the end was 38 globally, which doesn’t mean a whole lot today. But what we’re trying to do is develop markers so we can have benchmarks and understand how we as PMI are progressing against a goal of maximizing project success. Are projects getting more successful or not? We can go through the calculation and all that, but it’s difficult to do verbally. I think if you’d like to look at the calculation, it’s in the report. It’s at PMI.org/projectsuccess. If you go there, download it. It’s a really great report. Everything I’ll talk about here is in the report.
How to Use the NPSS
BILL YATES: So, give me advice on how a project leader and a team should use that score. Because I love the idea of baselining and benchmarking. Even if I’m a project manager that’s been managing efforts for a company for a while, and I want to just stop and start measuring right now, going into the future, what advice do you have for a project leader and for a team to understand how to use that score?
DAVE GARRETT: So that’s something we’re working on. NPSS is really today only a global marker of success. You know, we had to look across a large, diverse set of projects, you know, and then came up with a definition of success that was applicable to all of them. We haven’t tested this at a local level and don’t necessarily recommend you apply NPSS at a local level. We’ve been doing some testing internally and talking to folks at different organizations about how they might assess perception of success locally. We have to look at a lot of testing before we can actually recommend that. But I think the thing that’s coming out of this research that you can action today, there are three things. You know, the MORE factors that I was talking about earlier, you know what I mean…
BILL YATES: Yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: You understand by talking to your stakeholders what their perception is of the project, and you can get them, if you want them in that conversation, ask them to rate it from zero to 10. You can do that. And we all know from – even the PMBOK has stakeholder engagement. People have written dozens of books on the topic, you know, how to engage customers and stakeholders, that kind of thing.
So, kind of refocusing on that and the other MORE attributes, I think that’s one thing you can do. And then we have two key findings. One of them is around specific measurement, you know, at the project level, how important that is. And the other is related to sustainability. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in those two key findings to action at a local level.
BILL YATES: I’m with you, Dave. It’s like, this seems like a good first move. It’s going to take some teasing out, for sure. Just from our own surveying that we do at Velociteach in terms of asking customers how well a training session has gone or the tool set has been impactful for them, there’s always that element of subjectiveness that comes into that. So, teasing that out, figuring out a best way to do that. It doesn’t surprise me that you guys are still thinking, okay, how do we implement this at the local level? That makes sense to me.
Three Key Factors in Successful Projects
But to your point, you brought up that there were certain findings from the initiative, from this project that were really game changers. And one of those was certain projects were deemed two times more likely to be successful than others when three key factors were present in those projects. If you would, go into those three key factors because I think these are actionable items for project leaders to embrace going forward, to know about it and then think, okay, how do I do this in my project?
DAVE GARRETT: Right. Yeah, so these three things, they’ll sound like Mom and apple pie, but they’re not necessarily.
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: You think, you know, oh, everybody does that.
BILL YATES: Well, sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones; right?
DAVE GARRETT: Yeah, yeah. From my days running Gantthead or ProjectManagement.com, we always found that people messed up the basics constantly.
BILL YATES: Yes.
DAVE GARRETT: Just being reminded of the basics was more valuable than just about anything else we could do. But these three factors are related to measurement, and they’re very, very important to the success of your projects. We found that projects that did these three things doubled their success rates, doubled their likelihood of being successful.
The first thing was defining success criteria upfront, yeah, at the beginning of the project. That sounds super simple, but how many of us have seen projects where we’re three months in saying, what’s the success criteria? You know. Or we need to rework the success criteria, that kind of thing.
The second one is putting a performance measurement system in place that aligns and guides decision-making. Yeah, that’s really important, that aligns and guides decision-making. So not vanity metrics, not things that don’t matter. Things that help you understand the path to value I think are very important there.
Tracking performance throughout the project. So, we’ve seen a lot of metric systems, I’m sure you guys have seen them as well, where people start off with all the best intentions, but don’t necessarily track these things in the right way or communicate them effectively, making sure that people are aware of, you know, these are the way the measures are falling out. Are these going to impact our decisions? Do we need to align better on some of these things?
And the way they fit together is just, they’re very sort of powerful, I think, when they’re paired with this perception. Think about it, stakeholders have perceptions. They are aligned or misaligned with the things that you’re measuring locally. And that’s important to know. It’s not just that they’re wrong and they need to be realigned necessarily. That may be true. But it also may be true that they have a better idea than you do of what you should be doing.
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: I think that’s important. So, one thing that I want people to take away from this is only 38% of projects actually do this, do these three things, 38%. So that leaves more than half of projects out there with an opportunity to potentially double their chances for success, if they do these three things. You just take that back to your PMO and say, “You know what, if we do these three things on all our projects, this will happen.” And that it can’t hurt. It’s likely to really help a lot, you know, to emphasize these things that seem basic, but aren’t necessarily executed on in the real world. So that’s one really important takeaway I think that’s actionable today.
BILL YATES: I completely agree. I think many times project leaders have good intentions on this. They intend to do this from the beginning of the project. And let’s say it’s a 12-month project. Maybe the first two, three, four months they do it. And they’re all aligned. They’re communicating the right information. The right people are engaged with it and looking at those reports and talking about trends and that kind of thing. And then things get busy. Maybe there’s a big hiccup or an obstacle, and they fall off of that good habit that they’d set, and they forget about it.
This is great information to me as a reminder to project managers who do know better. They need to be doing these things. And here’s the proof is in the survey and the results that you guys have found. So, it really hits home with me. I think it’s powerful data.
Defining Success Criteria
WENDY GROUNDS: If we have some project managers who are saying,” Well, I need to be better at defining my success criteria,” what are some common mistakes that they should avoid when they’re defining their success criteria?
DAVE GARRETT: There’s a lot that’s been written on this, as well. The most basic thing that would come to mind for all of us is just vague or ambiguous success criteria. You know, we always say you have to set smart goals; right? And we all know what those are. So, I think that’s one thing upfront that you’d want to check before anything else. And there are others that actually map to MORE that I think are really important. The ignoring stakeholder expectations is a mistake a lot of people make.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm.
DAVE GARRETT: So that M, Managed Perceptions in MORE is really, really important. Focusing only on deliverables versus outcomes, you know, that sort of thing. So, what is the value you’re delivering? O for owning project success beyond project management success, I think that’s really helpful. Not reviewing or adjusting the success criteria. You know, so we talked about that early on, as well, sort of people saying, yeah, the success criteria, I’m sticking with it. You know, everybody just should align. That kind of thing is a mistake and maps to R, Relentlessly Reassess Project Parameters.
And then finally, overlooking risks and constraints. You know, if you pull back and you do the E, Expand Perspective thing, you pull back and you understand the project more holistically, you’re able to uncover risks that you maybe didn’t see before. You know, you have the different kind of conversation with your stakeholders. You’re able to see constraints that maybe you didn’t see before. Maybe there’s a regulatory constraint or something like that you weren’t thinking of in your world, you know, your project world. When you start opening up that lens, opening up the aperture, you can see more and see, yeah, from a risk and constraint perspective, I think that’s important. So those are the things that are sort of top of mind for me.
Managing NPSS Expectations
BILL YATES: Dave, when I look at the NPSS, one of the things that jumps out to me is it feels a bit subjective. And I’m thinking of how, if I have a group of maybe 10 different stakeholders that are replying to my question, where I’m asking them to give me an NPSS, give me a score based on this range of numbers. Talk a bit about perception and how do we manage expectations in terms of using this type of score?
DAVE GARRETT: Yeah, you know, a lot of people struggle with this. It is subjective. There’s no question about it. And I think it’s important that it be subjective because it can apply to a broad range of situations, a broad range of projects, and that’s critical. It’s like, what is important to you through your eyes? You know, how do you perceive success as you, as a person who not only has the metrics that we’re offering specific to the project, but has their own experiences, their own knowledge, their own judgment, you know, they’re applying to making decisions.
If all decisions were as easy as running the metrics and then getting the answer out, then computers would do everything. We’d have no role in that. And that would make no need for project stakeholders. So, they’re important because decisions are made based on perceptions, hopefully grounded in or supported by metrics.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
DAVE GARRETT: At the end, it’s that perception that becomes the foundation for decision-making. If you think about it, we deal with this in everyday life in various ways that we don’t even realize. You know, you go on Amazon to buy something, and what do you use as a guide? How many stars does it have; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah, sure.
DAVE GARRETT: Is this good or bad? Is it good to have five stars, or is it bad? Does it have three, two, one? You know, and then you dig into why it’s bad. You engage with it further to get there. This perception, you know, graded on a numerical scale is important because it is, it is a reflection of, like overall, is this good or bad? And then the engagement that follows is critical; you know? So, if you’re looking at Amazon, you want to see that review, that one-star review, what’s that about; you know?
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm.
DAVE GARRETT: Or that five-star review. Why is it five stars? Why do people love this product so much; right? You want to know why, and that’s – that’s why the engagement is so critical with project stakeholders. And with things like AI, coming onboard these days, AI helps you with the administrative, helps you become better in those conversations with project stakeholders. You could role play. You can ask it, what do you expect to get from this type of stakeholder given this situation? So you can be better prepared for that conversation, and you can have more time for that conversation based on AI and other technologies handling these sort of everyday building of reports or reporting status and that kind of stuff.
You want to clear the decks of that to the degree you can and focus more on managing those perceptions, interacting with those stakeholders, becoming more an integrated part of the business team.
An article I wrote six months ago on the PMI website, it’s in the blog, I was talking about the evolving profession a little bit there and comparing it to CPAs, accountants, you know, accountants used to be bookkeepers, you know, they used to write down a lot of numbers, add them up manually, et cetera. When spreadsheets came onboard, people thought this is going to go away. Accounting is going to go away as we know it. It did not go away. And what it allowed accountants to do was to level up and answer “what if” questions around, you know, what if we acquire this company? What if we cut expenses in this area? What if we do X, Y, or Z?
And what that did was allow them to engage with the business in a much more meaningful way that really made the progression evolve dramatically into a business partner, not just someone who does the number counting, but someone who can actually advise on direction, advise on what might happen if you take a certain action. And, you know, you think about the evolution of the CFO that came out of that, you saw more CFOs. This is in the ‘70s. We saw more CFOs after that as business partners.
When we think about our equivalent, whether you call them a Chief Transformation Officer or a Chief Project Officer, whatever you call them, you could see a lot more of that coming if project professionals evolve the way we see them evolving. So, thinking about it that way is kind of cool, you know, how can I evolve my position within the organization to be more integrated, to be more of a business advisor than just someone who executes on what’s asked of me.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yes.
BILL YATES: That’s a good analogy.
Find Out More
WENDY GROUNDS: Thank you so much for talking with us today, Dave. If our audience wants to find out more about this project success initiative or just to talk some more, where should they go?
DAVE GARRETT: Well, if they want to find the report itself, they should absolutely do that. It’s at PMI.org/projectsuccess. So that’s easy enough to find. I’m happy to connect with them on LinkedIn, if you like, Dave Garrett on LinkedIn. I think it’s LinkedIn.com/davegarrett. So, easy to find there. And happy to have conversations with anyone. There’s a lot of conversations going on on LinkedIn about this. It’s a really exciting topic. I think people are really getting into it and appreciating it as they understand it better. So, I think it’s going to really have an impact on the profession.
BILL YATES: Thank you for your time, Dave. I know you’re a busy man, and you’ve had a lot of influence in this industry. I know when I was first getting involved with PMI through Velociteach, I got to know you pretty quickly. You already had a lot of mojo going even before PMI, and then came onboard with PMI. And I just appreciate all the thought leadership that you’ve brought to the organization and the impact that you have on the industry.
DAVE GARRETT: That’s really kind of you. I appreciate that. Thank you.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s it for us here on Manage This. Thank you for hanging out with us today. It’s always a pleasure to have you along for the ride. Don’t forget, you can visit us anytime at Velociteach.com to subscribe, catch up on past episodes, or read the full transcript of today’s show.
And now it’s time to reward yourself. You just earned free PDUs for listening. To claim them, head over to Velociteach.com, click on Manage This Podcast at the top of the page, then hit the Claim PDUs button and follow the simple steps.
We’ll be back soon with more insights, stories, and strategies to help you master the art of project management. Until next time, keep your projects and coffee cups filled to the brim. Stay curious, stay inspired, and keep tuning in to Manage This.
Leave a Reply