Author: Drew Davison

Drew Davison is the owner and principal consultant at Davison Consulting and a former system development executive. He is the developer of Project Pre-Check, an innovative framework for launching projects and guiding successful project delivery, the author of Project Pre-Check - The Stakeholder Practice for Successful Business and Technology Change and Project Pre-Check FastPath - The Project Manager’s Guide to Stakeholder Management. He works with organizations that are undergoing major business and technology change to implement the empowered stakeholder groups critical to project success. Drew can be reached at [email protected].

From the Sponsor’s Desk – The Power of Perseverance

Written by Drew Davison on July 28, 2020. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on From the Sponsor’s Desk – The Power of Perseverance

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer”– Albert Einstein

Most of us live busy lives, even during this nasty pandemic. Coping with the demands of the job, family and friends and keeping up with the latest dictates of our governments and public health officials can be exhausting. That can make it difficult to keep one’s focus on priorities, on what matters most.

Yet, that’s exactly what’s needed, especially in these trying times. Sustained focus allows us to move forward, to make progress on the things that matter most, to achieve our personal and professional goals. That theme is the basis for the following story, demonstrating the power of perseverance.

The Situation

Jason Harder started his career as a Registered Respiratory Therapist. Today he is the Chief Executive Officer of PFM Scheduling Services, an already profitable recent start-up. That journey demonstrates the enormous power of perseverance.

Jason prospered in the health care setting, taking on ever more senior positions and expanding his knowledge and skills along the way, including Certified Professional in Health Care Quality and Certified Pulmonary Function Technologist. When he was asked to participate in a project, he sought to improve his project management knowledge and earned his PMP designation in the process. When he became involved in a corporate reorganization, he researched the applicable practices and earned his Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and Change Management certification along the way.

In 2008, Jason joined the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning (AICML) as a project manager with a focus on the health care sector. AICML was a research lab in the Computer Science Department at the University of Alberta and is now known as the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). In 2009, the AICML shifted its focus to perform world class research and also to transition its inventions to deliver commercial outcomes.

During one of his engagements, the COO of the Alberta Health Services (AHS) expressed the need for an automated solution to schedule its many staff and facilities in accordance with labour contract provisions, corporate policies and budgets and government regulations. When the COO asked Jason if there was anything on the market to solve his problem, Jason replied no. When the COO asked Jason if he could build a solution, an opportunity was born.

The Goal

To develop a powerful, easy to learn and use automated scheduling solution that could support hundreds of rules from employment contracts, organizational requirements and government regulations and provide compliance analysis and metrics for the client. The solution was to be delivered in stages and to be completed in two years.

The Project

The Scheduling project started out in January 2014 as an AICML initiative with funding provided by Alberta Innovation Technology Futures (AITF). The initial team included two principal investigators, (Computer Science professors from the University of Alberta), five PhD Students with Jason as Project Lead as well as founder, inventor, designer and QA. In addition, he created the technical specifications for each module right from the start. AHS was also actively involved from the beginning. The team’s mandate: to conceptualize and experiment to see if a solution was possible.

After six months of work, the team concluded that a viable solution was achievable and the team composition changed to one principal investigator, two PhD students, two commercial programmers with Jason still as Project Lead and jack-of-all-trades. The design developed during this initial stage included four dimensions: number of Positions, Position shift assignments, FTE assignments for each position and staffing levels per shift per day. Within this construct, algorithms and algorithmic matrices were designed to contend with rule, budget, and best practice data stream sets. Four product suite modules were envisioned: solver, checker (compliance), optimizer, and analytics including a customizable array of metrics for the clients.

From that effort, work proceeded on developing the graphical user interface (GUI), a key success factor for the project. An external contractor with extensive experience in GUI development was hired and provided with specific requirements for the user interface. Unfortunately, the worked lagged. The contractor was not meeting targets and when it did produce deliverables, they did not meet the specifications. After six months the contract was terminated.

Jason then partnered with another technology provider that had a key piece of GUI that was needed and hired a senior programmer to work with the provider to develop that component. As the PhD students were moving on, two Master’s students in Computing Science and a PhD in Computing Science were added to round out the team and provide the skill sets needed to continue with development.

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Jason specified GUI requirements by first defining the product layers that were necessary (i.e. administration layer, business layer, analytics layer). He then spent hours with a group of schedule builders at AHS to understand the process flow to ensure that the approach was intuitive for the user. Once he understood the voice of the customer, he designed the GUI layout to mimic what he heard. The team also partnered with several schedule builders to confirm customer needs and ensure that the user experience was intuitive and friendly. As the GUI was developed, incremental testing and feedback was provided by key members of the scheduling builder group. After eighteen months, a GUI was in place and ready to go.

Concurrent to the GUI development, work progressed on building the core of the Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and the necessary administrative functions. The stack leveraged Angular, part of the JavaScript ecosystem, for building the applications, along with Java Script, Mongo Db, Ruby on Rails and C#. The team used Couch DB to structure the database and developed proprietary algorithms and algorithmic matrices to contend with the hundreds of rules and various best practices. The development approach was purposeful ensure a flexible architecture that could meet the unique requirements of individual clients and translate well into other industry verticals.

But it wasn’t all a bed of roses. During this period, the project lost its development partner and funding was becoming scarce. Jason went months without a paycheck. But the team continued with the work on the product roadmap. They also collaborated with various domain experts Jason had encountered on the journey including a health system in Texas. He also drew on his international experience as a workforce management consultant and leveraged those learnings to give continuous direction to the development of the product. And, during the course of this effort, Jason also earned a certification in Agile Software Development.

Finally, with all the parts in place, the application was able to produce a schedule that met the set completion criteria, producing a critiqued plan over 24 weeks for 100 positions. That was in March, 2017. I expect you probably heard the noise from that celebration wherever you were.

The Results

PFM Scheduling Services was incorporated in 2016. The company featured the PFM Scheduler product suite and complimentary processes and services. They earned a five year contract with AHS to Schedule /Compliance check 65,000 employees. They also signed a five year contract with the United Nurses of Alberta (UNA). UNA uses PFM only to check rotations for compliance to collective agreement rules and have checked hundreds of schedules to date. The fact that AHS and UNA use the same tool that yields a consistent interpretation of the rules helps with communication between the union and employer

On top of the tool’s success, Jason was nominated for E & Y’s Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2019. And what, you might ask, does PFM stand for? Personnel and Fiscal Management of course. What a wonderful example of the power of perseverance!

How Great Leaders Delivered

This project was a road trip to remember. Some sections were tortuous and winding, some fast downhill straights. There were any number of hidden intersections and dead end cul-de-sacs. Changes in team members and team makeup, funding challenges, the involvement of many partners, some difficult some enlightening, and the pursuit of the elusive scheduling goal were all dealt with effectively in the end. How did Jason and his team do it? Here are some of the primary contributors:

Share the vision – Jason started out with a vision sparked by the AHS COO’s question. As that vision evolved and expanded, it became the force multiplier that kept the team on course through highs and lows, thick and thin.
Build a high performance team – When I asked Jason to list the lessons learned over the course of the project, four of the eight items he provided dealt with his team: leverage top talent, celebrating as a team, giving specific credit to team members when engaging with clients and mentoring and developing the team. His approach yielded amazing results.
Know you clients – From his relationship with the AHS COO to the work with the hospital’s and union’s scheduling teams, Jason ensured that his clients felt they were significant and valuable members of the PFM team. The knowledge they contributed made success possible.
Share with your partners – Jason’s outreach to his partners, for funding, for GUI expertise, for design insight and execution, for technological support, etc. provided an expanded frame of reference and a huge return in terms of product quality and capability.
Prove the concept – You’ll notice that there was no rush to market as soon as the need was identified. There was a proof of concept stage followed by GUI prototyping and development concurrent with core function work. The initial release included the Solver component only. The approach was deliberate. The focus was on priority, quality and client need.
Be creative with funding – Finding parties to bankroll an endeavor like the PFM Scheduling Suite can be a challenge. Jason was able to leverage government, commercial and private equity investors over the course of the project to keep the ball rolling. I expect he would only recommend going without a pay cheque as an option of last resort.
Use technology as an enabler – One might look at the PFM Scheduling Suite of products as primarily a technology solution. And that could not be further from the truth. This project was first and foremost a business project, involving changes in business processes, functions and rules. In fact, the company, PFM Scheduling Services, offers a six step consulting service to help its clients maximize the tool’s value. The technology that was selected to develop and operate the SaaS solution was chosen because it enhanced business value.
See obstacles as opportunities – There were numerous bumps in the road on this project journey. Any one of them could have been reason enough for Jason to throw up his hands and concede defeat. Instead, every obstacle became an opportunity to learn more, consider other options and do things differently. To stay with it.
Learn – Jason’s penchant for picking up certifications along the way imbued the team with a learning mindset as well. It became a problem solving learning machine.

So, if you’re involved in a challenging project with an uncertain future, consider what Jason and his team did to achieve a successful outcome. It worked for them. It can work for you and your team as well. And remember the power of perseverance. Also, make sure you use Project Pre-Check’s three building blocks covering the key stakeholder group, the decision management process and the Decision Framework right up front so you don’t overlook these key success factors.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has willingly shared their experiences for presentation in this blog. Everyone benefits. First time contributors get a copy of one of my books. Readers get insights they can apply to their own unique circumstances. So, if you have a project experience, a favorite best practice, or an interesting insight that can make a PM or change manager’s life easier, send me the details and we’ll chat. I’ll write it up and, when you’re happy with the results, Project Times will post it so others can learn from your insights.

From the Sponsor’s Desk – The Innovation Road

Written by Drew Davison on June 9, 2020. Posted in Articles. 4 Comments on From the Sponsor’s Desk – The Innovation Road

You see things and you say, ‘Why?’. But I dream things and I say, ‘Why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw

Innovation is often risky, time consuming and frequently more expensive than existing, conventional solutions. Many of the answers required to make effective long term decisions aren’t known. Indeed, many of the relevant questions haven’t yet been asked. However, failure to innovate, to adapt, to evolve can lead to a slow and painful end. That’s why one organization took on the challenge and followed the innovation road.

Faced with this dilemma in 2014, The Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA), sought to launch a standalone, independent organization to spearhead research and development of leading edge low carbon smart mobility technologies focused on advanced transit, transportation, and integrated mobility applications.

The result was CUTRIC, the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium. CUTRIC is an independent, not-for-profit organization with a mission “To support research, development, demonstration and integration through industry-academic project-based collaborations that bring innovation, design, and manufacturing to Canada’s transportation supply chain.”

The Situation

CUTRIC selected Josipa Petrunic as its first President and CEO. Since joining CUTRIC in 2015, Josipa and her team have grown CUTRIC’s footprint to a 120 member organization representing transit agencies and academic institutions across Canada and including the Who’s Who of Canada’s, and many of the world’s, leading industrial organizations. The total value of approved CUTRIC funded projects exceeds $40 million to date, including twelve R&D projects, three commercialization projects and five consultation, research and other initiatives.

CUTRIC’s objective is to “Make Canada a global leader in low-carbon smart mobility innovation” by supporting “industry-academic collaborations in the development of next generation technologies for Canadian transportation systems. These advancements will help drive forward innovation in transportation across Canada, leading to job growth, economic development and significant Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reductions.” The project and development focus is on its four pillars of innovation:

Zero- And Low-Emissions Propulsion Technologies and Systems Integration
“Smart” Vehicles and “Smart” Infrastructure
Big Data for Mobility Analytics and Mobility as a Service Application
Cybersecurity in Advanced Mobility Applications

CUTRIC‘s approach to launching projects, garnering partners and securing funding has contributed considerably to its success to date. Most partners pay an annual membership fee which, together with assorted government and industry grants and loans, provides the operating capital. The project ideas come from CUTRIC, from the industry and academic partners and from government and industry groups.

CUTRIC vets the project opportunities and prepares the project charter for submission to its members. Participation is voluntary and can range from two to three industry and academic partners to over fifty participants. A CUTRIC staff member is always in the sponsor’s chair. Project participants get input to the goals and conduct of the project, contribute to its conduct and share in the resulting deliverables and any intellectual property.

It became evident early on that a one-size-fits-all approach would not attract the diverse membership necessary to achieve CUTRIC’s mission. The needs and capabilities of its current and future partners varied considerably, from large regional transit organizations to small rural operations, from a vast array of industrial partners to colleges and universities across the country and beyond.

One of the key deliverables for serving that diverse community was a modelling tool that participants could use to plan, implement, manage and migrate low-carbon technologies in a cost-effective manner, reaping the rewards and managing risks along the way. The initial first generation prototype release was a tool called TRiPSIM^™, which was soon replaced by a second generation tool, called RoutΣ.i™, designed from scratch based on months of inputs gleaned from transit agencies that requested more powerful modelling and simulation capabilities.

The Goal

To develop a predictive model that enabled transit agencies and other fleet owners to make informed decisions about electric vehicle deployments by predicting operational costs and benefits, total CO2e savings, and charging and hydrogen fuelling requirements using proprietary information from the equipment manufacturers.

The Project

CUTRIC staff developed a proposal for the simulation tool and distributed it to its partners. Nine industry partners and three academic institutions expressed interest and committed to its further development.

Development of the TRiPSIM™ tool started in March 2017 with the University of Victoria. The main inputs included the characteristics of the bus, route topography, ridership, powertrain efficiencies, route scheduling, and driving speeds. The model would calculate e-bus energy consumption as well as battery state-of-charge, time required to charge, and total electricity consumed.

In July 2019, a team of six researchers, mostly with doctorates and master’s degrees in technical fields around energy consumption, modelling and GIS, located in Ontario and Quebec, developed RoutΣ.i™ using the mathematical language of Python. Individual projects were launched to incorporate each transit agency’s unique characteristics to the model. The overall project was governed by a CUTRIC guided steering committee including representatives from each of the committed industry and academic partners.

The tool included manufacturer-vetted and utility-vetted predictive modelling outputs to demonstrate how various e-buses and e-chargers would operate based on variable route topologies, passenger profiles, stop-start needs, and other route requirements. The tool also had to support extensions to model hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and other evolving innovations. Plans also called for the commercialization of the TRiPSIM^©app to generate new revenues for the consortium of partners.

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Subsequent releases of the TRiPSIM^© tool enabled comparative analyses of varied e-bus and fuel cell ebuses and their allied charging and/or fueling systems, integrating:

energy consumption estimations,
environmental costs and benefits;
electricity and fuel costs and benefits and;
resiliency costs and benefits for public fleet systems specifically.

RoutΣ.i™ is updated on monthly basis to meet ongoing changes in the costs and capabilities of low carbon technologies.

In addition, a complimentary tool, CloudTransit™, a cloud-based software analytics tool, has been developed to collect and assess data in real-time from overhead charging systems and electric buses accommodating emerging international standards and compatible with various OEM bus platforms. The shared platform merges real-time data from competitive OEM data loggers to perform meta-level analysis for transit agencies.

The CloudTransit™ team includes a half dozen researchers, most with advanced degrees, who overlap to some degree with the RoutΣ.i™ team.

The Results

The first outputs from the TRiPSIM^©modelling tool took nine months to deliver and were released in December 2017. Subsequent releases and modelling outputs based on the new capabilities of RoutΣ.i™ have resulted in more than twenty projects being completed for transit agencies across Canada and in California to date. Each project takes about three to six months depending on the complexity of the transit agency.

Because the application was built with direct powertrain inputs from manufacturing partners, it has become a highly unique and industry-leading tool. Plans call for a significant expansion of the application to cover all transit systems across Canada in support of the Federal Government’s carbon emission reduction targets.

The major challenge on CloudTransit™ is trying to build a tool to help transit agencies understand their fleets better only to discover that, in many cases, transit agencies did not collect data in a standard way, it was often not digitized and even when it was, it was not digitized in a standard format so municipalities could share and compare. In many cases, the agencies did not have robust data sets or precise GPS tracking for every one of their vehicles, or precise topographical maps.

As these challenges are overcome, agencies will be able to see meaningful real time results such as kilowatt hours per kilometer and energy consumption per passenger. Cities get much more insight into how their assets are performing. That allows them to work with manufacturers to ensure the results are consistent with product expectations and to work to close any performance gaps.

The CloudTransit™ tool is now being implemented for three large transit organizations, one in BC, two in Ontario, with twelve more agencies expressing support for the initiative. CloudTransit™, once it’s set up as a data trust, is intended to last forever as a municipal asset to support the evolution of smart cities. Like RoutΣ.i™, plans call for CloudTransit™ to grow, with a proposed cohort of over one hundred data scientists and researchers across Canada to be added to the initiative to cover all Canadian transit agencies with electric and hydrogen electric buses.

How a Great Leader Delivered

CUTRIC has mastered mass collaboration to achieve its goals, bringing together all levels of government, transit agencies big and small and private industry in Canada and beyond. Imagine if governments and industry worldwide could learn to apply mass collaboration with the same expertise and zeal as CUTRIC. Perhaps the pursuit of worldwide challenges, like COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, could be accelerated exponentially.

CUTRIC’s intriguing operating model and style has enabled it to achieve remarkable results in the few short years of its existence. Here are some of the other factors that have contributed to that success:

Leadership with vision, knowledge, passion and engagement – In my experience, organizations with informed, passionate and engaging leaders are invariably more successful. It’s clear why CUTRIC is where it is today. Josipa Petrunic, CUTRIC’s President and CEO, has lived and breathed this low carbon world for years, through her post graduate studies, her work as lead researcher in electric vehicle policy studies at McMaster University and her involvement with the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS) Foundation among other pursuits.
Top talent - Josipa is supported in her goals by a highly credentialed and experienced team of senior specialists, researchers and managers who bring their expertise and insights to every CUTRIC initiated collaboration.
An opportunity to innovate – CUTRIC exists to foster low carbon innovation in Canada’s transportation sector. Without that presence, many of the transit, industrial and academic organizations across the country would not have the vision, financial capability or technical talent to go it alone. For those organizations, the ability to participate in and benefit from ground breaking research and innovation is made possible and practical with CUTRIC’s partnership model, sharing the benefits and the risks.
The ability to choose – Every transit organization, every company, every academic institution is unique. Each serves different communities, different user needs, different geographical regions, different infrastructures and different political priorities. CUTRIC’s operational model provides an appealing opportunity for its partners to be exposed to the full gamut of initiatives being considered and under development. Yet each organization also has the ability to choose which specific undertakings they wish to commit to and be actively involved in. That is a compelling argument for membership.
A tolerance for ambiguity – CUTRIC’s ultimate success depends on a massive cultural shift. Transit agencies across Canada need support in learning how to standardize their data, learning how to collect that data in real time, how to move it to a cloud platform, how to cyber secure it, and then learning how to share it in real time. It’s a massive cultural shift to show that data openly so other cities can learn and act on those experiences. It’s also a significant change for industry members, where product performance can be tracked in detail. CUTRIC’s staff enables that transition, one project at a time, each step of the way.
Robust governance – Each initiative has a steering committee made up of the partners involved. The committees are essential for dealing with the challenges of deploying technology when there are multiple competitors at the table. Each has its own charter and voting mechanisms and meets regularly, with subcommittees as needed for things like public affairs and technical matters. The steering groups have been highly effective because participation is high and dedication is high.
Lean and mean – CUTRIC has a small, highly knowledgeable and talented staff. It relies on its industry, government and academic partners for financial support and incremental on-the-ground expertise and talent. That gives CUTRIC the ability to move swiftly, at little cost and risk, to take advantage of new opportunities and quickly terminate initiatives that are not yielding expected returns.
Focus – CUTRIC’s vision is to make Canada a global leader in zero- and low-emissions transportation technologies. While it welcomes participation from all, including international industrial and academic organizations, that focus on specific markets and technologies is a force multiplier.
Phased development and staged delivery – You won’t see any multi-million dollar, all partner implementations in CUTRIC’s portfolio of projects. Each initiative is carefully phased to manage risks and rewards. Each rollout is staged, in trials, by partner, by platform to gain insight, to improve the product, to make the next implementation even better.
Amplified communications – With a wide array of possible partners on each project, the inherent risks of innovation and the geographical challenges of a country like Canada, one would expect innumerable communication challenges and the resulting project pitfalls. Apparently not so. Precisely because a potentially large number and wide variety of stakeholders can be involved on each project, communications is job one. Shared interests, knowledgeable and talented participants, highly focused scope, phasing and staging and effective governance all help to improve and amplify communication effectiveness.

An example of that heightened communication focus can be found in the planned 2nd Canadian Low-Carbon Smart Mobility Technology Conference scheduled for June 17 – 19, 2020. Hosted by CUTRIC and originally planned as a physical, attend in person event, it’s now virtual!

So, if you’re involved in an innovation venture or a challenging change with a diverse set of participants, consider CUTRIC’s approach and the ten factors above that have helped it succeed year after year. Also remember, use Project Pre-Check’s three building blocks covering the key stakeholder group, the decision management process and the Decision Framework right up front so you don’t overlook these key success factors.

From the Sponsor’s Desk – 8 Steps to Deliver Your Dream

Written by Drew Davison on May 15, 2020. Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on From the Sponsor’s Desk – 8 Steps to Deliver Your Dream

“Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.”

–Gail Devers, two-time 100 meters Olympic champion

We all have dreams. But, in so many cases, our dreams often go unfulfilled or only partially realized. Some, however, do manage to achieve, even exceed their dreams in business, science, the arts, politics, sports, and medicine. How do they do it? I expect that most apply some form of the lessons learned in this story, the 8 Steps to Deliver Your Dream.

The Situation

Ling Huang is president and CEO of Technology North Corporation (TN), an IT firm in Edmonton, Alberta. TN offers IT infrastructure management for local businesses as well as IT consulting services and custom application development and operations. In 2004, Ling and his wife learned their youngest son, Brian, had severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with very low verbal language development. ASD is a developmental disability which can cause significant social, communication, and behavioral challenges. According to Health Canada, approximately 1 in 66 children and youth is diagnosed with ASD in Canada. Brian did not appear to have a good prognosis. Most adults with ASD, up to 85%, remain unemployed or underemployed, and it seemed Brian might never have a job or a career. However, his diagnosis decisively shifted the direction TN would travel and opened not only a job but a career pathway for Brian and millions of people like him.

In 2018, Brian graduated from high school having completed the “normal” stream of education alongside his neurotypical (non-ASD) peers. Ling knew that if Brian was to gain and retain employment, he would need to work in a unique setting which would take into consideration his ASD. When Ling’s son joined TN as a junior IT helper, it became clear to Ling why over 85% of the autism population is unemployed or underemployed—verbal communication and employer satisfaction barriers essentially eliminate the opportunity before it can even get started.

To overcome these and other limitations to ASD employment, Ling developed a unique socio-technological solution, “RoboCoach”.

The Goal

Ling’s long term goal has not been mere employment for individuals with ASD. He says, “Employment is not the end goal. Rather, it is a cornerstone of my dream—a sustainable live-and-work model for high-functioning individuals with autism.” Employment is a feature of a thriving community of individuals with ASD, each with opportunities to grow, and networks of helpful, caring people around them with whom to work and socialize.

The Project

In early 2019, Ling started a project called “RoboCoach”, an assistive technology platform to overcome employment barriers faced by youth with ASD. The project was partially funded by the Canadian Federal Industry Research Assistance Program (IRAP). RoboCoach is built on several ASD-focused building blocks developed by TN over the years such as TN ActiveCare (TNAC).

TNAC is an enabling platform and infrastructure for ASD service providers, schools, and parents. It was initiated in 2010 and implemented in the spring of 2011 in response to a request from the Excel Society and the Centre for Autism Services Alberta. These not-for-profit organizations provide support and advocacy for people with mental, physical, and development disabilities in Alberta. Prior to the development of TNAC, their growth to serve additional clients cost-effectively and efficiently was being impeded by their manual paper-based client progress and service delivery tracking processes. TNAC’s tools greatly improved their efficiencies, allowing web-based technologies to provide the logistical heavy lifting. Over the past decade since its adoption by social service providers, TNAC has improved the treatment outcomes of thousands of children in Canada, USA, and Mexico.

RoboCoach is also reliant on joint venture research conducted in 2014 through 2016 with a partner in Mexico called Hydralab. This TN-Hydralab research produced the masBility Framework (see figures 1 and 2, below) aimed at providing employers with tools to enable ASD employment in their establishments. The name, masBility, is a portmanteau from the Spanish word for “more”, mas, plus the English word “ability”. The masBility Framework has at its heart the philosophy that specific easy-to-fulfil actions and states can enable a stable, fulfilling, and profitable employment scenario for youth with ASD, enabling employers to deploy visible talents and unlock many latent capacities of this valuable segment of the Canadian employment pool.

In 2018, after Brian graduated from high school, TN took him on as a junior IT helper. Ling tested the masBility framework with an in-house pilot. The pilot assessed to what degree youth with ASD could successfully complete tasks in a typical IT employment environment. The pilot discovered that when unsupported, the work-task success of youth with ASD was 5% to 15%. When supported by assistive technologies, work-task success increased to between 80% and 90%. A parallel pilot conducted in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico by TN’s partner organization, Hydralab, delivered similar results and has validated the masBility framework.

The masBility pilot resulted in three developments:

The initial assistive technology stack later developed into RoboCoach;
The masBility Stakeholder Satisfaction Framework, which has become the foundation of RoboCoach; and
Enhancement of the masBility Inclusion Framework and Stakeholder Satisfaction Framework.

Figure 1: masBility Key Stakeholder Satisfaction Management Matrix

The masBility Stakeholder Satisfaction Framework (above) identifies the significant outcomes and the elements which can make or break the employment scenario for a particular stakeholder. The masBility Inclusion Framework (below) describes the steps to be taken and the required elements to be in place for employers to reshape their employment contexts to enable inclusiveness in hiring and supporting youth with ASD.

Figure 2: masBility Inclusion Framework

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With these fundamental components in place and adding value each day, Ling launched the RoboCoach project in 2019. One of the significant barriers to employing youth with ASD is the cost of job coaches. Job coaches provide the social-empathic bridge between youth with ASD and their line managers in addition to job skills and social skills training. In most ASD employment scenarios, job coaches are typically assigned to work 1:1 with individuals with ASD. With RoboCoach, job coaches can work with a higher number of individuals with ASD, helping keep the work performance of up to 10+ employees at a predetermined level.

RoboCoach provides workers with ASD, their team (job coach, line manager, and guardians) with:

Multiple tools and channels for team communication;
Task calendars for family and work to keep track of important events to remember;
A built-in wiki providing task instruction;
An incorporated RoboCoach AI chat bot to understand wellbeing.

RoboCoach ensures workers with ASD and their line managers, or paying employers, have many opportunities to strengthen the employment opportunity, enabling satisfaction in performance.

RoboCoach is configurable to tie into work process channels and determine performance in real-time, allowing job coaches and line managers to compare different task performance metrics across timeframes and individuals. When attention wanders, as determined by lengthening time periods between task signposts, RoboCoach redirects attention to the task at hand. Further, TN’s vision is evolving RoboCoach as the enabling infrastructure for independent living. According to Ling, “Independent at work is the same as independent at home.”

The RoboCoach project had a mixed team of part-time senior and full-time junior staff, using open source technologies including Linux, Docker, NoSQL DB and a mixed framework including JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3.

In August 2019, Ling started Digital Services (TNDS). Their first offering was a focused autism employment program that hires youth with ASD to perform document digitization using RoboCoach software. TNDS demonstrates how these technologies can assist youth with autism to succeed in the workplace and to achieve the goal of scalable, repeatable, and sustainable employment of youth with ASD.

For most firms, document digitization is a task assigned to a company’s staff on a one-off basis. It suffers from several key challenges. The work is typically approached unsystematically and off the side of workers’ desks. It is frequently perceived as difficult, dull, and endless and it can easily break the spirit of the typical worker. And then there are the staples, the eventual lost pages, the receipts of assorted tiny sizes, and the overall perception that the digitization job was left in an incomplete state and an absolute mess. TNDS resolves all these issues through a well-designed, systematic, scalable approach employing youth with ASD managed through RoboCoach.

TNDS digitizer teams composed of a job coach, an assistant job coach, and four youth with ASD work together to transform physical documents into digital ones. Digitization is an excellent type of work for youth with ASD. Its repetitive nature, requirements for attention to detail, moderate task complexity, and task staging allow youth with ASD to perform high calibre work in a short space of time with very few to no errors and with a minimal of training. TNDS document digitization engages job coaches as team leads who can catch and resolve challenges to ensure team work quality remains at the highest levels.

The Results

The quality and speed of service provided by TNDS employees with ASD has positively surprised the social service and business communities in Edmonton. In a few short months, TNDS has started to take off. Law firms, accounting firms, and government agencies are either already signed up or are in the process of signing up to have their documents digitized by the TNDS team. TNDS customers have been showing their appreciation of the teams’ skills with their dollars. TNDS revenue has rocketed from $2,000 in December 2019 to $20,000 in February 2020—evidence that autism employment is not only feasible, but very beneficial for business.

Perhaps the greatest testament to RoboCoach’s impact comes from the parents of one of the document digitization team’s members:

“Our son is a higher functioning young adult with autism and has been employed with TNDS since December 2019. He got introduced to TNDS and this employment opportunity after completing a work place experience program sponsored by the Alberta Autism Society and Employment Works Canada in the summer of 2019. The results of him integrating into and thriving in this position have been nothing short of fantastic! TNDS has created a supportive and nurturing environment for these young adults to complete their work efficiently and competently. For our son, this is his opportunity to engage in meaningful employment and truly have a long term career with TNDS. The mechanism for him to earn money, have a daily purpose, learn team work skills and support his goal of living independently is beyond measure. We are so blessed to have him involved with TNDS and can’t thank the management and staff at TNDS enough in providing him this opportunity!”

Through word-of-mouth, parents have been calling TNDS from as far away as Calgary, Ottawa, British Columbia, and California. The challenges for creating sustainable employment for youth with ASD are universal. TN’s solution is designed to be scalable, repeatable and sustainable with significantly reduced support costs. It offers the promise of placing a very large group of youths with ASD into a respectable employment environment in the digital economy. Critically, however, TNDS employees are not merely thrust into an employment scenario with wishes and hopes for good fortune. They are trained, mentored and supported from the moment they enter the doors of TNDS. They are guided through each step of the digitization process with the RoboCoach platform built upon the masBility frameworks.

TNDS started with document digitization to clearly illustrate the many employable skills of youth with ASD, to open space for these youth to proudly stand next to their neurotypical colleagues, and to address an immediate business need. In the future, TNDS plans to offer other digital services under the same business model and brand, including software QA testing and junior IT management. The opportunities, in fact, are endless! And my family doctor, with her rows and rows of paper files, could sure use TNDS’s services right about now! I would say Ling and his team have come a long way towards delivering his dream!

How a Great Leader Delivered

Mark Cuban, the American billionaire, entrepreneur and owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, once said, “It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once and then everyone can tell you that you are an overnight success.”

Ling’s TNDS looks like an overnight success doesn’t it? In reality, it is based on years of passion and perseverance. Ling had a dream. He has pursued that dream over more than a decade to address a need in the ASD community. As a by-product, he is also addressing a societal need and a business need. How did he deliver his dream? The following factors were major contributors:

We know what we know and we don’t know what we don’t know – Remember Donald Rumsfeld’s speech in 2002 about the purported weapons of mass destruction leading up to the Iraq war? “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know”. Ling and his team dealt with those uncertainties beautifully to arrive at the current state. They leveraged what they knew. They learned what they needed to learn. They built expertise incrementally, finding out what they didn’t know along the way and plugging those knowledge gaps while delivering real value.
The best way to predict the future is to create it – Ling Huang could have said that. Instead, it was Abraham Lincoln. Ling just modelled the behaviour. Repeatedly. Driven by his dream and his unwavering passion.
It’s a journey, not a destination –The road to the current state was a path filled with potholes and pitfalls, continuous learning on a multitude of fronts and enough successes to keep the fire burning. Persistence was the glue that kept Ling and his team stuck to the vision.
Know your subject matter – Ling was a business owner and technologist. He became knowledgeable about ASD though research, analysis, synthesis and action. He and his firm have become a continuous learning machine.
Collaborate – Look at the masBility frameworks and the players and perspectives involved. TN has collaborated with their clients, among clients, and across organizations and industries. They have reused extensively, including proven processes, practices, ideas, templates, frameworks, reports, and whatever else can improve quality, accelerate results and reduce costs.
Do it fast – It is better to deliver something of value, quickly, learn from the experience and incrementally build a solution that fits. Ling connected his dream to market reality and pursued the low-hanging fruit. RoboCoach is a perfect example. The initial implementation is yielding value now. Three more releases are planned for this year to take further advantage of what has been learned.
Know your stakeholders – The success of the RoboCoach initiative is directly attributable to the embedded knowledge and awareness of all relevant stakeholders in the TNDS DNA. They live and breathe stakeholder engagement to the fullest.
Build an amazing team – TNDS would not have been successful with the RoboCoach initiative without an amazing team of passionate participants, a diverse array of critical skills, and the resolute commitment of all involved.

So, if you have a dream, do as Ling has been doing: leveraging his passion and the lessons he has learned on his journey. Also remember, use Project Pre-Check’s three building blocks covering the key stakeholder group, the decision management process and the Decision Framework right up front so you don’t overlook these key success factors.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has willingly shared their experiences for presentation in this blog. Everyone benefits. First time contributors get a copy of one of my books. Readers get insights they can apply to their own unique circumstances. So, if you have a project experience, a favorite best practice, or an interesting insight that can make a PM or change manager’s life easier, send me the details and we’ll chat. I’ll write it up, and, when you’re happy with the results, Project Times will post it so others can learn from your insights.

From the Sponsor’s Desk – Lean Practices for a Cleaner Experience

Written by Drew Davison on April 7, 2020. Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on From the Sponsor’s Desk – Lean Practices for a Cleaner Experience

“There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow.” –Jack Welch

As a project or change manager or sponsor, you’ve undoubtedly been involved in a change or two that aims to deliver something of value to your customers. Perhaps a new product or service? Maybe better prices or improved service? And consider how often you had access to current, meaningful and relevant information about your customers’ satisfaction with your current products, prices and services. It seems to me that that kind of information is an essential input for guiding a change to completion and assessing its achievements. Yet, all too often, that information, if available, isn’t shared with the people who need it the most.

That was the situation in this case. Fortunately, the change leader was an experienced Lean practitioner who understood the power of that information to reveal opportunities and change behaviours for the better.

The Situation

This commuter service ran 30 inbound and 30 outbound train trips daily to service a major metropolitan area. Its overall operations were managed by a primary contractor who subcontracted some operations, such as mechanical repairs and car cleaning, to other organizations. It was a massive responsibility. There were 3,800 trains operating in the area on any given day, including freight, passenger and commuter. On-time performance was critical, due to knock on effects to the other trains sharing the system. One problem could impact the entire system and leave millions of passengers, operators and commuters fuming. The primary contractor was fined for not achieving contract standards and fines could amount up to a hundred thousand dollars per month.

At the time of this story, the service was experiencing problems on multiple fronts. It had received complaints from neighboring communities about diesel fumes and the noise from engines and bells. In fact, lawyers for local residents were already targeting a shutdown of the central depot as a solution to these problems. In addition, the budget for fuel had been reduced by the municipality. Idling engines in the yard was a major consumer of fuel so changes needed to be implemented to use ground power for lights, heating and air conditioning when the trains were in the yard. As well, there were many complaints about dirty cars, and dirty restrooms.

The primary contractor had previously attempted to organize the yard for better fuel conservation, noise reduction and improved car cleanliness. However, there was no acceptable data available to quantify the existing challenges so no agreement had been reached on a way forward. The contractor then decided to run a workshop and include all functions (drivers, technicians, and cleaners) to develop a plan to address the challenges and avoid significant fines.

The two day workshop was held with seven managers who covered all aspects of the commuter service’s operations. It started with a list of what they were good at and what was important and ended with list of responsibilities and a personal business plan for each manager designed to close the gap. The workshop was followed by the formation of the Failure Review Board which included the contractor’s local general manager and a representative from Human Resources and a daily review with each manager to monitor progress, provide guidance and acquire outside assistance if necessary.

Another benefit of the workshop was a tangible improvement in the teamwork, coordination and mutual understanding among the managers that carried through to their action plans and follow-on actions. Their frame of reference had been expanded. Perhaps their thinking wasn’t totally outside the box, but it was certainly expanded beyond their own departments.

It was as part of this search for expertise that Anders Nielsen was brought on board to help with the cleanliness challenge. Anders was a partner in Gardiner Nielsen Associates Inc., an organization that specialized in the implementation of Lean practices, including Deployment Planning, A3 Thinking and the 5S methodology, a workplace organization method that used a list of five Japanese words translated to “Sort”, “Set In order”, “Shine”, “Standardize” and “Sustain” to describe how to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness. With extensive experience on Lean practices, Anders took charge of the cleanliness challenge.

The Goal

Working with the cleaning staff and manager, to improve the commuter feedback scores on the organization’s commuter train service from poor to mostly positive in six months.

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The Project

Anders’ first order of business was to get an understanding of the challenges the cleaners were facing. So he did walkabouts with the cleaners: how bad is it, show me the process, tell me the issues that impede your ability to get the job done. He discovered that each train had one run in the morning and one in the afternoon or evening. Every locomotive and every car needed cleaning daily and the cleaning crew had a 30 minute window to clean the carriages of each train, with 4, 5 and even 6 double decker cars. He also reviewed commuter survey results from all the trains and discovered that riders cared about cleanliness as well.

With that understanding, Anders held a two day workshop with the 20 cleaners and their manager, arranged over the time when the trains were out of the depot on their morning and afternoon routes. The cleaners were asked to:

Draw a picture of a car
Identify all locations that need to be serviced
Specify each activity that had to occur at each location
Identify how long each activity took
List the equipment that was required to perform each activity
Identify the problems that were encountered
Suggest ways to improve each activity
Come up with a plan

The participants, unused to this kind of forum and hesitant at first, gradually warmed to the challenge.

Charts like the one above were developed for each location showing activities performed, the personal protective equipment, such as gloves and face shield, required, the supplies and tools needed and the time for one person to completely service the location under typical conditions. Problems identified included lack of power outlets for vacuuming, repairs taking place after cleaning, thus dirtying the cars again, the time to travel between trains and lack of the right supplies. The challenge was to determine how to clean properly in the time allowed.

Anders then lead the group though a series of problem solving exercises to develop new and improved ways to reduce the time required and increase the quality of the results. They considered individual assignments versus teams, locating cleaners to a specific area of the depot and assignments to a specific group of cars. They looked at changing the sequence of activities and locations serviced. They considered changing cleaning crew start times to match train availability.

And then they drafted a plan of action and tried it out over a week. Anders walked the cars with the manager, got feedback from the cleaners, reviewed rider survey results and shared those with the cleaners. Based on that input, they revised the approach and tried again. And again. The cycle of input, review, revise and test continued.

The Results

After 6 weeks, feedback from riders was much improved. Over 6 months, rider survey results went from poor and mostly negative to mostly and completely positive. Engaging the cleaners resulted in a continuous stream of improvement suggestions, from tools and equipment to assignments, processes and sequence of operations. Accepted process times reduced arguments based on opinion and emotion regarding how long tasks took and how to coordinate activities and produced greater commitment and collaboration.

But there were some missed opportunities:

Some routes were much more problematic than others in terms of cleanliness. Unfortunately, they were not pursued further.
There were opportunities to become more efficient, especially by reducing walking and transportation time. One suggestion to acquire a couple of golf carts to accelerate moving from train to train was turned down by the manager. He didn’t have the budget.
More could have been done to fully integrate all workers in the yard in the process of ensuring that clean, fully functioning trains leave the yard at the end of the day.

How a Great Leader Delivered

Anders was an accomplished Lean leader and practitioner who shared his knowledge and experience with the car cleaning team and helped them transform their rider survey results in six short months. Here are a few thoughts on how he managed the change and the challenges he faced:

If people need to change what they’re doing for a change to be successful, they need to have a say – Managing change is all about helping the people affected by a change make the transition to a new way of thinking, seeing and doing. If they’re part of the problem, they need to be part of the solution. Anders gave them free reign to assess the problem, develop ways to improve the situation and timely feedback on how the change was progressing. They were the essential steps to this successful and sustainable change. According to Anders, “The most important lesson learned is that the people who do the job know it best, and are best placed to improve it (given the choice, and some help). The coach (me) should not suggest solutions, but listen, challenge, and then facilitate the implementation of the ideas.”
People need to know how they’re doing – We perform better knowing how our efforts match expectations and contribute to overall goals. That’s true in our personal, family and organizational lives. In this case, while the consumer feedback on car cleanliness was important to senior management, the folks doing the work were never given that information. No one had ever shared the results with the cleaners. As Anders points out, “the voice of the customer rarely reaches the person who adds the value”. Once they were made aware, their individual and collective performance and attitude changed, and the results improved accordingly.
Culture eats change for breakfast – Daryl Conner, the founder of Conner Partners, a firm focused on helping organizations manage transformational change, often used this adaption of a saying attributed to Peter Drucker to emphasize the importance of recognizing and working with a company’s culture to foster the effectiveness of a change. In this instance, the company’s culture was diverse and multi-dimensional. That added significant additional complexity to this change effort and ultimately muted the results achieved.
The funding sources have to synchronize with the change impact – If the impact of a change is localized to a department or division, it’s reasonable to ask that unit to fund the effort. However, if the change affects multiple departments or divisions, or the entire enterprise, the funding needs to be supplied by the broader organization. Asking each department to pay for the change efforts within their organization puts the change at the mercy of each local manager’s perceptions and priorities and risks the entire venture.
As a change agent, your influence is essential but finite – Anders was hired by a subcontractor to the primary contractor charged with managing the entire commuter service. He had limited knowledge of or influence on the other parts of the change. As such, he focused on his mandate – the twenty cleaners and their boss and the feedback from the thousands of commuters who rode the trains daily. However, the lack of a collective and sharing forum for the whole operation meant that Anders couldn’t gain insight into the broader challenges and wasn’t able to benefit from the other perspectives from the rest of the organization. That was a missed opportunity for the company.

So, if you’re given a small slice of a much bigger pie, do as Anders did and focus on your own accountabilities. That will help you maximize your contribution on that assignment. But keep an eye open for opportunities to contribute and leverage others’ contributions on the greater challenge. Also remember, use Project Pre-Check’s three building blocks covering the key stakeholder group, the decision management process and the Decision Framework right up front so you don’t overlook these key success factors.

From the Sponsor’s Desk – Creating an Enterprise Portfolio Management Office

Written by Drew Davison on March 19, 2020. Posted in Articles. 3 Comments on From the Sponsor’s Desk – Creating an Enterprise Portfolio Management Office

We know implementing a major organizational change is difficult. The chance of success is probably less than 50%.

Creating an Enterprise Portfolio Management Office (EPMO) in a large organization is a major change that has its own risks and issues.

Yet, in this case, the project that delivered a new project management practice and transformed the corporate strategic planning exercise in support of the EPMO implementation was a resounding success. How did they do it? Read on to discover the eight factors that shaped the initiative and guided it to a successful conclusion.

The Situation

This organization was a community care provider and operated as a not for profit and charity. It delivered more than 1.3 million hours of care annually with 2,600 staff and has almost 400 volunteers, travelling in excess of 12 million kilometres in a fleet of vehicles.

The organization had engaged consultants to review why their projects were not as successful as they expected. The consultants found that:

Cross-divisional projects were often complex but poorly documented
Projects were not managed in a consistent way
Project activities were not visible to managers and the Executive
It was difficult for the Executive to prioritise and schedule projects
A previous attempt to set up a ‘Project Support Office’ had failed

The consultants recommended two things:

Establish an EPMO for the business
Use PRINCE2 as the standard project management methodology

The consultants also drafted an EPMO charter for the executives’ consideration which included the following:

The EPMO is an advisory and reporting body for corporate project activity. The EPMO performs the following functions:

Manages the Projects Register
Tracks and reports project progress against defined milestones
Defines standard processes and template documents
Provides project assurance, support, coaching and mentoring
Operates as part of the Strategy Division.

Following up on the consultants’ report, the company’s executive hired Graham Colborne on a fixed term contract to implement the consultants’ recommendations. Graham was a seasoned Project Management professional with years of experience and a track record of success managing projects and running and implementing project and programme management offices.

The Goal

To implement an Enterprise Portfolio Management Office (EPMO) and manage its operations to encompass the consultants’ recommendations including the implementation of PRINCE2 as the standard project management practice within the organization

The Project

Graham recognized the assignment’s challenge: he had both project and operational responsibilities. He spent his first few weeks getting to know the lay of the land, talking to his sponsor, key stakeholders and project managers. His sponsor was the CEO. The Project Board was the organization’s Executive Committee, to whom he reported every two weeks.

As a result of his explorations, he found:

Around 40 to 50 concurrent corporate projects in operation at any one time.
Programmes were not treated any differently to projects.
There was a lack of a unified approach.
Conflict between business-as-usual and project activities.
A “we don’t have time to plan, just get the job done” mindset.
Lack of consistent user involvement.
No real knowledge of the true cost of projects,

A very early activity for Graham was to benchmark the organization. This allowed him to identify the pinch points and also to be able to demonstrate progress from this baseline at a future date. He used P3M3 for this purpose. P3M3 (Portfolio, Programme & Project Management Maturity Model) comes from Axelos, the organization that offers best practice suites for IT service management (ITIL), project management (PRINCE2), programme management (MSP), portfolio management (MoP), project offices (P3O), risk management (MoR) and cyber security management.

According to Graham, P3M3 seemed to be the flavour of the day, very easy to use and totally compatible with the other standards. In fact, he only actually surveyed project management as there was no programme or portfolio management activity in place at that time. The maturity levels are: Level 1 – initial process, Level 2 – repeatable process, Level 3 – defined process, Level 4 – managed process and Level 5 – optimized process.

It should be noted that self-assessments are generally recognised to paint a more optimistic picture than reality. Even then, the scoring was mainly at level 1 with some level 2s. The survey was conducted with all Executive staff participating, and a large number of other stakeholders and practitioners.

Graham also decided to use the P3O (Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices) model to build the EPMO. This was a relatively new standard and also came for the same best practices family. P3O was entirely tailorable and could be used from small offices to very large ones.

With the maturity level baseline in place and P3O to guide the development of the targeted EPMO, Graham developed the following approach for the endeavour.

In terms of implementation Graham wanted to take a low key, quick win approach. This was a huge cultural shift for the organization. He realised that a full implementation of PRINCE2 would most likely fail if attempted as a “big bang” so he prioritized the aspects that needed implementing first. These were as follows:

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Every project should have a definition document.
Establish a projects register.
Commence a PRINCE2 training program.
Segregation of projects into 3 levels:
- Board level – reportable to the Board
- Executive level – reportable to the Executive Body
- Divisional – managed within a division
Defined approvals mechanisms and defined reporting lines

The project managers were not fans of the definition document initially. It was seen as more work for them. Graham explained that this represented their “contract” with the stakeholders and it was there to protect them as well as the stakeholders by specifically defining what was to be done and what success looked like. The PMs became much more enthusiastic about the idea over time as they realized the value it provided.

Regarding the projects register, there had never been a single list of all the projects being executed at any one time. The register was established as an online system but also as a printed wall chart 1m X 1.4m outside the boardroom. This was extremely popular with the CEO as he could see for himself what was going on before he entered a meeting. Other executives and PMs began to take an interest as well.

The first PRINCE2 course had 9 attendees and was paid for out of Graham’s EPMO funds. Graham picked those initial attendees because of their proven project management track record and willingness to embrace the new practices and promote them to others. They did their jobs superbly. Due to the success of that first course it became a “badge of office” and people were queuing up to get on a course. Two further courses were held resulting in 30 accredited staff.

Graham never wasted an opportunity to promote the EPMO, delivering over twenty presentations to staff gatherings in head office and the regions. He also used the company’s internal publications to report on progress and cover the EPMO’s accomplishments, including the intranet, project charts and project completions.

In spite of the board’s approval of the EPMO initiative, Graham still encountered some significant sceptics. The executive lead of one of the organization’s flagship initiatives admitted that he was sceptical about the whole EPMO concept but was reluctantly willing to give it a try. Following the successful delivery of that project using the EPMO’s processes and practices, the executive became one of its strongest supporters.

With PRINCE2 practices being applied and EPMO services widely utilized, Graham was feeling very positive about the progress being made. And then the Quality programme emerged. The organization was looking to become accredited by the Council on Healthcare Standards. Because of the significance and size of the undertaking, Graham decided he’d run the programme himself. Working with a Business Change
Manager, they identified 26 individual projects with a total of 14 Project Managers.

In order to become accredited an organization has to reach a satisfactory level in all areas measured. Occasionally an organization is awarded an “Outstanding Achievement” (OA) in an area but these are rare. On completion of the Quality programme, the organization was awarded a total of four OAs. The EPMO, not normally a part of the accreditation, got a special mention in the final report due to the way that it liaised effectively with the other departments.

The final part of Graham’s assignment was perhaps the most challenging – changing the way the company’s strategic plan and supporting project portfolio were developed. Fortunately, Graham reported to the head of the Strategy department. She had witnessed Graham’s progress on the EPMO work and was a committed supporter of his strategy process transformation plans.

Instead of starting with “What projects are we going to do next year”, Graham had the senior managers concentrate on what they were trying to achieve as an organization. Graham used the recently released Management of Portfolios (MoP) best practices to guide the work.

As part of that process, the executives agreed on the five core strategies and then considered how best to achieve their goals. From that exercise, they delivered a 5 year strategic plan and defined the required strategic initiatives to achieve that plan. Specific projects were identified to support the strategic initiatives with completed mandates documenting the strategic alignment.

In total, 62 initiatives were identified and 42 were prioritized for the following calendar year. Of those, 25 were considered corporate projects to be managed by the EPMO. The remainder were divisional undertakings to be managed locally.

Graham started this journey as the lone resource. As the project gained speed and generated demands for services and support, he hired his first two project managers, then recruited three more plus an administrative support person. At peak, there were 15 or so PMs embedded in the business units that were managing projects and had a dotted line responsibility to the EPMO.

The Results

Before Graham left, he conducted a final P3M3 review (with the same participants as the first one). The results were quite clear. Now the organization was above 2 in all aspects of the survey with 4 items above level 3. Furthermore, as the participants were now better acquainted with the principles, they were being far more critical in their scoring.

In addition to the growth in project management maturity, Graham was responsible for putting proven project, programme and portfolio management practices in place and delivering an EPMO that supported and reinforced those practices going forward.

The Management of Portfolios (MoP) standard was being written during Graham’s time on the EPMO programme. Because of that involvement, he was invited to be one of the reviewers and so had early access to the standard. That allowed him to build the EPMO and shape the strategic plan with those principles in mind.

Graham was later personally invited to participate in the worldwide pilot exam for Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices (P3O) Practitioner level and was one of the first people in the world to be accredited as a practitioner for the P3O standard.

Graham was also invited to present at the APMG Best Practice Showcase because of his knowledge of and involvement with the Axelos standards and the sterling results he had achieved in the EPMO programme. He discovered somewhat later that Curtin University were using the model he had presented at the Best Practice Showcase as material in their lectures on project management.

The bottom line: Graham managed to deliver beyond expectations:

There was much greater visibility of corporate project activity.
There was superior engagement of stakeholders.
There was a complete implementation of the PRINCE2 standard, including the product-based planning approach.
Projects were managed more effectively, improving the delivery of the right results in the right timeframe at the right cost.
Resources, risks and issues were managed across all projects.
More consistently managed projects made it easier to understand what was happening across the organization.

You know your cultural change is succeeding when you start hearing PRINCE2 terminology in the corridor conversations!

How a Great Leader Delivered

This change was a massive undertaking for the organization. In addition, Graham faced a multitude of distractions throughout the engagement. How did he manage to survive and thrive? I think the following eight factors helped.

Sponsorship is vital – A change of this size needs sponsorship not just from the project sponsor, the CEO in this case, but from all senior managers. Graham’s move to ensure the former executive sceptic became an outspoken supporter of the EPMO through the effective delivery of his pet project was a masterstroke. His own placement reporting to the head of Strategy helped cement support for the revamped portfolio management efforts.
User engagement is essential – Early use of PRINCE2’s project boards helped change the culture and increase engagement. It sent an early and powerful message that things were changing.
Dialogue is the glue that makes change stick – When the change you’re implementing becomes “conventional wisdom”, there is a much greater chance that the change will stick. Graham’s ongoing dialogue throughout the organization was a force multiplier.
Implement a piece at a time – Changing corporate culture has to be approached slowly and methodically. Focusing on the initial PRINCE2 deliverables helped put the foundation in place for the follow-on effort and substantially increased the chances for early wins.
Target easy and early wins – Graham’s early work with the project managers to accept and embrace the project definition document and PRINCE2 training were important catalysts to the ongoing success.
Recognize and reward supporters and contributors – Momentum needs to be maintained following the “honeymoon period”. The project register, accessible intranet services and the wall chart on the boardroom wall for the CEO and other senior executives continuously reinforced the change message.
Measurement makes dreams into reality – They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A chart or graph presenting a few key measures achieves a similar result. The initial project management maturity chart reinforced the need for change. The final chart communicated the significant results achieved.
Keep your eye on the prize – Graham could have been easily distracted by the project managers’ lack enthusiasm for PRINCE2 deliverables, or by the executive sceptic, or by the introduction of the sizeable Quality project, or by his involvement in P3O and MoP development. Fortunately he wasn’t. He kept focused on his mandate and delivered successfully.

So, when you’re given a massive undertaking to deliver, take a deep breath and consider leveraging each of the eight factors above. They worked for Graham. They should make a big difference for you too. Also remember, use Project Pre-Check’s three building blocks covering the key stakeholder group, the decision management process and the Decision Framework right up front so you don’t overlook these key success factors.