How To Develop The Next Generation Of Top Project Managers

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Galen Low: So you've been asked to help grow the project management team. Just find some great candidates. Someone you like. Someone like you. Fine. But after weeks of reviewing CVs and sitting in on candidate interviews, you are still coming up short. You either can't afford them or they just don't have enough experience.

And then one day, as you're re-reading the job posting, you realize that all the things you're looking for remind you of someone. They remind you of... Diego from accounting? If finding skilled project managers for your team feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack, keep listening. We're going to be exploring the personality traits of a strong project manager and what to do if the person you're looking for ends up being right under your nose and just doesn't know that they're a project manager yet.

Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with The Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Okay, today we are talking about the project managers that don't know they're project managers yet and how businesses can identify and groom these folks to become top performers in their project practice. With me today is Barbara Kephart, a project management mentor and entrepreneur whose organization, Projects Pivot, takes a hands-on approach to matching organizations to up and coming and undiscovered talent to create project management rock stars.

Barb, thanks so much for joining us today. 

Barbara Kephart: Thanks Galen, and thanks for inviting me to the DPM podcast. 

Galen Low: Oh, it's great to have you here. And to our listeners, Barb and I have been chatting, we've had many conversations leading up to this, some of which have occupied several hours of time, which we will spare you, we'll give you the distilled version.

But Barb, I'm just so excited to have you on the show. I think your story is really interesting. I thought maybe we could just start out, could you just tell our listeners a bit about Projects Pivot and who your team helps? 

Barbara Kephart: So Projects Pivot was created because I was originally, when I first started in business, I was just managing projects.

I was just out there and I was taking some projects and I was working on 'em for my clients. And after a while, my clients said, Hey, we want you to be clone. Can you do that? And I went, well, I am an entrepreneur now, so sure, yeah, I can do that. And then I went back and went, oh boy, how do I do that?

So what I did was I just started reaching out to my network and I realized I have quite a big group of folks out there that either are early stage project managers or something we call project coordinators, meaning that they're still in their early stages of project management and they're learning.

And so I went to them and I'm like, Hey, I have a client. They need some work. I'm still gonna be there, but I need you to do this part. And they're like, sure. So they jumped in. And they got it done. And I thought, and my client was happy. So I thought, you know what? I have something here. Because as these projects become, I have a tendency to manage really complex projects.

And as the projects become more and more complex, there's a lot of things that I can hand over to people that they can learn as new project managers. And then next thing they're making their way into more and more complex projects, which is what we like to do as project managers. Those of us who love and are geeky project managers, we love the challenge of complex projects.

And so it just worked out. So that's how Projects Pivot originally was started. So now what I do is I match companies with a project manager coordinator. I've also expanded into analysts, so that might be business analysts or data analysts or systems analysts. And I help them improve their processes long term, and I manage their projects successfully no matter how much they pivot. 

Because that is why I call my company Projects Pivot because as we know, projects do pivot. And then what I do is when the project coordinator, and I should say, I don't always place a project coordinator analyst within the company. Many times the company already has a ton of really incredible people who are managing projects within their organization that can also be trained and mentored.

So I either place a project coordinator analyst in the company, or I use what's already there and then I mentor and guide them. And I either use myself or some of my other senior project managers and we guide them so that they're, the projects are better aligned to the company's needs. And then we do all the PM stuff.

We work through, summary, the work required, we outline all of our next steps. We do lot of iterations, and essentially we get stuff done. 

Galen Low: I love that. And I love the pairing model because I think when folks say, oh, I need to clone myself, that's not usually how they're thinking. They're like, okay, I have 10 years of experience.

I've got 20, 25 years of experience. I need to find someone else who's got, 20, 25 years of experience as well. That is my clone versus, wait a minute, let me see if I can find someone sort of early on in their journey as a project manager who can be my extra set of hands and we're gonna partner on this. And as we're partnering, we're going to like, I'm going to transfer knowledge to this person and I'm gonna help them make decisions, especially when a project does pivot and we're gonna get stuff done.

And I think that's a really great model that I don't think a lot of organizations think about all the time. I think there is this sort of like echelon of like, okay, this is an important project. We've got Barb here running it. And the answer to the question, well, would you like, someone more junior running it?

The answer's usually, No, I don't know if I trust that. I think I need someone as experienced as Barb to do this because otherwise there's a lot at stake and there's a lot at risk and it's not a natural kind of decision for a lot of organizations to make, to be like, oh, what if we bring on junior talent and kind of mentor them and groom them to become what we need them to be?

And that might be a more permanent fixture, which I think we'll get into as well. But how can I sort of, develop talent in my organization rather than just try and find it and get it off the shelf, which I think is a really fascinating idea. 

Barbara Kephart: Right. I call it bringing in layers of project management because many people are not ready to bring in entire new project management practices all at once.

A lot of the clients that I work for are growing companies. They have a lot of projects or what they think are projects. Some of them might not be full projects. Some of them may be full fledged projects that they have no idea how big of a monstrosity they're going up against and they're really not sure who's doing what.

And so I call it in bringing in layers of project management. So I don't wanna bring in only external. I would like to see what they already have in place and build upon it. And so that adds that layer. So it's bringing in that foundation and then we build upon it. A combination of myself, what I train and mentor, as well as the folks that I'm training and mentoring.

And that said, it's not only me that is in that senior project management role. We also have other project managers who are in the senior role that come in and do the training and mentoring as well. 

Galen Low: I love that. I think that's so cool. And actually, I think you've identified the other pivot. What I see as the other pivot is that your clients are actually pivoting into project management, or at least you know they're ready for that next layer. They know they need something, they're trying to mature in their project practice, but they're not ready or are struggling to find the right talent to make that happen. And so what I'm imagining is, and don't let me put words in your mouth, tell me if this is true.

That they're like, we're at a turning point in our organization. There's stuff going on. To your point, they might not even know they have projects. But they're like, Barb, we've got a lot of things going on. We just need someone to help us, bring it all together, keep it organized, and get it done.

And you're kinda like, oh, aha! Well, maybe you need to do that next layer of your project management practice, because which, in fairness might be the first layer of project management of their practice. 

Barbara Kephart: It sometimes is. The clients pivot a lot. And this is one thing that is very telltale of a project's pivot client because they themselves are pivoting a lot, so they need someone who can pivot as much as they can.

And so I don't advocate using the super, super traditional project management methodologies that work for very large organizations that are established and have been doing the same type of work over and over again. With companies that pivot a lot, you need to bring in something that's more practical, more agile, which I know agile can be a bit of an overused word, but meaning that we can move fast and we can change direction as the company changes direction.

Galen Low: All the pivots. That was like three layers of pivots listeners. So you're welcome. I imagine that, I mean, we're recording this. I don't always like to timestamp or date stamp these podcasts, but you know, we're in May 2023.

The economy's doing, funny things. Layoffs are happening across the board in tech and elsewhere. And I know a lot of individuals are struggling. Folks who've been laid off, folks who are looking to, take a different path with their careers. Just switch gears a little bit, like their pivot.

And also know that organizations are, they're struggling too. Like I imagine that they don't want to make mass layoffs, but like everyone's tightening their belts in this current economy and in this level of uncertainty. I'm just wondering, like right now, May 2023, what is the most salient challenge that you find that your clients are bringing to you to solve?

Barbara Kephart: The most important thing that they're bringing to me is that they have a problem getting projects done. And what does "done" mean? I'm not sure if you noticed, but I didn't use the word projects done successfully. Because success is a different definition because a successful project has all kinds of things associated with, it isn't just what happens at the end of the project when you tie up your loose ends and you're done and you're moving on.

But what happens in six months, which happens in a year, which happens in five years? Now as far as getting projects done, leaving the success out of it, they're finding that there's a lot of floating things out there, or one project turns into 10 very suddenly. And they're not quite sure how that happened.

And so there's not a lot of visibility as to what's going on within projects. So that's something that the senior part of Projects Pivot, which we are trying to move our junior project managers into that role. But as senior folks, we have the ability to help with the strategic project management and understanding where all these projects are living, who's doing what, and how they all fit together.

Now our goal is as we have either someone we place or someone internal, we move them up to be able to do that level so they can do it moving forward after we train them. So number one, they're not seeing exactly what is going on within their company and what all these different projects are. They don't know, and when I say they, I usually mean leadership of the company.

They don't know who is doing what, and they also are seeing that there's a lot of redundancy. For example, they might see that something was completed and they're like, great, yeah, that's great. That was done. And then the next week they hear somebody else has completed the exact same thing and they're like, well, wait a minute.

A person just last week told me they did this, so I don't quite understand. And then it ends up that, the right hand's not talking to left hand. And then both teams didn't know they were doing the exact same things. The other thing that I'm also seeing in this economy right now is the leadership of the companies are being pulled into the weeds of projects that they don't wanna be pulled into the weeds.

They have a lot more important things to be doing right now with keeping their company going, figuring out the right direction that their company needs to be going and they don't want to be managing their projects. Once they've made the decision that they are doing a specific thing or group of things over, let's say a year period of time, they don't wanna be pulled into the weeds.

They wanna be receiving their high level status updates. They wanna be notified when things are not working, or they wanna be notified when there's a change that needs to be done and it's been vetted by the entire team and they can give a "yes/no" that they agree that this is a change. 

So this is where having trusted project management professionals within your organizations, which again, is bringing in those layers of project management can take a lot of stress off the leaders of companies so they can focus on what they do best, which is bringing in those sales, which is moving the company in the right direction, and then they can let the projects happen.

And this brings us to the success word. So then that also looks at what does "success" mean? So this is something that the project management team needs to define once a project begins. There's a lot of problems that happen in economies such like this with not clear requirements gathering. Do we really need this project right now?

Or based on what's going on, let's say with our sales or our staffing or resourcing, perhaps maybe we should be putting this project off till next year after we wait to see what happens. So that's where we have to also look at the requirements that are needed for the projects and what does success look like.

And if we cannot meet that right now, then perhaps this one needs to be put on hold and let's move something that is a little more beneficial to our company right now. 

Galen Low: I love that interplay between sort of speed and visibility on projects, and then prioritization. To your point, what I'm seeing is a lot of organizations are struggling to keep up with the speed that they think they need to be moving at.

Therefore, they aren't really finding that they have the capacity to do it or the systems to do it. They are not talking to one another internally to understand what's going on, and then they're just not defining their goals because they're moving so quickly. It's almost like we're caught in this catch up moment, which is triggering some of that uncertainty of like, okay, well, do I have like so much redundancy in my organization that I need to make cuts?

Do I have a need to actually build a more formal project management practice? Or if not that, then what is the next step in between? Because right now, we are running too fast for our shoes and we don't know where we're going and we need help. 

Barbara Kephart: Exactly. And we have to remember the leaders of these companies, they're visionaries. Their job is to come up with ideas. That's why they have these successful companies. It's our job to help them understand the reality of those ideas. If I were to count how many times a leader of a company said, I got this great idea, let's do this. And I'll say, yeah, and I'll get all the information from them and I'll be just as excited as they are.

Then when I actually do my job, which is really distill this down and figure out what actually can be done. This is what, like I mentioned earlier, we call our requirements gathering and how this is possible, and of course how much it's gonna cost. This is when we can bring it back as a nice little neat package saying, yes, actually this can happen with these few minor changes, but this can happen.

Or, we have a problem with this. We can do it. However, here's what it's gonna look like. And then we can have those discussions back and forth to figure out, okay, maybe a piece of this can happen right now, or maybe all of it needs to wait. Or maybe this is a beneficial and we might have to move something, shift something around a little bit.

So we have to remember that leaves these companies, this is what they're good at, and it's our job to make them look good at what they do and not push something through a company that has a high failure rate. Many projects have a much higher failure rate than people realize, and they don't realize until it's done. Or like I said, six months later or a year later, people will say, why did we ever do this? This was a bad idea. 

Galen Low: Prioritization, starting everything and not being willing to kill anything, even if it's not working. I see it all the time. I really love this because I think that it connects some of what you were saying before, which is that, you do have this notion of senior project managers within your organization who then might get paired with a project coordinator. And then I think our listeners, their ears may have perked up right there cuz they were like, oh, this conversation about prioritization with the executives seems like a very senior project manager conversation, and it probably is. 

And then to your earlier point, there's also lots to do in keeping projects organized, executing them, getting them done that is not necessarily something that the one senior project manager needs to do alone. And I think their in is that sort of like that's where that partnership comes in. I wondered if we could just like dive into what that looks like, because I know some folks listening either run an organization or work within an organization or they are struggling to find that one unicorn senior project manager who's gonna do it all, who's gonna have so much capacity, they're gonna run every project in this organization. 

And they can't find that person because they're a unicorn. And I know there's a lot of folks out there who are trying to get a job as a project manager, as a project coordinator even, and just trying to move into that space, or are considering moving into that space, but are finding only those job postings. Looking for someone with five years of experience. Well, guess what, like people who have four years and less are still trying to do project management work, can still do project management, but may not be finding the right opportunities for themselves to get in. So I wondered, could you just step us through how it works?

Like if a client comes to you with a challenge and maybe just talk through an example project of how you would assess that situation, how you would do the matchmaking, and then how that project would run? 

Barbara Kephart: So not everybody is ready for full-fledged bringing in unicorns into their organization because they have to have kind of some level of organizational processes and procedures set up within their company to start with.

So to me, that is a first step. I call it project management readiness, meaning that there has to be something in place, whether it's on the operational side or even on the project side. Or let's say even a client onboarding side that is in place so that your staff is aware that there are ways that we need to follow things.

Many times when I go into an organization and everybody's just willy-nilly doing their own thing, it's much harder to get them to that level of understanding what project management really is and how it can benefit the organization. So usually it takes a while and I'm not gonna give years in business because it's different for each client.

And it depends on how fast they're growing. When a company is growing fast, they have a tendency to really speed those things up. So it's best if there's some level of organizational processes, procedures within a company before we come in to do our work. And then the other thing that we also have to have is there has to be that growth aspect going on with the company. 

So lots of ideas and projects in the pipeline. And then we also have to have the awareness of the leaders of the company, know that they can no longer lead these projects. That's key. If they feel like they can continue to lead the project, then we have a tug of war going on.

So the unicorn can come in, but the unicorn is tugging from the CEO who says, no, I'm the only one who can do this. And I get it. I'm an entrepreneur as well. So I completely get that, that it's really hard to give up something that you've been doing really well and hand it over to someone else in trust that they're gonna do it just as well as you did it.

So that's always a challenge as well. So, number one, of course, making sure I'll reiterate that, is making sure that the organizational processes and procedures are in place, or at least some aspect of it, and they're working. They're ready to be iterated, but they're working. Also that there's lots of things going on.

We wanna make sure that the company's in a growing state, so there's lots of different things coming from all different directions, and they're not really sure which one to do first. And once again, that leaders are ready to hand things over. They know that there's other things that they need to do within the company.

So the first thing that we do is we try and do that match. We start with that matchmaking, and when we do that matchmaking, we try to make sure we have the right fit. It doesn't always work. More often than it does because I've been really refining my what process to bring in somebody, whether they're internal, meaning that there's somebody or internally they already have that either puts their hand up and says, Hey, I wanna do this.

Or somebody that one of the leaders or someone else within the organization points the finger at him, says, Hey, we think you can do that. So there's those plus there's the ones if they don't have anybody like that, there's ones we bring in from the outside. I have a process that I work through with them called a situational judgment assessment.

It sounds like a test. I need to find a new name for it, but for now what it is that I work through various project management scenarios with the person that's going to be taking on the bulk of this work, and I figure out how they would answer. There's no right or wrong answer, but I gauge to see how they could do this.

It's very similar to what we do when we get our project management certification. There's some certifications we get over time after we've been working in the field for a long time. And it's loosely based on how we answer these scenario type questions we do in those tests. So I've made this really simple modified version for those that are like, I'm not really sure I like this.

And the ones that by the time we get to question two, they're excited about answering. They're like, Hey, this is really fun. Already then I know I have somebody who's gonna be a potentially good project coordinator or junior manager or analyst in the future. So then after we do that is we figure out what fit can happen between this person, let's say, or the people that they already have within the company based on personalities, based on skillset.

And also current skill sets as well as the ability of whether they have the ability to learn, that's the other thing that we look at as well. So not only what their current skillsets are, but whether they have the ability to learn skills that they don't have. Then we do the fun stuff. So once a decision has been made that either we have somebody internally that's gonna be the doing the training or mentoring, or we're bringing in somebody externally, we do something called a seatbelt session.

I called it a seatbelt session because I once had a client years ago, and I really needed information out of his head, but he didn't wanna sit down long enough to give it to me. He would give it to me in bits and pieces. He was a mega athlete. He liked jogging, he liked running, he liked doing all kinds of things that kept himself busy.

And so finally I said to him, Hey, listen. I need to get this information from you. I would like you to sit down for an hour or so, and I'm gonna put a seatbelt on you. You're allowed to get up about every 15 to 20 minutes, but I really, the rest of the time, I need to put a seatbelt on you to get the information.

So he agreed, and literally I put like a scarf around his waist and I got information out of him. And then every 15 or 20 minutes, I let him run around the building a few times and then he came back. And so that's where a seatbelt session came from. And what this is used is that we bring in not only the leadership of the company, one or two people, whoever has the most information in their head that we need to extract.

And I bring in the new project management professional that is ah, what have I got myself into? And we use this to help discover and identify the buckets of work within the company that need to be identified. And then I have a tendency to be a really good translator. And then we translate these into drill down project management action items.

So we take that super high level of all these different projects that are going on within the company, and we call this sometimes our portfolio level, if you're familiar with the project management terminology of portfolio. And then how we can drill those down into the tiniest little tasks, and we do this in a short period of time.

Because we only have these leaders of these company for a very short period of time. Outside of the time, we're letting them run around the building to get a break. And we need as much information out of them as possible so that they can release all this information to us so that they can go off and manage their company.

Then what happens is we take it from there, so usually contracts start at about three months long because that's a good trial period between both client and either the person internally to see if this is the job they want or the person we're bringing in externally to see if this is gonna be a good working relationship.

We mentor the project coordinator, project manager or analyst with one of our senior project managers, and we have a new platform that we're bringing up called Projects Practice, where it allows the project coordinator and analyst to be able to practice these things without it touching the company right away.

So it allows them some helpful trial and error time and not feeling like they're being judged on what they're doing. So that's how we run our mentoring programs. Every week we meet with them and then we discuss various different project management topics that are directly relevant to what's going on in the company.

And then of course no training would be complete without having some homework. Each week the project coordinators do have a little, an analysts do have a little bit of homework that they have to work on that also is directly related to whatever the company is going on right now. 

Galen Low: Huh. Tailored to the organization. I like that. Honestly, there's so many things I like about that. First of all, the readiness assessment, right? It's like, not everyone's ready to just pour gas on their project management practice and hope everything goes okay. I like that a huge piece of that is leaders relinquishing control if they've been very hands-on and in the trenches.

I also love the fact that at the seatbelt session, because I do find that the biggest self-fulfilling prophecy for senior folks who are in the trenches is they're like, oh, I need to do it because I know all the stuff. And they hire someone, they're like, okay, I'll try it. I'll hire somebody. They don't tell 'em anything.

That person fails. They're like, see, it didn't work. Whereas a seatbelt session is like, no, I'm gonna force you to actually distill the information in your brain because that's what's going to empower somebody to be able to succeed at doing the thing that you've been doing. And successfully free you up to do that other thing.

And then I also love the like learning on the job thing and how formalized it is in a good way. At the end of the day, we all learn on the job, right? Like, in other words, usually we're making mistakes and learning from them in the job making, potentially career limiting moves. Not always having a safe place to practice, but it is always about learning.

So why wouldn't there be this kind of component that is not just, oh, please take this course, but please take this course that's actually relevant to what we're trying to achieve in the organization, because that is training as well. And that's the combination that's going to have some of this talent really get it.

And I've seen it time and time again. I wouldn't say every time, but I would say that the folks who come in at a junior or mid-level and are compelled to stay and grow there, they don't just build their skill, they build their understanding of the business. Whereas if you bring in someone who's, the most senior of senior project managers, the rockstar, the person that everybody's been trying to hire, and you're gonna, lay out a very lush six vigor salary to this individual who might just not get the organization, might be great at what they do, but might not have that foundation to actually like deliver on the strategy and the vision and the mission for that organization. 

Barbara Kephart: I see this a lot where people will ask me and say, I wanna hire a project manager. What do I look for? Or can you help me write a project manager job description? And I'll say, "Yes, and". 

You really need to understand what this person is gonna be doing and be warned if, nothing against experienced project managers, I am one of them. However, experienced project managers do have a tendency to come in and do what they have done best in other organizations, which may not work for your organization.

So making sure that the person they bring in, if they are gonna bring in the person, the more experienced project manager, cuz that's good too. And there's plenty of project management companies out there that can help you find a very experienced project manager. Or you can apply for them yourself, or you can search for them yourself.

Those people are great. However, that should be one of your interview questions. When you come in, are you going to use the exact same ways of project management that you have done at your all other companies? If they answer yes, it might be someone that you may have to really work with a little bit more to really get the right answer to that.

Because the standard project management practices do work. However, they have to be modified between organization to organization, and we can't just carry over. There are many people who say they're good project managers, but they've been managing the same type of project over and over and over again.

If I manage the same type of project over and over again, of course I'd be really good at the projects that I manage. However, I have a tendency to get bored managing the same type of projects over and over again. The people that I bring in within my company are the people I identify with in companies that make good project managers.

We like to be challenged. We like to have different projects handed to us. We like to be handed a messy project and say, clean this up by next week. We love the challenge of that. People used to tell me I parachute in and fix messy projects. And actually I do, and that's what I train people to do. So be cautious when you have somebody that you're hiring that says, oh, I'm really good at project management because I follow everything that project management techniques that I've been taught and I've managed this type of project over and over again really well. 

Those are the ones that can be really good if you give 'em the same type of project. But if one day you're giving 'em a technology project and the next day you're giving them to set up a brand new accounting system, they may not be able to connect over to, or let's say different example.

Usually they manage graphic design projects and then you say to them, can you set up this accounting system for me? They may not be able to do it because it's outside of what they're comfortable and what their comfort zone is. 

Galen Low: That's solely fair and definitely one of the perks of the job I have found is that you can get yourself stuck into different types of projects and to your point, parachute in.

And that's exciting. And then rewinding back to what you said originally, which is that sometimes you're just looking for that passion to light up in people's eyes when they're like, oh, problems to solve? Project management? Okay, yeah, maybe I am into this. I really love that. I did wanna dig into the other side of it.

So yes a lot of organizations are like, I need a project manager. Barb help, I need to post something. I'm gonna post it on LinkedIn or Indeed and find an experienced project manager who answers these questions but the other thing you had said is sometimes there are these folks internally that either raise their hand, get voluntold, or if I'm understanding you correctly, someone that gets identified, maybe even by you as someone who is like that person. 

Their title is not project manager, but what I see there is someone who'd be good at doing this. Can you walk me through that process, and also for our listeners as well, who literally were about to probably post that job posting and maybe should think twice and look internally first.

Like what do you look for and how does that process work? Is it the same level of assessment and what does it mean for an organization to have someone sort of shift gears and maybe try on project management for size?

Barbara Kephart: So the first thing I do when I am talking with a client for the first time, I try to identify who currently exists and who is touching projects and who is not.

And I also ask a lot of questions. A good project manager asks lots of questions, ask lots of different questions. And I usually will find out that there's one or two people that are already managing projects within the organization. Sometimes when we go to those people, they'll say, Nope, I'm actually fine.

I love my role. I love what I do, and I actually have no desire. Actually, they may say, I know I could be a good project manager, but they're very comfortable and we have to respect that. There may be a reason why they like where they are for various different reasons. Sometimes they might have something going on in their personal life that makes it so that they want a nice, comfortable in, they don't wanna be challenged at this point. 

That doesn't mean that they won't wanna be challenged in the future. However, more often than not, there's lots of them that are just sitting there waiting to get an opportunity to show their stuff. And boy, when they show their stuff, next thing the company is just making strides because somebody has been uplifted into a different role and they have all kinds of ideas. 

And I know that because I was that one. I was the person that just sat there and I watched everything going on. When I was an employee, I was watching and I was like, oh, that can be improved. Okay, that can be improved. Okay, that can be improved. And I didn't even know what project management was. 

At that point, I was a healthcare provider for 20 years. I was in medical imaging, and then I got moved over into the IT department where I learned, and I was trained to be a systems analyst. And when I was a systems analyst, I didn't realize, but I was project managing the whole time. And in fact I've probably been project managing my whole life.

That's a whole other conversation. But I was project managing aspects of this large electronic medical system that I was doing. And I was also identifying room for improvement. And that's what you look for within a project manager. We are always thinking five or six steps ahead, sometimes 10 steps ahead as we become more at a senior project manager.

And all of a sudden someone came to me and sat, and I'll never forget the date cuz they came to my desk and they said, do you know what project management is? And I said, no. And they said, well, you're already doing it. And we have a position available right now that you can apply for where half of your day is still gonna be spent as a systems analyst building the system, but you're also gonna be spending the other half of your day project management.

And all I did was I made a quick phone call to the Project Management Institute because I had no idea what this was. There was a nice person on the other line who answered all my questions and I hung up the phone and I said, I will apply for that position. And that is how I got started as an official project manager.

But everything I've been doing, not only in my work, but my personal life had led me to that. So back to what a company may have, those little pieces of gold that are sitting there waiting, that are just quietly watching. Sometimes you may already identify 'em because they're the ones in meetings that are saying, what about if we try this or how about we try that?

Or, what about doing this? Or they're the ones who are building out your processes and procedures that don't know their project managing. Those are the ones that can really, if you give them the ability to shine, they will shine. Also, you don't wanna lose those people. So those people may figure out on their own that they are not giving, being given the opportunity.

They want to be challenged and to be able to advance within your own company that you have, and so you may find they leave and you may find they leave suddenly. And because they've been given opportunity to get into either a project coordinator or a project or some type of other role within a lot more project components and a lot more complexity, good project managers, we increase the size of our projects that we manage by increasing complexity with the increased number of people, increased number of deliverables, increase budget, all of the things that go along when you hear about project management.

And if those people are not getting it within your company, they will leave and you're gonna have a gap not only of what they're currently leaving, but what they could have been within your company. 

Galen Low: I like that. It's also a retention play. It's like capturing and retaining value and maybe solving a project management problem within your organization.

Yeah, maybe just look internally and don't write that off yet before you, go out and look for Rockstar Unicorn PM, which is fine too. But you might have one internally. 

Barbara Kephart: You might have one internally. And also knowing when I work with clients is that many clients will say, oh, it needs to be people within the same department that come together to bring in these layers of project management.

Or it needs to be people in the org structure at a certain position within the org structure. That's not true. I have had wonderful experience with groups of all different education level, all different experience level, all the way from PhDs working with admins on project management. All of our jobs involve some pieces of project management, and when you bring in the people that are the most fascinated and geek out about project management details, they could be your PhD and they could be your newest executive, virtual assistant or EA that you bring in. And bringing them together when we're all talking the same language and making sure things are being done within the company, it can be a beautiful thing. 

Galen Low: I love this sort of notion of like, giving people a chance to shine. And without getting too political, I wasn't sure if I was gonna take it here, but without getting too political, at this present time there's a lot of sort of human migration happening right now.

So they are, there's a lot of folks where we are, a lot of newcomers who are very talented and very skilled and may be struggling to find an opportunity and may not have the experience that one might need. So, five years of experience running x type of whatever electronic medical record projects within North America. They're not gonna have it, but they might also be those rockstars, undiscovered rockstars.

And it strikes me that, this model does sort of support that in a way where it's like, okay, I'm, Barb's still gonna be here, or one of Barb's senior PM is gonna be here helping make strategic decisions. And we're gonna bring someone in who's the right fit and cultivate them into this role.

Like do you find yourself in from the external side of things, bringing in talent that also are undiscovered project managers into your talent pool to say, listen, you would be a great person for me to pair with this organization, and I'll have that conversation. Let me broker that discussion with them to say this is the right person.

I will support them, even though if you looked at their resume and they came and interviewed, you probably would never hire them. But let me make this work. Is that a part of what you do? 

Barbara Kephart: Yes, it is what I do. And I do encourage the people that are coming externally to help them clean up their resume, to show their project management experience, because they don't always understand that they have been project managing.

However that said, resumes do not always show what someone is capable of in a project management. And so for those people who are listening, who are hiring through Indeed or LinkedIn or wherever it may be for a senior project manager, just know that the resume doesn't always reflect their actual project management skills. And I find that newcomers to Canada and the US are highly educated in something else.

Sometimes they might be physicians, sometimes they might be pharmacists. Sometimes they might have a couple of master's degrees or a couple PhDs, and you're exactly right, they can't get jobs here. Because either their credentials don't match, they can't get anything within their field. But simply the fact that they got here made it that they're pretty darn organized to have made it here and have been able to stay and go through the process that is involved in that.

I know when I returned to Canada after living in the US for a long period of time, it's a big process going back into a country and I just came from the next country over. I can't imagine coming from a different country and not being able to have it as my first language. And so a lot of these people do come my way, and a lot of them are incredible project coordinators and project managers long term.

They don't necessarily have to have the exact subject matter expertise that the company is doing, but they move into these roles and they are sharp. They can do the work, they want to do the work, and they're highly motivated to learn. And they come with a wealth of experience and education from their home countries that we don't have here. And people need to understand the value of these newcomers and how much they can contribute towards a company success. I find that, yes, a lot of my people that I place are newcomers. However, a lot of them are also people who are changing careers, who are choosing to leave.

We have a lot of people who are switching jobs right now that they're like, this job is not working out for me right now. And so there's other ones that we need to take into account. Those might also be newcomers as well, where they have left their country and they're like, I actually don't wanna do the job that I had before.

And so there's kind of two aspects to that. There are the newcomers as well as they're the people who are like, Nope, it's time for me to change jobs and this is the area that I wanna go to. And that those are the ones that I can help them figure out, is being a project manager long-term, really for you?

The other one I wanna call out is, besides the newcomers and those who are wanting to change their career and try something different are the ones who are working, I call it working projects off the sides of their desks. So those have a tendency also to be very highly educated people. They have a tendency to be more senior staff within a company.

And they keep giving projects, but they really don't wanna do it because they really like, the regulatory affairs that they're working in. Or they really like the water management engineer job that they have, but they're also having to manage projects. Those are people that also need some help because they want to do a good job.

But they want to do the project aspects of it as quickly and efficiently as possible so they could get back to the job that they really love, which is, the more senior role that they're in. So those are the other ones, and that's where I was saying is when we bring in layers of project management, it could be a combination of all three of those examples that I just gave.

It could be the more senior, person who's managing the projects off the sides of their desk, plus the newcomer who might be coming in who has been given an incredible opportunity to have this job. Plus the one who's, let's say, an executive admin who wants to, put their hand up and said that I wanna have a different career.

And yes, I would think project management, for me, I would love to have this opportunity. So that can be across one company where you could have those three types of groups of people coming in and building out your project management. 

Galen Low: In terms of the tough stuff, it seems like a lot of stars need to align for this to work and there is risk. So like what are some of the things that can go wrong with this model and how do you know when it's just not working? 

Barbara Kephart: So after we go through this whole process and we have this trial period, even though we have this three month trial period, and at the end of the trial period, by the way, what happens is the.

Let's see, it's someone I bring in from externally. The client has the option to either extend the person for a little bit longer to see if it works out. Maybe they're not ready to hire that person internally yet, or so we just either extend the contract or they say, yes, I want this person. So then they're able to take the person as part of our contract.

We have arrangements that we make through that. But sometimes during that three month period of time, they may not work out. I usually have a tendency, either myself or my senior project managers have a tendency to know within the first couple weeks the red flags that come up. And a good project manager, by the way, always picks 'em up when they're yellow, not red.

So let's say the yellow flags that we pick up are the person is expecting whoever they're working with the company is to give them direction. That's not a good trade of a project manager, so that's one of the more common things that I see is whoever it is in this role is waiting for direction. That's not a skill of a good project manager long term.

They have to be self-starters. They have to be able to jump in there, and they have to be able to find the information they're looking for. They have to be asking all kinds of questions, asking all the right questions. So that's the number one thing that I see where I have to start saying, okay, wait a minute.

You can't expect them to hand you over everything. You need to be getting in there and finding it. You need to be figuring out what their problems are. So this is something we can help them through our mentoring, but at the same time, if somebody can't do that, then that's a yellow flag. The other yellow flag that I get are people that kind of wanna stay on the surface of the projects, if that makes sense.

They don't really wanna dive into the details. They think they're gonna be a good project manager, but when it comes down to the details, they don't really care for them that much. Those ones I encourage them that it, they might be better off at like more of a sales job or something that has a close where then you move on to something else.

But diving deep into details, this is something that we, as project managers, as dedicated project managers, we love. The more details the better. And so that is a yellow flag that turns into a red flag when I see someone not being able to do that as well. So at the end of a two to three week period of time, if we're not seeing any outcomes, cuz everything is about outcomes, then I usually work with the leaders of the company to say, what are you noticing with this person?

And if they don't work out, we do have to pull them out and then we immediately replace with another person who is either the next one in line or whoever else might be available. That said though, and then of course we repeat that process with that same person. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

I do wanna call that out. The thing is the person that didn't work out, we are now developing ways to be able to get that person back up to speed. Whether it's staying in project management or encouraging them into other different jobs that might be better suited for them, because we don't want to just let them go.

So we are trying to work with those people to say, okay, what happened? So in our project management field, we call this a postmortem or a retrospective analysis. So we work with them to say, okay, what do you think happened here? What do you think could have been improved on? How could we have improved? How could have the client have improved to work this process out?

To try and give them another chance, whether it's in another position or potentially looking into a different job field, referring them elsewhere to different types of jobs that might exist for them that are better suited. 

Galen Low: I think that's so cool. I love the idea of a sort of placement. Postmortem are retrospective. Because I mean, to your point the thing that would have caught your eye in the first place is someone who's willing to learn.

What about the flip side? Have you ever fired a client because their readiness sort of altered? 

Barbara Kephart: I haven't fired a client, but I have asked that we might have to just hold off for a little bit and slow down. And I do have clients that we have done that and it's been mutual where they'll say to me and I'll say to them, You have a lot going on right now, but it's hard for us to put any solid processes in place because there's no base organizational structure yet.

We're not really sure right seats, roles that hasn't been taken in place. So on the operational side, they're not quite ready yet. So I do have a partner company that brings in operational people that I can ask to see if they might wanna talk to them, to see if we can build out the operational team a little bit better.

And then what happens is we sometimes will slow down, we'll still keep engaged where we might continue to do some smaller trainings or workshops to keep people engaged. Because we don't want to discourage the staff that are thinking all this good project management stuff is coming into place, and then we ramp back up at a later period of time.

I've had repeat clients come to me over the years, come back to me over the years saying, okay, now we're ready for a different level. Okay, now we're ready for a different level. Or let's say staff changes. Let's say they did have someone that worked out and either I trained them or they trained them themselves or whatever it might be, and then the person moved across the world and now they have new staff that's coming in so we can repeat the process and bring those people up to speed quickly.

The most important thing is whatever we put in place on the Projects Pivot side within a company is meant to last. It's not meant to, once we are out of the picture, that it gets dropped because the projects people are no longer around. This is meant to last and be sustainable over time. So that's why when clients come back to me, it's because the processes are still working, but they need some iteration.

Project management is all about iteration and continuing to make improvements, small improvements over time as we know, continuous improvement. So yes, I have been fortunate that I have not had to fire a client yet, but we have had to slow down sometimes based on what they have going on within their company.

Galen Low: Fair enough. I like that sort of notion of like a transformation partner in iterations. To your point, layers of project management maturity. 

Alright, last question from me. I just wondered if somebody feels like they may be, or they might know a "undiscovered project manager" within their organization and they wanna take the next step, what advice would you have for someone like that? Who's considering they're not sure, they think they might be a project manager or they know someone who just would be a great project manager and just needs to like, figure out what to do next and explore it. What advice do you have for them? 

Barbara Kephart: Yeah, the first advice I always give people is go and volunteer as a project manager. It may not be called a project manager volunteer position, so don't go searching that on Google. But volunteer and do something that involves a project. So a definition of a project is it has a, it has a unique output, it's temporary, and it has a distinct start and finish.

So find something like that, to even figure out if this is for you. It's twofold. If you get in there and you start diving into all these details and you're like, ah, yuck, I can't stand details, then you might have to reconsider, maybe I shouldn't be a project manager. But if you dive into the details and you want more and they keep giving you more and more work and they keep, the volunteer organization keeps saying, oh, we love you.

Here's more and more, which is what I get stuck in, then you know you probably are going to be a good project manager. And so the other, the, that's twofold. That's the first advantage is that you get more and more experience. And the second one is you can put that on your resume. You can put it in your volunteer section of your resume and you're clearly showing that you have experienced managing projects.

No, you maybe didn't get paid for it, but it's still showing experience and that counts. The other thing too is when you look at whether you yourself wanna be a project manager or somebody wanna be a project manager, there's certain traits that we all carry. We're very curious people. You're gonna find that we ask a lot of questions and we also want to go check things out.

We wanna go look at this and we wanna look at that. I know myself, when I look back in time, a time that I knew I wanted to be a project manager was the very first time I took CPR class and I was there with my best friend. And when the time come for us to have a break, I needed to know how the mannequin worked.

So I was taking the mannequin apart and I wanted to know how the air got in and how the air got back in. And she was, we were what, 14 years old? And she just was like, oh, Barb, I can't believe her taking apart the mannequin at break. And when we look back now, that was one of those times that I realized, I was so curious about how this mannequin worked.

She has since become a writer. She doesn't care about how mannequins are taken apart. She just likes writing. And so, you really want to figure things out and how to fix them. And so the other thing about project managers, and I've mentioned this before, is we're bored doing the same thing over and over again.

We wanna be challenged. We wanna be challenged more and more. We're also good at listening. We're also good at, in particular, active listening. So really focusing in on what somebody is saying and being able to repeat it back and being able to translate that into action items, that's another skill that project managers. And then we also don't have to be told what to do next.

So those are the skills when you look at whether you, yourself, feel like you could be a good project manager or somebody who can be a good project manager. Those are the skill sets that we naturally carry. You'll also find that these people have been probably project managing their whole life.

If you're the one that's referring a project manager, they may have been project managing you their whole lives. And so those are traits to look at within a project manager. And then the biggest advice I can give 'em besides the volunteer experience is go talk to a project manager. Talk to an experienced project manager.

I picked up the phone and I called the Project Management Institute. Like I said, I got this nice person on the other line who calmly answered all of my questions. And my biggest question was, what happens when the project is done? If I decide to be a project manager, what happens when the project is done?

And the person said to me, you get another project. And I was like, okay, that's a good answer. And so go and talk to somebody who has experience being a project manager and come with your list of questions. And that's the best way that you can learn if this is for you or not. 

Galen Low: And also it works in reverse for organizations looking for these people. Turns out you just have to run some CPR training and see who takes apart the dummy during lunch break. 

Barbara Kephart: Exactly. 

Galen Low: There you go! Barb, thanks so much for your insights today. Thanks for all your stories. I know our listeners have found this insightful and of course it's always a pleasure. If folks wanna learn more about you and Projects Pivot, where can they go?

Barbara Kephart: They can go to projectspivot.com.

Galen Low: Alright folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come and join our collective! 

Head over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch on thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening.