Dawn Feltner has been a chapter member for almost 10 years and like many of us wonders where the time went. She joined PMI to obtain her PMP which she received shortly after joining in October of 2011. Like many of us, she was performing the work of a project manager long before before she learned of the title. Dawn stumbled on it while studying for the PMP. Once she started studying for her certification, suddenly there was a name, some tools and rigor to what she had been doing and it all clicked! Dawn was fortunate enough that her previous employer, Voya Investment Management, was willing to pay for a PMP boot camp and she had 6 months to study and pass the test. "I loved the classes and study groups, but put that test off until the last possible moment and passed (whew)!"

She is passionate about learning and emphasizes that it doesn't have to be solely academic. Dawn shared, "just listen to people around you (whether you agree with them or not), listen to yourself." The certification has opened professional doors and windows of learnings. "I've learned so much from others in this space and it's great when we can connect and share best practices as well as war stories!"
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Dawn Feltner's personal motto, "If you don't swing you don't hit, so be brave, even if you miss, you learn. Say yes to opportunities that serve you! Live! I try to do a little something different each day since we don't know our expiration date." From a career perspective, Dawn shared, "don't be afraid to ask for help. It gets easier with practice."

When I asked how her what makes her unique it was that a communications major could somehow fit into a financial and technology field and make it this far, it was beyond her imagination. Dawn started her career as a radio morning show co-host for a country music station and at the time was not a country music lover.

Dawn's path to project management? "My project management journey started when I was a kid! I always liked organizing fun events... like getting a group of us to the water park or skiing for the day and it carried with me into my professional life." Dawn started doing corporate event planning, then assisting with IT transformations and a complete continuous improvement business initiative. Dawn Feltner now has a new title, she is a Change Manager for GoDaddy, which is becoming more entwined with traditional Project Management.

Dawn's proudest moment, winning the highest award at my previous company for helping to develop a training course on "Developing a Culture of Feedback" Her inspiration was seeing light bulb moments when people you work with understand and are excited for what's going on...whether its a project, during training or coaching. She is so thankful to have had a supportive workplace and leaders who walked the walk when it came to work life balance and that showed me how to integrate the two.

Dawn Feltner's, heros were her parents. They illustrated a strong work ethic, compassion, tenacity and humor. "You need to get it done while having some fun, her career attitude." The causes she cares about, AZ Helping Hands which provides basic needs for foster children in Arizona. She is on their Junior Board to help with scheduled events from a project process management perspective. It brings her joy to watch kids becoming who they are meant to be.

If she needs to balance her work and daily life she seeks nature. Dawn is a mountain, lake and wilderness seeker to find a bit of tranquility to slow down the chaos of life. Dawn's can do manner, impressed me and brought me a ray of sunshine.

He is being honored for his work on his most recent project of the past two years, Future Cities. Future Cities is a reoccurring social good project that the chapter supports, year over year, supporting local high school students. They mentor project management skills, interview and judge students across Arizona.

His colleagues often tell John that he is organized, creative, and a team player. Helping him through his daily work is his sense of humor. John Chico recently went back to his career roots of accounting and applied the project management principles to his work. His attention to detail is serving him well as an SRP Auditor. John's philosophy is that in challenging times, success comes to those that demonstrate focus and flexibility.

John Chico enjoys music and travel and hopes to make it to Northern Italy. John is a centered family man whose passion revolves around his wife, children, and grandchildren. His proudest moments were their births that continued his family legacy.
From a career perspective, John Chico's proudest moment of his professional career was when he worked for an airline that had fatalities on 9/11. John was asked to be part of a project to help victims' families. "Getting those families through events that were so sudden and tragic made me feel like I had made a difference when it was most needed."

I was struck with my realization that John Chico pauses in his life journey to smell the roses. His motto is to be kind, appreciate the environment around you, and say thank you. Yes, like all project managers, he works hard, but this was also instilled by his grandfathers, who were immigrants. They taught him to work hard and to be kind to others. The message of kindness and the practice of gratitude resonated with him. For those of you who might not be familiar with the concept of the practice of gratitude, it is noticing the small things when you are fully present. If you string the small things together, it promotes well being, positivity and over time, creates a feeling of well-being, which helps alleviate our stress in our daily life of being a project manager.

Giving back to youth and others resonate with John Chico. His passion was apparent, and the chapter is proud to award him the February 2021 volunteer of the month award.

PMI Global is looking for participants to pilot test our upcoming eLearning offering – the Citizen Developer Practitioner Course and Micro-credential. This will include 4-5 hours to complete the course and a 60-minute exam. The pilot test will begin on 22 March, and you will have three weeks to complete the course and exam. After completion, you will be required to provide feedback on your experience.

In this course, you will learn how to:
• Determine if your problem can be solved with a Citizen Development process
• Effectively brainstorm solutions
• Evaluate the challenges that your app must overcome
• Gather the data and resources you will need
• Bring your project to fruition

Participants will receive the product for a greatly discounted price of $99 (Actual price : $249) and earn both a digital micro-credential badge and a minimum of 6 PDUs.
PMI Global will be in touch on 18 March to inform those who have been selected. As there are limited spots available, not all who apply will be able to participate. Those not selected will be provided with a discount code to take the course once it has been launched.

PARTICIPATE IN THE PILOT

Offer valid for a limited time. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Discount is applied to the full price. Other conditions may apply. For details on terms and conditions, visit PMI.org/terms.

Agile is getting a lot of great press lately as we see companies like Amazon thriving by leveraging the concepts. But we also see push back from other business leaders on why Agile won’t work for them, or companies that have tried going Agile but are not seeing the expected improvements. Instead of realizing Agile as an all or nothing idea, we should analyze each of the Agile principles, taking a pragmatic approach to leveraging Agile within our own organizations.

This focused segmentation on each Agile principle is key since no individual practice will provide a competitive advantage. If something is easy to replicate, everyone will do it. Also, what organizations do is not simple – each one is completing a complex combination of different tasks to create customer value.

That leads me to this – The secret sauce of Agile is: It’s a framework built on strong principles you adjust to fit your organization. The goal is to make the right adjustments while not losing the underlying strengths that Agile brings.

To do that successfully, you need to understand each of the principles in depth. The four key Agile principles we have identified are:

BREAKING PROJECTS INTO SMALLER BITES

CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF TEAMS

BUILDING IN CONTINUAL LEARNING

Join me over the next few posts, as we delve into each one of the principles throughout this Agile blog series. Today, we start with: Breaking Projects into Small Bites.

Smaller Bites

The first principle is breaking projects and initiatives into smaller bites, following the old adage that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. As we think about how to break up projects, we need to also answer:

If you think about construction, where traditional project management comes from, these questions are fairly easy to answer. If you are looking at building a new bridge, for example, to see if there is value, it’s easy to see what those who would use the bridge are doing today, and if they are willing to pay for a replacement. This answers the first two questions, so then the real focus is on how we do it. Since this isn’t the first bridge that’s been built, we can get a reasonable idea and estimates from previous projects to help us answer the last question. If we found ourselves without previous information, we would need to experiment. That’s much harder on these types of projects since there may not be an easy way to break the project up into smaller bites. We could start with a rope bridge, but chances are it’s not going to add any value till we have a four-lane highway ready to use, thus failing the first question.

Construction projects are not the only ones that may provide this complication. IT infrastructure or software upgrade projects are often similar and are quite a bit different from software projects – which is where Agile came from. Software projects are far more unique and have their own conditions to be considered. You see similar issues in marketing, educational design, business process changes, or any project where we don’t have a good, previous solution to copy.

The problem with these types of projects is:

Even with this complexity, there is some good news. Unlike construction projects, these projects are easier to break up into experiments where we can test our assumptions and reduce the risk to the organization. The key is to focus on breaking the project up into the right pieces, that will help answer these questions as quickly as possible.

How to Break Projects Into Small Pieces

Let’s talk about how to break that elephant up with a real-life example. A company I worked with had a hypothesis that they were paying generous benefits but employees weren’t seeing that value since they didn’t know what those benefits cost. For the three questions, the hypothesis was:

How will this project deliver value to the customer?

If employees knew the cost of their benefits, they would be more satisfied

How will it deliver value to the organization?

Satisfied employees would provide more value to the organization (in this case reduced turnover)

How do we do it, including how long will it take, or how much will it cost?

We have access to the benefit information and can present it in the right format to make it easy for employees to understand.

Looking at how to break this project up, we would want to:

Present employees an example of a current benefit to see if this increases satisfaction. If possible, we probably want to start with the biggest benefit.

We don’t have time to wait for turnover, but we still need to measure satisfaction, perhaps with a questionnaire, targeting a group of employees that have the most turnover.

We need to test if we can get access to the data and test different ways to show the information to make sure it is easy to understand

As you lay out what you want to learn, it gets easier to understand how to break the project into the right pieces.

Value of Breaking Projects into Smaller Pieces

So whether you’re agile or not, let’s talk about the benefits of this approach:

As an organization – testing the value of ideas early lets you focus on the good ones. It also helps to uncover big technical risks quickly so you get a picture of the real effort projects will take. Finally, delivering the projects quickly, and in small increments lets you deliver value faster, speeding return on investment.

As a customer – teams are already testing on real customers today; all of them when they release. Smaller testing means you get to see what approach a team is considering early, provide meaningful input on finding the best approach, and only a small group of customers is impacted.

As a team – testing early means you waste less time on bad ideas. It’s demoralizing to put your heart into a project and then not find out till the end it didn’t deliver the value you expected.

By taking this approach, Agile is pushing an empirical tactic, pressing you to think like a scientist, understand what ideas are really theories, and find ways to test the theories early.

As you look at getting this same value with your own projects, think about the three questions around organizational value, customer value, and the approach. If you have good evidence to support your ideas, it may be more similar to the construction

project example, and focusing on how to efficiently put the project in place could be the best approach. But, if there are a lot of assumptions like we described above, it’s worth the time to set up a quick experiment and validate them.

On our next post, I’ll be reviewing the second principle, Connecting with Customers.

The Power of Teams

As kids, I think everyone of us wanted to be superheroes. Teams give us that ability – they turn ordinary people into top performers. In his book Scrum Twice the Work in Half the Time – Sutherland explains the difference between your best and worst individual performers is 10 times. That means the best performers get 10 times more done than the worst. That sounds impressive, until you hear the difference between the worst and best teams is 2,000 times (2,000 times better starts to sound and feel a lot like a superhero).

Part of the difference might be in existing team structure. Most of the time, we think about teams as individuals working on similar items with a manager directing traffic. That’s not a team. And, it won’t provide the advantage of leveraging the intelligence of the group. In his book Turn the Ship Around, Marquette talks about how, traditionally in a submarine, you have one captain thinking for the 140 crew. Marquette discusses how he got each individual to think for themselves. By doing that, he outperformed every other submarine in the US fleet. It was easy for him to see that no other captain, however smart they may be, is going to be as smart as 140 people.

For those who have worked in a solid team, it’s a great experience.  However, teams need the right elements to be successful. An example I like to share is a research project called Aristotle looking at successful teams that Google conducted. They started with an assumption that great teams would be made of great individuals, but couldn’t find any correlation. What they did find were five key elements that did correlate with team performance:

Psychological Safety

Can we take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

Dependability

Can we count on each other to do high quality work and meet commitments?

Structure and Clarity

Are the goals, roles, and plans on the team clear?

Work Meaning

Does our work provide us with an individual sense of purpose?

Work Impact

Do we believe the work we’re doing matters?

If you’re looking for structure, Scrum, the most popular Agile framework, provides teams a simple approach on how to plan, touch base regularly, review work against plans, and implement regular retrospectives to identify and make needed adjustments.

Benefits of Teams

There are so many benefits to high functioning teams, but one of the most valuable is innovation. New ideas often come from leveraging existing ideas in a new way. When you present a problem to a group, each person comes with a different perspective, a lifetime of different experiences, and the more diverse your team is, the more diverse those experiences will be. Great ideas come from one person seeing the problem in a different way, and then others in the group building on those ideas till at the end you have a completely new solution.  This means:

As an organization – innovation is the lifeblood of any good company. It is the ultimate source of competitive advantage. It is why companies like Google and Amazon are so hard to compete with.

As a customer – it gives you the best product at the best price. Customers are so tired of hearing the word “or.” Would you like quality or would you like a price you can afford?  Innovation gives you the ability to give customers “and.” Toyota did this in the 50’s, providing the quality of a Mercedes for the cost of a Ford, gaining a decade of competitive advantage.

As a team – we talked about a key part of successful teams is meaning and impact. There is a joy of going home (or logging off our computer in our home office) at the end of the day knowing that, as a team, you did the impossible and the world is better because of it. Innovation makes the impossible possible, and it’s fun getting to do it.

You don’t have to be Agile to improve what your teams are doing today.  Look at the Google Aristotle aspects of a team and think about how you make groups more like teams.  Wherever you are today, leveraging the genius of the entire organization will help you be far more effective, with a side effect of much happier employees.

In the last part of our Agile Series, we’ll take a look at Continual Learning.