While sitting in a governance meeting the other day, I heard how (before I joined the team) a vendor brought in some high paid six sigma black belts to try to bring the vendor governance workflow in line with my client’s governance workflow.  My client wasn’t sure what they got out of the deal, but if you have a black belt in something, it should be good…right?  Because this venture proved fruitless, the vendor announced, “what you need is kaizen!”  That may be what they said, but it’s not what my client heard.

This was paraphrased by one of my client’s team.  In trying to understand what she was saying, we had a quick back and forth that went a little something like this:

The vendor said there was something that would fix everything.
Cry Pan or Pie Pan or something like that.

I looked at her and ask, do you mean “kaizen”?

She then started to matter-of-factly pointing at me.
That’s it! That’s it! Now, what does it mean?
I said it just means improvement or refinement.

She looked disappointed.  That’s it?

Yep, that’s it.

Now, I know it’s not that simple.  There are no silver bullets.  I do believe in using refactoring or refinement to get you where you need to be, but that’s going to be another post.  This post is more of a shame on you post.  Anyone out there who uses a new term, particularly one in a foreign language without explaining it first, shame on you!  Anyone out there who proposes there are silver bullets in project management, shame on you! And, anyone out there who proposes there are silver bullets in project management, uses a new term to label it, AND charges a lot of money for it, shame on you!

I strongly believe approaches like Agile, Kanban, and others bring a lot of potential value to programs.  Customers don’t need snake-oil nor do they need silver bullets.  What we have here is, a failure to communicate.

I was thinking, maybe I should start a practice that will solve all you’re problems and call it Verbesserung.

Any takers?

Today my wife looked at me and said, “ya know, you’re like that guy on My Big Fat Greek Wedding. We talk about something, anything, and you tell me how it relates to Project Management.”  You know what?  She’s right!  We talk about snow removal…Agile. We talk about getting through the honey-do list…Kanban.  I asked her what I should write this post about.  She said, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

The person she was referring to was Gus Portokalos. He  said, “Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek.” Oh Gus, you wise man.  Recently, I decided I was going to write a lot more.  That leaves me with a bit of a challenge.  I don’t want to produce garbage just for the sake of publishing something.  I see people like James Rich, a blogger I follow, push a volume of product but his quality hasn’t gone down.  As a result, I find myself not only internalizing project management but also verbalizing it at every turn.

Yes, I absolutely believe if you give me a topic, any topic, and I will show you how that topic relates to project management.  So, if by chance you read my blog one day this next week and I’m ranting about how a particular restaurant could offer better service if they employed Agile Methods instead of following a Waterfall Process, you’ll be forewarned.

Remember, there are two kinds of people – Project Managers, and everyone else who wish they were Project Managers.

The question is always asked, which Methodology is best?  It is interesting to see or read the responses from people and their reasoning behind their opinion.  I actually don’t like to use the term Methodology. I would prefer to use the term Approach.  Merriam-Webster defines methodology as a body of methods, rules, and postulates employed by a discipline; a particular procedure or set of procedures.  An approach is the taking of preliminary steps toward a particular purpose.  THAT is what people do.  If you review the PMBoK or the Agile Manifesto, neither are going to say in the event of A-B-C, in this sequence, do D-E-F.  Life, application development, and project management are complicated enough.  You don’t need to write an algorithm to know the next step needed to accomplish goals.

There is a pain point in the industry that I’ve seen ongoing for several years now.  In this post, I’m not going to say which approach I think is better and why.  It’s really kind of irrelevant.  I think what is important is we ask ourselves and our stakeholder. What IS important?

I recently commented on two blogs that address similar topics.  Jesse Fewell wants to empower teams to succeed, equip managers to lead, and enable executives to unlock the secrets of high performing organizations.  Jesse wrote a blog post offering the real reasons behind the methodology wars.  It’s an insightful post and I would recommend you go and read it.

The other blog post was from Mike Cottmeyer, someone I turn to on a regular basis to find inspiration and wisdom within the industry.  Mike wrote a blog post asking Why is Agile so hard to sell? Again, it is a very good read and you should set aside some time to read some of his writings.

My bridge to both blog posts is identifying Wants and Needs.  Both drive motivations.  Once you understand the motivation, you can answer the question “why?”

Before analyzing why one team likes one approach or has disdain for another, you have to question their motivations. We assume we all desire the delivery of value. That’s not necessarily true. Some are more motivated at protecting the status quo or their position in the program.

The hierarchy of wants, not needs, will commonly differ between teams, if we want to admit it or not.

Image courtesy of quickandirty

I’m Derek, a project manager and technology geek who lives and breaths general project management, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and technology.  You can follow me on Twitter @derekhuether or if you really liked this article, subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Over the course of the last 15 years, I’ve really expanded my personal brand.  I started out as a full on Tech Geek.  I launched my first startup in October of 1996.  Yes, when the Pentium 133 was the latest thing.  It was a good ride.  Sure, the company died off after 10 years of business but I got my exit and I learned a lot.  Two things I learned.  One, I like to interact with people.  Two, I don’t like to interact with people when they don’t want to interact with me.  Let’s not waste our time here, people.  Who would you rather have a conversation with?  [1] That guy or gal who walks around the room pushing his business card into everyone’s face.  Or [2], that guy or gal who you know has similar interests or passions as you.

After leaving the hardware-and-software-geek world for the application development world, I found a niche with project management.  I loved the idea I could help solve a problem (deliver on time, on budget, within scope) when given the opportunity to do so.  I could identify a need and provide a solution.  The need to talk project management when dealing with Businesses, Government Agencies and Educational Institutions led me to get my PMP® Certification.  The need to empower my development teams led me to get my Certified Scrum Master Certification.  The need to optimize my work throughput led me to champion the use of a Personal Kanban.

All of these are all mere tools in my toolbox.  But, when you put them all together, they start to describe my personal brand.  I’m a guy who believes in transparency, technology, and information dissemination.  I deliver products with passion, commitment, and skill.

So, what’s the paradox?  I’ve been writing The Critical Path for a while now.  Since it’s launch, I’ve grown more and more passionate about things other then just project management.  I really have two options.  [1] Launch another blog with my personal perspective and focus The Critical Path on my professional perspective. [2] Expand The Critical Path to include more about my other passions.

I love going on Twitter and finding a thousand personal brand experts or social media experts. (That’s kind of a joke)  But, what I believe in most is the wisdom of the crowd.  I would love to see what you have to say.  If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them below.

I’m not going sit here an boast of being some kind of expert on Kanban or guru of personal productivity.  I’m just a Project Manager/Leader who is always keeping his eyes and ears open for newer or better ways to manage time or work.  I believe you should always try to eliminate non-value-added processes, resulting in a positive impact of customer satisfaction, while reducing support costs.  How do you do that?  You get it done as effectively and efficiently as possible.

I recently completed Getting Things Done by David Allen.  It was an interesting book.  Though I use paperless processes to “get things done”, David offered one bit of advice that resonated with me.  To advance a task or activity to more of an actionable conclusion, he said to ask “What’s the next action?”

This parallels what I do with my Kanban (task) board.  I currently have 4 columns:  Backlog, Work In Progress (WIP), Blocked, Done.  When a prioritized task can not be worked, I put the task card (user story) in the “blocked” column.  I then ask myself the question.  What’s the next action? Without asking yourself that simple question, your task may be blocked longer than necessary.  You have to understand there may be 3 or 4 steps you need to complete before you can unblock your task and get it back to WIP.  So, ask the question.

As to not ignore the obvious, I recommend you write your tasks in a standard user story format. As a [perspective], I want to [activity], so I can [desired outcome]

It doesn’t matter if you use a physical or virtual Kanban (task) board.  I recommend following 3 simple rules:

1. Keep your tasks visible
2. Keep your tasks limited
3. Keep your tasks actionable