The podcast by project managers for project managers.
Table of Contents
01:00 … Meet Andy and Bill
04:07 … The Evolution of the PM
06:40 … Managing Stakeholders
12:42 … Common Challenges in Consulting Projects
19:24 … Technology Development and Non-IT Workgroups
23:10 … Is Agile Truly Being Used?
26:22 … Recommendations for New PMs/PMO Role in Agile
31:20 … Starting out in Project Management
33:02 … Wrap Up
ANDY CROWE: But I would start out not focused on the letters after my name, not focused on the alphabet soup, but focused on the fundamentals of project management and learning it.
NICK WALKER: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. This is our time to talk with you about what really matters to you as a professional project manager. We want to encourage you, to challenge you, to give you some new ideas and perhaps a fresh way of looking at the profession.
I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the two guys who make this podcast happen, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates. And Andy, today we’re actually going to hone in on some questions that we’ve gotten from our listeners.
ANDY CROWE: I like that. We’ve gotten some good feedback from our listener community. And I’m looking forward to diving into that.
Meet Andy and Bill
NICK WALKER: I think it would probably be a good idea, though, to maybe learn a little bit more about you two guys. I mean, we’ve gone for so long talking to different guests, learning about them. But who is Andy Crowe and Bill Yates? Andy, you are an author, a speaker. You’ve done so many things. How did you get into this?
ANDY CROWE: And I’m also an existentialist, so that’s a really interesting question that you’re asking. Who am I? Why am I here?
You know, Nick, I have been doing this a while. I’ve been managing projects really since the late ‘80s; but technically, formally, with the title since the early ‘90s. And seen a lot of changes come through. You know, when I started, it’s funny because I was there, you know, for the birth of Microsoft Project, and we all thought this was amazing. And that turned out to be a really interesting thing for project managers because it could reformulate a schedule. It could do things like that. But it didn’t make people better project managers. Just like handing Microsoft Word to a writer is not going to make them a better writer; handing a good microphone and an amp to a speaker isn’t going to make them a better speaker or a better communicator.
And so, you know, when I started with this, the tools that were coming along were useful, but they also just enabled a lot of bad practices. So I put my career and my energy into learning project management, learning how it should be done, probably learning enough to be really dangerous because then I had a hundred different ways to do something that probably just needed a simple solution.
I’ve written a few books on project management. I’ve written a couple of test-oriented resources for the PMP Exam, “How to Pass on Your First Try,” and the PMI-ACP, which is the Agile Certified Practitioner exam, “How to Pass on Your First Try.” And then “Alpha Project Managers,” which is my favorite of the three. It’s not the one that’s been the most commercially successful of the three, but it was the most fun to really get in and research the practices. It’s called “What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not.” And it looks at the practices that make some project managers successful and maybe sets them apart from their peers.
NICK WALKER: We’re looking forward to tackling some of the questions using your background and expertise in getting into some of these things that our listeners have asked us. But let’s meet Bill Yates.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
NICK WALKER: Bill, we’ve heard your voice. We’ve sort of gotten to know you a little bit through the podcast, but tell me a little bit about your background.
BILL YATES: So who is this guy; right?
