Welcome to the Everyday PM Podcast, the podcast where we
discuss project management principles for your everyday
life. My name is Anne Campia.
I'm a certified project manager. I also come with experience in
various industries including healthcare, tech, marketing, you
name it. I think I've had a awesome time
experiencing being a project manager in any of those
industries. I'm currently the VP of project
Management and Operations over at True Sense Marketing.
I'm so excited to welcome our very special guest, Corey Cogan,
who is Franklin Covey's Vice President of content and senior
consultant, as well as the co-author of project management
for the Unofficial Project Manager.
Corey, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us
today. Thank you and for having me,
it's a delight to be here. And I wanted to obviously dive
into the details of not just the book, but of your professional
journey. But before we get started with
today's conversation, why don't you take a brief moment to
introduce yourself to our audience?
Well. Thank you for that.
And again, like you said, I, I've been with Frank Mcgovy for
hard to believe almost 18 years now.
Time has flown and I bring I, I guess my claim to fame is I
bring an executive on the street background to Franklin Covey.
So been around the block around executive leadership, project
management, all those kinds of things and having the
opportunity to blend all of that with the principles of Franklin
Covey has been a gift. You might tell from my accent,
I'm born and raised in New York City, but I live in Tucson, AZ
and I've held many positions around training, project
management, sales. And here we are.
Here we are today working on lots of things around
leadership, project management, sales, etcetera.
So it's just a delight to be here.
And this book has been really unbelievably successful.
A surprise to us as how how important it's been for
unofficial project managers. So real, real delight to be able
to talk about it today with you. Yeah.
And our audience, you know, is project managers, non
traditional, traditional, whatever you want to call it.
So I think what was most attractive to me about the
title, even the title of the book is you.
You speak about project managers, but unofficial project
managers, which you know in in today's world and kind of coming
up as APMA, lot of us fell into project management accidentally,
unofficially. And so I appreciate that you've
provided that viewpoint, not just as a part of your book, but
it sounds like it's part of your professional journey as well.
That's true. I'd like to say that I'm a
scarred unofficial project manager.
I previously was the executive vice president of worldwide
operations for a global franchise organization and
coming up, you know, in that organization, just doing these
big projects like implementing ISO 9000 globally and A and a
worldwide learning management system.
You don't, you need to be an engineer or a, you know, APMP to
do that. You just in this day and age of
knowledge workers, we were paid to think, innovate and create
and execute. We're asked to do these big
things and don't realize these are projects and along the way
without having, you know, little a little extra knowledge, we
push our ways through and we get the job done.
But with with a few scars, unless we know just a few things
that really make a difference. Let me ask you something 'cause
I'm curious you, you said you took on a lot of these projects
and you know, at some point was there an aha moment where you
said, wait a minute, All of the things I've been doing on these
massive projects that I've taken on exemplifies all of the skills
that are being looked at for a project manager.
Was there that moment where you went from I'm an unofficial
project manager to wait? I'm actually project managing
this this project. There, there were a couple.
I, I, I sort of knew early on that it, I mean, I knew it was a
project, but I didn't have knowledge really of the official
processes of project management TMI and you know, all of that.
The most interesting one, I know this will be a little
surprising, but relatable for people is when I was doing this
implementation of ISO 9000 and my boss, who was the CEO of the
company, kept saying to me, Corey, Are you sure?
You you should we get a consultant to help you because,
you know, all these pieces are going to come together and
you're going to sort of get crushed.
And, and I'm like, Oh no, I've got, you know, I've got this,
you know, kind of, and I didn't. And that day came where I got
crushed and he, he almost lovingly fired me.
He didn't. But that was a big aha, that I
finally was paying attention to the fact that there were systems
and processes in place that could make my life easier.
And then, you know, as the years went by, particularly at
Franklin Covey, you know, sort of understanding and learning
more about official project management and the understanding
that you can distill things from that to put into play in our
day-to-day work started to started to rise to the top for
me. And being that scarred from that
episode, I was all about looking for how do I make things easier
because this is more of my day-to-day job than I thought.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. By the way, ISO 9000 for those
that don't understand them, massive complexity of a project
like that. Corey, I'm just in awe that you
said, don't worry, I got it because that's a big project.
But I think, you know, going along the lines of you, you hit
some of these bumps that eventually made you look further
into, are there foundational things from a project management
perspective that I can start to capture as part of how I manage
these types of projects moving forward?
You know, can you share some more of those pitfalls that you
see happening as you know, folks do take on these unofficial
project management type roles and that type of work, some of
the other pitfalls that they might see?
I know that personally, I've had to take my bumps as well just to
get those experiences under my belt.
Well, the interesting thing is and for whether you're a small
business or a medium business or a large business.
So I'll go back to what I said before.
We are all now many of us are knowledge workers paid to think,
innovate, create and execute. Do you know, excuse me?
And we don't, we've slipped into this role.
Sometimes we don't even, we're not even aware of it.
And so wherever I go around the world, I'll ask the question,
I'll I'll say, hey, let's bring storm.
What are some of the challenges of projects?
And the same things come up over and over and over again.
Goals aren't clear or the objectives aren't clear.
We don't have right good communication.
We Scope Creek is, you know, a favorite one and we get this,
this list of failures. Why do projects fail?
That is consistent. I could be in Rwanda or Dubai or
the UK or the United States. I have gotten the same list
every single time and it's become normalized.
So a lot of workers, whether you're a leader or an individual
contributor, we are 80. If you think about it, we don't
have project manager on our business card or in our
signature on our e-mail, but most of the work we're doing has
a beginning and an end. It's a it's, it's a project.
And so but we wake up and we go to work, whether you are the
leader or you are on a project team and you're like, OK,
there's not going to be clear objectives.
There's not going to be good communication.
We're going to have the wrong roles for, you know, etcetera.
And it's just become normalized. And the cost of that is
overwhelming. I mean, overwhelming until
people realize, wait a minute, all those challenges or why the
project fail, I can do something about it.
So it just sort of comes upon US versus this consciousness
around, Oh my goodness, I'm unofficial.
It's like, no, wait, I'm unofficial.
I didn't realize it. And there's something I can do
about it and make people's lives better by minimizing some of
these failures or reasons for failure that just had become
normalized. Yeah.
So did you find as you started to pick up on these trends that
it helped kind of frame your perspective on how you wanted to
manage projects through start to finish?
Does even today and again, you don't have to go.
I, I, there's, I mean, I have all the respect in the world
for, you know, project management professionals, BMI
and and the other organizations that certified but it it, it
governs. I don't always get my way and it
always doesn't go right. So I'd like to consider myself a
laboratory rat with this stuff, but I am always thinking about
and using the principles of project management processes to
govern, even today, how I work a project or a part of a project
to try to make my life and other people live people's lives, you
know, easier. Yeah, and and, and it and I
obviously I don't represent PMI, so I shared the same sentiment
as you. As you know, you look at PMI as
a governing body and they try to put out publications and other
ways, frameworks like agile, hybrid methodologies, waterfall
approaches to help guide project managers.
But essentially what you're saying is true.
It's, you know, you can only get so much from a foundational
perspective, understanding the principles.
But when you actually get into the work, that then becomes just
you as the unofficial or official PM to just figure out
what you need to do to overcome and navigate some of those
challenges. And I want to say that's part of
the reason why I loved reading through the way that you've
written this book with your co-author is because it is
practical. It really does get into, you can
tell that yourself and your co-author have been through that
grind, have tried to take the principles and apply them in the
ways that makes sense for your business.
And so for those who haven't read it yet, I think there's a
lot of value in just reading it from the perspective of people
who have lived through what we've lived through as project
managers and are trying to take some of the standards and things
that PMI is out there promoting. But also understanding that
that's not going to solve the challenges that you have to
navigate. It's just going to give you a
little bit of structure, a little bit of guidance on how to
maybe get there and be successful.
Yeah. And we're endorsed by PMI.
So I mean, people can take our courses and they get credit for
that. So we used, I mean, the
principles now with, you know, even with Pimbok, which is
their, their, their guidance, you know, we're always on top of
that. Moving from six to seven is when
we updated the book and, and updated our course and stuff
like that. It's just taking those things
and distilling them down into something usable for somebody
like me who's out there, you know, working on things with
beginning and end most of my, you know, most of my career.
Yeah, agreed, agreed. And do you would you say there
are any differences in the skill sets that unofficial project
manager should, you know, try to practice on a day-to-day basis
versus somebody who is an official titled project
management role? You know, I think a lot of the
skills are the same. I mean, so you know, our
process, if you think about it, is, you know, we there's five
steps we need to scope the project, we need to plan the
project, we need to engage the people, we need to track and
adapt the project that we need to close.
So you can tell we took pieces of Timbot 6:00 and 7:00 and we
sort of have this blend of waterfall and agile.
So it's interesting 'cause you sort of do some of these things
intuitively and, and, and you know, 'cause when we scope AI
mean you can think about, you know, a, a big dinner that
you're making or a holiday dinner.
You need to plan it. You, you, you need to scope it,
you need to plan it out. You need to engage people to
help you, you need to track everything.
And you know, you need to serve the dinner kind of thing.
So it's interesting how intuitive this is and how,
whether you're an official project manager or an unofficial
1, you are institutionalizing or making really conscious these
skills. What I will tell you and, and
really is, is is brought out in the book is two other components
besides those things that are sort of skill, one sort of
skills, but one of them is that the process doesn't work by
itself. That we say, you know, that the
mindset, which is where we start with skill development, the
mindset of a project manager, whether you are official or
unofficial, is that it is value plus people plus process.
So particularly, and when we talk about agile and waterfall
agile, meaning we're just more in tune with, are we really
providing value with the end product versus finishing a
product only to find out that it didn't meet the original scope.
That's as simple as, you know, making that definition.
But the key to doing that is not the process, it is how a project
manager is leading the people that are part of the project
team. And that is a major skill
because whether you are a functional leader with actual
direct reports or a matrix leader, which is mainly what
projects are, the goal defines the team really in a project you
need to lead with and be skillful in what we call
informal authority. You can't say you have to do it
this way or you're going to be, you know, it's like I don't
report to you. It's how are you inviting people
to want to play on your team and want to play to win?
That is a skill. And that's where we get into
talking about the five behaviors.
Out of all the leadership development things out there, he
can just master the five behaviors that are in the book.
You will go a long way in making people feel like they'd like to
work with you and like to get the job done, which makes
everything much easier. That's the real skill.
Corey, are you willing to dive in?
You know, obviously we don't want to give the whole secret
sauce of the recipe to to the audience.
I want definitely want them to pick up the book and read it.
But do you want to give an overview of those five behaviors
for for the audience? I'd love to and, and again,
remember, you know, a really important thing is, and I'm sure
some of you will relate to this, a lot of people that are running
projects made conscious decisions to not lead people in.
And in organizations, you notice there's a leadership track.
Sometimes they call it a genius or a technical track 'cause
they're like, not I'm not into leading people and they lead
projects, but then they end up leading people anyway.
Yes, very true. And so that's why I say there's
a ton of leadership development stuff out there, including, you
know, Franklin Covey. It's what we're known for and
for us as unofficial project managers, what we decided was,
you know what, let's just distill down sort of what I was
saying. And this comes from Stephen, Mr.
Covey's work. If you know the speed of trust
body of work out there, he says there's 13 behaviors of high
trust leaders. We narrow that to five.
Here's the five you need to and and they sound easy.
It's like, well, my parents taught me this, but when you're
under pressure stuff and I being, and again, I hate to
stereotype myself, born and raised New York City.
I, I'm an executive. So you can imagine I'm very
direct to the point. I, I and, and so I could be
abrupt and I could put people off possibly if I'm not careful.
I've had to work on that my entire career. 5 behaviors.
First one, demonstrate respect. I, I mean, you real, you know,
again, saying hey, just do it because I said so isn't going to
work for you. It's not going to, it's not
going to invite somebody to volunteer their best efforts.
You need to listen. Listen first as we say, and you
need to clarify expectations. And we don't mean clarify
expectations of the project. That's different.
I have been, I've seen this happen where somebody will say,
hey, why am I doing this task on the project?
And the project leader will say, don't worry about it.
Just do the task. You know, you don't need to
know. And you've, you've turned that
into a task that they just want to punch in, punch out, you
know, you're not getting anything extra from them versus
saying, oh, I'm so glad you asked.
Here's the purpose of your task and the bigger picture.
And again, I know we're on borrowed time.
There's so much research on people needing to feel purpose
at work and how and how vital that has become anyway.
So clarifying expectations of how each person and their job
fits into the bigger scope of the project.
Extend trust. Again, I could go on about each
of these behaviors. Extending trust to others.
You have to delegate out the work and not do everything
yourself. Or they need to feel like you
trust them. They'll give you so much when
they feel trusted by you. And then finally, practice
accountability. First of all, you need to be a
model of accountability. So you need to stick to your
commitments, but the harder not, but it's an end because first
and foremost, you need to model accountability.
You have to hold people accountability and you have to
learn how to do that in front of other people respectfully and
how to do it to get the job done.
Because if Anne, you show up to the meetings late three times in
a row and nothing happens, then I'm like, hey, I don't, I don't
need to, I'm going to go, you know, take my kids to school
because why I there's no repercussions.
So but, but holding accountability without
embarrassing people and doing it in a way that's very
professional. So those are the five behaviors
and they. They tie in so beautifully to
what you said before you went into the overview, which was
this idea around value and the project managers, unofficial or
official understanding how you can drive the even the concept
of value add of the project to to the team, to the
organization. And I think that coupled with
these five behaviors as of you as a leader, is really kind of
digging into all of the elements that come into play.
If you become an unofficial project manager and are trying
to figure out how to navigate being successful in your role.
I think that that's absolutely some of the secret sauce that we
need to infuse into what we do on a day-to-day basis.
Yeah. And and also for official
project managers because we do a lot of times have official
project managers in our groups and coming to us.
And I would say to anybody that's on this call, they
struggle that I again, I'm, I'm making a big statement here.
They tend to struggle the most. With.
Asking the right questions to get to the value prop.
And more importantly, they struggle with the people side.
So the last thing that they need to read about in this book is
how to do a Gantt chart. They know how to do a Gantt
chart. What they really struggle with
official project managers is how do I engage people to do the
work? And that's so.
So this is not just the unofficial project world.
This is across the spectrum. And I, I would love to hear your
perspective kind of just to round out this conversation
around, obviously, you're an executive at Franklin Covey,
you've written this book, you've got the unofficial, even
official experiences as being a project manager throughout your
professional journey. This all leads to how can we be
successful as project managers titled or not?
And what are the things we can do to help ourselves and our
organizations be successful, but ultimately get that value back?
So that's a long way of me asking you, you know, at
Franklin Covey in terms of your role now and as an executive and
knowing the things that you've learned having LED these types
of projects, what are the some of the things that you've
promoted within your organization or that you've seen
seen be successful as a result of some of the things that
you've captured in your book? Great question.
And I will continue to say that I'm a laboratory rat and it's
really hard. It doesn't always go the way I
want it to go either. And I continue to work at it and
even right now handedly right in the middle of a project that is
now paused. And if I think about a
retrospective or lessons learned I could have done and we, it's a
big we, right? It's not just me, but we could
have done or should have done a better job, a better job front
loading. So back in scoping, how could we
have done better? And sometimes you can't.
It's only in the retrospective, which is an important part of
closing a project which we're not up to yet, but is you always
have to look at that and say how could I have done this better to
avoid this kind of pause, if you will, you know next time.
So what's been successful is again, making sure that you
first of all have the right stakeholders and the right key
stakeholders. And we go into that in the book
and by the book, the way the book is really a series of
stories. Speaking of success, it's a
series of 3 or 4, like you were reading a novel in addition to
the technical aspects. So it's not this heavy book, but
you're going to see some of these challenges and some of
them are autobiographical. So when you see the story about,
you know, building out a new headquarters for a hybrid, you
know, work environment, that's from my previous experience as
well. So, like many authors, we bury
our angst into, you know. Into what we're.
Into what we're, we're writing, identifying the right key
stakeholders is really key and we give guidance on that because
it's, you know, what's obvious a lot of time are the signers, you
know, who is, holds the budget and you the CEO, you know,
whoever it might be. And we call it the key
stakeholder dance. Who are the decision makers, who
has the authority, who has the need?
Those are obvious. It's the C and the E who has the
connections and the energy because those are influencers.
And sometimes we forget about the influencers, both positive
and negative, right? So you have and, and so when
you're looking at key stakeholders and I have people
out in the field that I have as influencers because I know those
that are going to be the negative, they say you're, I say
that with respect, you know, kind of thing.
So really important to make sure you identify all of the possible
stakeholders. And again, it's like Will, this
is going to take time, It's not going to take that much time and
it'll save you time in the long run.
But any possible stakeholder in order to then find your group of
key stakeholders and not get blindsided down the road, which
I think a lot of us have have handled.
So doing a really good job of that.
And I'll go back to what I said before and what we do with final
cover, asking really good questions, You know, why are we
doing the project? What's the expectation?
What are the goals around it? Really getting to the value of
it is, you know, is really key. I, you know, I think that and,
and, and I think what I have to work on the most, particularly
in an agile environment 'cause we write programs.
So, you know, training, learning programs.
We're not doing software development, but this
combination of waterfall and agile has a really important
component of today's world. Tracking and adapting is really
important along the way. How do you make sure you're
hitting key stakeholder needs? And again, I'll be the
laboratory rat here and say it's really important to be open
minded to making sure with key stakeholders and testing that
you are headed in the wrong direction.
Don't get so locked into the scope that that it's immovable.
That's, that's, you know, if you're building a bridge, that's
one thing, but that's not how we operate in today's world of
knowledge work mainly. And I would say I have to work,
I always have to work at being open minded to feedback and
feedback loops because I want to just go and that's not, you
know, you have to find the sweet spot there.
So I think we are good at that. That's a real key to success and
knowing where to stop that so you don't get into scopes creep.
Corey, I can I just say that I love how you responded to my
question because you responded to it in the voice and with the
mindset of a project manager who is running their own self
reflection and retrospective on the work that they've done.
So I think in the way that you've portrayed all of the
skill sets, the capabilities, the support that you would need
to be able to understand how to navigate being an unofficial
project manager. In addition to the details and
content of the book that you've now published and then updated
to make sure that it's also staying relevant with, you know,
PMI standards. I think all of that to say,
you've shared just a wealth of knowledge with our audience
today. And I very much appreciate
everything that you've been able to share with us, your insights,
your expertise, as well as the time you've taken out of your
day to spend with us. So is there any closing thoughts
from you as we wrap up our conversation?
You know, I thank you for what you just said.
I, you know, I, I speak all over the world and the last thing I
want to do is be an imposter. So I don't want to get up and
tell everybody what great leadership looks like and what
great project management looks like unless I'm living it.
So I would, I'm a laboratory rat.
I'm human. So, so it's, so I thank you
because it's cathartic for me to share, you know, my, my journey
of reality and I people respond to reality more than you know,
you should be a perfect, you know, person, you know, doing
leadership kind of thing. What I, my final comment,
project management is all the rage, even with AIAI is not, you
know, there's a lot of it's going to replace.
I the statistics on, yes, it's going to replace X amount of
jobs, but it's going to create even more jobs for humans.
Project. Everything is a project.
Since the pandemic, everything has changed.
New systems are being formed every day.
We're making things every day and project management is the
place to be. So if you haven't tried it yet,
give it a try. And if you're in it, take a deep
breath because it really is the skill set of today and the
future as we continue in the new world of AI.
But the human capability side of project development is key to
all of that working really well. Thank you, Corey, and please
always look at the everyday PM and our audience as your area to
just be your authentic self, which you brought forward to us
today. So we can be that group therapy
for you if you ever want to come back onto the podcast and just
have a real conversation around how it really feels to be a
project manager, unofficial or not.
And I look forward to, if you ever want our planning to do an
update to the book that talks about, you know, how AI and PM
is going to end up being kind of cohesive in the future again.
And you're more than welcome to come back onto the podcast to
share your thoughts on that. So Corey, thank you so much for
taking the time with us today to share your insights as well as
share some of the context of the book.
I'll make sure all of the links are dropped as we drop this
episode so that folks can pick up the book and follow Corey as
well as any other areas that you want to promote Corey.
I'll make sure that those are included in this posting.
So folks want to chat further with you.
Can they find you on LinkedIn or is there another place that they
can connect with you on? Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place
and if you want to learn more about anything Frank and Covey
or project management, the book is in the regular sellers and
www.frankandcovey.com. So happy anybody reaches out on
LinkedIn. I'm always glad to connect.
Fantastic. So Corey, on behalf of our
audience, thank you again for choosing this platform to share
your insights on. If folks want to follow me, I'm
on LinkedIn as well. And Kanthia, you can also follow
the Everyday PM podcasts on any of your podcasting platforms.
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, you name it, we're there.
Just search for the everyday PM that will do it for Corey and I
on this instalment of the Everyday PM Podcast.
And until next time, take care.