Forward Momentum: Delivering Results

By Vicki Wrona, PMP;  Rob Zell

While listening to podcasts and reading articles that I enjoy, I thought that if we all share our favorite business blogs and podcasts, we might find a few gems to brighten our weeks. Below are some suggestions. What are your favorite podcasts?

From Vicki:

The podcasts I enjoy listening to are:

• Get it Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More podcast by Stever Robbins provides good tips for professionals.

• TED Talks – available in hi-def video or audio only, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a non-profit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Topics include business, environment, technology, engineering, science.  The podcast can be found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video.

• To The Best of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK) by PRI and Wisconsin Public Radio. I have subscribed to this podcast for years, both through audible.com as well as directly from their site. I am a fan of this show, its wide (huge) variety of topics, and its excellent interviewers. I have enjoyed shows on topics I would never have thought about or taken the time to look into.

From Rob :

I admit to not listening to many podcasts as I tend to be more of a visual learner. I enjoy a series by RSA called RSAnimate.  You can find them on YouTube for free here:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rsa+animate&aq=0&oq=rsa

RSA creates videos from audio tracks of famous authors talking about their works and matches it up to video of an artist sketching the concepts. Fun and educational for the auditory and visual learner. It includes summaries from Daniel Pink (Drive), Sir Ken Robinson (on education), and many other thought leaders. It’s fascinating to listen to the summaries while the artist expresses the content visually.

By Vicki Wrona, PMP

As you may have heard, PMI changed the exam on August 31, 2011 by 30%. This was driven by a change in the Role Delineation Study and was designed to make the exam better reflect the updated skills needed and used by project managers. If you started studying to take the PMP® exam using the 4^th edition of the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and couldn’t take the exam before the change, what do you do?

First, don’t panic. Yes, the exam changed 30%. However, some of that is due to a classification adjustment of where different skills fall. Some of it is driven by how scores will be compiled and reported back. In other words, more of it is driven by administration and less of it due to content change from a practical perspective. That is good news, both for those who took the exam by August 30^th and for those taking the exam on or after August 31^st.

We have reached a point in the project management profession where it is sophisticated enough to be defined fairly well. Yes, we will tweak our standard to keep it current and relevant, but overall, the techniques we will use to successfully define and complete projects and to lead our teams are fairly well defined and will remain the same.  This is a compliment to the work that our profession has accomplished over the years and the work PMI has done to capture and document those best practices.

In my opinion, the biggest impact to those taking the exam immediately following the change on August 31^st is that for 4-6 weeks, your score will not be provided immediately. In my opinion, this is to allow time to collect exam results, verify that the exam is fair and test the new exam process. PMI will notify you when your results are available at pmi.org, probably around mid-October. There you will learn whether you passed or not. 

If you are planning to take the exam shortly after August 31, know in advance that you will not know your pass-fail status. If you are OK with that, great. If not, you may choose to wait to take the exam until mid-October.

In summary, don’t panic. If you were able to take the exam by August 30^th, great. If not, that’s fine too. The bigger change will come after the 5^th edition PMBOK® Guide is issued Dec 31, 2012. I strongly suggest that if you have begun studying under the 4^th edition PMBOK® Guide, that you take the exam before it reflects the 5^th edition PMBOK® Guide. While changes to the 5^th edition will not be as extensive as those made in the 4^th edition and while many (most) of the definitions, techniques and best practices you are studying now should remain intact with the 5^th edition, there will still be new names, terms, processes, etc. in the 5^th edition to learn. Together, the changes made in the 5^th edition will most likely be greater than the 30% change in the exam experienced on August 31, 2011. Therefore, if you have started studying, set a goal to take the exam under the 4^th edition PMBOK® Guide if at all possible.

By Rob Zell

How do we increase the longevity of a learning solution? In Part 1 of this series, I challenged the learning organization to examine some basics in their processes and create more effective solutions. In Part 2 of this series I challenged the learner to take a more active role in the learning experience and to share the new found knowledge and skill with the team. However, an effective learning intervention relies on three elements: the solution, the learners and the environment to which the learners will return. In this post, Part 3 of 3, I’m going to examine the environment into which the learner returns and the person responsible for that environment: the manager.

1. Be Laser Focused

As a manager, your people are constantly looking for opportunities to learn and develop themselves. Whether they state it in their development plans (as mandated by HR) or keep it rolling in their subconscious we all want to be the best at something. Your job is to help them get there while being laser focused on the goals of the organization and how your team contributes to those goals. There is rarely warm, fuzzy time to send folks away to training when you have reports to create, products to manufacture, clients to satisfy and budgets to meet. It is critical, therefore, to do two things:

1. Be constantly aware of the goals of the organization and how your team contributes to meeting those goals.
2. Grow your people in ways that help contribute to those ends.

Tune in to the potential you see in your employees and their own goals and align their needs to the business. Look for ways to give them opportunities to be better and contribute in a way that makes your team and the organization better. Does this sound self-serving? It shouldn’t. Think about organizations that rely on employees to be highly focused, demand constant improvement and have high standards for how success is measured. How about NBA basketball teams? As I write this, the NBA finals are underway. Consider how those organizations view talent development, even in their star players.

2. Get Help From Experts

Your organization probably has a training team just waiting to help you be more successful. Granted they may feel understaffed and can’t offer all the classes you want or need. But they are experts in the field of learning and can probably offer you options for informal methods of helping your people grow without formal classes or courseware. They can probably help you set up mentoring sessions, job shadowing, special projects, provide learning resources and draft objectives and outcomes that you can use to demonstrate the power of learning and the impact on your work group.

Don’t be fooled in to thinking that learning only happens at a learning event. Some of the best learning comes from actually working at something new and different. It might mean you need some coaching on how to help your people process and get the most from the experience. That’s ok; you are a learner too.

3. You Don’t Have To Be The Expert

One of the hardest parts of moving up the management ladder is change. You were probably promoted because you were the fastest developer, the most accurate auditor, the most analytical financier, or the most profitable salesperson. Your promotion has taken you from those ranks, and now you process reports, communicate goals and track budgets. You’ve stopped doing the work and started leading the work. It was great when you were still the expert, but times change. New hires have better info, faster tools, new ideas and different perspectives.

Again, that’s ok.

Part of leading is knowing when to turn over decision making to the team. Let them be the experts. Be a learner yourself and have your people demonstrate what they know and what they’ve learned so you can be better at leading and showing off how great your team is. Work to understand what they bring to the table and they will continue to want to grow and develop to be better. When you create an environment in which employees have the confidence to stay informed and look for improvements all the time, you build a stronger, more effective team that gets results. The team that gets results looks good and makes you look like the leader you want to be.

When you create the right atmosphere for learning you foster a team that seeks constant improvement, that shares knowledge, and that strives for success. To be effective, learning can’t be something that is done to you, or to your employees. Learning must be something that teams embrace and leverage for competitive advantage. What do you think? How are you leveraging the art of learning in your work group? What do you do well to foster learning and what obstacles do you face that derail the process?

By Rob Zell

Note: This is Part 2 of 3. Read Part 1 here.

How do we increase the longevity of a learning solution? In Part 1 of this series, I challenged the learning organization to examine some basics in their processes and create more effective solutions. However, an effective learning intervention relies on three elements: the solution, the learners and the environment to which the learners will return.

In this post, part 2 of 3, I’m going to challenge all of us to rethink how we as learners should prepare for the learning and apply what we take from our learning experiences. I’m going to challenge you to think about your own behavior and re-invent yourself as a learner.

Prepare Yourself

As learners we have an obligation to show that the investment of time and resources has a payoff. That’s right, I said obligation. We also have to own our development plan and look for ways to incorporate what we learn into our daily activities.

1. One critical element is knowing how we best learn and apply information. Are you a visual learner? Be prepared to create mind maps and take notes as images of what you see. Learn best by listening? Maybe you want to record the session to listen to later. If you are a kinesthetic learner, keep a small squishy ball handy to fiddle with and be an active note taker. Armed with some basic knowledge regarding how you best process new information can help you plan ways to apply new information and get the most from the experience.
2. Learning is not an event, so quit thinking about it that way. As learners we owe some due diligence to the process. In your favorite journaling tool (notebook, binder, Outlook) jot down some thoughts on why you have enrolled in the learning experience, what you hope to gain, how it benefits your current work, and how it might improve your performance. What knowledge or experience do you have that relates to the topic? When you enter the learning with your own point of view you engage in the content as an active participant rather than a passive one.

Enjoy the Experience

Think about the learning experience as a chance to reinvent yourself. How often do you have the chance to try and fail without repercussions (not a good example if you are engaged in food or workplace safety training mind you)? A quality learning experience should give you the opportunity to explore the content, roll it around your mind and apply it to build skills in a safe environment.

Close the Loop on the Experience

Once the session is over, it’s time to start applying and sharing what you learned. Here are some things you can do to add permanence to your new knowledge.

1. Take your new knowledge and skills and purposefully apply them to the work. One basic tenet of adult learning is that we learn by applying our prior experiences to new information.
2. Blog about your experience or share it with the team over lunch.
3. Build a new process map and post it in your work space as a visual reminder.
4. Involve your manager or peer group.
5. Ask others for input. Ask others to respond to what you have learned and give them a chance to weigh in. When we broaden the experience pool by involving others we come to a more robust understanding of the content.
6. Plan your own follow-up. Most of use some type of software that allows us to plan to-do items and create checklists. Create some personal items and schedule them 30, 60 and 90 days out. Schedule time with yourself to check in on your progress. Think about what you recall and what you have used.
7. Consider previous challenges and obstacles. How could you have used your new found knowledge and skills to overcome them?

The learning activity itself is rarely the magic bullet that fixes everything. It can be a very powerful experience that adds to your productivity and effectiveness if you participate in the right activities and take an active role in your own experience.

What do you think? How are you owning your learning experiences and making them practical and powerful?