Transcript
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Welcome back. There's been two very central questions in the break.
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The first question was, who are you?
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Because I forgot to introduce myself. And I am Michael Ellers and I'm the project leader of the project have told. I'm also partner here and implement the nuffin employment for the last year before that five years. And so that was the short story. So that's who I am. And the other central question, can we have the slides?
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The answer is yes. We will send them out after the session.
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So. So they will be in your mailbox later. So I think that's the two most critical questions that I wanted to answer. Before we go to the next part of this session, where Ralph will talk a little about how governance is important for projects and how different types of governance can affect approaches. So, Ralph, I would like to welcome you back on the stage again if you would help you with an applause.
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Yeah, let's talk a little bit about governance, if I if I ask my students what is governance, what do you think the answer is?
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It's the most boring subject because it's all about policies and processes and documents that nobody reads.
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Is that right? I would say it's all about people and it is about making giving people guidance on how to behave for the company to be successful. So it boils down to people's issues. And we address the people's issues through a thing called values, a set of values through governance. That is the the the kernel of what I'm going to talk about. So you start by looking into governance levels within the organization to define what type of governance. And then we move into the central part governance paradigms and the different value systems that are related to different paradigms of thinking patterns in governance.
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And then we go into the execution. How do we execute governance? And then there are two mechanisms that we have. One is trust and what is control? If you talk a little bit about that and then we have to break session again and etc. and if time permits, I can say a few words about the human side of of governance, and that is governance and good governance in the in the world of projects. How do we position governance against management?
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Yeah. Some Trocaire in this book on the corporate governance has a nice sentence. He says management runs the business. Yeah. The CEO and all the managers below the CEO, they run the business. But governance, the board of directors, they make sure that it runs in the right direction and that it runs efficiently. And what is true for the organization, for the permanent organization is also true for the temporary organization, which we call the project.
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We have the CEO, which is the project manager, and we have some project managers who are then the other managers. They run the business, they run the project. And then we have this governance institution called Steering Committee, you know, who make sure that it runs in the right direction. Governance is not only found at the level of of projects at the corporate level, we find that many different levels here and we find that the portfolio level needs to go on portfolios.
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We need to govern our programs. We need to go and project. We need to govern project management as a service which is different from the project and all these these governance things. They are part of corporate governance. Yeah. So it's a subset of of corporate governance. And for example, corporate governance says we do not do business based on fixed price contracts. Then we with our project have no other choice. We have to accept it. And the way we do business with others are based on other contracts.
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But whatever is in governance, in governance, we see, first of all, the value system and culture and governance overlap to a large extent because both refer to the value system. So the value system is in there. And then of course, all the things that my master students don't like, the other list of responsibilities, the list of processes and roles and all these kind of things which are only there to make sure that people understand what do we do in this company and how do we do our job.
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So what we see on the surface in terms of governance with all these documents and definitions is only there to make sure we are running in the right. Could we be already certain that governance happens that had many different layers in the organization and that started at the top by looking into corporate governance and corporate governance, we define the business goals. To what extent is our business based on projects? What part of our business shall be doing projects and what part of our business is done in the process?
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And as we develop the policies, the objectives, the ethical principles of the organization at this corporate level. But we also decide on shall we have a the PMO impose a very costly experience and it can pay back extremely well, but it needs to have a high investment in the first place and that needs to be okayed by by corporate governance. So once corporate governance has defined which part of the business we do in projects, we get to the level of governance of projects and the plural is important projects within it.
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We are talking about groups of projects like programs that the portfolio and this level is all about standardization. It is about making sure that our project report against the same metrics in order for us as a company to find out which projects are very good and which projects are poor. What can we deliver? Yeah, so our standard is standardizing reporting, but also standardizing the way we select the right products for the company. What are the criteria and are they transparent?
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There's ample evidence and in the research that companies that are not transparent in their in their criteria how to select their projects, they do much worse than organizations that put all the information at the at the wall and let people participate. It's also about having a pool of bacteriologists. 50 percent of all companies have only one methodology, project management methodology. No assume for a moment you work for a large company like AstraZeneca. Also, they have these drug development projects, which lasts for 15, 20 years, and they have small I.T. improvement projects, which lasts for three weeks.
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Do you think you can run both types of products with the same methodology? It doesn't work. So we need to have a pool of methodologies for the different types of projects we have.
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And so selecting the right projects, synchronizing measures here, having a pool of methods. And that's what we do at the level of governance of the project. And then we go down to the level of the individual project. Yes, we have project governance where we have a steering committee or an owner who defines the goal, provides the resources to achieve those goals and of course, controls what we do with the money that he gives us. So project governance typically executed by the steering committee of owner.
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And then there is this thing, which is the interface between management and governance, the interface between the steering group and the project manager. We call this the project management methodology, and it gives a process for both parties that the governor is the CEO and the management of the project. But then it becomes a matter of perspective, whether it's seen as a management tool or governance to the people in the steering committee, they are more interested in what is my milestone, what is my view on these kinds of things.
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For them, it's a governance tool for the project manager with the with the with with the process and the tools for value and the tools for planning and all this kind of thing. It becomes a management tool. So it is the borderline thing between governance and in management. And then the question arises, how does that all be together? So far we are only going down the downhill and somehow we are going to leave that all together. And what it means together in terms of governance is defined by the whole city as governance principles in which the system you still report.
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We know that there are four principles of good governance, four principles of good governance, transparency, accountability, responsibility and fairness. If you look at something that is typically, well, governing in our part of the world, and that is traffic flow and driving out there with the you have you will see Mr.. Nicely expressed here, apparently with your sign so that you can be identified, yeah, responsibility, making sure that you have a driver's license, you fairness with the law that you help others when they have a car accident and all these.
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So for principles of good corporate governance or governance as such, transparency is about when it comes to the world of products, disclosure of accurate, timely information.
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Now our research on ethical issues and projects showed that 97 percent of all projects, this governance principles are violated by the project manager.
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Project managers do not report the true status of their projects using the approach that Michael presented here and where the owner is part of the project for, let's say like four hours. And we said we would avoid that problem because the owner would see what's going on. So the transparency is the biggest problem in terms of ethical problems, because then you have accountability. They have a clear understanding of rules and rights. So who is doing what if if I have to complain about something, where can I go?
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Who was a target with my complaint and who's responsible for what they responsibility? And that is about do we do our work in accordance with the standards of the profession of the society? So accountability is to up the organization so that people can identify what am I responsible for and the responsibility that is downstream, making sure that I do my work. And if I have people that are important to me, that those people keep wanting to do their work in accordance with existing standards and also needs the moral principles, be ethics in in the in the way we do our business for in contractual relations that we do not always subcontract our nephew in every project and to can be good.
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And so we see that, that the different levels and that we have of governance, they have very different things to do, but they all contribute to the poor governance principles which are then accumulated at the top of the organization. And for example, Sarbanes-Oxley requires us to report what's going on here. We have a big project. We have to report it. And since Sarbanes-Oxley top managers all of the sudden involved in in their large projects. Yes, up until that point in time, it's not really clear about what projects are going on.
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But now they are responsible to forecast the revenues and the cost of operating profit. Now they seem to be interested in governance, helps to bring in more transparency into the whole undertaking. Good. So we see that governance is different at different levels. And let us for a moment look at the level of the governance of of projects. How do we govern the projects in our organization?
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In order to identify that, we must first understand what type of an organization do we have, what is the corporate governance approach and people who are professional researchers and academics in the world of corporate governance, they say there's a continuum from shareholder orientation to stakeholder orientation. On that continuum, we can find any company. So what is shareholder orientation? Shareholder oriented companies are those companies where every decision is governed by the desire to maximize shareholder return on investment and maximize share price.
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And all we do is to drive up the share price in the company. So we have one group of stakeholders who overrides the desires of all other groups. So stakeholders are no more the opposite. Thinking today is the stakeholder orientation in stakeholder orientation. We assume that our company is part of society and has been part of the society. We create a market. We create a market. And if you look at this, this guy over there, yeah, Steve Jobs, he created a company that created its own market.
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And what do they do? They try to find market niches every day. Yeah, they create new markets all the time. Well, knowing that if they go out of business, the whole market will disappear. So they have so many stakeholder groups that they want to satisfy at the same time. Yet they are with the families of the employees here. There's the local community. There are the the environmentalists and the shareholders. And so shareholders are also the group of stakeholders, but only one of many stakeholder groups.
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So the question is, in the company that we are in, is the company more on the left hand side or more on the right hand side? You will probably never find a company that is at the extreme on that continue. But we see a tendency towards the left on tendency towards the right. As a rule of thumb, the corporate governance people tell us English speaking countries tend to be a bit more to the left. If we overlay this with the way we control in organizations and since Augean in the 1980s, we know that the companies control people in three weeks.
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They either control their behavior, they want them to adhere to a process. They have to follow a process or they control them by the results of their work. We call that outcome control. And the third control is what they call ground control, and that is the control that comes through organizations like PME, who tells us how to do project management in a company. We need focus on on two types of control, and that is other behavior control or outcome, as a rule of thumb, against the behavior control very often found in high risk industries.
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And a pilot of a commercial airplane has to go through dozens of checklists before he is even allowed to start the engine. Yeah, so very much process control. Like any one of the causes I gave, I had a former stewardess attending and then we did an exercise on what is governance, what is management. She she said the pilot does nothing. The pilot does nothing then following the process. Yeah. So I would say that that was only partly right, because sometimes things go wrong and then the pilot is very important.
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But the as a rule of thumb, the higher risk we have in the business, the more we tend to have processes we trust in the process. We do not trust so much in of the people opposite to that outcome control. Here we have the Superman and Superman. Yeah, we we give them a task and they do the impossible like in sales department. Can you tell people you have to sell 100 million this year? We don't care how you do that as long as you do.
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And so on a different way, very much based on trust on people. Not so much based on trust in the process. So with those four, I would with those two dimensions, we identify four different ways we can govern our projects in the organization. We have those projects which are governed by the by the desire that people follow the process and by the desire to maximize shareholder orientation. Yes. And this is what we call the conformist paradigm, where people are told what to do and they do a little bit different.
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But still interested in maximizing shareholder value is an outcome control, which we call the flexible economist, the project managers that are typically asked to find the most economically reasonable methodology to run the project or the most economically of solving the problem. So we have a level of freedom here. But still our goal is to maximize shareholder return very different than the versatile artist and the versatile artist paradigm. We have the most difficult thing to do. We have to deliver outcome and we are responsible for delivering the right outcome to the different stakeholder groups and keep them all satisfied at the same time.
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So no wonder that in that paradigm over here we find the most senior project managers and here we have the guys who have gray hair or no hair left at all. Yeah, they are. They develop their methodology on the fly while they sit with their customers who are very experienced people and project management consulting organizations, that they are typically in the most difficult paradigm also in terms of ethical issues. And then we have the agile pragmatist paradigm where we really have a clear process to follow.
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Agile is a very positive positive. So it is a process oriented thing. But the owner of the project tells us which business function shall be developed first and hand over to our customers. Each business function as a second, hand it over to the customer. So with the help of the owner, you can then satisfy and balance the the satisfaction of the different stakeholder groups that have support for very different ways of of governing our of our products and in expressing the expectations that we have in our project managers.
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So we looked into. Several hundred, I think six or seven hundred projects worldwide or and and look into what is the preferred or the average paradigm by country. And the first concern was that declining support from corporate governance, corporate governance as English speaking countries, typically more shareholder oriented than stakeholder oriented, would be seen in the US, the UK as Canada, Australia. They all tend to be a bit more to the to the left hand side when we have those countries on the right hand side that we see relatively small countries where we have small markets.
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And being in that market, you cannot afford to lose a customer. You need to have all your stakeholders in order to survive in the marketplace. So Lithuania, Norway, Denmark, etc. they are very much focused on keeping their customers and then other European countries and including China. You see, they are also very much stakeholder oriented here. They want to balance the different requirements for the different stakeholder groups. A question that always pops up is why Sweden here, Norway, they're the answer is very simple.
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If we look into the sample of Swedish companies, we've only seen very large stock oriented companies. That's maybe that's something that's Volvo. That is our pack. And they are run like a typical American company. All we do is to maximize stockholder value. So that doesn't come as a surprise. Norway, on the other hand, if you look at that sample, they're very small companies with with the exception of one big oil company. We have only small companies in there, many in the fishery industry.
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Yeah. And in related industries to make sure that fish don't don't get sick. You know, all these kind of things are relatively small companies who have the desire to keep their customers Denmark very process oriented. Yeah, I worked nine years in Denmark and I can only support that coming from a German organization, entering a Danish organization. They dumped on me the first week all kinds of processes that I could think of and the other in my life, you know.
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Twenty years I worked before had seen so many processes like that. When I started, I had to take this company. So whether or not the Danes follow these processes, but they have them in place, they have the goods. When you look at the same paradigms from a project size perspective, we see that small part, up to half a million euros out of control, stakeholder oriented. And then there's almost a straight line that goes with the size of the project.
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The bigger the project, the more we get down the shareholder orientation, media control and look at those those big those large investment projects like airports, etc., clear shareholder orientation have be. We must make sure that we spend the taxpayers' money wisely and therefore the very clear processes on the people and the suppliers. So we start over here with these types of men. We have the same thing this time with the types of projects. So we we see it in telecom products, very much shareholder oriented behavior control, engineering and construction project more outcome control because they are typically more skynyrd's that you can referred to.
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And the Business Change Organization, a project we are typically more people oriented, more and more stakeholder oriented. Now, with that in mind, we can now use those profiles of successful project managers and put them into the quarter over here to see what type of project manager do I need and what type of a governance structure. Yeah, so down here on the lower left, shareholder oriented behavior control and we have the ITU and telecom products, people very high and critical thinking, conscientiousness, empowering others, managing others, and high sensitivity for two very high dimensions in IQ, one very high in IQ and too high in in.
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Up here, the engineering and construction project looks different, the project managers over here are very high in self-awareness, but also very high on conscientiousness and critical thinking, just like these guys down here. But the rest is more or less like the average manager in the industry, in the world of outcome, control and sexual orientation. You see, these people are extremely high in many of the emotional intelligence dimensions and the managerial dimension, whereas the IQ dimensions must not be so strongly expressed.
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It's more about dealing with people now in the last quarter and I have a bit of a problem because I have not done a study myself on that last quarter, but I have a study that is related to it. I'm not 100 percent. So I presented as a shaded diagram because here the NRA, with the level to a 50 percent range, is not the average manager of in the industry here. This is the average project manager. So those are different from the other three.
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As we said before here, the 50 percent is the average manager in the industry and here the 50 percent is the average project manager. So in the role of Agile, we have project managers who are loyal conscientiousness and motivation than the average project manager for the average project manager, you see, is very high in conscientiousness. So in other words, being low here does not mean it's absolutely low. It's only relatively low relative to other project managers, but they are better in communication than.
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And then the other product managers, they are good in developing a better than the average project manager develop into developing others. And they are very high intelligence. Otherwise they meet different people with different governance structures. That leads us to to the question of methodology. Does methodology play a role in the success? And one of my my students to the reason some years back on what's the impact of the methodology on participants. And he found out overall across across the board, across all products, there's a six percent impact of methodology, compared with six percent at the same level as the Pinto and seven critical success factors.
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And they had an average of six percent impact. So in other words, it is another critical success, just as ridiculous as the table is. But he also found out another thing, and that is that there are basically two different types of methodologies. There are those methodology who are very clear in what a project manager has to do and provide tools, techniques, processes for every step along the way in the project. And it was a comprehensive methodology which are not supplemented by something new because everything is in that one year project.
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Yes, no wonder its behavior control. Yes, it's for people who are relatively new in the world of project management. They do not feel comfortable in developing their own methodology. So they have a tool that guides them clearly from the other type of methodology are incomplete by design methodologies, which are open to be adjusted to the particular circumstances of the project. You know, they provide some rudimentary steps and techniques and these kind of things, but then leave it to the to the experienced project manager to fill the gaps in between with those things that are good for the particular type of.
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Apparently, this is more for the poor, for the senior project manager than we said earlier, the senior project managers are up here in this type of government and. Good. That leads us to the question, how do we govern? And we said that there are two mechanisms to govern. One is control and one is trust. Now we all know what control is. I do not spend time here explaining as all of our control is with time reporting and things, but we trust is as a government is making.
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This might be a bit of interest. First of all, what is trust is the willingness of one person to be vulnerable to the actions of another person based on the expectation that the other person will perform in particular actually important to the one who trusts, irrespective of the ability to control this activity of trust as such is said to be impossible to measure. What because we can put a probe in the eyes of the people and then measure things like feeB Fever instead of measuring trust directly.
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Agree, there's a proxy which is called trustworthiness and trustworthiness is measured along three dimensions. The first one is the ability does the person has the ability to choose to do the job? Yeah, the second one is. Here is the person willing to do something good to us. To us who trust. So will he behave in our best interests in Los Angeles? Is the person showing integrity? Does he walk the talk? Does he do what he says?
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Yeah. So this is an integer person so we can typically measure trust along this line. And in terms of trust, then there are many different views to trust. But two very popular ones are system trust and people trust the system. Trust is do we trust the system, the governance system to help us and people trust this? Do we trust the person to do the job? And what we see is that the system trust and the people trust are related.
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If we have a governance system that helps the people to level that has a lot of trust in the people in terms of assuming they have the ability, benevolence and integrity to do that job, then these people trust the governance system that it is good for them to by asking people if you have an ethical problem. Yeah. Does the government system authorize you to decide and implement counter actions to that ethical problem? 70 percent of the people said, yes, I have the freedom to decide these things on my site and 30 percent said no.
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Now, asking a similar question. Yeah. Do you trust your your governance system to help you in the case of the problem? Eighty percent of the people said yes. So there is a reciprocal relationship between system trust and people trust. In other words, if we build up a governance system that trust the people, we create people that trust the system. If we do the opposite, which we will talk about in a minute, we create the democracy.
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And once again, for governance paradigms, we talk about it behavior, outcome, control, shareholder, stakeholder orientation. If we look at which governance mechanism is applied, where we see that downhere behavior control, the shareholder orientation, we need governance through control, that we want to make people behave in accordance with the particular process. Opposite to that, the governance mechanism of more stakeholder, an outcome. Should we trust the people that they can do the job?
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Yes, we only control them in terms of the final result of their work. So we see trust as a governance mechanism. And I think you do a little bit of statistics and asked people what your level of trust and what your your your orientation as a company. We clearly see as a very strong correlation between higher stakeholder orientation and more trust between project managers. At the same time, we see a very strong correlation between higher levels of project success and more stakeholder orientation.
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And you might have. Spotted already that I talk about correlation and not causation, because causation is a different question, but we see a high correlation and you can say we trust those people because the public is successful and not the project is successful because we trust the people. So we need only see coalitions at that point of time. But what is interesting is if we look at these large investment projects again, look at Berlin Airport, for example, can we start these projects over here?
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Yeah, we impose a lot of strict restrictions on the suppliers. They have to follow the process all done in order to make sure that we spend the Taxpayers' money wisely. So we start off the project with a lot of control, which means mistrust. So we do not trust the people in the control room to the extent possible. And what what have we said on that slide here? If we start with mistrust here, we create the same thing in the people.
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Yeah. So in other words, if we start over here, we create a culture that everybody is looking for loopholes and we cannot circumvent the governance structure to try to do something good for myself, to do something beneficial for myself. And that increases the control there. And we are in what must be because the iron cage of bureaucracy, we are down here, we are locked in here mentality, and we cannot escape the opposite to that. What happens if we start a project over here?
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We trust the people. And there are two possibilities. One is they are successful in Australia. The other is there might be a problem and we move somewhere else in those countries. But nevertheless, we have at least given them a chance. If we had started down here, we would have never given them a chance to move up here. It's very, very unlikely that the project moves that way. It happens much more the policy parties that have started off here to remain here for the rest of their life.
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And that is in line with a lot of studies on trust. The initial level of trust is decisive for the entire relationship and then the entire project lifecycle. So the message here is the initial level of trust has a big impact on whether you can set the stage for a successful project or you are heading towards trouble. And from the outset of the. I'm doing something on that. Yes, OK, good.
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I think Michael has a few questions for you and then we come back to to the discussion.
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Thank you so much. So what we would like you to do now is do the same thing as you did before. Use 10 minutes. Thank you. Use 10 minutes around the table to discuss what what governance paradigm is dominating in your organization and what how would that fit your project? And then discuss how you could increase the likelihood of project success by improving trust and stakeholder orientation. So how can you go towards the more yellow direction of the company?
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All right. So a discussion around the tables about what you just heard. Ten minutes.
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I had to interrupt this great discussion around the table. All right, so great discussions around the table tonight. It seems very interesting. And I'm actually I'm just going to give you a quick twist into how this relates to have double. And then there is a question you have wrote to to help us to relate to some of this. So how does this relate to project half double? Because as you know, we're just doing one project with a methodology.
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We're not really trying to change a governance system. Having said that, it is also a challenge with all projects that they would have to somehow apply to the governance and in the organization that you're in. So what we do with a half dozen methodology is really to take each of the methods and make sure that they are translated into the local organization and the governance that is part of the local organization. So how that would help, what that would mean in terms of overall decision making and how the project owner should relate maybe to an overall board is, of course, the relationship that we would like to start from very early on in the project.
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Another thing that we would like to establish with the project very early on is if there is a a common project model that you should use for the type of project that you're doing in terms of you have to project, then there would be a standard flow, for instance, for IT projects in some companies and there would be a standard for for maybe all projects in the companies that you would have to apply to in terms of having meetings with discussion boards at certain times.
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So, of course, applying the overall flow model or approaching model to this project is, of course, a part of a half dollar translation.
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So how do we then view governance when we are doing a half double project? Well, there were three things that we would like to keep a very close attention to. The first thing is that, of course, we would like to customize to the uniqueness of the project, meaning that we would like to create a willingness to twist the governance or adjust the project to the governance.
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And when we do project have trouble, usually what happens is that we because we typically reduce the time to impact.
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We also use other decision making that you would usually see in a waterfall approach, because the waterfall approach, you specify the whole project and then you kind of make the contract and then you execute it. What we do is that we kind of build an overall impact solution design for how to reduce the time to impact. And then we produce some of the project. So we really make very important decisions very early on in the project in order to gain insight.
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And sometimes that conflicts with the governance and the overall decision making. So this is a a more premature decision that you would then you would you should have seen a project. And of course, you need to align that with the with the governance committee of the board, that that will be part of that. And usually it is possible, but sometimes it conflicts a little with the current governance in the organization that we're in. So that's why we say that we would like to customize to the uniqueness, but also create a willingness to maybe twist some of the standard approaches to governance and then, of course, also maybe adjust the project to how the governance is.
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Of course. I was one of those ways actually trying to balance that. And then, of course, we like to enhance trust before control. So we would like to really use less effort and status reporting. We would like to invite the project owner or maybe maybe governance board members into the room and see the project as it is in its raw state. So we invite them into the colocation room and we just have a talk about the project right there on the spot, talk about the real critical issues instead of the nice little presentations that might become watermelon projects.
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I mean, projects that are green on the outside and the inside. So we try to avoid that by inviting them into the room and having a discussion about what is really going on in the project. And sometimes, of course, that conflicts with governance, because that's not a usual way that this works. And then, of course, in order to make all that happen, then we try to anchor with key people very early on in the project.
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So we try to make sure that we have some kind of executive anchoring to this, that there would be an executive at the higher level that would oversee the project to follow how to use this methodology, because sometimes having that sponsorship will make it easier to adjust governance and even. Some of these things and then having project management office closely associated to this project, because usually the project management office would be responsible of the methodology of how to do projects in a given organization.
[00:45:36.070]
So having someone from the project management office to follow this project, first of all, to learn from it, but also to help us to adjust to the to the governance is a way to approach this as well. So so that's how we use governance and have to build projects. And I'm not trying to say that we try to bypass it, but what happens when you work in a new way like we usually do and have to do projects? Usually you need to adjust to the given setup.
[00:46:02.440]
That is the current governance or despair, how we can make that choice through that adjustment to to make sure that we are still following the project. So that's how we are. We kind of approach that. And the interesting thing is, if we look at this slide the roof showed us, we would situate ourselves somewhere off here as a starting point with it, with the approach we go for the trust part, we would like to invite people into the room and have the dialogue right there on the spot about how to do the project.
[00:46:33.580]
And I think that we had a great case with with what is actually related to this, because no one noticed. My initial guess would be that the governance would be kind of in this direction, which would make perfect sense because they made drug products. So people should not die from it. Why do you need to follow certain governance? That's just how it goes. And this was an IT project. And we tried to start somewhere up here. And I think we kind of ended up in the middle.
[00:46:58.480]
And I think that the reason why we ended up in the middle was that we had a strong executive sponsor to help us to adjust with the governance and to help us to adjust with the board. So so that was at least a tricky in that pilot project. So so I'm not saying that, you know, everything is is a mess. If you want to run a project, maybe with this conference and you are in an organization where you have this governance, it is really possible to align those two approaches.
[00:47:25.690]
If you just started the dialogue about it and figure out what's the consequence, how can we then come about? So that was some of the input received from a double perspective related to governance. And I've also heard that that actually we have a great question here we would like to ask to you, Ralph. So I would like to invite you back for for a few minutes and then I dare to ask you I got to ask a question, but well, a couple of us here around the table, we're experiencing that we're actually coming from the more trust based environment and seeing that this didn't work.
[00:48:09.970]
Projects go over budget, over line exploding. Scopa We are moving towards a more control based environment.
[00:48:19.360]
And and up there you say that the projects that focus on trust are more likely to have success. That's what I'm reading, and so so I was kind of curious what what we did wrong in the trust area since we didn't succeed. Yeah, without knowing your politics, I, I would say you did nothing wrong. It may be the nature of politics and the nature of the context of your politics that requires you to be a bit more on the control side.
[00:49:02.610]
Yeah. So I trust people to be smart and then run their politics and their private business in the best possible way. And if they move into more control, then there's a reason for it. And it can't be that that the nature of your politics requires more control in all the circumstances under which the project is one requires more control. We we know that when when the economy goes goes south, goes bad, then the leaders typically go to control these type of leadership and in order to recover the situation.
[00:49:42.120]
But once it is getting better, you can then instill a bit more trust again. And probably the same thing in your project. You there might be reasons within the project that requires you to to apply more control, at least for a period of time.
[00:50:02.400]
And one last follow up question and I just ask you were you're really good at involving the senior management in controlling and prioritizing projects. So what do you do really good at involving senior management in controlling and prioritizing who was involved and engaged? He probably not as much as we. So, yeah, I thought maybe they didn't put an end to this kind of thing. If they came across the wrong from my side. Don't don't get me wrong by assuming that control is always bad and you can't control can be very good, and it's just that you see the strong correlation between successful profits and profits.
[00:50:57.810]
All right. Thank you very much. Well, you're welcome. See if I can do this. Thank you. How would you help me to give one more thought, Ralph?
[00:51:14.120]
OK, so we're getting to the wrap up part, I'm just going to use a word here, so we're getting to the wrap up part and and the wrap up part is really two things, a few messages.
[00:51:30.110]
And then I'm going to try to set up the sparring sessions. And as you know, there there voluntarily saying you can sign up for them. And I'm just going to give you a few for how to do that. But first, a few short messages. And the first message is important in terms of this project, half double, because the overall half of the project is funded by the Danish Industry Foundation with 14 million Danish drummers. And we have a few targets that that's related to receiving the most money.
[00:52:00.770]
And one of the one of the targets that we have is really related to this community. So we have committed ourselves to create an engaging and an activated community of a thousand people.
[00:52:13.520]
And what happened yesterday was that we actually have a member about 1000 signing off for the community and we need your number one for you. That's better than that one is male, so that's perfectly normal. Ten thousand, right? The other thing that I just want to share with you is that we're doing a similar morning dealing with this the next morning, which will not be with a thought. You know, it will be with the group proud of all of us and more people from the community.
[00:52:57.280]
And that will happen the 21st of April. And we will look into results from the pilot projects and how to apply the methodology, because we have already done seven pilot projects. Peer and his team is right down there. He's a part of the research team. We have peer here and we also have and eye here as part of the research team. And they've done a report about the results of the pilot project. And we will look into some of those results of the pilot project.
[00:53:26.370]
We will also maybe have a few from the pod, 42 percent, how we applied the methodology and then, of course, try to relate that to your own projects. So that will go on the 21st of April 2017. And you can sign up at the Web page and then it's time for the for what we call the sparring sessions and to give you this set up on the very sessions. The idea is really to make this community come alive without this session.
[00:53:55.180]
So having this session will ignite that. You might need, you know, other people from the network until next time we'll see each other on the 21st of April. So this is really a race to try to connect you with each other and having some of those great people who have always sort of some of you have been part of this community for almost three years now. And some of you are very familiar with the mythology. Some of you have just signed up by you and might not know the methodology that well.
[00:54:24.790]
So why not use that resource and mic you guys to team up around that? That's the main idea. We haven't done it before in this size. We've done it three times before because Stephanie and Linda, we were very proud of the community from the start. You have we're right about the database. You say we would like to help that we do this. So so based on their bright idea, we've done this twice now and it turned out to be pretty good.
[00:54:53.470]
And we're going to try to do as well. And we will see this is a bigger problem than usual, but let's just try it out. So the the main idea here is that that you can sign up today and do the spam sessions between the parent and the coach. And then in between the meetings you might meet and then you might meet again at the next session. That's kind of the idea. So if you're present in the room, then we would have, you know, teams from last time that might turn up today again and we would have new teams joining up.
[00:55:22.810]
So so let's see how that falls out and we'll make it into a chaos exercise. And there are two roles that you can choose here if you would like to participate in it. There's the pioneer role. And the pioneer role would be the role of you being eager to use some of the half dozen methods in your project. You would have a willingness to share that with a coach. And then, of course, you can capture this opportunity to to develop and learn about how to use the methodology.
[00:55:52.360]
And then, of course, we're hoping by the end of your sessions that you would like to share some of your insight of some of your learnings with the rest of the crowd here. Maybe not project specific things, but at least know share some of your learnings in the wrap up of these sessions and then you can choose to go for the and of course, the pioneer role would entitle that. You have a project back home the way you would like to apply some of these methods on and try it out.
[00:56:18.250]
So that's the one role that you can sign up for. The other role that you could sign up for was what we called the cultural and in the cultural. We would hope that you would know the three principles by heart and also the principal and how to make that come alive to some extent. You should also know a little about the nine 1/2 of methods in order to apply to to the project over there. Hopefully you have your experience as a project leader.
[00:56:44.080]
You've tried this before, doing projects before, and you might also have tried to do the half the pathology yourself and try to enable that local translation, maybe with one or maybe even six of the of the methods. And then, of course, hopefully you will be capable of asking questions and try to understand the project that that that you're sitting across and try to get a grip on it and figure out how to apply some of the methodology of this.
[00:57:11.590]
And then, of course, hopefully you would share some of if there will be general insights afterwards in the wrap up session. So we put the ambition pretty high. And the idea, of course, is that it should you should be coached by someone who knows the methodology to some extent. We do not expect it to be total experts, but we would like you to have at least heard about. There's a dog maybe even bred the methodology and the methodology guide, which is this one over here.
[00:57:41.690]
So so that's a sign of for that if you if you think you want to if you want to be in the coach position.
[00:57:47.710]
So I'm going to put this chart in the middle of the room. And while we're having lunch, you walk up here, write your name and your project on a on a on a Post-it and you put it there or if you want to, because just your name and then we'll see if we can match it all together. And we have a few rooms and we'll set up a few sessions in here and then we'll see how that falls out.
[00:58:15.130]
So about quarter past 12, we'll do that exact match. So from now on and up to 12, 15, you will be having lunch and I assume there will be some sandwiches and you put up your posters here and they will do the match before 12.
[00:58:33.100]
Any questions for this before? I am no good, so I won't be so nice to have you here today.
[00:58:42.940]
I see that the sandwiches are coming. That's perfect timing. So enjoy enjoy the lunch today and see you in 20.
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