Transcript - Thought Leader Ralf Müller
[00:00:01] Hi, welcome back. There's been two very central questions in the break. The first question was, who are you? Because I forgot to introduce myself. I am Michael Edwards and I'm the project leader of the project have doubled. I'm also a partner here in implement and I've been in implement for the last year. Before that five years, A.C.. So that was the short story. So that's who I am. And the other central question, can we have the slides? The answer is yes. We will send them out after the session. So. So they will be in your big box later. Week. I think that's two most critical questions that I wanted to answer. Before we go to the next part of this session where Ralph will talk. Talk a little about how governance is important for projects and how different types of governance can affect the process. So Ralph would like to welcome you back on the stage again, if you would help me with an applause.
[00:01:19] Yeah, let's talk a little bit about governance. If I if I ask my Masters students what is governance, what do you think the answer is? It's the most boring subject because it's all about policies and processes and documents that nobody reads.
[00:01:44] Is that right? I would say it's all about people. It is about making giving people guidance on how to behave for the company to be successful.
[00:01:58] So it boils down to people's issues. And we address the people's issues through a thing called values.
[00:02:06] We set the values through governance. And then that is the the the kernel of what I'm going to talk about.
[00:02:16] So you start by looking into governance levels here. When the organization we find 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.
[00:02:35] Then we go into the execution. How do we execute governance? And then there are two mechanisms that we have. One is trust. And one is control. If you talk a little bit about that and then the big we have to break session again, etc. and if time to permit, I can say a few words about the human side of of governance, and that is governance, good governance and the in the world of projects. How do we position governance against management? Yeah, some trickle in his 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, the 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 Tamminen organization is also true for the temporary organization, which we call the project. You have the CEO, which is the project manager. Yeah. And we have some project managers who attended the other managers. They run the business. They run the project. And then we have this governance institution called Steering Committee to make sure that it runs in the workers. Governance is not only found at the level of of projects and at the corporate level, we find that many different levels. Yet we find that the portfolio level need to go on portfolios. We need to govern our programs. We need a common project. We need to cover project management as a service which is different from the project Inception and all these these governance things. They are part of corporate governance. So it's a subset of corporate governance. And for example, corporate governance says we do not do business based on fixed price contracts, then leave with our project, have no other choice.
[00:04:36] We have to accept it and the way we do business with other based on other contracts.
[00:04:45] But what it would ease in governance, in in governance, we see, first of all, the value system and culture and governance overlap to a large extent because of both refer to the value system. So the value systems is in there.
[00:05:02] And then, of course, all the things that my master students don't like here, the list of responsibilities, the list of processes and roads and all these kinds 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. So what we see on the surface in terms of governance with all these documents and definitions here is only there to make sure we are running in the right.
[00:05:32] Good. We are. We already said that governance happens at as many different layers in the organization. And let's started at the top by by looking into corporate governance here, corporate governance, we defined the business goals. And to what extent is our business based on projects? What part of our business shall we do in projects? And what part of our business is done in the process? As we develop the policies, the objectives, the ethical principles of the of the organization at this corporate level. But we also decide on shall we have a team on the PMO is a very costly experience.
[00:06:14] 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.
[00:06:28] So once corporate governance has defined which part of the business we do in products, we get to the level of governance of projects and the pluralism is important. Again, projects with if you're talking about groups of projects like programs and portfolios, 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 we good at, which projects are before. What can we do about. So a standard standardizing reporting, but also standardizing the way we select the right projects for the company. What are the criteria and are they transparent? There is there's ample evidence and in research that companies that are not transparent in their in their quality criteria, how to select their projects, they do much worse than organizations that put all the information at it at the wall and let people participate. It's also about having a pool of better geologists. 50 percent of all companies have only one methodology, project management methodology. Now, assume for a moment you work for a large company like AstraZeneca also. Have these drug development projects which last for 15, 20 years, and they have small I.T. improvement projects, which lasts for three weeks. Do you think you can run both types of projects 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. So selecting the right projects, synchronizing measures here, having a pool of methods and these that's what we do at the level governance of project. And then we go down to the level of the individual project.
[00:08:26] 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 it, by the steering committee or an owner.
[00:08:47] And then there is this thing, which is the interface between management and governance at the interface between the steering group and the project manager. We call this thing project management methodology. It gives the process for both parties here. The governor, who is the CEO and the manager from the project. But then it becomes a matter of perspective. That is, they had seen as a management tool or governance to the people. The steering committee they are more interested in, but is my my strong is my review and these kind of things.
[00:09:26] 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 if it's the borderline thing between governance and management and then the question arises, how does that all be together?
[00:09:49] So far we only go down downhill and somehow we need to leave that all together and put it in together in terms of governance is defined by the holy city as the governance principles in all ECD. Since the new field report, we know that there are four principles of good governance. Four principles of good governance, transparency, accountability, responsibility fits.
[00:10:19] If you look at something that is typically, well, governing in our part of the world, that is traffic flow and driving out there would be Dukat. You will see these things. Nicely expressed here. Apparently with your sign so that you can be identified a responsibility making sure that you have a driver's license here. Fairness with the law that you had others, will they have a car accident and all this.
[00:10:51] So for principle of good corporate governance or governance as such, transparency is about when it comes to develop projects, disclosure of accurate, timely information to state. Now, our research on ethical issues and projects showed that 97 percent of all projects, this governance principles are violated by the project manager.
[00:11:19] Project managers do not report the true status of their projects using the approach that Michael presented here and where the embedded owner is part of the project for, let's say, like Michael said, four hours.
[00:11:36] And we said we would avoid that problem because the owner would see what's going on. So transparency. That's the biggest problem in terms of ethical problems, because then you have accountability and a clear understanding of roads and rights.
[00:11:55] So who is doing what if? If I have to complain about something, where can I go? Who was their target is with my company and who's responsible for what? Their responsibility. Yeah.
[00:12:08] And that is about do we do our work in accordance with the standards of the profession of the society? So accountability is typically up the organization so that people can identify what am I responsible for and responsibilities. It is downstream. You are making sure that I do my work and if I have people is important to me that those people can point me to their work in accordance with existing standards and also at the moral principles, the ethics in improving the way we do our business. For example, in contractual relations that we do not always subcontract our nephew in every project is good.
[00:12:59] So we see that that the different levels that we have of governance, they have very different things to do.
[00:13:09] But they all contribute to the for governance principles which are then accumulated. And at the top of the organization. And for example, Sarbanes Oxley requires us to report what's going on here. If you have a big project, you have to report it.
[00:13:27] And since someone Oxly top managers all of the sudden involved in in their large projects. Yes.
[00:13:34] Up until that point in time, Top did not really care about what projects are going on. Yeah, but now they are responsible to forecast the revenues and in cost of of of new product. Now they seem to be interested in Medicare. Good governance helps to bring even more transparency into the whole undertaking. Good. So we see that governance is different and different levels. And let us for a moment look at the level over here. Governance of of projects. How do we govern the projects in our organization? In order to identify that, we must first understand what type of an organization do we have? What is the corporate governance approach?
[00:14:24] 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 in this maximize share price?
[00:14:56] 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 number one.
[00:15:12] The opposite thinking today is this is a stakeholder orientation in a stakeholder orientation.
[00:15:21] We assume that our company is part of society and has being 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. And what do they do? They tried to find new 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, yes, they are the families of the employees here. There's the local community. There are the the environmentalists and all the shareholders. And so shareholders, although a group of stakeholders, but only one of many stakeholder groups. So the question is, in the company that we are in, is the company on the left hand side or more on the right side.
[00:16:26] 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.
[00:16:46] If we overlay this with the way we control in organizations and since Augean in the nineteen eighties, we know that companies control people in three ways.
[00:16:58] They either control their behavior and they want them to adhere to a process. They have to follow a process or they control them by the results of their work because the outcome control. And the third control is what what they can and control. And that is the control that comes to organizations like PMI who tells us how to do project manager in a company. The media focus on on two types of control, and that is the other behavior, control or outcome. As the rule of thumb, again, the behavior control very often found in high risk industries and a pilot of a commercial airplane has to go through dozens of checklists before he's even allowed to start the engine. 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 and what is management. She she said the pilot does nothing. The pilot does nothing. Then following the process. So I would say that that is only partially right, because sometimes things go wrong and then the pilot is very important.
[00:18:18] But the as a rule of thumb, the higher risk we have in the business, the more we do tend to have processes we trust in the process and we do not trust so much into the people opposite to that outcome control.
[00:18:34] Here we have the Superman and Superwoman. Yeah, we give them a task and they do the impossible like in sales departments. Yeah. We can tell people you have to sell for hundred million this year. We don't care how you do that as long as you do. So what a different way. Very much based on trust on people. Not so much based on trust in the process. So with those four would be those two dimensions. We we identify four different ways we can govern our products in the organization. We have those products which are governed by the by the desire that people follow the process. And by the desire to maximize shareholder orientation. Yes.
[00:19:22] And this is what we call the conformists paradigm, where people are told what to do and they do a little bit different, but still interested in maximizing shareholder value is an outcome control, which we call the flexible economist project managers that are typically asked to find the most economic and 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.
[00:20:03] No different than the versatile artist and then the West 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. So no wonder that in that paradigm over here we find the most senior project managers. And yet here you 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 up here. It's the most difficult paradigm. Also in terms of ethical issues. And then we have the edge pragmatist paradigm where we really have a clear process to follow. Your agile is very much of a profit base. So this is a process oriented thing. But the owner of the project tells us which business function shall be generally developed first and hand over to our customer, which business function as a second we handed over to the customer.
[00:21:19] So with the help of the owner, it can then satisfy and balance the dissatisfaction of the different stakeholder groups. So for four very different ways of governing our of our product mix and expressing the expectations that we have in our project managers.
[00:21:43] So we looked into. Several hundred. I think six or seven hundred products worldwide. And and look into what what is the preferred or the average paradigm by countries. And the first class, it was that we found support from corporate governance and corporate governance, says English speaking countries, typically more shareholder oriented than stakeholder oriented. We see that as the US, the UK, that's Canada, that our failure. They all tend to be a bit more to the to the left hand side. And then we have those those countries on the right hand side that we see relatively small countries where we have small markets.
[00:22:30] And being in that market, you cannot afford to lose a customer.
[00:22:34] You need to have you on you and your stakeholders in order to survive in the marketplace. So Lithuania, Norway, Denmark, etc., with the they are very much focused on keeping their their customers and then other European countries, including China. You see, they are also very much stakeholder oriented here.
[00:22:56] They they want to balance the different requirements for this stakeholder groups.
[00:23:05] A question that always pops up is why Sweden here, Norway there? The answer is very simple.
[00:23:12] If we look into the sample of Swedish companies, we've only seen very large stock oriented companies. Yeah, that's Aviva. This site there does Volvo. That is TTR Park. Yeah. And they are one like a typical American company. All we do is to maximize stockholder. So that doesn't come as a surprise. Norway, on the other hand, if you look at that sample, there are very small companies with with the exception of one big oil company, we have only small companies in there, many in the fishery industry. Yeah. And in related industries, to make sure that fish don't don't get sick in all these kind of things are relatively small companies who have decided to keep their customers, Denmark, very process oriented.
[00:24:07] I worked nine years in Denmark and I can always 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, 20 years I worked before had seen so many processes. Later that week when I started, I had a Danish company, food.
[00:24:31] And whether or not the Danes follow these processes, not only that, but they have that in place that they could good look at the same paradigms from a profit side perspective.
[00:24:48] We see that small parties up to half a million euros, maybe outcome control, stakeholder oriented. And then there is almost a straight line that goes with the size of the project. The bigger the project, the more we are down the shareholder orientation, behavior control. And look at those those big those large investment projects like airports, et cetera.
[00:25:12] Clear shareholder orientation yabbie.
[00:25:14] We must make sure that we spend the taxpayers money wisely and therefore he would jump very clear processes on the people and the suppliers. So we start over here with these types of companies. Let me have the same thing this time that the types of projects that we see, ITN, telephone projects, very much shareholder oriented behavior control, engineering and and construction projects, more outcome control because they are typically more standards that he can refer to. And the Business Change and Organization project are typically more people oriented. They are more more stakeholder organ.
[00:25:59] Now, with that in mind, yes, we can now use those profiles of successful project managers and put them into the quadrant over here to see what type of project manager do I need in what type of a governance structure. So down here on the lower left, shareholder oriented behavior controlled. Yes, we have the I.T. and telecom projects, people very high and critical thinking, conscientiousness, empowering others, managing others and high sensitivity.
[00:26:32] So are two very high dimensions in EKU. Yeah, one very high in IQ and too high in energy.
[00:26:44] Up here, the engineering and construction project. It looks different and then the project managers over here very high and self-awareness, but also very high on conscientiousness and critical thinking, just like these guys down here.
[00:26:56] But the rest is more or less what the average manager in the industry, in the world of outcome, control and stakeholder orientation.
[00:27:06] You never see these people are very high in many of the emotional intelligence dimensions and the managerial dimensions.
[00:27:14] Whereas in the ICU, dimensions must not be so strongly expressed. It's more about dealing with people.
[00:27:24] Now, in the last quarter when I had a bit of a problem because I have not done a study myself on it on that last quarter. But I have a study that is related to it, but not 100 percent. So I presented as a shaded diagram because here the imagery with the liver to a 50 percent range is not the average manager.
[00:27:48] I've been in the industry here. This read is the average project manager. So that this one is different from the other. As we said before here, the 50 percent me is the average manager in the industry. And here the 50 percent rate is the average project manager.
[00:28:08] So in the the vote of of ajai. At the end, we have project managers who are loyal conscientiousness and motivation. Then the average project manager above 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 is only relatively low relative to other project managers.
[00:28:34] But they are better in communication than than the other product managers. They are good in developing a better plan than the average profit margin. Develop developing others and they are very high intuitiveness.
[00:28:48] Otherwise, we need different people with different governance structures.
[00:28:54] That leads us to the question of methodology.
[00:28:58] Does methodology play a role in the profit, success and bottom line? My PSG students to do this study some some years back on. What's the impact of the methodology on project success? And he found out overall across the across the board, across all products. There's a six percent impact of methodology on the six percent.
[00:29:27] We at the same level as dropping to an intense level and critical success factors.
[00:29:32] They had an average also at six percent. So in other words, it is another critical success. Trust us is ridiculous. It's pretty simple arithmetic.
[00:29:44] But he also found out another thing, and that is that there are basically two different types of methodologies.
[00:29:52] 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.
[00:30:11] Give us a comprehensive methodologies here, which are not supplemented by something new because everything is in that run your product. Yet no one doubts its behavior control. Yes, it's for people who are relatively new in the world of project management. They've failed to not feel comfortable in developing their own majority. So they have a tool that guides them clearly from P2P. The other type of methodology is are incomplete by design methodologies, which are open to be adjusted to the particular circumstances of the project.
[00:30:50] They provide some rudimentary steps and techniques in these kind of things, but then leave it to the to the expeience project manager to fill the gaps in between those things that are good for the particular type of project.
[00:31:10] Apparently, this is more for the firm, for the senior project manager than when we said earlier that senior project managers are up here in this type of government.
[00:31:20] John.
[00:31:23] Good. That leads us to the question, how do we govern? And basically said that there are two mechanisms to govern.
[00:31:35] One is control and one is trust. Now we all know what control is.
[00:31:39] I do not spend time here explaining as all what control is with the time reporting and all these is, but what trust is as a government is making. These might be a bit of interest. First of all, what is trust? It's a living as a one person to be vulnerable to the actions of another person based on the expectation that the other person will perform that particular action important to the one who trusts, irrespective of the ability to control this activity of trust.
[00:32:17] As such is said to be impossible to measure. What because we cannot put a probe in the eyes of the people and then measure this? Things like fever, fever. Instead of measuring trust directly, there's a proxy which is called trustworthiness. And trustworthiness is measured along three dimensions. The first one is the ability. Does the president has the ability to do the job? The second one is benevolence. Here is the person willing to do something good to us. To us. Who? You trust him. So will he behave in our best interests? And last not least, is the person showing integrity? Does he walk the talk? Does he do what he says?
[00:33:09] So this is an integer person. So when we typically measure trust along this line in terms of trust, then there are many different views to trust.
[00:33:20] But two very popular ones. Assistant trust in people, trust the system. Trust is. Do we trust the system?
[00:33:29] The governance system to help us and people trust us. Do we trust the person to do the job? And what we see is that the system trust and the people trust are related.
[00:33:44] If we have a governance system that helps the people too, then that has a lot of trust in the people in terms of assuming they have the ability, benevolence, integrity to do their job. Then these people trust the governance system that it is good for them to by asking people. Yeah. If you have an ethical problem. Yeah. Does the governance system authorize you to decide and implement counteractions to that ethical problem?
[00:34:16] Yeah, 70 percent of the people said, yes, I have the freedom to decide these things on my. And 30 percent said no. Now asking a similar question. Yeah. Doug, do you trust your your governance system to help you in your case of the problem? Eighty percent of the people say yes. So there is a reciprocal relationship between system trust and 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 democracy and we have the odds once again for governance paradigms here.
[00:35:03] 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 the governance through control.
[00:35:21] We want to make people behave in accordance with a particular process.
[00:35:28] Obviously, to that, the governance mechanism is more stakeholder, an outcome. Should we trust the people that they can do the job? Yes, we only control them in terms of the final result of their work.
[00:35:42] So we food trust as a governance mechanism. OK.
[00:35:49] Now I think you do a little bit of statistics and asked people, what's your level of trust then? What's your view? Your orientation as a company, we clearly see 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. 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 project is successful and not the project is successful because we trust. So we only see a correlation at that point of time.
[00:36:45] But what is interesting is if we really look at these large investment projects again, we get Berlin Airport, for example, we start these projects over here.
[00:37:00] We impose a lot of strict restrictions on the suppliers. They have to follow the process all down in order to make sure that we spend the taxpayers money wisely. So this is start off the project with a lot of control, which means Miss Trust. Yeah. So we do not trust the people who control them to the extent possible. And what what have we said on on on that slide here? If we start with mistrust here, we create the same thing in the people. Yeah. So in other words, if we start off here, we create a culture where everybody's looking for loopholes and we cannot circumvent the governance structure to actually do something good for myself, to do something beneficial for us. And that increases the control then. And we are in what must be because the iron cage of democracy are we are down here. We are locked in here mentally. And we cannot escape the opposite to that. What happens if we start a project over here? We trust the people. And there are two possibilities. One is they are successful in the stadium.
[00:38:19] The other is there might be a problem and we move somewhere else in those four corners. 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 part of the project that I started off here. They typically remain here for the rest of their life. 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, yes, 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.
[00:39:19] From the outset of the.
[00:39:27] I'm doing OK.
[00:39:32] Good. I think, Michael, I have a few questions for you. And then we come back to the discussion. Thank you, Roe, so much.
[00:39:42] So what we would like you to do now is do the same thing as you did before. Use ten minutes. Thank you, Ralph.
[00:39:49] Use 10 minutes around the table to discuss what per what governance paradigm is dominating in your organization and what how would that fit your project? And then discuss how we could increase the likelihood of project success by improving trut and stakeholder orientation. So how can you go towards the more yellow direction of decompensate? Right. So a discussion around the tables about what you just heard. Ten minutes.
[00:40:28] And this. You're right. Discussions around the table.
[00:40:36] All right.
[00:40:39] So great discussions around the table. So it seems very interesting.
[00:40:43] And I'm actually I'm just going to give you a twist in two. How would this relate to have double? And then if there is a question, we will have round two. To help us to relate to some of this. So how does this relate to Project Hafta? Because as you know, we're just doing one project with a methodology. We're not really trying to change a governance system. Having said that, it is although a challenge with all projects that they would have to somehow apply to the governance at in the organization that you're in. So what we do with a half Double mint pathology 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, but 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 establish from her early on in the project.
[00:41:49] And 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 do you have double project, then there would be a standard flow, for instance, for I.T. projects and some companies, and there would be a standard flow for for maybe all projects in the companies that you would have to apply to in terms of having gate meetings with discussion boards at certain times. So, of course, applying the overall flow model or project model to this project is, of course, a part of a half toppled translation. So how do we then view governance when we're 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. And when we do project have doubled. Usually what happens is that we because we decree reduced the time to impact. 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've really made very important decisions very early on in the project in which you gain insight. And sometimes that conflicts with the governance incentive and the overall decision making. So, so interesting. This is a a more premature decision that you wouldn't then you would you should have seen a project. And of course, you need to align that with the US, with the governance committee, with 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 willingness to maybe Twist's some of the standard approaches to governance. And then, of course, also maybe adjust the project to how the governance is set up. Of course. Do I want one of those ways actually to try to balance that? And then, of course, we'd like to enhance trust before control. So we would like to really use less effort and status report. We would like to invite the project donor or maybe maybe governance board members into the room and see the project as it really is in its roasting. So we invite them into the collocation 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 flitter presentations that might become water method projects. I mean, projects that are green on the outside and red on the inside. So we try to avoid that by inviting them into the room and having a discussion about what has been 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 would try to anchor with key people very early on in the project. 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 or follow how to use this methodology, because it sometimes having that sponsorship will make it easier to adjust governance and the. 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 mythology of how to do projects in a given organization. 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 in half double 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 in half double projects? Usually you need to adjust a little to the given setup. That is the true governance or despair. How we can make that twist through that adjustment to to make sure that we have still flow in the project. So that's how we we kind of approach that. And the interesting thing is that if we look at this slide the Ralph showed us, we would situate ourselves somewhere up here as a starting point. And with it would have to be. I would go for the most part, we would like to invite people into the room and have the dialog right there on the spot about how to do the project. And I think that we had a great case with with Novo is actually related to this because no one noticed. My initial guess would be that the governance would be unique kind of in this direction, which would make perfect sense because they make drug products that people should not die from. Right. You need to follow certain governance. That's just how it goes. And this was an I.T. project and we tried to start somewhere up here. And I think we kind of ended up in the middle. 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 boom. So so that was a DEA trickey in that pilot project. So so I'm not saying that, you know, everything is is a mess. If if you want to run a project, maybe with this competence and you are in an organization where you have this governance, it is really possible to align those two approaches. If you just started the dialog 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 half double perspective related to governance. And I've also heard that that actually we have a great question here that people 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 Yakup to ask a question.
[00:47:59] Well, a couple of those here on the table were experiencing that were actually coming from the more trust based environment and seeing that this didn't work. Projects go over budget over deadline, exploding skogen. We are moving towards a more control based environment. And of there, you say that the projects that focus on trust are more likely to have success. That's what I'm reading. So so I was kind of curious what what we did wrong in the trust area since we didn't succeed.
[00:48:47] Yeah. Without knowing your politics, I, I would say you did nothing wrong.
[00:48:54] It may be the nature of the project and the nature of the context of your project that requires you to be a bit more on the controls. Yeah.
[00:49:03] So I trust people to be smart and then run their their projects and their perfect business in the best possible way.
[00:49:12] And if they move into more control than there's a reason for it. Yeah. And it can't be that, that the nature of your profits requires more control. You know, the circumstances under which the project is run requires more control. We know that when the income of the economy goes, goes south, goes bad, and then the leaders typically provided go through a bull controlled beast type type of leadership in order to recover the situation. But once it is getting better, you can then instill a bit more trust again. And probably the same thing in your project. There might be reasons within the projects that requires you to to apply more control, at least put a period of time effort.
[00:50:03] One last follow up question. I just ask you where you're really good at involving the senior management in controlling and pioritizing projects.
[00:50:15] So what will they do if you're really good at and all these senior management in controlling and firefighting?
[00:50:22] Well, they will and can get. The problem is not as much as we should the.
[00:50:31] So, yeah, thought maybe it's been an anchoring overseas kind of thing. Smith.
[00:50:38] It did make Kagan a bit wrong from from my side. Don't don't get me wrong by assuming that control is always bad. Couldn't control be very good. It's just that you see this strong correlation between successful profits and trust and profit.
[00:50:57] All right. Thank you very much. Well, see if I can do this. Thank you. Would you help me to give one more. Rob.
[00:51:14] OK. So we're getting to the wrap up part. I'm just going to use this word here. Let's see.
[00:51:23] We get into the wrap up part and the wrap up part is really two things, a few messages. And then I'm going to try to set up the despairing sessions. But as you know, there are there voluntarily so you can sign up for them. And I'm just going to give you a few input for how to do that. But first, A, if you showed 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 trollers. And we have a few targets that that's related to receiving those money. And one of the one of the targets that we have is really relate to this community. So we have committed ourselves to create an engaging and an activated community of a thousand people. And what happened yesterday was that we actually have member number 1000 signing up for the community, using the utility.
[00:52:27] You're right, a remember, number one, the.
[00:52:38] That's better than that one as nails. That's perfect. Now going to the ten thousand, right.
[00:52:43] The other thing that I just want to share with you is that we're doing a similar morning meeting with this. The next morning meeting will not be with a Thorpedo. It will be with the group proud of all of us. And more people from the community. 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 Peer is right down there. He's that part of the research team. We have peer here and we also have a 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 projects. We will also maybe have a few from the pilot, 42 percent, how we apply mythology. And then, of course, try to relate that to your own projects. So that will go on the 21st of April, 2017. You can sign up at the Web page and then it's time for the full movie called The Despairing Sessions, and to give you this set up on the Spirit Sessions. The idea is really to make this community come alive without this session. 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. 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've who've always sort of some of you've 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 Edina and might not know the methodology that well. 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. We've done it three times before because Stephanie and Linda were very probably because of the community from the start. You have lived right another day. As you said, we would like to help, but why don't we do this? So. So based on their bright idea, we've done this twice now and it turned out to be pretty good. And we're going to try today as well. And we'll see. This is a bigger prop than usual. But let's just try to. So the the math here here is that that you can sign up today and do dispair 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 join up today again and we would have new teams joining up. So so let's see how that falls out and we'll make it into a cadeaux exercise. 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 your methodology. Community and Confirmation
[00:55:52] And then, of course, we are hoping that by the end of your sessions that you would like to share some of your insights, some of your learnings with the rest of the crowd here, maybe not project specific things, but at least, you 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 robot entitled that you have a project back home. That way you would like to apply some of these methods on and try it. So that's the one road that you can sign up for. The other road that you could sign up, folks, will be called the coach route. And in the profile, we would hope that you would know the three principles by heart and also the principal research and how to to make that come alive to some extent. You should also know a little about the nine 1/2 table methods in order to apply to to the project over there. Hopefully you have your experience as a project leader. You've tried this before, doing project before, and you might also have tried to do the half of mythology 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 you're sitting across and try to get a grip on and figure out, you know, how can we apply some of the methodology of this? And then, of course, hopefully you will share some of if there will be general insights afterwards in the wrap up session. So we've put the vision 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 you to be total experts, but we would like you to have at least heard about. If a all maybe even bred the methodology and the methodology guide would just this one over here, so. So that's a positive sign up for that. If you think of what? If you want to be the coach position. So I'm going to put this.
[00:57:52] Chart in the middle of the room.
[00:57:55] And while we were having lunch, you walk up here, write your name and your project 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. So at about quarter past 12, we'll do that exact match. So from now on and up up to twelve fifteen, you will be having lunch and that will arrive soon. There will be some sandwiches and you put up your posters here and they will do the match of your past. Any questions for this before?
[00:58:34] I am no good. So they look so nice to have you here today. I see that the sandwiches are coming. That's perfect timing. So enjoy. Enjoy the lunch and see you in. Took a deep.
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