This week I’m loving
I follow a lot of content and every once in a while there’s a gem of information like the latest newsletter from Work3 - The Future of Work. I don’t have a particular item here that stuck out to me, the whole thing was valuable as an assessment of the current work landscape and what to pay attention to as you navigate it. I hope you enjoy!
From the Practice
This week’s From the Practice is a heads up that PMI has issued a draft standard for public member comment on AI for Portfolio, Program, and Project Management. You can check out all 351 pages of this as a logged in PMI Member for the next 8 weeks here. I was fairly impressed with the thoroughness and structure of the standard. I think it will prove useful for us all in the coming years.
And while we are at it, if you are interested in how your AI skills stack up, Generalist World just release an interesting skills quiz you can have fun with!
An interesting read
This week’s interesting read is a little treatise on how we think about value from the Business Agility Institute. As someone who talks often about value delivery, I enjoyed the perspective the article brings. It can be easy to get caught up in the feeling that because a solution is good that it will be needed. In fact, this is much less common than we think. For half of my career I watched the Canadian healthcare system lumber along with mediocre and inadequate solutions to many problems for which good solutions existed. Habits are powerful. If you combine policy and habits, it gets even trickier.
I enjoyed three smart definitions in the article:
output - the work done (I’m going to add…the work done by the project team)
outcome - a behavioral change in the target customer
impact - the long-term results or benefits
These definitions are smart because they show you how you can assess the opportunity through the lens of value. Specifically you can ask two questions:
How likely is the behavioral change that would be needed in the target customer?
If we succeed, how big is the impact?
As they say, “no risk, no reward”. It might be worth making a bet that you can influence a behavioral change in your target customer when the impact of that change is substantial. This might be worth it even if the likelihood of the behavioral change is low because the benefit might offset this risk. But, if on the other hand, the impact is low and the behavioral change is unlikely, then you know immediately not to take the bet.
Once you’ve assessed how big of a bet you would be taking, then you can properly assess whether the investment in the outputs required of the team would be worthwhile. Remembering of course that value is only delivered if we can generate something that will garner a price that is higher than our investment.
Your product strategy will be informed by your “bet”, in that it should be focused on how you will change the target customer behavior. So this framing is also valuable for the team to consider these aspects of product development for an enhanced chance at success. Some might say, this is where you hedge your bet.
I do want to call out something important in this mindset though. If we only pursue winnable bets, transformative change in the world might never occur. Sometimes you have to bet because you believe it will work out in the long-run, even when the bet looks bad. These kinds of bets should be made when we know the impact that the outcome will make is important, even if it takes a long time.
What do you think?
A tip
This week’s reminder comes to us from Amber McMillan, an amazing person I am blessed to know and who inspires me everyday with her ferocity on outstanding project communications.
It can be tempting to think that we, as project managers, need to jump in to fix things. Sometimes, this works. But sometimes, we should remember to cultivate space for others to step up; cultivate time for stakeholders to come around to a new perspective; cultivate quiet to help calm the team toward high-performance.
So in that next meeting where it isn’t going great, or you are feeling like something is going sideways, take a pause; breathe in the silence; survey the landscape; and then move forward. You may be surprised by what emerges.
A lesson
As Generalists we are always learning, and we love to work in environments that love learning. This week’s interesting “lesson” comes from a Harvard Business Review article by Amy Edmondson and colleagues on the impacts of different types of learning on innovation potential in organizations. This is a fascinating read and will support every generalist PM to consider the types of learning going on (either individually or in the organization) and what it may mean for our creativity and innovation in the moment. Check it out!