High Agency

MO DHALIWAL

[00:00:00] Welcome to High Agency, where we ignite conversations that drive change and spark momentum towards transformative action and professional mastery.  Everything we see in thought leadership around business is about driving growth, breaking into new markets, or launching new products or companies.  However, we don't spend enough time talking about the role that delivers all of this, those thankless operators that make things happen.  That's why today we're talking about project management.  It's a really interesting topic for me because I work in spaces where everyone thinks they know what project management is or what good project management looks like, because it's just Gantt charts and tasks, right?  It's about assigning duties and responsibilities and making sure things get done.  And if that's all it is, then why is it so difficult?  Looking at some statistics published by the Project Management Institute, KPMG, and some others, there are some very dubious numbers that jump out.  So today, 70% of projects fail; 42% of companies don't understand the need or importance of project management, and projects become two and a half times more successful when project management practices are in place.  Project management itself has evolved a lot.  For a long time, it wasn't even called project management.  Sometime around 1910, Henry L.  Gantt first invented the Gantt chart to visually schedule tasks over time, and that blew people's minds.  At the end of the 1950s, the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT)  and the Critical Path Method were developed by the U.S. Navy.  And the 1960s wasn't all just about the project management; that's also when the first professional organizations were founded and started formalizing project management as a discipline.  In 1970, the waterfall methodology of project management was introduced by Dr. Winston W.  Royce.  And then the 1980s saw the publication of the Project Management Body of Knowledge by the PMI.  Through the dot-com boom of the 1990s, there was huge growth in the software tools available to help manage projects.  Yet, software projects in particular continue to see an 80% failure rate.  So you can imagine that this is probably what drove 17 frustrated but highly experienced software engineers to get together and publish the Agile Manifesto in 2001.  And that began the shift towards agile project management.  Since then, there have been further iterations through Scrum, Kanban, many flavors of Agile, and all of this is to say that I was one of those who thought they knew what project management was until I saw the light.  And my deliverance was orchestrated by our guest today, Sanaz Afshar.  She's the head of delivery at Cycle.  In this and previous roles, Sanaz has managed to save many projects and souls from damnation.  Welcome, Sanaz.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:03:24] Thank you.  That was really nice.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:03:27] Well, thanks for joining us today.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:03:28] Yeah, thanks for having me.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:03:29] I feel like this is almost a redundant question for you, your values, the way you work, and the world you come from.  But what does high agency mean to you?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:03:38] So high agency from where I sit is really, they're just qualities in the people that you work with.  So people that can take ownership, people that have high resilience, people that persist and can get things done despite the challenges that are around them.  These are qualities that we all have.  Of course, in the right environment, you can really become a high agency individual.  And of course, on the flip side to that, the right leadership can also bring it out in you as well.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:04:13] So project management, I mean, I gave a bit of a summary of where it came from.  And what you can see in all of this is that humans, for some amount of time, in these capitalistic structures we live in, have been trying to bring in a lot of the things that we do.  Bring people and resources together over time, and try to get things done, and to manage that energy.  So, what does project management mean to you?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:04:38] Project management, in general, is just a matter of having a group of people come together to achieve a goal.  So as a project manager, what you want to do is, you know, really hone in on your facilitation skills, making sure you understand what it is we're working towards, making sure you understand what it is we're working towards, making sure the group understands what they're working towards and being able to say, okay, we've hit this milestone or we've hit this deliverable based on these, you know, outcomes we were trying to reach.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:05:10] So when we first met, I think it was like eight years ago now, nine years, something like that, I remember a real light bulb went off for me because up until then, we'd been pretty outcome focused in what we were trying to build and deliver for our clients.  And I myself had looked at project management as a bit of a necessary sort of add-on, but not the focus of anything.  And then when you joined Skyrocket Digital initially and took a look around, and I'm sure you thought, 'Okay, what a trash fire, we need to clean this up.'  That was the first time that I had an appreciation of moving from the simple, kind of good intentioned project management of saying, 'Okay, let's list out all the things we need to do and try to plot them out over time without real, any connection to how much effort things take, managing the complexity, or even getting some of the psychological buy-in from the people that needed to be involved, right?  So what does good project management look like?  Because I'm sure you've seen the bad side.  We're going to talk about that as well.  But what does it look like when it's really effective?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:06:17] So, I think there's the world of project management and then there's the world of, you know, what methodology, what methodology are you following?  And so for me, being a servant leader is what makes the difference.  Of course, there's predictive project management where, you know, you're coming up with the work backlog schedule and you might have the Gantt chart that you were referencing, but a successful project manager is somebody who's a master facilitator, somebody who is a servant leader, someone who's really interested in making sure that there is, you know, an understanding and well-being amongst the team.  And I think that's, that's what makes the difference as a good project manager.  You're looking for that sort of cohesive, you know, ownership amongst the group to get something done.  So for me, a good project manager has the qualities that often fall into the category of agile or scrum, which makes you, you know, a servant leader, somebody who's got great active listening skills, someone who's looking to coach the team, making sure that everyone's they're succeeding in what they're doing.  That, that to me is successful project management.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:07:31] So you didn't mention any software tools.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:07:34] No, I think tools are absolutely bogus.  I think that project management tools are, I mean, you need them, but this idea that a tool is going to save your, your team or your project is a farce.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:07:46] I feel like that was me for a long time.  It would be, okay, this isn't working or we're seeing some inefficiencies in some other area.  And so we'd go hunting.  We'd look for the next great project management tool that had all the right promises and maybe that would make things feel better.  But it wasn’t until we started working with you really started coaching us that we realized that actually it was more to do with the human dynamic.  And then we just needed something in behind the human dynamic to help us with hygiene, to help us with reporting, and essentially to keep the details organized, right?  Because you don't want to hold on to memory.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:08:18] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:08:19] For everything, yeah.  So that was a big learning for me personally.  So when you're walking into a new situation, what enables you for success?  Like the companies that you've worked with, whether it was Skyrocket or whether it was your roles since then, you know, what do you need to set you up for success?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:08:37] So I think what I need to be set up for success is probably similar to what a lot of people need.  Usually a good organization has strong leadership.  You know, strong leadership is people that can come in and provide positive influence, that can enable you to do your job, that can create a safe environment.  Creating a safe environment or a safe culture for your staff is critical.  And you know that your environment is safe when your staff feels comfortable asking more questions or if they're, you know, if they're open to having more conversations.  So I don't quite get what we're doing here or, you know, can we talk a little bit more about this deadline?  I need these things in order to be able to deliver whatever it is that I'm supposed to deliver.  Right?  Yeah.  Yeah.  That to me is sort of the recipe for success for anyone coming into any job.  I think we all have a little bit of project manager skills within us, and we all have to be organized to be able to do our jobs.  But I think the very foundation of what makes a project manager successful is the right kind of leadership, being given the room to, you know, establish a framework that works for the environment.  But really, it's all about the people and, you know, who you're working with, who you're partnered with.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:09:55] So if safety is so important, I mean, how do you create that?  Because I know you've worked in them.  I've worked in them as well as situations where there's deadlines, there's urgency, there's – you know, mission critical.  Like, that's not a, you know, like a happy little fuzzy friendly term, right?  Yeah.  These are environments and even some terminology that can generate a lot of fear, right?  Like it's called critical path, right?  Because it's critical, right?  Yeah.  So how do you create safety?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:10:25] Yeah, that's a great question.  And it can get really challenging when there's deadlines or where if you've maybe had some things fail or if you've lost clients and now it's starting to feel, you know, like you're maybe chasing your tail.  Creating a safe, I mean, it takes a lot of courage to create a safe environment.  For those in leadership positions, you have to really come to terms with your own knowledge gap.  Like you should know, you know, these are the things that I'm good at.  And these are the areas that I need help with.  And then finding people that you can work with so that those gaps are filled appropriately.  I think that was something that you and I did really well when we worked together; that I had a set of skills, and it was very different than your set of skills, but they were very complementary to each other.  And so, you know, you would come in and you have these high-level ideas and you want to execute something.  And then I have the skill set to take that high-level idea and bring it down to earth and put some structure around it.  So, you know, it's really about the people that you kind of assemble to create that team and allowing those people to actually do their job well.  And I think sometimes that gets very scary for those that are in senior leadership roles.  Relinquishing a little bit of power to your team can feel quite destabilizing, yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:11:49] But I mean, the benefits are huge.  And actually, I don't think I fully appreciated the need for that middle structure.  Fully until you brought it in and implemented it, because I think I have fairly entrepreneurial instincts.  That's maybe a nice and friendly way of saying that I have sometimes unrealistic expectations and high impatience to get things done.  And so there were many situations where I would come in and either provide like a really broad 30,000-foot view of what the value is, what the vision was, and where we're headed.  And I could operate there at that level or I could operate at the level of just shoving people out of the way and saying, 'I'll do it myself.'  But the middle thing of like fully activating a team and giving them the structure to actually break down sometimes some pretty big missions into smaller parts and move towards them.  That's something I didn't fully appreciate until you actually taught me about Agile, and we started going down the road of implementing it.  So, you know, what was your experience?  My experience here in coming into an agency where up until that point, we had treated pretty much every project and every initiative as waterfall.  It was either, you know, a small waterfall thing that we did repeatedly or it was some big waterfall project that might take a year or more.  But yeah, what was your experience of coming into that situation and bringing in Agile to an environment that didn't have it at all?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:13:22] So what was great in terms of, my experience in that example was that, again, you as the person in the leadership role, you were open to new ideas.  And so, you know, when I came to you and I said, okay, well, this is how I think we can execute on our projects.  There was, you know, clearly it was new information for you, but you were willing to listen and you were willing to try it.  And so the experience at Skyrocket was amazing.  It was actually so amazing that I thought that I was the greatest project manager ever and tried to do the exact same thing in my next role, which didn't quite work out as well.  But the experience at Skyrocket was wonderful.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:14:04] Well, I mean, you were the greatest project manager that we ever had.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:14:08] Oh, that's really lovely.  Thank you.  I think it just, everything came together in a way that was lucky.  I think, you know, I introduced some concepts and the team that we had together, everyone was willing to try.  I think, you know, everyone coming to the table with a sense of curiosity was really important.  People being interested in learning about this, you know, this new way that we're going to do this together and participate.  Something that was really special about the team at the time is that everyone really had naturally a good sense of accountability and ownership for the work that they did.  And it was something that I deeply took for granted.  You don't always get that quality in everyone that you work with.  And it's something that you have to coach and remind people about.  But at the time, it was a really great experience.  It was, you know, here's the framework.  Here's how we're going to do it.  You know, some of the other things that were really helpful in that experience was that we were the same set of people.  We, you know, would try something for a sprint or a few sprints.  We'd come together.  We would have the retrospective.  Okay, what's working well?  What's not?  Let's shift.  And so because we were the same group of people, people working together, we just incrementally got better and better.  Not only at the practice of working within that framework, but also just working with each other, which is critical.  Getting to know each other, understanding each other's strengths.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:15:39] Yeah, I remember that about that time as well, was that we may not have had the discipline or the frameworks before you introduced them, but there was definitely an openness.  There was an accountability.  And there was a culture of experimentation, right?  Mm-hmm.  There was no fear.  There was no fear about trying something for some, you know, reasonable period of time and seeing if it works.  And if it does, great.  And if not, move on and try something else.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:16:03] Yeah, and you know, that's

MO DHALIWAL

[00:16:04] - That culture persisted for sure.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:16:05] That's the testament to good leadership.  If, you know, if we're talking about what makes a safe organization, a safe culture, is having the opportunity to try something with the potential that it might fail, but you're not going to, you know, the fear isn't that you're going to lose your job or get demoted and that there is an opportunity to learn from it and quickly, quickly pivot.  So I think that was really helpful.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:16:28] Yeah, well, you know, I think you also did a really good job of communicating the values and benefits of Agile because I've got to say for someone who up until that point had come from very waterfall environments, it was a little jarring and quite uncomfortable, right?  Because, and actually maybe this is a point we should get into definitions a little bit.  So, waterfall, you know, we're using this terminology as if everybody understands it, but waterfall is this notion that you can plan every phase of a project.  It's predictive.  It's predictive, right?  So, you start off by doing some amount of, you know, research and analysis.  You might start designing a solution.  Then, you plan how the solution is going to roll out.  Then, you go and actually execute the solution, and then eventually, you launch it, right?  And the idea is that every phase will be so well thought out that you're just going to move, you're just going to move, waterfall fashion, from one phase to the next.  And at the end, out pops your finished perfect product.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:17:28] Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:17:28] And that's also why 80% of projects fail.  But waterfall planning always feels good though, right?  It provides a lot of reassurance to leadership and I think even team members because you can plot out 12 months on a wall as if that's the truth and say, 'Okay, here's everything that we're going to do.'  And of course it's all going to go perfectly, but it's kind of akin to like standing in the middle of a wall.  It's kind of akin to like standing in one spot and trying to imagine every twist and turn that's going to arrive in a road that you can't even fully see, right?  So agile is more realistic, but I think for leadership, it does generate some uncertainty because like we have this conversation with clients sometimes, right?  Where they'll say, 'Okay, you know, here's what we need and you know, when can you deliver by?'  And we'll say, 'Well, you know, we're not sure because the need isn't, you know, totally clear.  It's not clearly articulated yet, but here's what we can do to get started on the journey, right?  And a good client will get curious about that and be interested in, 'Okay, you know, tell me about this journey.'  What does that mean?  And the wrong client for us will, I think, check out right there and say, 'You know, I just want the thing.'  I don't care about the journey, but how do you bring people into the journey of uncertainty, right?  Because that's actually what agile does is it takes the uncertainty and it breaks it down into smaller pieces but for a leader in a company that's looking for absolute certainty and I'm like, I don't care about agile.  I don't care about the journey.  Give me a date.  All right, give me the date that the thing's going to be built by.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:19:02] And it's a fair request.  So I've never been in a situation where someone doesn't want the dates.  And you have to come up with, you know, some hybrid model to be able to appease those that are your stakeholders or your, you know, the people on senior leadership that just need to understand when is this thing that I want going to be finished or a piece of it.  So this is, this is where this idea of value comes in.  You know, can you incrementally deliver some value that you're able to show in some way?  So in the world of software, for example, you know, you can deliver small increments of value.  Okay, I'm going to demo this portion of the software and show you that this workflow that, you know, that is part of the bigger project is now working and next week I'm going to show you this other piece.  And then sometimes you just have to build out those timelines, but then you, you know, I find that I have to also amp up the communication and how often I check in with those folks and let them know about the changes that are happening or, you know, some of the gotchas or the unknowns that are coming up or, you know, why we're having to make, you know, a decision to maybe pause this part of the project and move to this other part of the project.  So it's really in how much communication can you provide to your stakeholders and leadership to make them feel comfortable.  If you're not able to do the waterfall style schedule, right?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:20:20] Yeah, and of course, in any situation, you can do the waterfall style scheduling.  It's adhering to it, well, not even adhering to it.  It's like waterfall sets up an unrealistic situation at the outset.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:20:36] Yeah, you're often never going to hit exactly what you said you were going to hit.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:20:40] Yeah.  And so the idea in Agile being that you're always delivering some value and you're improving upon and continuously iterating on that value that you're providing.  So even Agile, I mean, you know, from the manifesto in 2001 that was produced by those 17 frustrated software engineers, even Agile itself has gotten quite a bit more complicated, right?  There was some stuff circulating online, these really famous diagrams from like Accenture and others that were laying out their Agile, you know, delivery methodology.  And it looked like, you know, the most complicated transit map of the London underground that you've ever seen.  It was like this giant thing with just arrows flowing into other arrows and a big circle, then lots of arrows and icons indicating people, checks and balances, reporting, and all sorts of stuff going on.  And so Agile to some extent has also become a science unto itself.  And to some extent, sometimes I feel like, you know, have people lost the point?  I mean, what we're trying to do with these PM methodologies and tools, which was deliver something valuable that people care about, and it's become its own thing.  And so within that, there's things like Scrum, for example, and kind of not the opposite, but adjacent to that is another methodology called Kanban.  I know there's plenty of others that are like in between this.  So how do you decide?  Well, maybe first tell us, you know, what's your understanding of what these are?  And how they fit into Agile?  And then what do you decide, you know, what to use and where?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:22:26] So I haven't seen the Accenture diagram that you're referencing.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:22:30] I'll send it to you.  It's wild.  Yeah.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:22:31] And of course, some projects are high-risk and require that level of checks and balances to make sure that you deliver what you're delivering.  And sometimes you really are building something that, you know, human lives depend on.  So it has to have that kind of structure to it.  Mm-hmm.  But for me, it's just about the human relationships.  And I think that's ultimately when you really look at the foundation of Scrum or Agile or Kanban, it's just really a matter of having people come together and work together instead of the process being the thing that we're all following, right?  If we can get to know each other, if we can learn to work with a set of rules that work for us as a group that are currently working on a project together, that is the foundation of Agile.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:23:25] Yeah.  Yeah.  And, you know, for anybody that reads the Agile manifesto, the major points are all about human interaction, right?  What favoring direct feedback, favouring people working together over processes and tools.  It's a very humanistic thing.  But these are values that you espouse as an individual and in your practice.  How do you transmit those into other people that don't have your knowledge, your experience, your commitment to that stuff?  Like how do you walk into a new situation and say, okay, these are my values, but how do you make them everybody else's values?  Because what you're describing, absolutely, that would be successful if we walked into a room and everybody knew that, okay, we're here to create and deliver value, but it's about human interaction and it's about us coming together and understanding each other.  Like that's great, right?  But what do you do when that doesn't exist?  How do you bring it in?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:24:22] So everyone has a certain level of agency.  Everyone has a certain, you know, inner drive that excites them to do their job.  I think, you know, coming into, you know, a group of people, you want to get to know what motivates people.  You want to understand, you know, what are your goals?  What are your growth goals?  Like what do you hope to, you know, go in next in your career?  Can I help facilitate that?  I get really excited watching people get better at what they do, understanding, you know, what they want to do and can I help them do that thing that they want to get to do.  So really coaching, first getting to know your team, getting to know what their needs are, getting to understand what excites them, but you know, really being able to sort of create an environment where you're allowing people to do their job in a way that is empowering, you know, allowing people to speak up.  You know, it's an environment, again, a safe environment where people can maybe make mistakes and continue to grow from that.  But it is a lot of repetitive work, making sure people understand the goals that we're trying to reach, understanding this is a set of rules that we're working within.  You know, let's have a retrospective.  Are these sets of rules working for us?  If not, let's adjust so that it works for us as a group together.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:25:57] Okay, so let's do a little role play.  Okay.  But it's a role you're used to.  So you've walked into a new company and they've been already working on some sort of software product for some period of time and they're using the right tools and they say they're running in two-week sprints.  Meaning that they're, you know, defining what they're going to do ahead of two weeks and then over that two-week period trying to finish everything that they defined and then moving on to the next, you know, basket of tasks.  Sure.  And you've come in off the street and the sprints are broken.  There's no real clear definition of what's going to be done and by when.  And there's a team of people that seem to be in a bit of disarray but they're under a lot of pressure and they've been getting yelled at by various VPs in the company because things are late and they're not meeting expectations.  So for you it's day one on the job and you've come in.  Now what does your first day look like?  What does your first couple of weeks look like?  And what does your first couple of months look like?  I'm sorry this is sounding like a job interview but it is.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:27:07] So I'd say the first day, I would want to understand what the goals are for the projects that we're working on, for the company in general.  Within two weeks, I would probably want to understand; you know, I'd want to get to know the team.  Maybe, you know, have some informal conversations around; you know, what's working for them, what's not working for them.  I mean, what you're referencing is pretty; what you're referencing is a little bit of a sticky situation because what you're saying is someone new is stepping into an ecosystem and then, you know, looking to make change or looking to improve things which you have to be quite sensitive about it.  You know, you have to understand the politics.  You have to be a pretty self-aware individual and be able to come in and read the room, and you know, make sure that once you go through that storming phase, that you're not, you know, disregarding anyone.  You know, the thing to remember is that everyone is working quite hard and everyone's doing the best that they can.  So really being able to, in a way that is, you know, respectful and transparent, be able to surface some of the challenges that maybe are within that environment or within that team, and then try to work towards – okay, what can we work out together?  It's never a directive one person telling the team what's going on.  It's really a, so it's a lot about facilitation and being able to get the team to come together to come up with a solution together.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:28:39] Yeah, that's a really empathetic approach because I think it's easy for somebody new entering that situation to come in with some amount of arrogance and condescension, because if things are already dysfunctional, it's easy to - yeah, I think to some extent look down on people who are there that allow that to happen.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:29:00] Or just be like, 'Oh, I've got fresh eyes and I know exactly what's wrong, and this is how we're going to fix it.'  But that's not necessarily going to actually solve the problem right now.  Right away.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:29:09] Of course. Right.  And some of those hostilities just come from somebody coming in from the outside that doesn't fully understand the circumstances.  Yeah.  Because in every company, you've got, you know, ridiculously competent people that have all the skill sets that are incredibly capable.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:29:22] And a history of hard deadlines and things that maybe couldn't have happened the way you want it to happen.  Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:29:28] But there's something in the context that may have, you know, created that failure rate or created some issues or created restrictions.  And yeah, sometimes it takes somebody coming in from the outside to take a look at that and know exactly what to do next.  But with enough empathy that they can actually be heard and not just look like yet another hostile entity that is now thrusting more expectations and change on them.  Mm-hmm.  Where did you, where did you fail?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:29:57] Where did I fail?  So a really fun, fun example of this.  Fun maybe for you.  At the time it wasn't so much fun for me.  Fun for you to hear.  So my experience at Skyrocket was wonderful.  At the time it was just the right group of people.  And we talked about this, you know, everyone came to the table curious and willing to participate.  So, walking away from Skyrocket, I felt like I had the idea of how I could introduce the idea of agile or Scrum to a team, or how I, you know, how I could practice this form of change management.  So, I went to a different company with a team that was more than double the size of Skyrocket.  And they were having the same issues, except obviously at a larger scale.  Different format.  They were a SaaS company instead of an agency.  I was working on multiple small projects.  So, in theory, I thought: okay, it's one big project.  It couldn't possibly be almost a little bit even easier to manage because it's just one big project.  So something at Skyrocket that I, that I really promoted a lot and coached folks on was this form of empowerment.  I'm going to forget the other word.  This is why I brought my notes with me.  So bear with me as I look at my notes because.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:31:19] Was it agency, accountability?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:31:21] No, self-organization.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:31:22] Self-organization.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:31:23] And accountability is the one that I actually didn't really need to coach folks on at Skyrocket.  So empowerment and self-organization.  Can you, you know, can you self-organize?  You're all experts in what you do.  You don't necessarily need anyone to hold your hand in order to do your job.  If you're an excellent UX designer, you're an excellent UX designer, you're an excellent developer, you're an excellent architect, graphic design, you know, illustrator, content writer, whatever your role is, you've been hired into this position because you are good at what you do and you don't need somebody over your shoulder telling you how to do your job.  So, you know, self-organization is really a matter of trusting yourself and tuning into your own inner project manager and being able to get organized to get your work done.  Empowerment has a lot to do with creating that safe environment; allowing people to speak up.  You know, if you've got, you know, your folks in leadership saying, 'Okay, this thing is due in two weeks.'  You know, we've got to get it done in two weeks.  If you're feeling empowered and the environment is right, you can speak up and say, 'Okay, well, you know, we need these three things in order to do this.'  We need to be able to achieve our deadline or, you know, coaching the team on how to assess risk, how to identify and assess risk.  So these are all things that I felt like I had accomplished and done really well.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:32:45] And actually, sorry, you're halfway into your response, but I just want to interject on one thing, which was actually so profound that I don't want to lose it.  And it was in the idea of self-organization and empowerment.  When we're managing projects and we're working with a team, there's a norm around deciding what needs to be done and then doling out the work, right?  Assigning tasks.  And what you brought in for us was this idea of having the team decide what needs to be done.  And then when it's actually time to get the work started, they go in and they pick up tickets, right?  They assign the task to themselves.  And that's the psychological difference of telling somebody what needs to be done, even on a small thing of saying, 'Okay, here's a task, I'm assigning it to you', versus having them work with a group, decide what overall needs to be accomplished, and then self-selecting and saying, 'Okay, I elect to take on these priorities, right?'  And the psychological difference in doing that versus being told what to do, right?  It totally changes the buy-in.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:33:43] It does.  It really does change the mindset.  And this is where a really good tool might actually support your process.  So at the time, we were using Jira.  And so the act of me picking up a ticket, assigning that ticket to myself, putting it into progress, taking it all the way to the 'done'  status and saying 'this is done', or at least getting it ready for review and reviewing, and then reviewing that with my stakeholder, whether that's my account person or the product person, and then having it approved as 'done'  and then moving it to the 'done'  column, there is that sense of empowerment and ownership that you've gone in and you've picked up the work, you finished the work, and you did the work.  And that is critical in being able to get the team to self-organize.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:34:28] Sorry, I totally cut you off.  You're answering the failure question, but I want to definitely get the rest of it.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:34:32] Yeah, for sure.  So basically at Skyrocket, these are all things that we were able to accomplish in a positive way.  So I moved to my next job and coached the team in the same capacity.  There's self-organization.  You should feel empowered to speak up if you're seeing risk.  Being able to talk about risk and being able to talk about how that risk might affect your delivery or the risk might affect your business.  It might affect the system being buggy in some way or whatever the case may be.  Having the language to speak about risk and being able to talk about how it might affect the project in a way that's unsatisfactory.  So all of these things we did, and we did very well.  The piece that I, because I just historically didn't have to lean into this very much and therefore stopped really thinking about it, is the piece that is critical in the balance of this trifecta.  And that's accountability.  So you have self-organization.  You have this idea of being empowered to speak up.  And within empowerment, there's a lot of work that happens, a lot of coaching that happens around teaching people to identify risk.  How do we assess risk?  And then how do we work on mitigating that risk?  And then obviously the third part of this triangle is accountability.  And so what I, what I learned, what I learned, what I learned, what I learned, what I wasn't coaching people on was: okay, well, you, you know, yes, you've identified an issue.  Yes, you're empowered to speak up if something doesn't feel right about the project.  But you are still accountable to deliver.  And if, if you, you know, if there is a problem here, it's still your responsibility as someone who is self-organized and a, an expert in your job, someone that we've hired to do this, you know, to do this work; if you're seeing an issue, it's still your job to actually help us solve the problem.  And so this is where it totally went sideways.  And I created a culture of, instead of creating a culture of, okay, you know, we're, we're empowered, we're self-organized, and we're accountable, so we're going to solve our problems.  It became a situation of I'm empowered to say no, and I'm empowered to say these are problematic requests or the deadline's too tight.  Therefore, I'm not going to do it.  Or I, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm not delivering or, it's not so much that people were saying I'm not delivering, but we would get closer and closer to the deadline and people would come to stand up or people would come, you know, by end of week and, you know, I would say, okay, well, where is this thing you said you were going to do?  And it was like, well, I'm not done.  I'm not done because I'm waiting for someone or I'm not, I couldn't get it done because, you know, I need more time.  And, and so there, there is this huge, there's like an ocean-sized amount of coaching that comes with that notion of accountability that I missed.  Yeah.  And so it turned, it turned the culture of the organization into something that, you know, I don't, the way to describe it is almost like petulant adults that were, that were kind of, you know, and it was, it was something that I was, I had coached.  And that was, you know, I remember I had a, a new CTO come in to the organization and join the team.  And, and, you know, the first thing he noticed was within a few weeks he was like, 'Where's the accountability?'  He was like, 'How is it that people are just not delivering?'  And I, it was my first, like, it was a moment of like, 'Oh no, where is the accountability?'

MO DHALIWAL

[00:38:15] Well, that's so clear though, where those three pillars.  Yeah.  And I can see how, yeah, any one of them would create massive risk if it wasn't accurate.  Yeah.  And I think that's actually a part of your overall coaching, right?  Yeah.  And the culture that you created in the team.  So what's been your, your most recent success?  Like, where have you gone into a project and really felt like, 'Okay, I brought in what I had to what the team needed and now we've, we've been successful.'

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:38:44] My most recent success, I don't, I don't know if I have like a particular project that I would say is a most recent success.  I think that something that recently, that I have, you know, I feel more confident about, which overall makes me just a better project manager is understanding my own resiliency and knowing, you know, just knowing, knowing my strengths and really being able to understand, you know, where I can provide a lot of value.  I think a lot of people don't necessarily spend time sort of thinking about what they're good at and being able to articulate that.  And so, I think my, my most recent success is being able to really understand what parts of my skillset are, are skills that I can really, you know, shine at.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:39:45] So, more or less a personal sort of self-awareness.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:39:49] Yeah.  Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:39:51] Okay.  What are you excited about?  Like, are there big changes coming to the way projects are managed in methodologies and the psychology behind project management?  I know it's not about the software, the tools.  That's an area that I just get way too excited about.  But is there any change sort of coming to the field of delivery of software that is exciting for you?

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:40:16] I think the thing that - I don't know if there's any changes in terms of the methodology.  Or the way that things people are, you know, what people are doing or how they're delivering.  I think the thing that is exciting is that you can, if you coach people the right way, they become really great project managers.  So, like, currently, you know, what I'm really excited about in my current role is that I work with some folks that are quite senior in what they do, like architects and, you know, senior developers or senior UX people.  That are ultimately also really great project managers.  And what's really exciting is that sort of, you know, you can really lean into that flattened hierarchy and, you know, how we can all share the work together.  And I think that's always really exciting.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:41:07] Yeah.  I mean, what you're describing kind of sounds a little like the Holy Grail, right?  Because you would imagine that really good project management would almost be invisible.  Because, you know, the work isn't – to talk about the work and spend all your time trying to, to manage the work.  The work is the work.  It's to, you know, create and deliver value in some meaningful way.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:41:28] Yeah.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:41:28] And so if you're working with a team that's already aligned on those values and the culture is created, and everybody's coming together to get the job done, then project management becomes kind of invisible.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:41:40] And it's that saying that, you know, if the team truly becomes self-organized, then you don't need the Scrum Master anymore.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:41:46] Thanks for joining me, Sanas.

SANAZ AFSHAR

[00:41:47] Yeah, this was really fun.  Thank you.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:41:49] Thank you.  Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about.  That was High Agency.  Like and subscribe, and we will see you next time.

‍