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Mastering Project Management: Insights and Experiences with Veteran Joseph Jordan

• Walt Sparling • Season 1 • Episode 42

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In This Episode:

A seasoned veteran of project and program management, Joseph Jordan, joins us in a riveting discussion on PM Mastery. With 45 years of invaluable experience, Joseph provides us with an inside look into his current role with Trace Systems and his exciting journey of writing his book, The Mini Project Framework. He also takes us along on his future endeavours as he hopes to create a product or application that will assist others in the realm of project management.

Navigating the dynamic landscape of project management, Joseph enlightens us on the challenges it holds and the significance of staying well-informed. He imparts his wisdom on managing the constraint triangle of scope, schedule, and budget - a skill honed from his vast professional experience. Gleaning from his personal tools, Joseph introduces us to the efficacy of Microsoft Project and OneNote and provides a sneak peek into his mini-project framework.

As we delve deeper, we explore the Project Management Institute's framework for citizen development and the fascinating concept of project revolution. Joseph explains the potential benefits of transitioning a project to a product. He underscores the importance of gate reviews and the poignant idea of accepting sunk costs as a part of the project management journey. The discussion takes an insightful turn as we uncover the principles of Rolling Wave planning and its applications across various project types. Listen in and enrich your project management journey with Joseph's trailblazing experiences and insights.

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Joseph Jordan:

What is very fascinating is when you pick a topic like this, you're going to be in contact with people all over the world.

Intro/Outro:

Welcome to the PM Mastery podcast. This podcast is all about helping you master your project management skills by sharing tips, tricks, tools and training to get you to the next level, while sharing the stories of other project managers on their journey in project management. And now here's your host, walt Sparling.

Walt Sparling:

Welcome everyone to the current edition of PM Mastery. Today, I have with me Joseph Jordan. Welcome to the show, Joseph.

Joseph Jordan:

Thank you for having me.

Walt Sparling:

And I'm going to let Joseph walk through a little bit about who he is, what he does and why. We'll start out with tell us a little bit about you personally. Who are you?

Joseph Jordan:

Well, let's see, I've been in the workforce for about 45 years, so I'm going to have to truncate anything I say about my career. I am a father. My two children. They're grown and they live in Europe. Their mother is Italian, so you know we're not together anymore, but she lives in Italy, they live in Germany and they work in Germany. I have a girlfriend now and we're traveling the world getting ready to go to Paris in a couple of days for a week, looking forward to that. So that's my life.

Joseph Jordan:

I do work for a company called Trace Systems. They do work for the Department of Defense. I've been with them since 2008,. Although I have left them a couple of times to pursue other opportunities, but for whatever reason, they allow me to come back. So I'm with them now and, as we were talking earlier, I'm no longer out in the field working project management or any of the technical work that I was doing before. It was mostly infrastructure type work, dealing with the hardware, the servers. There's some software involved, but not a software developer. But the main thing is now I'm doing marketing. I'm out of that world, but I'm still interested in program management, project management. So those are the things that I'm talking about in my blogs and also writing some books about it, and those are where my interests are Hoping. In a couple of years, when I reach 65 and I'm eligible for Medicaid, then I'll go ahead and strike out on my own and then keep doing some kind of consulting work until I finally retire.

Walt Sparling:

Okay, and that's one of the things I was curious about is, if you went out, or when you go out, what kind of business would it be? So it's going to be a consulting. You think it's going to be in project and program management.

Joseph Jordan:

There will definitely be some form of project program management, because that's where my knowledge at least that's the knowledge that I have that I think I can pass on what that's going to look like as Is it going to be a consultant. Am I going to do projects freelance, like Kaila does? I would like to maybe come up with some type of product, even if it's just templates or things like that, that people can download and use, or some kind of application they can use to help them in their work. So I have two years to figure that out. Right now I'm just building my audience.

Walt Sparling:

I think there's a lot of people interested in doing that right now. The corporate world is crazy. I mentioned earlier I have a friend who's looking into doing that. He's been in the banking world for his entire career. He already does this work on the side as kind of a helping, but now he's thinking about, hey, maybe I'll just do it full time. I wish I'm the best of luck. Yes, why? Why have you done this for as long as you have, and what keeps you going?

Joseph Jordan:

I have been working because I need the money. That's the main reason I work out. The nice thing about this work is it's something that I can do until I'm 70 years old because of life choices I've made in the past. I still have a spousal support. I still have children who are fully grown, but I still support them every once in a while. I want to travel and do a lot of things. So I do need the money and I can't retire right now, but I can keep working. It's not like I'm a coal miner or anything like that. Right, I do enjoy I've always enjoyed writing, I enjoy doing projects and things like the blogging. I really come to like blogging and I, as we mentioned, I'm looking forward to developing some kind of product that can be either downloaded or referenced online to help people with running their programs and projects.

Walt Sparling:

And writing a book.

Joseph Jordan:

Yes, I'm about 60% through a book I call the mini project framework. I must admit, it was not my intent to write a book. It was just at the beginning of my blogging and I saw some of the things that people were struggling with, mostly people who said, hey, I want to transition from another career into project management and I don't know how to do that. And I said, well, you know, if you already have a career, you probably were doing things that were considered projects. You just haven't documented it the right way.

Joseph Jordan:

So I came up with a blog and said, hey, if you document what you're doing in this way, you can even come up with the metrics that everybody's interested in. You do your scope, you do your schedule, you do your budgeting and then you can prove that you have this experience so that you can put on your resume, you can mention it in interviews and you can get. You're not starting from scratch. You can actually say, hey, I had done project management work, even if I was not called a project manager. And that blog seemed to resonate and a lot of people liked it. So I said, well, I think I can probably turn that into a book. It'll be a short one easy to get through, but I hope the people can get right to what they need, and that's documenting their work so that they can show that they're doing project work.

Walt Sparling:

Well, I think that's great. One of the things that I've noticed is you and I are in similar communities on LinkedIn and the transitioning topic is huge, especially in the teacher sector.

Joseph Jordan:

Which, by the way, it's unfortunate because I have friends, my girlfriend's daughter just left the teaching field and I understand why they're doing it. I feel for them, but I think we're losing a lot of people in a very important sector. But anyway, yes, that's one of the big groups trying to get into project management.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, it's a very stressful job and I think there is rewards to it, but sometimes it's just overly taxing. Now I can tell you, in the time in project management you can have similar results too. They can be stressful and time consuming, but it's a good career for Payswell usually good benefits so I can understand why a lot of people would go in that direction. But it is interesting how many people are transitioning in that direction and I think a couple of people have brought up. John Connolly has and trying to think who else maybe? Logan has talked about the growth in project management in all industries. So there is opportunities out there. And then teaching.

Walt Sparling:

Melissa Chapman, who I just interviewed recently, is coming out with an ebook on her experience and she had transitioned from teaching to project management and she went through, like you said, trying to describe how she actually did projects as a teacher so that she could explain that in the application. It was really good. I look forward to her ebook coming out. Even though you've been around a long time, done a lot of stuff going to write a book, how do you still keep up with what's going on?

Joseph Jordan:

Well, I mean, nowadays that's easier than it's ever been with the internet, so definitely on LinkedIn.

Joseph Jordan:

That's probably the main way that I keep in touch with people who have an interest in project management, program management. What is very fascinating is, when you pick a topic like this, you're going to be in contact with people all over the world. I mean, obviously, from my point of view, they have to speak English or they can speak Italian. I can communicate with them, but all over the world, in any industry, they need project managers, so you can communicate with these people on using the same vernacular, the same concepts, same ideas, and they may be doing pharmaceuticals and you're doing information technology type work, but it's very similar in scope, so you have this in common, so it's very easy to reach out to different people in doing this.

Joseph Jordan:

Obviously, I think that's always going to be a very effective way to learn things. I think the web videos, online courses, those kind of things that's very helpful. I always need a book to back that up, though. I have to have a book in front of me so I can actually go back and page through and do my marker and do all of your pages, oh yeah, your highlights and curl the pages over.

Joseph Jordan:

And the posts. Yeah, so I definitely need that. So those are all the ways to do it. It is getting difficult. I mean it's difficult to keep up on things like software development or infrastructure technology type things if you don't actually have hands on. But fortunately, I think, with the amount of time I've had in those fields, for me it's just a matter of keeping up and I can do that through courses and books and talking with people, so I don't think I'm losing that technical edge.

Walt Sparling:

So, speaking of challenges, what is maybe the biggest challenge you continue to deal with, or something you've dealt with recently?

Joseph Jordan:

Well, I think the biggest challenge I think I've covered that, and then I don't have hands on, I'm not out in the field anymore, so it is a challenge to keep up when I was out there. I think it's a personal challenge for me. I think it is what I identify as the biggest challenge in project management and that's the schedule, the time, so anything that goes wrong with the project. A lot of times people will say, well, the project failed because it went over budget or the project failed because it didn't reach scope. Most of the times the root cause of that is something in the schedule. Either they didn't allow enough time to do things or they, or that was something happened. They weren't able to get to certain things. And if you, if you're, if your schedule goes out of whack, then that's going to eat up your budget, it's going to impact the scope.

Joseph Jordan:

So I've always been a big, big proponent of saying, hey, project managers, you should concentrate on your schedule above all. I should temper that and say, not above all. You know stakeholder management, communications that those are all super important also, but in the in the constraint triangle of scope, schedule and budget schedules, where you need to focus your time, and that takes a lot of time management too. So I'm also a big proponent of learning about how to manage your time, the difference between sequential time, time that passes by and the time that you actually budget. So it's one thing to say oh well, I think I can do this, this task, in five hours. Okay, that's fine. Are you going to be able to do those five hours in a row today, or is that like one hour today, one hour tomorrow, two hours next week? Those are the type of time things that I don't think a lot of project managers take into account enough, and that's where they run into problems with their projects.

Walt Sparling:

Definitely, schedule is very key. I know it depends on your industry how much control you have over that. I mean every project should have a schedule. You're there's, it's a definite start, definite finish. What I've noticed in the construction world is we have considerable issues with materials, lead times. Manufacturing is still a problem since COVID and it is really hard to lock in schedules.

Walt Sparling:

Storm we just had a project get delayed because we had a hurricane come through. No significant damage to where the project was, but the people that work on the project, their houses were flooded, they couldn't get to the project site. So you're short on resources etc. So those things come up and now when you do your risk register, obviously you're supposed to consider that in there. So you have an allocation, but we're getting right near the end of the project and we were like three weeks out. Now we've got to push it a week Because of that one thing. So yeah, schedule is important. So challenges tools you had indicated that you have some favorite tools. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what those are?

Joseph Jordan:

Well, I'm not even so much if they're favorite, but was that I use just because I work with a DoD? So I've been brought up in the Microsoft world, so I use the Microsoft tools. Microsoft project is, as an application, is very interesting. There are a lot of challenges to it. I learned some keys on how to make it easier to use and I've published some blogs about that. Do you like OneNote? I think that's a very versatile tool, but a lot of the things that I use are very, very standard. The spreadsheet is just such a powerful tool that's not going away. It's too much utility in that. Now my mini project framework, though, for example. I'm presenting that in a way that I'm saying, hey, I'm presenting in a way that you can use a tablet and pencil if that's all you have available to you, because you're just learning. You're trying to document what you've done. You're not trying to do, you know, trying to build a bridge or anything like that. So a lot of times, the tools can be simple. It's just how you use them.

Walt Sparling:

Good deal. That makes sense. Now I noticed one of your tools. You didn't mention it out loud, but was Acrobat Professional. So Acrobat is one of those like Microsoft, where it has it's like a toolbox. It's got so many different things in it. Most people only use bits and pieces, just like with Microsoft Office. Is there certain things about Acrobat Professional that you use more than others?

Joseph Jordan:

Yes, for me it's very important for forms. I am so frustrated. I'm sure many of your readers sorry, your listeners will agree you have to fill out a form so they want you to download it, print it out, sign it, scan it and then send it off. I just think in nowadays, that's crazy. You shouldn't have to do that. So I create forms so that you can fill them out online. You know, type in, you don't have to use, you know my handwriting is horrible. So I can type in the information you need to. You know, and then just send it off. So yeah, creating forms is what I use that for.

Walt Sparling:

Just like the form I sent you for the interview, exactly, exactly. I'm with you and that's one of the things I used to have. You know, you create the forms, you create a block and people fill that out or you put in lines, and then I'm like, wait a minute, if I could turn this into a PDF form, they could just fill it out and send it back. It's awesome. Yeah, we don't use it for form creation. We do use it for redlining, commenting and probably Signing. We do some, but most of our stuff is now done through Adobe Sign. Yes, but yeah, that is one of the tools out there. That's awesome. Just about everything is now available in a final document as a PDF. All right, so favorite tools MS OneNote is definitely probably the one most popular tool that people talk about all the time. Glad to hear that you did mention citizen development. You chat a little bit about that.

Joseph Jordan:

Yeah, now, this is something that I've been trying to dabble in for quite a few years now. Basically, citizen development is an umbrella term for low code, no code platforms out there. I'm sure there are a lot of them out there. The one I'm familiar with, because I'm in this Microsoft world, is Microsoft Power they call them Power Platform which includes Power Apps, power Flow, bi, the background I'm sorry the business intelligence application that has been rolled up into the Power Platform. It's a way that someone who has knowledge of a particular work that they do, they know how to do the work, they have processes that they have to duplicate and do over and over again so they can then use these no code, low code applications to build a process online that will automate this for them without having a software developer coming down. You don't even often you don't even have to put a service ticket in for your IT people to get involved at all because they're probably too busy to help you out. I will admit it's not something that I've actually delved into as much as I would like to. I've taken courses. I've got some certifications.

Joseph Jordan:

The Project Management Institute they're big into this. They have three certification courses that you can take to learn about citizen development. Now they look at it from a very agnostic point of view. They're not looking at any kind of any particular platform, but they're saying, hey, if you're going to do this type of work, you have to be you know. There's things you have to consider. You have to have requirements, you have to be, everything's got to be secure, you have to worry about privacy issues. So they've walked you through this. They have a framework that you can use so that if you get a hold of one of these platforms and you're able to use them, then you have they set up a framework for you to use so that you can make one, two multiple applications that might will help you and maybe even help your teammates or even your entire organization, if you can get the IT people to accept it.

Walt Sparling:

Awesome, so we had. You had brought it up a couple of times and okay, so we know you're going to write a book, your concept of the mini project framework You've got a post out there about it. Without giving up too much, could you maybe give us a little bit about, maybe a teaser on, what that is going to be and how it will benefit people?

Joseph Jordan:

Yeah. So the point of the mini project framework is to help people who, who they have some kind of experience, they want to document it so that when they go for a project manager job, they can say hey, I was not a project manager, but I have this, I have this documentation. So I look at it from the point of view of you have a requirement. Normally maybe it would just be a task, maybe it was something that you could knock out in a day, but if you have the time and you want to actually document it, you can turn it into what I call a mini project. So then you say, okay, well, I have the requirement, it's going to have a. I'm going to monitor what. I have a scope, what I need to do, I need to monitor what's going on and I need the outcome. Well, I'm going to ask if you can just pause a second, because I should have had that in front of me.

Walt Sparling:

I'll just race back through this.

Joseph Jordan:

Yeah, yeah, I got right that I'm trying to have him. I'm drawing a blank on how I did my whole my whole thing here. Sorry, you think up so much of your time here.

Walt Sparling:

Oh no, not a problem, all right, equally glad, exactly, yeah, ohokes.

Joseph Jordan:

I should have had this diagram in here, and then you would have talked about it.

Walt Sparling:

I know when you on your blog you had in the intro you were talking about a book, about the project revolution.

Joseph Jordan:

Well, that, okay, the project revolution was one of the ideas that I that brought us to. Now we're deviating a little bit from the mini project framework and this goes into this, goes into the work where, like Kayla is involved in and Logan mentions this a lot is the fact that there is so much project work out there. A lot of these projects may not be, they may not be, a nine to five job with a corporation that you're going to stay with for year after year after year. You may be with, or you may be with a company who will farm you out as a project manager to other organizations that need these. But or you can do, you can be a consultant and do that yourself.

Joseph Jordan:

But the idea is that that projects are going to keep getting. They're going to be more and more because these organizations are going to start saying, hey, we have to add value to what we're doing. And in order to do that, we have to create a project where that is a project, to create a piece of software that then becomes a product, and then you then you'll use product management type of methodologies instead of project management. But still, to get the thing started, you have to have somebody, has to say you have a budget, you have a certain amount of time, you can produce something and here's what you want you to produce. And then, once you, once you do then, then you sell it, then you can keep maintaining as a product. But in the beginning there's always going to be a scope, a schedule and a budget for that.

Walt Sparling:

I was thinking. So I work for a project management company. They're huge, they're all over the world and we go through things called initiatives, but in reality, when you think about it, there are just many projects within the project management company that we do for whether we're going to do some new forms for, uh, in taking information or reporting, but it, you know, it might be a six week project and there's a, there's a team and they'll do a pilot. It's a project. Now we don't. We have zero budget. Really, it's just the time. We have a COE group that manages it and then we have volunteers that are part of the pilot and provide input.

Walt Sparling:

But there is an end result that they want. They want to complete it within a certain timeframe, like, hey, we got it, I want to have this thing rolled out by first quarter or whatever. So there's your schedule and budget. You might say, well, I don't want too many people working on it, because now you're taking away earners from you know making money. But yeah, so those initiatives are really nothing more than a project. So when you, when someone says I didn't do any projects, I got involved in all these initiatives, right, that is a project.

Joseph Jordan:

Well, in fact, I talk a lot about it in my blogs and in the book here. I call it the de facto projects. Yeah, as opposed to your, the your projects, where they have. Yeah, this is a project and you're given all this, you're given the budget, you're given a team, whatever, where you just have these tasks you're told to do and then you can turn them into your own Does, your de facto project. And then I say we'll make that, use the mini project framework to to build that.

Joseph Jordan:

But anyway, the thing of it is is to you have the requirement, you know what you need to do. You can divide that up into activities and then you'll want to put the. You'll want to say when you can work on those activities, because it's probably not your, your regular job, so you can't dedicate every eight hours a day to this. You'll be doing a few days, a few hours today, a few hours tomorrow, but you have to determine when you think that you can have that completed based on this analysis. So this, so you have that sets up your forecast. So you develop this, this schedule forecast, when you think you can get it done. You can divide it into tasks and you can say when you're going to get each task done and then you monitor Over the work. If you're a single contributor and you're the only one doing the work, you monitor. Okay, yeah, did I did I do this today? Yes, I did three hours. Like I said, oh, today I only did two hours, I want to do three hours. So now I'm a little bit behind. So I may be able to crash and catch up later on, or I may I may have to push out and say I'm not going to be able to finish this task when I thought I was going to be. So then.

Joseph Jordan:

And then for budget. So in most cases, if you're in this kind of environment, you don't have a budget. No one said here's $10,000 to do this thing, but there is a cost involved. And if it's nothing more than labor hours and you don't even have to, you don't even have to express it in dollars. You can just say no, my resource is labor hours, whether it's just me as a single contributor or I have a team of people and they're able to devote a certain amount of their time to this project. You just go by labor hours. Doesn't matter how much money they're costing the organization, you just do it in labor hours. So then at the end you take through and you say, okay, I said I was going to get it done by this day. It took me a couple days extra. So then you can come out with a percentage saying I was, you know, you know, 2% over schedule. Same thing with labor hours, though. Oh, I actually was able to do it in fewer labor hours, so I was ahead of it.

Joseph Jordan:

So you can't you gather these statistics. And again, I said you can do this on a piece of paper with a pencil, because it's not, though. It's not the work you put in that you're going to show someone, it's the actual Information you gain from it. And then I say, okay, well, now you will want to create a project management plan. Even if this is unofficial, you'll create a project management plan. It could be just a couple pages, but this is where you'll put that information in these metrics. And then that's your first project.

Joseph Jordan:

And if you do a whole bunch of these, well then you can do several things. First of all, you can document that you've done a lot of project work. Second, you can also see how you've done and you can compare how you did from project one to project two Are you improving? Are your still things you need to work out and figure out? You must, you must also consider that some projects are more complex than others. So maybe you did well in this one project because of simple. This other project was very big, it took a lot more people involved, so you, your statistics, may not look as good. So this is not meant to be. This is not meant to be a way of saying, oh, am I doing good or bad. It's just a way of engaging. How well you're doing, more importantly, the fact that you're doing this analysis. That's what a prospective employer or somebody in your organization says. I need a project manager. Who could I go to you say well, have this experience, you know, choose me.

Walt Sparling:

So is your thought that when you do the book that you would have because I think one of the things you pointed out earlier on was That'd be a good way to explain Work in the past as a project Would are there going to be like templates or forms in there that someone could Mimic or go okay? So I want to take my experience and apply it to this outline and say this is this, this was a project.

Joseph Jordan:

Well, the book itself will not have templates in. I mean, it has example, has an example. I take one example that I go throughout the book showing how I okay, I came up with this, this methodology, and I use it. I use this, the same Example, in several scenarios. One scenario I'm a single contributor and I have no. I have no timeline, so I'm free to do it in however amount of time I went to. Then I changed the serenary, said okay, well, now your boss said no, you have to do in two weeks. Then I show you how to crash and do things like that.

Joseph Jordan:

And then I say okay, well, now you have to do in two weeks, and because it's in two weeks, we know that you can't do it by yourself. Now we're gonna say choose these for the people that are gonna help you and you have to manage them. So there's also matrix management and then there's a lot of data that you can use to make sure that you have to do the same thing. That's what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna use this as a Experiencing game from this when you have people who don't report to you, but they're gonna contribute to your project, and then To get I'm sorry to get to your original question. I do not provide templates in here. It's, it's all freeform for the person, whoever the reader, how are they wanna do it? However, I do foresee that or they have that, and then from that I probably come up with Templates that I can either offer for free on my blog or maybe package up as a, as a workbook that can accompany the book. So those are all things that I'm gonna be considering in the future.

Walt Sparling:

Oh, now to my favorite, the. Did you know? Do you have interesting, did you know?

Joseph Jordan:

This is a? Did you know that I learned from from one of the originally built the, the PMP exam and he we had we had he was a speaker at one of our PMI I'm at the Washington DC chapter and he came out there and he said hey, you know, it's ironic because I was. I was gonna ask him a question. I was gonna ask him the question to say what do you think this, about this, about agile Kind of being taken from the software world and really shoved down in the project management world? And you know there are people out there trying to make us think that if we're not doing agile, we're not a, we're not a modern project manager. What do you think about that? I didn't have a chance because he that was the first thing he addressed he came out and said hey, you know agile, you know we've had agile for decades. Man, it's called rolling wave planner and I must admit I do remember studying that when I took the PMP exam, but I had forgotten all about it. So since he's mentioned it, I've been looking into it and, yes, certainly it's a way of doing.

Joseph Jordan:

You can do iterative type work. I prefer to think of it also what I call fuzzy planning so you can say, hey, I have a project, I think it's gonna take three years. I know what. The first few months are gonna be pretty detailed. I don't know what it's gonna look like a year from now. I'm not 100% sure I'm gonna have a budget for two years from now. Three years from now wow, that's really strategic thinking. So you can plan out a different granularity, so you can use most of Microsoft projects. You can use whatever your favorite tool is a spreadsheet. It's just that you have more detail up front and less detail out in the beginning, because the last thing you wanna do is you wanna be updating things three years from now Every time something changes on your day to day work on the project.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, I was trying to think of some examples of Rolling Wave and a couple of Wanna Software, because you could start with an application that could then grow and to be much bigger and more diverse. Another is like home projects, like landscaping You're gonna upgrade your backyard and you start out with a patio and then you've had a fire pit, but you don't have that all planned up front. You just kind of continually Rolling Wave planned through all these different phases. And then the other one I thought of is maybe like city planning, like I'm sure they do a city core, but after that they have to go. You know how much industrial? Are we gonna take the highway out there? Are we gonna run railways out in this direction, et cetera.

Joseph Jordan:

Well, one of the biggest infrastructure programs projects in the world that I am aware of is one that's being done somewhere I don't remember exactly where it was in Northern Europe, where they're trying to tie these two parts of the continent together with a combination of underwater tunnels and then bridges, and this is a 10-year project. So how do you plan a 10-year project? I mean, for one thing, you know, if nothing else, materials change, so you might have some, you might have new material and might come out and say, wow, I can do this a lot easier, faster than before. So yeah, so I mean, any kind of infrastructure project is going to be. You know, they have to do some kind of even if they don't call it Rolling Wave program project manager, they have to do some thing like that.

Joseph Jordan:

So in a blog that I did on this Rolling Wave plan or idea, I divided up. I said, well, here you can divide up. You can say I know, for example, maybe gate reviews. There are a lot of industries that use gate reviews for building, like a car or anything. So okay, so I can plan it out to the first gate review very detailed, but I'm not going to know what's going to be in this afterwards until we get through this gate review. And then, once we get through the gate review, okay, now I know how I'm going to plan this out, based on how things went before the gate review and so on.

Joseph Jordan:

You can do it by funding. Say, hey, I know we're funded for a year, so we're going to plan this out for a year and then hopefully we'll get funding for the next year. But I'm not going to be able to, I'm not going to bother planning it out with a lot of detail until we get the actual funding. So you're going to do it by funding cycles. So a lot of different ways you can slice and dice it.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, that's interesting. The gates, one of the things that the company I work for, our client, has gates and on some projects you have to go through every gate. Some projects they skip some gates that they don't consider as important. So you initiate your commit, your build, your close, commission close. But it's frustrating when you spend maybe many thousand dollars on a design I don't say how much, but many and then you go that is going to get you to the commit gate and then, after the commit gate, you're going to or actually that is part of the commit gate, and then they're going to take you to the build gate and at that point they might kill the project Exactly, and I point that out.

Joseph Jordan:

Like I said, I'm a big thing on schedule and a big thing on you saying and that's why the whole idea about there's a project have value, so yeah, if it gets finished and the scope was achieved whether it was behind schedule or way over budget then it had value. It had value. The worst case scenario is you have sunk in cost. They can get to a certain point saying you know that this is not working out. We're not going to chase good money after bad money. Just accept the sum from cost. Lessons learned, we'll go on to the next project.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, and I think the most where I've seen it is to your earlier point about funding. So we don't have the funding. So a lot of times you'll get to a gate and that gate will say now you've done your estimation for the actual build portion and they had in their mind they had $3 million and it comes out that it's 5.2 million and it's like, well, we don't have that funding because everything else is allocated. We had $3 million allocated. So they go all right, well, put it on the back burner, let's see what else we can pull forward, and then next year we'll reevaluate and if it's OK, we'll move on to the next gate and we'll continue on. So it's an interesting evolution.

Joseph Jordan:

These are the facts of life you can't get around to, you can't agile your way out of something like that.

Walt Sparling:

Well, joseph, this has been a very nice conversation. I look forward to reading your book when it comes out and I'm going to include on the show notes page. On the show notes page, I will include your LinkedIn profile, your website and, if there's any other information that you'd like to maybe provide some links to, feel free to email them to me and I'll include those in the show notes as well.

Joseph Jordan:

OK, I appreciate that very much.

Walt Sparling:

All right, thank you, sir, and for everyone else, we'll see you on the next episode of PMS3.

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