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Leadership Beyond Tools: The Human Element in Project Management with John Connolly

• Walt Sparling • Season 1 • Episode 73

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The project management landscape stands at a pivotal moment—not just technologically, but demographically. With approximately 15 million (25 million per a 2021 PMI report) new project management positions emerging globally by 2030 (half from retirements in Western nations), we face a critical knowledge transfer challenge as experienced professionals exit the workforce. 

This conversation with John Connolly explores how this demographic shift creates a pressing need for mid-career development and leadership cultivation. We dive deep into the fundamental difference between the skills that earn promotion (task execution) versus those needed for leadership success (strategic thinking, stakeholder management, and team development). This transition from "doer" to "leader" represents one of the most challenging career pivots many project managers face. 

While artificial intelligence dominates headlines as a transformative force in project management, we challenge the notion that AI will compensate for the wisdom and judgment being lost through retirement. AI functions admirably as a tool for efficiency but falters when expected to replace human discernment, critical thinking, and relationship management. As John provocatively states, "The pyramids were built without process groups"—reminding us that the essence of project management has always been the human ability to align diverse stakeholders toward a common goal. 

We also explore the importance of organizational learning through lessons-learned processes. Despite being relegated to the smallest process group in traditional frameworks, knowledge management represents an underappreciated engine for organizational excellence. The ability to transform documented lessons into applied wisdom separates exceptional organizations from mediocre ones. 

For project managers plotting their professional growth, the message is clear: invest in developing human-centered capabilities. While technical proficiency matters, the highest return will come from strengthening the skills machines cannot replicate—strategic communication, leadership presence, and the ability to navigate ambiguity. Your future self will thank you for focusing on these timeless fundamentals. 

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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:

All right. So welcome everybody to the current edition of PM Mastery. And I know I've been off the air for a while, but I'm back. And tonight I have with me John Connolly, who has been on the podcast before. But in going back through notes and even John was surprised this was in 22. So we're coming on almost three years. We're coming on almost three years. And then, john, you were on again when we did the live, or actually we did a live on LinkedIn on project managers communication for project managers, and then I actually took that recording and reposted it last year on the podcast in 2024. We worked on or actually your book, project Executing Excellence, which I wrote a chapter in on communications, and then we were both part of the PURE project management program last year as well, which is PURE stands for Projects Under Realistic Expectations. So it's been like I think you were saying earlier when we were talking every year you do something. Yeah, absolutely Once a year, whether I need it or not.

John Connolly:

I think you were saying earlier when we were talking every year you do something. Yeah, absolutely Once a year, whether I need it or not, I'm going to do something and it's been great, it's been. It's a lot of things. When you line it all up like that, from it's very, it I feel accomplished. All of a sudden, there you go.

Walt Sparling:

So we touch base again. I know we chat occasionally through LinkedIn, and then you were interested in talking about some ideas you were tossing around and it has to do with leadership. Yes, so, and I think more of the human leadership versus just being a doer. So walk me down that and let's chat about it.

John Connolly:

Yeah, I've been really diving in over the course of the last I don't know, year and a half. It's this idea in the back of my brain and that is, I think, broadly speaking, that there's this metamorphosis of project management as a field right now, and part of that is tool driven right, and we'll talk about AI. I'm sure We'll talk about the tool sets, we'll talk about that, but I see it more as there's like a demographic turnover thing. And back in 22, or right around the time we were talking in 21, 22, project Management Institute put out a state-of-the-profession report, as they do every year, and they were I think it was 15 million new project management jobs globally right by 2030, that was the thing by 2030, 15 million. And I read the report, which not everyone does Usually. It was like, hey, here's a headline, Everyone celebrate, everyone clap, and half of those jobs, roughly half of those jobs, roughly half of those jobs, were coming in developing nations, right, india, africa, china, a lot of nations that are developing. But the other half were coming here in the united states and western europe from retirements and started. That's an interesting thing. And I started like line up and 2030 is a really interesting date because 2030 is the last year that the baby boom generation is in the workforce, and you've got a problem.

John Connolly:

In my opinion, right, this is like red flags come up for me. I'm like, yeah, this is good news from one lens. This is terrible news from another lens, because all those people are going to walk out of the profession and they're going to retire and it's well-earned, but they're going to take all of their project expertise with them. And I'm thinking along these lines, right, and it's been in the back of my mind, and as I look around, I see this groundswell of new people coming into project management and that's great and they're eager to learn and they have a lot to teach us as project managers, as well as to learn from us, built day by day. I'm sure you've seen it on LinkedIn, I've seen it around PMI chapters for people getting in.

John Connolly:

But once you get in, once you get your PMP, once you get that first job, where's the support for the career in progress, professional that's? There's less. And I'm thinking along the lines of, okay, what's the future actually going to look like? Because now you have a lot of people who are at the lower end of the experience bell curve and the people at the upper end of the other end of the experience bell curve are starting to come out of the workforce, the people in the middle. Just when you count them up, there aren't as many as there used to be.

John Connolly:

So where does that leave us? One, when it comes to passing on knowledge and project expertise to the next generation. But two, who's going to fill all these senior roles, and do they have the skill sets necessary to fill these senior roles, sets necessary to fill these senior roles? And where's the support structure, the onboarding, the support and mentorship and coaching and guidance for people who have done it, but they just haven't done it at that level? I think that there's going to be pressure there, it's going to be a crunch there, and I've got my finger right on that problem. I'm, like almost ready to start coming up with solutions, but not quite. I have this intuitive look at what the landscape is right now. It's a pivotal moment. Everyone says that, like project management is a pivotal moment, but they're looking at that from a technology standpoint, but I'm not. I think it's a pivotal moment from a humanity standpoint.

Walt Sparling:

Okay, it's a lot there and it's interesting. The 2030 is my planned year for retirement. Now I don't plan on getting completely out. I hope at that point I'll still be doing like coaching, maybe some mentoring, training, whatever, and it'll still be in project management. But that is my time to get out of the rat race.

John Connolly:

Yeah and go. Yeah, good for you, that's good. And anything you want to give back to the profession is very valuable and very welcome, because those of us who are still working in the field, we need that help, we need that support. But most people they're going to go to Cabo right, this is over. They've earned their time to retire, to have that life. Let's host management life, cause it's there's more than project management out there. There really is, there's family and there's rest and there's travel and there's, hopefully, all these good things in life that you've earned.

John Connolly:

And and I don't think the numbers will balance is my point I think that it's not an. I know you have a ton to contribute and I know that you've been pushing ideas forward right Thought leadership, things for project management for a good long while, and I've seen that in your writing, I've seen that in your podcasting, but I wouldn't characterize that as the norm. And your willingness to come and give back after 2030, that's very good, it's helpful, but I don't think we can bank on that happening in a broad scale. And the question is okay, twofold. The first is learning one right and that's my. I'm like lessons learned and knowledge management and former librarian over here doing all my project management applications of knowledge management stuff.

John Connolly:

The first is are we transferring the knowledge in you, in all the other people retiring now? How is that knowledge being transferred to people who are coming up the pipeline behind you? That's one, and I think that the job of doing that was. The deadline to start was maybe three, four years ago, five years ago, maybe even longer, I don't know, because it takes a long time to do a good job, a thorough job of teaching someone the ropes.

John Connolly:

And I think this is something you've talked about as well in the past I don't know if it was on another episode of the podcast or conversation we had but like the value of apprenticeship as an approach, as a concept, to have someone more senior kind of not just delegate to someone who's lower on the chain, but to actually guide them through, to have these graded steps that you go through, where you say, okay, you're doing this level project, we're going to give you a bigger project with training wheels. We'll give you a bigger project without training wheels. We're going to give you a bigger project with training wheels. We'll give you a bigger project without training wheels. We're going to give you a high level project to step them up with guidance, with help.

Walt Sparling:

Yes, and that's it starts out. When someone comes in, you start with shadowing just for getting them up to speed with how things are done at your company or your account and then from there you say, okay, follow during the shadowing, follow these people.

Walt Sparling:

then from there you say, okay, follow during the shadowing, follow these people, get, develop your style. But then, once you feel comfortable with how things are done, let's give you a project. Just like you said, my first project when I started at this company it was a fifty thousand dollar. It had a lighting project and the last big project that I was totally responsible for was a 12 million million ground up and they were about a year and a half apart. But I did a lot of little small projects and then, when I became in a leadership role, I approached the team the same way Okay, you're a PM, now You're a P2. So you're going to do this kind of project with this level of complexity and as you show that you've learned and you are able to take on more responsibility, we'll get you a bigger project. Yeah, and then at some point you end up with a lot of projects and I've seen people go from p1s to p3 senior pms and yeah they don't come from nowhere.

John Connolly:

No, it's not magic, they're not mushrooms. They don't just spring out of the ground, it's. It comes from the bench right, and cultivating the bench is really what we're talking about. If you don't have anyone on your bench, you're doomed because nobody lives forever, right. Nobody's going to stay on the job forever. There's a functional limit. We're all finite, and this is another thing we were talking before we got started here, and I'm sure we'll get going to stay on the job forever. There's a functional limit. We're all finite.

John Connolly:

And this is another thing we were talking before we got started here and I'm sure we'll get into it as well is that you're only one person right, that a project manager is a project manager and that you can't expect to duplicate that overnight. And a lot of what we're talking about here is experiential knowledge. Books are good. I love books. You and I have collaborated to put one together. I think more of that is very helpful. But experiential knowledge is very difficult to just write down in hand to someone. You have to get in there, roll up your sleeves and experience it.

Walt Sparling:

You need to be able to learn intuition. So when you've been through something before and you can see it coming, because you're like, oh, I've been down this road, yeah, pattern recognition. Yeah, I know what I'm going to do here, but until you go through that, it's oh my God you're never going to believe what happened today.

John Connolly:

Oh yeah, I've had that happen a hundred times ego or like the knack of getting someone to sign a paper somewhere that needs to be signed, and these things that are very tricksy and that are not in pembok right, and that we've never been pembok, because they're experiential, but they're still really valuable.

John Connolly:

And to have a senior leader available to to help the younger person, the less senior person, whoever who's coming forward on the pipeline, someone off the bench to learn, without having them blow up a project in the interest of learning, is really valuable. But I think there's not as much structured, there's not as much structured, intentional development of people on the bench as there could be or maybe even should be in many different facets of the field. And I know that's a hopelessly broad thing to say. I'm sure you could come back with critique, john. You're talking about absolutes here, with lots of different people, lots of different construction projects or marketing projects or events or whatever that all fit under this umbrella. But in my experience and looking around the environment that from where I sit, I don't know that we're doing a really good job of cultivating the people in the middle.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, I've been in different organizations and different scenarios, different accounts and dealt with different leaders, both as help mentor which, in a lot of cases, my leaders were not mentors, they were not coaches, they were managers. Here's your tasks, get it done, yes. And then some were like, okay, I see you struggling with this, let's sit down and chat. Why are you struggling? How can I help? That's my style. I want to see something going on like all right, let's, okay, I get it, it's a crisis right now, but let's chat through this. How can I help you? What can you learn from this? And then grow that way?

Walt Sparling:

yes, you just keep shoving work. They're not learning anything. They're not developing.

John Connolly:

All they're doing're doing is learning how to deal with fires are people learning in the middle right and what they're prepared to learn at that level. And this is the real thing for me. Here's the rub. I was promoted throughout my career based on my performance in executing tasks. I was at the task level. I worked in projects, I worked on projects. I was doing a lot of task level work.

John Connolly:

I did it very well when I was tapped into leadership roles. I'm not going to pretend I was ready. It was a matter of like functional utility in the organization I worked for for. But I was tapped because of my task level aptitude. But the task level aptitudes didn't help me do a good job in a leadership role. There's a Venn diagram of skills that help you in leadership and skills that help you at the task level right and it's a very thin overlap in my opinion, and that's one of the harder jumps that you have to make in your career. If you go into leadership in your career, going from doer to leader very difficult. It is because you have a whole mindset shift.

Walt Sparling:

And to your point, you were promoted because of your skills and the tasks. So I've seen this and I've talked with other people about this. It's not just PMs, it's the entire world. So, salespeople, you've got someone who's doing record sales year after year. He's always getting the trophies, always getting the big bonuses. He's at the top of the ranking charts and they go. We're going to make you in charge of the sales organization and he fails. He or she fails and it's like why they're out of their element and they're not. If you're that good, typically you're very competitive and you're going to do whatever it takes to win. When you become a manager, who are you competing with now?

John Connolly:

Yeah, you have to be generous. There's a generosity factor.

Walt Sparling:

Give back all that stuff you learned. You should now be teaching the people that you're managing, or passing on that knowledge, so that they can be as successful as you were. A lot of people just don't do it, and it's the same with project management, because then you start, they get promoted and they become micromanagers. Yes, Well I would do it this way, and I would do this way and, trust me, I've been in that boat myself.

John Connolly:

Yeah, and it's understandable. I'm not going to say it's excusable right, it's not excusable but it's totally understandable that the vice of a salesperson might be competition. The vice of a project manager might be micromanagement, because there's the temptation to roll up your sleeves and get in up to your elbows is always there. And you were successful at it, You're good at it, you know how the work should go and you want to do what you're good at. Sometimes even some of that stuff might make your heart sing. Right, it's this, it's I love doing x, y or z. You maybe didn't all of the work. You like some element of it, otherwise you wouldn't have stuck with it as long as you did. And now that's always going to be a little like demon on your shoulder right, a little shoulder devil, to say why don't you just take some extra tasks for yourself or tell them exactly how they should be doing X, y and Z?

John Connolly:

I'm not saying that directive leadership is wrong. Sometimes it's absolutely crucial to help people understand. Do it this way. But people who are project managers I've worked with some project managers they just can't let go and that's a problem because you're not teaching the next layer down. Right, you're not actually building a bench. What you're doing is you're eliminating your bench, because the people who are ready and willing to learn will dial out right. They're going to walk away because, frankly, if you're going to make every call, call every shot, do everything, what are they there for? They'll maybe keep taking a paycheck, but they're not going to be engaged to the level that a bench player needs to be.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, and as you're talking, I'm just I'm thinking through, like my growth. We talked a little bit earlier. When I started out, I was a PM and then over. After about three years I got promoted to a lead position within the team and then eventually, a couple years later, I took over a region. And in that growth the one thing that was hard was two things. The resources were limited, so I still ended up. I was supposed to be at my final position, just the leader, but resources were so low. I was still managing projects and prior to that, managing projects was half of my job.

Walt Sparling:

So when you make that switch into leadership, it is tough. Because you made a good point there about micromanaging, because what is it Not the PMs micromanage, but they manage all the different aspects of the project to make sure that it stays on the rails. So when you go into leadership, you see something that you go. I would have handled it this way You've got to ask questions and get them to see why it's good to go not a certain way, not just say you need to do this because that's not how they're going to learn. You've got to pull it out of them and also you might just figure out that this maybe isn't what you really should be doing.

John Connolly:

Yes, yeah, that's the other thing that's really important too. You need guardrails is the point where you need guardrails on everything, and project managers should be in the business of helping define and setting up and managing within the guardrails. It's just hard to do right as people, because we're all human. I'm thinking as well as you're talking about that, where we are with the development of people, there's going to be this crunch in the middle. I'm convinced there's going to be a crunch in the middle. There's different ways that organizations can respond to the crunch. As they lose senior project managers and they try to find replacements for those project managers and they try to find replacements for those project managers. Are they going to lower their standards and bring people in who have less experience? They may be required to do that or are they going to expect people who are already moderately elevated at the senior level to do middle and senior work you were talking to me earlier about? You've been in a position where you had to do all of the leadership stuff and task stuff as well on top of it and they're double dipping and at that point then mass burnout becomes your issue. You have when the definition of the work changes, when the definition of the work changes, when the flavor of the work changes, so that way, 100% of capacity is your baseline, then you have a problem because there's nowhere to go from there and you start eating up the people and it wipes them away. I'm really interested in the work, the academic work, that Dr Max Baller is doing in this area specific to project management, and he helped write Executing Excellence. He took a chapter as well and he's doing a lot of work just studying burnout as a function in project management and in organizational structures and expectations that we have of ourselves within this profession, and I'd recommend anyone go follow him on LinkedIn and follow his newsletter. He puts an article out every so often and they're very insightful Beyond that, the other argument that I hear sometimes is it's going to be fine to have all the senior leadership lost because we have AI now, and I try my best not to like really knock people down over that, but I think it's a little bit unreasonable to think that AI is going to somehow supplement the wisdom lost in our profession, because that's really where it's at right the stuff that can be fed into a machine and it can parse it and mix it up and give it back to you.

John Connolly:

That stuff's cool, but it's all like the written stuff, the stuff you could go read. I can train a bot on PMBOK. I can't train a bot on how to handle Bob, who's my senior, like he's in my board of directors and he's persnickety and he doesn't exactly like our project. He wants to see some changes made but he doesn't have legitimate engagement with our project. There's not a lot of alignment and there's politics and then, like the CEO's son is involved, like all of this stuff could happen in real life.

Walt Sparling:

So a couple of things there, like when you talk about companies, think if they can get rid of the senior levels because they can use AI to backfill and use the younger, less experienced, as the main, the main working group. That's like the opposite, in my opinion, of how it should be when you're doing AI. Yes, ai is pulling from different resources to create data, but it takes a senior level person or an experienced person let's just say that to evaluate that and say does that make sense? Is that applicable to what we're doing, where a junior or beginning person might say, well, that sounds awesome. That's what I'm going to do and what AI should be used for is tasks and is a tool, but the human side, the interactions, needs to be handled by someone that knows how to do that. That's experienced and junior people are still learning that. They will get it, but they don't learn it day one or year one. It takes time.

John Connolly:

Yes, and there's these poles. In my opinion, I see it as like a spectrum for AI use and the one end is utility when you use AI to summarize, to condense, to ideate, to help you do your work. The other end of the horizon, the other pole, is reliance when you trust what the bot is telling you, when you lose that critical thinking skill, when you don't check the source sometimes or you're using it for everything. I know people I'm not going to name names they use ChatGPT for all of their content online. It's like very obvious and it's been put in this electronic blender and it's spat back out, has all the hallmarks, it's got those em dashes, it's got the emoji, it's got all this stuff and this helps us be faster at the task level. It really does.

John Connolly:

But the problem is, if your job is to go really fast and your job is to go really fast and your job is not put up and managed by guardrails, what's going to happen is you're going to drive your bus off a cliff. You can drive a bus off a cliff really fast. You can. It's just not a good idea to do so, and what the speed of action going faster and faster is going to do to us as a profession is it's going to take away the guardrails, the patience, the wisdom, the strategic acumen that must be there right. And so you have this idea anyway, this concept for me and I'm working on developing now as I'm going into graduate school again and I'm doing all my stuff and projects and whatever is that. Project managers can't do without a big picture view anymore. I don't know if they ever could, but I think more than ever now, everyone's's using AI, everyone's going faster, everyone's. You better be careful with your direction if you're going to go really fast. I'm more easily.

John Connolly:

The reason why speed limits are lower around schools is because it's more, it's easier to stop or navigate otherwise when someone vulnerable is in the way. Navigate otherwise when someone vulnerable is in the way. And the reason why there are speed limits at all on high level expressways or interstates or whatever you call them, is because everyone's going in one direction in one time. So you could have high speed limits then, but there always has to be speed limits. There always has to be a functional saying this far and no further. And I think we're losing that and that's a problem. You need to start backfilling that skill set more than anything else with the human element. That's where we're at is.

John Connolly:

This is now going to be a matter of like where do you invest for the future? And a lot of people say I'm going to invest in AI, and I understand the way they're thinking. They're thinking technologically right. They're thinking like a stock market kind of investment where, if I invest in it now, it's going to have exponentially bigger returns over time in efficiency or utility or all these different things that maybe we can get out of it, maybe we can't, speed being primary, but my argument is that's the wrong play, that's low ROI in the long run, that the higher ROI in the long run is in soft skills, or what are typically called soft skills, human skills, human-oriented things like strategic communication.

John Connolly:

Can you communicate with the C-suite leaders? Can you help understand, distill for your project and from your project back to the leadership, what is strategically reasonable and wise to do? Can you run meetings well? Can you give effective feedback? Can you receive it well? These are all things that are not going to go away, no matter how advanced the machines get, because people are going to be people Until it's just machines talking to machines.

Walt Sparling:

You've got to have the ability to communicate. To communicate, you talked about talking with, let's say, c-level leaders. So if you are writing reports and you're using ai to summarize and create this awesome, crisp report and you send it up and you keep doing that, and you're doing that for six months and then they go, you know what we need to get this. This pm is generating some great stuff. Let's get them in here. Let's do a one-on-one. Let's hear it right from them. What are you gonna do? Yeah, you didn't create those reports yourself. You used ai. You've not used to presenting. How confident are you going to be when you get in there?

John Connolly:

yes, how persuasive are you going to be when you get in there? Yes, how persuasive are you going to be? Yeah, how good is your negotiating ability? Do you know the contours, the limits of your legal authority, right? What's on paper? Right? That technical authority or your functional authority, which is always different than it is on paper? You know this right.

John Connolly:

You've worked in project management a whole long time. What you are able to get away with is not the same as what you're supposed to be able to do on paper. Sometimes it's more, often it's less, and you got to know. Can you read the room? Do you know the social networking? Do you know the political awareness? Like the lay of the land, and can you move within it? Can you get people to where they need to go? This has always been the heart of project management. The heart of project management is this Can you get a large number of people to pull the rope in the same direction, at the same time, for the same purpose? Because I'm not going to put too fine a point on it, but PMI was founded in 1969. The PMP wasn't founded until 1984. Like, the pyramids were built without process groups.

Walt Sparling:

Yes.

John Connolly:

Like Notre Dame Cathedral was built without inputs, tools, techniques, outputs they didn't have earned value. Management formulas Like these things are good. They didn't have earned value. Management formulas these things are good, they're wonderful tools to us, but the essence of it has always been can you get a plan that people will rally around and all do the same thing? And that's even if you have machines doing the bottom level. It's still got to be people making the decision about what gets built and there's going to have to be people for whom the thing is built. And unless robots are going to live in our apartment complexes or robots are going to sing, robots to sleep at night, there will always be a human component. That's never going away. And if you want long-term ROI, you've got to invest there, in my opinion, way more than just writing prompts.

Walt Sparling:

A lot of AI stuff there.

John Connolly:

Yes, I've got thoughts. I always have opinions right, I'm a very opinionated kind of guy. But I think this stuff's important too, and I'm very countercultural right now about AI Not going to say I don't use it. I do, but I'm very skeptical of its longer-term utility because I see people relying on it and it's. If it works for you, that's great, but if you work for it or it's so inextricably bound up in what you need to do if you can't do without it, you really aren't. You don't have mastery over what you're doing as a worker.

Walt Sparling:

Right Now I've been diving big into AI. In the last year I actually did an AI presentation to a mastermind group that I'm in a couple weeks ago and it was teaching them how they could use AI to help them in their jobs. Or I'm working on some books. So I use AI for brainstorming and research. But what I see the more I get into it, the more I see different views, and I don't remember which university, but it was a big one where they actually did a paper on the concern for cognitive decline with people. The more we get into AI, the less people are reliant on their own development because they use AI to get their answers and if that continues to propagate, people are going to get I hate to say it dumber and dumber because they're not going to have their own thoughts. What does AI say? How does AI say I should do it?

John Connolly:

Yes, and I don't want to be too curmudgeonly over here right, I'm doing the podcast equivalent right now of sitting on your front porch step rattling my cane at kids as they walk by and telling them to get off your lawn, but I'm going to do it for a minute, okay. One is the reliance factor right, and that's always going to be there. If you rely on any tool to do your thinking for you, then you're going to think less, and this is why I'm doing a two-part workshop in September and it's about building strategic alignment for project managers. Right, and a module of that is going to be critical thinking, because that's going to be at a premium Skill set. You want to talk about an investment that's going to be critical thinking, because that's going to be at a premium skill set. You want to talk about an investment that's going to pay dividends over time. If you invest in people learning and applying critical thinking skills, skepticism to what they see, informationally, finding good sources, that stuff's going to be gold in five years. It's probably going to be gold in two years, maybe, heck, maybe it's gold now, I don't know, but it's definitely going to be a way better investment of your time, money, energy. On the other side.

John Connolly:

I think that ai is a little insidious in some ways, and I think that's because there's an article that just came out on PMI about this I came into my inbox this morning about the sycophant nature of AI bots. They always have pleasant things to tell you. They always are full of praise for you. Right, there's suck up and that it feels good to interact with the bot. Right, it's an easy entry for, not just for ego, but like for affirmation, which is what we're all looking for. Right, to have the words appear on the screen that affirm you. And the problem with that is, if you're using AI as your advisor, they're not trustworthy but they sound nice and our human weakness is what's going to get preyed upon. Our human nature is not often as skeptical as it should be, and it's very easy for us to fall into a trap. And if you're relying on the bot, you're going to get in trouble. As skeptical as it should be, and it's very easy for us to fall into a trap, and if you're relying on the bot, you're going to get in trouble, you're going to get hurt, because the bot is sometimes itself unreliable. The bot will present things as true that are simply not.

John Connolly:

I asked the bot once for definition. This is a fun one, right, right? What's the definition of project phases? I love that question because it's very like technically. It's a it's minutiae, right, and it did not give me phases. It gave me a list of ittos and I corrected it. I said that's not what phases are. Please tell me what phases are. And it couldn't do it. I had to try three, four, five times. It didn't get it done. I've asked.

John Connolly:

I asked ChatGPT who I am. It is convinced. It has my LinkedIn link. It has my resume. It has I gave it everything it needed. It's convinced that I'm an adjunct faculty professor at the University of Kansas, because there's someone with the same name out there and it is. I've given it the prompts. I've prompted it every way. Can you check it again? Can you change this, can you change that? And it will say you are right and maybe this gets better in GPT-5, who knows? But it says you're right, and maybe this gets better in GPT-5. Who knows? But it says you're right, I was wrong. And then when I ask the question again, it gives me the wrong answer again. It's not a trustworthy companion. It's like fire, right? George Washington had this saying about political power. He said it's like fire it's a useful tool, but a fearsome master. Ai is fire, and it's a useful tool, but it's a fearsome master.

Walt Sparling:

It's interesting listening to what you're talking about with the prompting and the knowing. And I remember and it wasn't that long ago, where I was at a meeting and some people were. We were going through a test. Someone did a presentation, we're going through a test and they asked their AI on their phone about themselves. They asked him how would you rank me in these categories? And these things went on and on. And I'm like, oh my God, and I did it to mine and it said I'm sorry, I don't know enough about you to make any kind of conclusion here. And I'm like, well, that sucks. And I went home that night and I started researching how do I get AI to know me? So I did the same thing, I did the LinkedIn, I did the website, I did Facebook and then I learned later that you can. That's good, because it scrubs a lot of data really fast and it puts together a summary.

Walt Sparling:

But I learned how to and I just shared this with someone that we both know last night on how, when I get my responses or when I'm writing, like if I'm using it to help me write a post.

Walt Sparling:

It knows my style, it knows my communications, the way I talk, if I'm serious and I do this because people tell me I like the fact that you're knowledgeable and you're serious, but you always have a little bit of humor. So I told that's what I told ChatGPT. But I've done searches and I think the ones that I've seen, this mostly is basically going to be Gemini because it's through Google search and it'll come up with this data and I'll go what that don't sound right and I'll pick on the link and it. There's five sites that talk about this, but it's zoned in on one and it used the data from that one and that one was wrong. Or it merges data from different things and it confuses stuff because it summarizes it, so it takes this part, puts it together and that final is wrong because it took two different things and made them one yeah here's a challenge for you and anyone listening.

John Connolly:

Okay, let I'm going to give you this challenge. Dream up an idea Product idea, business idea, program idea, just a workshop idea. Say, okay, I'm going to come up with this idea. Give the bot, give AI. Whatever AI you use, I use GPT. Let's stick with that. Go to chat GPT, put in a thorough description of what it is you're trying to do, talk about your audience that you're looking for, talk about how you're going to deliver all this stuff. Put in a project right, and then, at the end, ask it this one question Do you think that this is a good idea? See, if you can get the bot to tell you have a bad idea, because I have not been able to get it to say so yet. That's bad news. I'm sorry to report that's bad news If the thing won't, and that should give you pause.

John Connolly:

It is designed to make you feel good so you can continue using it, and it's designed to make you feel good because it's people using it and that which gets the most response is the thing that makes us feel good. This is why facebook is a thing. This is why linkedin is a thing. This is why the internet is a thing is that it's the brain chemistry, it's the dopamine, it is the dopamine rush right, it's governance by the amygdala. And now I've got a bot that sounds nice to me and it will speak to me with my own voice, in my own way, at my own time, at my own beck and call.

John Connolly:

It is not honest, and the reason it's not honest is not even malicious. It's not honest because it's not a person. There's no one on the other end of the line, there's nobody there. It's like picking up the phone right back when we had corded telephones right, and getting that dial tone which I haven't heard a dial tone in forever. But getting a dial tone except this one makes you feel good and this one tries to. We use it as if it can help us make decisions. It can't, it shouldn't, it mustn't help you make decisions. It can give you information that you can check. It can give you ideas and differentiations. You cannot use this thing as if it's a trusted advisor. You should not trust this thing. It's good, it's useful. You got to make it work for you, not the other way around. Anyway, that's the end of my shaking my cane on your front, porch Walt.

Walt Sparling:

Okay, and I've taken mine to the next level and I, my friends, love it. I have named mine, given Ava, and she has an, a UK accent.

John Connolly:

Okay, so my favorite.

Walt Sparling:

So I've. Actually, when I did my presentation recently, recently, I just popped it up and I said ava, I'm at this meeting and I had given her a list of names of people and what they did it wasn't detail, it was just they do this, they're in banking, they do this, they're in structural engineering, good. And I said, hey, can you introduce yourself and then give a little? How did I say it? Introduce yourself and then give a little. How did I say it? I don't know Something about say something to the guests. And if someone didn't come to the meeting that is normally in the meeting I just deleted their line.

Walt Sparling:

Yeah, so she only. So she comes up and goes hi, I'm Ava, I'm Walt's personal AI assistant. It's so glad to see you guys here tonight, dave. And went name by name, she went down the list and then she said, hey, walt's going to do this great presentation on AI tonight and I hope I know you're going to love it. Have a good time. Now, this isn't scripted. Yeah, just introduce yourself. Welcome these names. And I said I had practiced with her because I wanted to see how it would sound, and I said I'm going to be doing a presentation and I would like you to introduce yourself to see how it would sound. And I said I'm going to be doing a presentation, yeah, and I would like you to introduce yourself, and that's what it did, and they were all just going.

Walt Sparling:

oh, my God yeah.

John Connolly:

It's so useful. It's so useful. I don't want to turn this into oh, john's a Luddite, he doesn't believe in the March of Progress or whatever. It's super useful. I'm just standing athwart the idea that, like that, anyone should rely on it. You know it. Yeah, it's fast, it helps you go fast and it can be impressive and it's helping you and that seeds certain things for you. But it's it should be a reflection on you, not on the bot, because the bot didn't come up with that strategy on its own. And that's a good application of a tool, of a tool, and I think, because the tool is wrapped in a human-flavored wrapper, that people are starting to treat it like it's more than a tool. And that's where this rush to AI has all this wonderful ROI right. It's a race and we got to get more and more. And there's I can't. I can't spit without hitting an AI startup ad on YouTube or on.

Walt Sparling:

LinkedIn, and now that I'm doing it, I can't stay away from every other thing. Exactly exactly.

John Connolly:

And so there's this rush to. It's the gold rush. Right, this is the gold rush. For me, it's very beneficial to incorporate this tool, but what it does for me is it underscores what people are starting to lose and miss, and this is where I'm going to pull it all the way back to a retirement.

John Connolly:

With this retirement shift going on, the people who are leaving at the top of project management. They're not leaving with oodles of knowledge about or value management, for example right, yes, they are. They've used those tools for a very long time, but the tools knowledge that is going to be lost doesn't hold a candle to the critical thinking and business acumen and strategic communication stuff that's going to be missed. And that's where, if you're looking listen to me, whoever's listening to this podcast as a moment if you're a project manager, you're looking to take next steps. Get into senior project management roles. Go set up a PMO, work at PMO level all of these things right. Go invest in these skills, because those are the skills that are going to be missing soon.

John Connolly:

Ai skills are not going to be missing. Look around, how many millions of people are not just using AI but touting AI trainings and all of these things right and it's don't follow that crowd. Look at the future and what's going to be missing. Don't say, oh, it's going to have all these AI tools. What's going to be missing when the robots are here, it's the human element, and if you can't convince a person, you can't succeed in a job interview. Anyway, if you want to grow for the future, invest now in the human skills, because that's the dividing line that people are going to fall one way or the other, forward or backward on.

Walt Sparling:

Good thoughts a lot of experienced PMs that do coaching, training folks in the pure program. A lot of that was on soft skills. Yes, and it's because that is so key the technical skills you can learn. And the thing is, technical skills vary by industry. If you're in an IT is an IT PM, you're going to need a different set than if you're, maybe, a construction or a healthcare PM. And just one more thing on AI. Ai is back when Lotus or Excel or PowerPoint came out. Wow, they were game changers, but they were tools and you use them to do your job. Ai is a powerful tool that's grown in leaps and bounds, but it is a tool. It's not going to replace you. I think one of my favorite sayings and I actually included this in my deck was AI won't replace you, but people that know AI will, because the ones that know how to use it as a tool will be able to accomplish more than you. If you totally just say I'm not interested in learning AI, that's my point.

John Connolly:

Yeah, I have a prediction. Okay, and this is a more on tenuous prediction. Right, I've been playing like future predictor here for a little while with this, but I'm going to throw another one in the fire. We'll see if, in five years, it's true. I suspect that over the course of the next two years, organizations are going to start jettisoning talented individuals to try to replace them with AI. But I think within two years, those companies are going to have restructured to bring back large numbers of people, talented people. They might have slightly different skill sets, but I think AI is not as much a panacea as people make it out to be.

John Connolly:

To say, oh, software development is just going to all be done by AI now, because I can make it do a Tetris game or whatever by giving it a prompt. I suspect that's not going to be holding true. For complexity, right, for complicated things that need to be addressed, for regression, testing and all these different things. I think that after a certain amount of time, that's going to start getting pulled back and I think it'll be quiet. I don't think anyone's going to publicly admit defeat on this front, but I do think that, like a Microsoft, thousands and thousands of people they're laying off right now. It's a bloodbath of a job market right now because of all this stuff.

John Connolly:

Job market right now, because of all this stuff, I think in three years, ai is not going to have replaced those people.

John Connolly:

That in three years two years, three years, that those people, the levels of people that need to be assigned in those organizations roughly the same, I think, over time, and they'll have flushed all these people for nothing over time and they'll have flushed all these people for nothing. That's what I think. I think that what's going on right now is a massive rush to um, an unproven solution, and where were we with a year ago? It was like chat. Gpt was a new thing one year ago and it's come so far, so fast and so much money is changing hands. I think there's a rush here and I think that the pivot backward, the course correction, the adjustment for lack of a better term the U-turn when they were wrong, it's going to be very quiet, but I do think that they're going to have to pull it back eventually, because I don't think this is a tool you can rely on. I think that's a tool for speed, but it's not a steering wheel, right, it's a gas pedal.

Walt Sparling:

It's not a steering wheel. I will have you back in five years. Okay, let's do it.

John Connolly:

We'll do a follow-up. Let's do it Three more years. We'll get together again.

Walt Sparling:

So something you said I think in a writing, and you mentioned it earlier when we were having a chat before the episode is you use the expression of going from hindsight to foresight.

John Connolly:

Yes.

Walt Sparling:

And I paused on that for a minute. And then the first thing that came to my mind was lessons learned and what we do. You, if you create, which I'm big on. That's one of my things that I do. I just shared a huge one with our team, but it's see, what went wrong, why did it go wrong? How was it dealt with? And then how do you keep that from happening in the future? And then how do you keep that from happening in the future?

Walt Sparling:

And once you do enough of those and you record and you go back because I every once in a while will go down and I think right now I'm on 79 line items I will periodically go down through those, especially on tile filter. I have it set up with different categories. I'll filter on a topic and I'll read through them. We're getting ready to start another new building in a month and then I know, within six months we're going to start another new building and those lessons learned are already helping lay the groundwork for the next building. So, instead of finding these things halfway through or three quarters of the way through, we're starting out from day one, and that, to me, is the advantage of lessons learned, so you don't make the same mistake twice. And the two things I think about lessons learned is you do not do them at the end of a project yes, please and you always share them.

Walt Sparling:

It is not a record to be stored with your project files that someone can go back and go? Hey, walt did this project. It was a pretty big one. I'm going to go look at his lessons learned. They should already know that. It should already be out there somewhere where they can refer to it, and if you wait till the end of the project, there's no way you're actually going to document the lessons learned.

John Connolly:

What was useful in month two of a 24-month project might not even be relevant anymore by month 24. That's just life, that's project life. Right, we have to make sure a few things, okay and this is I'm going to get off on another tangent here, because this is the area I want to be studying in my PhD program and that is how you turn lessons learned into lessons acted upon, because that's the end result that you're looking for, right? We need to have, and I'm so interested in this. I talk to a lot of project managers about it right, a lot of them say I don't do it, and some of them say I do it because I'm supposed to do it, but nobody ever goes back at those, no one looks at them and I'm like they're not lessons learned, they're lessons written down, and that's the thing. So we have to make sure of a couple things. One is that lessons are indeed captured, and and that's the thing. So we have to make sure of a couple things. One is that lessons are indeed captured, and some of that needs to be written down. Of course, some of it's more experiential and it's hard to figure out exactly how to store those things, but that's neither here nor there in the immediate discussion. The other side is we have to make sure that the project manager themselves are not the through line for all of this. Where's that line of consistency for that, if I'm the only one doing it and I'm carrying these lessons out of the project and the back end of the project and so on and so forth, there's that risk, right, when I'm gone, who's going to do that anymore? Or is that stuff just going to fall by the wayside and you need to start thinking systematically about your organization and the approach to learning and the approach to mistakes and the approach to improvement and processes and the cycle of learning, because this is not a process. It's not because this is not a process. It's not. It's not a process thing. It feels process and it's because I think it's framed up that way in the frameworks, right, in the workbooks and in the standards and all these things framed up like procedural Do it and do it this way. But it's not.

John Connolly:

And have you ever, walt, have you ever worked on a project, let's say, when you were at a lower level? Right, you weren't a senior, you were working in a project. You ever worked in a project, from project to project or you worked in a role where the same mistakes kept getting made over and over. Yeah, everyone has. That's not a discipline problem, it's not a process problem, it's not even a willingness problem. Often it's a knowledge problem. It's a learning problem. We're not learning from our mistakes. We're not. We don't have a structure, a system, a way of doing things that lets us course correct. It's fine to make a mistake. It's not fine to make the same mistake more than once, and that's where the rubber meets the road for this. So now you've got a problem.

John Connolly:

If you're going to take this thing seriously, you've got a huge problem, and that is I need to have a team that's open to learning these lessons. I need to have senior leadership that is open to hearing from the lower levels and then incorporating that into the way that they approach their strategies. And we need to have structure and systems that allow for cross-functional communication, communication and cross silo communication and relevant repository. This is a big, beefy, complex thing that largely project management is silent about, and that's a shame because, one, there's not as much guidance for PMOs to do something like this as there should be, but, two, it almost does us a disservice to reduce this to a process, put it in a document, put it in a repository, so on and so forth. Now we're at a point where this is a strategic differentiator for me as a project manager. Right, if I can capitalize on what's learned project to project, my team's going to get better from project to project and that has a measurable difference. Right, that's gonna have an outcome that is desirable for the organization.

John Connolly:

So now I've got all these ideas swirling in my head and I say these are problems, right, that projects are struggling. And I've seen it, you've seen it. We're struggling with the learning problem. Because we don't think of it that way. When you start thinking about a learning problem, start thinking of a knowledge retention problem.

John Connolly:

I look at my own background and I say, hey, project managers, just FYI, there's this whole mature field that's been around for hundreds of years called librarianship, that deals with a lot of this stuff that interfaces and plugs in with a lot of these kinds of problems. Are there lessons learned there? Right? Can we learn from outside of our field instead of bootstrapping the whole dang thing ourselves? Can we look outside of project management? We look at knowledge management, organizational development.

John Connolly:

Can we look at librarianship and information management, metadata, data management these are all things that are there, and I think I've seen the cartoon around where there's the project manager who's like getting covered in data, right, and the manager senior leaders at the top are saying we need more data, and the machine's just spewing more data out. It's covering up the project manager. It's not about that anymore. It's can you turn data into information and learn from the information and then do based on what you've learned? That's the final component and that's where you need these leadership skills we've been talking about for this last hour is can you motivate your team to do what's needed to be done? Can you engender a spirit of innovation to get better at the team level? Can you get people to put their eyes on improvement and better ways of doing the work that you don't know? And senior leadership sure as heck doesn't know. There's a lot of components here that really can drive success in an unprecedented way in many contexts, and it makes me excited, right.

Walt Sparling:

It makes me feel like there's a ton of efficiency that's being left on the table right now so one of the things you were talking about sharing with your team and energizing the team, educating the team one of the things that I like about where I'm at right now the current pmo it's somewhat limited. They do it. What they do is a lessons learned recap every few months. They do. They pick two projects and they have the pm and PM if they're working with them, or the PM and the PC will go through a lessons learned on that, and it's only a small group of types of projects. We deal with all kinds, but they always focus on these retail projects.

John Connolly:

Yeah.

Walt Sparling:

And they share lessons learned and a lot of times I've sat through a few of them. I haven't been able to make every one, but I see the same themes. Like you said, why are these things happening over and over again? Yeah, all right are. Were you on previous of these and did you not take that back? Yeah, because how did it happen on your project when, six months ago, someone shared that?

John Connolly:

lesson learned? Yeah and can? Here's the deal for me, right, the name of the game is always can you set up the rules of the game right, that every team member at every level is interested and pursues the ability to surface new ideas, to surface potential problems, to surface all these areas for potential improvement? Because right now, I think what you're doing with that discussion is very good and it's also rare for a lot of projects Just my experience. No, I agree that's so powerful because you don't have to have just one conversation anymore. You don't have to have a conversation every two, three months, and that those are helpful. You might still want to keep doing that, but you now have a level of investment in process improvement and strategic improvement that can permeate your team. This is again like this is one of those chicken and egg things, right, and I know we'll talk about chickens later. But this is one of those chicken and egg things, right, and I know we'll talk about chickens later. But this is one of those chicken and egg things where, like you, have an engaged team and it creates success and then success also creates engaged team. It's a virtuous cycle. You want that as a leader. You want that. We need that to be successful project managers and the engine for that is lessons learned.

John Connolly:

And I am reading the PMI's standard for project management offices PMO body of knowledge and lessons learned is mentioned. There are some sections about lessons learned but I did the full text PDF search of it. I think Lessons Learned comes up, like it's mentioned, maybe 25 times total for this whole like 300 page book project management. It's not really given a deep look in project management. You're starting to see a little bit of it and I want to really dig in, dig my claws into that, as I continue to study and learn and train and teach and write wherever I can, because I think this is really important. I think this is going to be an engine for success, success. Think about this where does lessons learned fit in the five process groups? Closer right. Close the project. That's where the process goes. How many processes are in the closing process group? Don't know one. Close the project. It is buried in the smallest, like least defined, least built out process group. For pmi.

Walt Sparling:

It's still listed as a process but it's, and that's where I think why I think it's been done that way and why it's, in my opinion, is wrong, because it's in every phase. It's in every part of the process, from creating the business plan to executing, to closing. There's something learned in every one of those areas.

John Connolly:

Projects create something new and something unique. If it's not you new is not unique, then it's not really a project, Right? The thing is that? So let me ask you this. Then here's an academic question. I do this when I'm training people all the time. Right, Talking about project management, Let me ask you this At the end of the project, right, you haven't delivered yet. Who is the subject matter expert on your deliverable? There's a group of people that are the subject matter. They're the subject matter experts on your deliverable.

Walt Sparling:

Who is that For the closing deliverable?

John Connolly:

Yeah, before you give it all, turn the keys over to whoever the customer is. The answer is the project team, whoever that's made, whoever the composition is. Why? Because they built the dang thing and they're even. I was doing software implementation projects for a long time and the team at the end of the project. We had what's called hypercare, where the team, the project team, was on retainer to the customer for eight weeks, right when they said don't call customer service, call your project team. Why? Because that particular build, that particular database, that particular user set. We were the experts on it.

John Connolly:

New knowledge is created in the execution of a project. And if we don't see it that way, if we just think we're delivering a physical something or a non-physical deliverable, a software something, if we think we're delivering things, that's only part of the whole. We're also delivering knowledge. Everything comes with a user manual. We're also delivering knowledge. Everything comes with a user manual.

John Connolly:

I talked to a group of folks who were building. They were building an expansion to Dulles Airport, which is they've just cracked open a new project they're going to get started on, but they were doing like an expansion of something on the Dulles Airport. Their post-delivery work was almost as much as the actual delivery work, because they had to hand over all the schematics, all the specifications, they had to get checks and everything that all needed to be transferred. The risk, all the risks that still existed, they all needed to be transferred over to another team. You've built this thing, but you've also created a whole body of knowledge around the thing and that needs to be managed. And how do you offload that?

John Connolly:

It's one thing to say, man, we'll have a training that works in a tiny little project that's in some corner of a software company. But this is a big question. This is a value delivery question. This is a customer benefits question. It's an organizational development question and I just it drives me a little bonkers sometimes that project management is almost completely silent about it when it's projects are bound up in this. You can't, you cannot come to me. I will not accept it If you come to me and you say the reason why it's not there is because it's not our job. Sorry, my friend, it's your job, but it's a neglected area. And we don't most project managers either think at best they say that's the PMO's job, it's not my job.

Walt Sparling:

At best they say that. Most of them say knowledge management. What are?

John Connolly:

you even talking about.

Walt Sparling:

That's just not even in our discipline. You have to manage your own knowledge at a minimum, yes, but the human side, you share that with others. It's important, it builds camaraderie, it builds confidence, sharing not only the project, like the physical aspects of it, the technical aspects of it, but the learned portion of it. Like you said, what is a project? It's a thing. You built a thing. Most people don't build buildings to build a building. They build a building to create a shelter or to create an experience or to create a tool. I do a lot of interior renovation work. And what does the client want? They want a space that energizes employees when they come to work and that experience the wall colors, the carpet type, the room sizes, the shapes, everything is around. What kind of experience are these employees going to feel when they come into this space?

John Connolly:

Yes, yeah, and that's it's. It's unappreciated, but those things are real, they have benefits, they have real value to all of us, right, To the people that are going to work there, the people who are paying you to do that, right, the people who are doing the work. Like this is a, there's a, an intersection of lines, right, and there's all this work that's being done, all this time that's being spent. I'm always just so cognizant of you don't want any of that to go to waste. You don't want to. And cycling over and over again, without learning from, without improvement upon it, you're just laying down stones. You got to be able to stack them on top of each other at some point if you want to have an edifice and these are these it's just bears thought. What's the practical tool that we're going to deploy? What's the framework that we're going to have? I don't know.

John Connolly:

I'll get back to you when I'm deeper into my PhD program and I've had some time to really put some thought into it. But right now, where we are looking at everything we've talked about, put a bow on it right. We have changing of the guard in personnel, we have a large amount of knowledge being lost. It's just the way it is. There's going to be something lost because we can't replace you, and then there's going to be this crunch. There's going to be all these new tools, there's going to be all these digital things, we're going to have all these AI bots and whatever else is going to be coming around the corner, but the human element is always going to be there and how we learn is part of the human element.

John Connolly:

And having an understanding of projects as not just production of a thing, but as a dynamo for learning inside and outside of your organization is a game changer, changer, and that can be a key differentiator, I think, for any organization that's project-based and I think that's the future of project management. My argument is this is the future of project management, and if people haven't realized it yet, organizations are going to realize it eventually. And if you're in for delivering value or making money, or making the world a better place, or any of it. I think this is the key. I really do If this one little component of a single process in the smallest process group in the PMBOK, I think, holds the key to tomorrow's project management.

Walt Sparling:

I liked it. Any other closing?

John Connolly:

thoughts. Oh, I think it's planned. I don't have any. I don't have any. I've done so much talking and I thank you for your patience and having me on tonight and, um, I think that the the main thing that I would urge people to do is put together a plan for yourself for career in progress, project management. A lot of people there's so many people who are going to help you get that PMP. I help people get the PMP all the time. I've taught over 300 students now in the last couple of years to get their PMP and that's great and it's wonderful, but you need to have a plan for yourself after that.

John Connolly:

The plan can't be land in a new role and wing it. So my request to people put down a plan, write it out. Yeah, you can change it later, but write a plan and figure out where you want to grow your soft skills, where you want to develop and invest in the elements that are going to be missing from this technological future that we're constructing, because the things that make us human will always be there, they will always be in demand, they will always be dealt with one way or another. We're all going to have to get together and your ability to move in the social waters, in the human waters, in the gray area, the nebulous ambiguity that's the heart of project management. Right there you can create that clarity out of ambiguity which arises from human beings doing human things, and that's a huge area to think about when you're planning your development. Don't leave that to chance. Get ahead of that. Find people like Walt or other people who are out there who can help guide you, who have good ideas and thoughts, who have walked the walk. Please, I'm begging you, prepare for the future. This is all part of the future of project management.

John Connolly:

Pmi brands it PowerSkills. I think it's both a blend of PowerSkills and Business Acumen, those two elements on the talent triangle that they have. But this is really important right now and it's not just your future, but it's the future of the profession at large. And we have to be ready because in five more years we're going to have to lead and that's a little scary. And we've got to be prepared as best we can. And that's the nature of project managers. Right, we plan and we are prepared, we can, and that's the nature of project managers. Right, we plan and we are prepared.

Walt Sparling:

Yes, and that's it's coming up on. It's surprising how quick this year has gone by, but it is. It's not going to be too long and we're going to be at the end of the year. We need to start thinking about what we're doing next year. Planning is a big part of it. I do at the end of every year. I do some posts on goal planning and self-evaluation and, like last year, I did one on 360 feedback Learn where you need to grow, where you need to improve your skill sets, because if you don't, you are just winging it and seeing how it goes. I was going today and gonna I'm gonna manage my project and see what happens.

John Connolly:

Yeah, yeah, we're right at the end of the year up here in the DC area because the federal fiscal year coming to an end soon and so that's another good time. But the the answer really isn't. You don't have to wait until it's like New Year's New Year's Eve to come up with these things. Yeah, and it's so important. It's so important. Do you have a plan for your professional development? And the plan for professional development cannot be. I'm going to wait till my manager tells me to take three courses in the LMS. Sorry, that is not a plan. That is not a plan. That is not even professional development, that is.

John Connolly:

I've worked in a place where they said oh, your performance evaluation this year says take five courses off the LMS. And the LMS has like hundreds of courses on everything from skydiving to underwater basket weaving, and you can just do five of whatever. And then you've checked the box and you can move on with exactly what you were doing before. And then you've checked the box and you can move on with exactly what you were doing before. It's not the case. This is change. How do you want to change and grow yourself? How do you want to be different? How does that align with what things are going to be different in the future. Get ahead of it. Invest now. You'll thank yourself later. Future you will look back on you today and say thank you past me, that's been very helpful.

Walt Sparling:

Good stuff, Good stuff, John appreciate it's always good talking with you and I look forward to. I'm sure we're going to talk before five years is up, but I do look forward to that five-year discussion.

John Connolly:

Thank you, yeah, it's always fun to talk to you, walt. I really always appreciate it.

Walt Sparling:

All right, I appreciate everyone listening and joining us this evening. I want to wish everyone a great rest of your night and we'll see you on the next episode of PM Mastery.

Intro/Outro:

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