PM-Mastery

From Finance To Consulting With Lessons From A $250 Million Project

• Walt Sparling • Season 2 • Episode 78

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A $250 million implementation with laws changing right before launch will clarify your project management instincts fast, especially when the site crashes after just 20 users. That’s the kind of pressure-tested learning we unpack with Alex Tuck, founder of Tuck Consulting Group and host of the Project Zero podcast, where he interviews project managers about the project that taught them what the job really is. 

We talk through Alex’s own pivot from financial services to nonprofit work and then into building a 60-person project management consulting team delivering projects across healthcare, SaaS rollouts, professional services, and more. Alex also shares why his team loves ClickUp consulting, especially for nonprofits and growth-stage small businesses that need a flexible system for project tracking plus operations, process, and visibility without buying a pile of disconnected software. 

Then we go deep on “Project Zero,” the project where it finally clicks how to lead without authority: negotiating with executives, aligning developers and stakeholders, anticipating risks instead of merely documenting them, and staying calm when reality ignores the plan. We also dig into AI in project management, what parts of the PM role are most likely to be automated, why adoption often fails inside large organizations, and how to focus your career on the human work that still creates outsized value. 

If you want practical lessons from the trenches and a clearer picture of where project leadership is headed, listen now, subscribe, and share this episode with a PM who’s thinking about the next step. After you listen, leave a review and tell us: what was your Project Zero? 

Check the full episode show notes for links to connect with Alex. 

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Welcome And Guest Introduction

Walt Sparling

And now welcome everyone to the current edition of PM Mastery. And today I have a cool guest, Alex Tuck with Tuck Consulting. How are you doing, Alex?

Alex Tuck

Good. Thanks for having me on the show. So excited to be on the other side. I got to interview you a few months ago.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, so that was a fun experience.

Alex Tuck

Yeah.

Walt Sparling

Want to talk a little bit. We're going of our normal method and just be casual about this. We do want I want I want to share a little bit about who you are, what you do, and talk a little bit about project management and a few other current topics. So let's start with give us a little bit about your background and what you do.

Alex Tuck

Yeah.

Alex’s Career Pivot Into PM

Alex Tuck

I started Tuck Consulting Group in what was it, 2013, right? Quick backstory. Went to five, went to school for finance and economics, went into financial services, made a bunch of money, helped some rich people get richer, and then realized that wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So then I took all the money that I made, moved to Central America with my then girlfriend, now wife, and started a nonprofit. And then had to come back and start a new career, right? In something different. And so I started the company, Affordable Care Act had just gotten passed year before. And I had all of this project management experience. We didn't call it project management. I was running projects left and right. But then I sat for the PMP and I was like, I'm going to pitch myself on these exchanges. I'm going to try to figure out an avenue to get into there. And so I did. I got on the Vermont Exchange, which is where my wife was from. And I was a project analyst there. So that's how I just got started. And then fast forward to today. And it's we've got this 60-person PM team that delivers projects all across the country. It's pretty, pretty fun, pretty fun journey.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, it was interesting, is I know when we first talked, when I interviewed on your podcast, I saw a little bit about what you did. But prior to this one, I wanted to dive in a little more. And I was going through all your services, and I was amazed at the size and breadth of your team. Lots of smart people. All over the country.

Alex Tuck

Lots of smart people. Yeah. We we work in four main industries, but project management, it's like you can jump into most industries and be a very effective PM as long as you have the core tenants that are necessary, the core skills that are necessary for project management. But there are some that it does help if you have industry expertise. And I'm just blown away. A group that amazes me the most is our healthcare PMs. And I like to call myself like a healthcare PM like because I worked on the payer side with ACA, but our healthcare PMs can step into a hospital scenario or a clinic and just speak the same language. And it's fascinating to just watch them in action because it's it is, it's like speaking a different language for folks. But yeah, we do healthcare, project management, professional services, PM, SaaS like rollouts, some agile stuff as well. But it's fun. It's just like every client is different. They have a different challenge. Use the same techniques. It's very exciting to work in the consulting space because you do get to work with such a variety of folks.

Walt Sparling

I

Why ClickUp Works For Growth

Walt Sparling

see one of your maybe a core service is the ClickUp consulting.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah, our it's that's our favorite practice area because that is where we go outside of even those four industries. And what our specialty with ClickUp is we have strong nonprofit practice. And so we are the number one nonprofit ClickUp implementer in the world. And uh and we also focus on small businesses. That's really a specialty for us. So companies that are really in that growth phase, it could be anywhere from like 10 to 200 folks. And so when ClickUp sees a client in that space that needs a little bit of help, they'll send the projects over to us. And those are the best because it's I just got off a I got a got off a call with this really cool company that works in the data center space and such a good culture. But their challenge is literally they're starting from zero and growing to 200 people. And so it's just like they have to move fast. And so clickup's just a fun tool to be able to help them do that without investing in a bunch of other software as well.

Walt Sparling

That's cool. Yeah. Yeah, I've dinked around with it a little bit. There's so many different platforms out there. It's a million. A million.

Alex Tuck

It's funny because like ClickUp, uh, if I was just a pure PM, right, that all I was gonna do was like waterfall project management. Yeah, I could I'd do it in ClickUp, but I there might be some other tools that are locked down a little bit more and built for just doing project management. But what I love about ClickUp is it's an everything tool, right? So you can really build a lot of things. We're just talking about building an asset management tracking system in ClickUp, and it's easy to do. You can do it with a couple of hours of work, and then you have that stood up or an HR, like a mini HRIS system. You can just build it in ClickUp. And it's much harder to do that in other PM tools. They're just it's just not built for that flexibility, like ClickUp is. So that's why we run our entire company off of it. We love it. Cool, yeah, I like it. Yeah, it's good.

Walt Sparling

So you work in all these, are you working for primary and then you have your clickup, which you could be doing irregular business or PMing?

Speaker 2

Yep.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, gonna bounce to when I interviewed with you.

Defining A True Project Zero

Walt Sparling

One of your focuses was on a project zero. So with you working in so many different areas, maybe you have four, one for each area, or do you have one that was like your project zero? And before we before you answer that, I want you to give your description when you do your to make it clear to everyone, Alex has a podcast and it's called Project Zero, and he interviews PMs about what they do, and then he discusses their Project Zero. So before you answer, tell the audience what your definition of or what you're looking for with a Project Zero, and then tell us your Project Zero.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, I know. I love that because I love to define like what I want from a Project Zero. And uh honestly, every single one of my guests has given a different style of Project Zero, and I love them all, right? So, what I'm looking for in a Project Zero is that first project, not the first project that you ran, right? Because that one could be a disaster. It could be your project zero, but it's probably not your project zero. Your project zero is that project where you actually figured out what it takes to be a PM, right? Like you might have had success, you might have had failure, you definitely had failure, right? There's definitely failure in it, but you learned how to negotiate with executive teams or with the development team. You figured out what it means to manage and mitigate risks versus document them in a risk log, or you figured out how to anticipate schedule slips because in the winter in Vermont, you know, there's gonna be like weather that is gonna prevent people from being able to get into the office or whatever it might be, right? And so all of this is to say that your project zero is that place where like it clicked, right? It was like, all right, I know what it takes to be a PM now. And uh mine was not like usually like a lot of folks that share their project zeros, they're pretty small. Your yours wasn't, but a lot of the project zeros are like maybe a couple hundred thousand dollar project, maybe even smaller, risky, but not big risk. My my project zero was a $250 million implementation, and I wasn't the lead PM on it. I was one of four PMs on the project. It was the ACA implementation that we did here in Vermont. Um, it was a legislative, hugely challenging legislatively, not only at the federal level, but then at the state level, we were making additional laws that made building a piece of software near impossible. Like we had changes to the requirements literally like the week before we were supposed to go live and passed. And anyway, it was absolutely crazy. And I still call it the $250 million workaround. And I say that lovingly because I am so proud of what we did. We spent 100 hours every single week, like just grinding, building this piece of the system and that piece of the system and adjusting. And it wasn't just the vendor side, I was on the vendor side. The state folks, we all took naps in the control center, right? Like we were all there when we hit go, right? When Odie hit go on go live, and then the site came crashing down after 20 people went on. Like and it's there's so many lessons, right? But we learned that project plan is only as good as the inputs that you're getting from the folks. That the governor shouting at you every single day can be a positive or a negative thing, and it was a mix of both. And anyway, it was a lot of fun. We learned a lot, and I use lessons from that day, from those three and a half years. I I use lessons in every project that I run right now. I share it with my team members as examples of mostly what not to do, but also how to learn quickly and to also not really take yourself so seriously, right? Like we're not, it's not like that. That was a really important project because like it was a difference between someone getting access to healthcare that day when they go to the doctor or not, right? They're getting getting but most of the stuff we're doing now, it's like, all right, yeah, this clickup thing didn't work today. Like, let's let's dust it off and learn from this and do better next time. So anyway, it was such a fun experience. My my best friends in the industry all come from those three and a half years.

Walt Sparling

That's cool, yeah. And that's a beast of a program or a project. Yeah. And then I just lit listening to what you say about sharing experiences. And I think that's the beauty of having those kind of experiences. Is there are PMs that may never do that or may never even come close. But sharing some of your history and stories and experiences can already help them become a better project manager, even if they hadn't gone through it. Just because now they have something to think about and consider and hear the stories from the trenches of people that have done it.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, I love that's what I love about the show too. And it's also an opportunity. Like when you hear these stories, right? One, it can be it, it's basically humbling. It's like mostly humbling when we talk about that. Because it was like, wow, like we did so many things wrong. For the listener, it's really helpful to like hear your story in that person's story. And that's why we try to have healthcare PMs on our show, and we try to have IT PMs on our show, and we have construction PMs on our show, and like all these different folks that have different experiences so that people can envision one, how to be a better PM if they're new to the industry, or more importantly, like those folks that are in the early to middle part of the industry area of their career. How do they go to that next level? How do they start running those big $250 million projects if that's what they want to do? They also might hear it and say, all right, I'm not doing that, right? And that's okay too, right? It's just fun to hear different perspectives on how project management can be done.

Mentors Failure And PM Growth

Walt Sparling

Oh, yeah. And it's so interesting, people want to get into project management because they hear about maybe the money or maybe the cool factor or whatever reason. And then I've worked with some PMs that are they were like PCs and or even APMs, and they want to get into the bigger stuff, and they get an opportunity and maybe six months, maybe a year, whatever, they're like, Yeah, I'm gonna go into resourcing or uh back to PCing. It's just no, I don't, that's too much stress.

Alex Tuck

It's a lot of stress, and that I won't blow it, but there's I we just did I just did an interview a couple of hours ago, and it's coming out next Thursday. But we talked about exactly that. It's like when you go from being a PC to being a PM and running it, it's so funny. He basically said, I did everything wrong that you could possibly do wrong on that first project. But what was cool about it was he had a mentor there that let him fail, told him it was okay, helped him learn from those things. And now he's 30 years into his career and it's he can do it in his sleep, right? Like he he really gets it, he knows he can anticipate all of the challenges, still fails. We all still fail, right? Oh, yeah. Hopefully the failure is like this big and not that big.

Walt Sparling

It's like a minor, yeah. The more experience you have and the more complicated or the more complicated projects you'll get because hey, you've proven your track record, but then you get into new stuff, and then you miss something. It's like, how could you have so much experience miss that? It's like that is such a small thing compared to all the other things that went right.

Alex Tuck

That's right. No, it's crazy. I I had I was at a session by the folks that make Movila. I don't know if you've heard of the PM tool Movila, but they they're such nerds and I love it. And like I because I'm a nerd too, right? And we were talking about the math around a task, right? Or the number of tasks. So let's say you have a hundred tasks, right, on a project. That's a hundred different ways that there could be something wrong with the project. And so if you just do the math, it's a powers conversation, right? It's not a hundred different, it's a hundred to the to the whatever 99th power. Like it's it, there's that many opportunities for it to go wrong. And when you think about it that way, you're never gonna get it perfect, right? It's just how do you create value for your client, right? PMI, I love that PMI is switching it up and focusing on value versus just managing the freaking project. It's taken a while, but I'm so glad we're here now. But we're creating business value. How are we creating business value? And how do you mitigate the risks that are there, right? How do you anticipate as much as you can, get the smartest people in the room, and try to make sure that the big stuff doesn't happen. And then you can take the little people get sick, people things happen. How do you prevent the bridge from falling down or missing a deadline by 18 months? That's hard.

Walt Sparling

Oh, I can't even imagine that. We run into weeks delays, and it's oh my god. Oh, I know. We were talking earlier before we started about we're not saving lives here, we're we're running projects. And I'd said, Yeah, but we're saving egos. A lot of the sponsors and the leadership teams, like, no, you gotta get that in time, you gotta deliver on schedule. Yep, whatever it takes.

Alex Tuck

Yep, exactly. Now, in in consulting, right? Like I always tell my team who's your hero on this project, right? Who are we going to make look awesome? Let's figure out if they have the right definition of what success looks like. Who do they have to look good to? Help them define what that is, right? And then that's the business value that we create, right? And then that's gonna be our north star. And then we'll get the project done. We just have to make sure that we hit that north star. But yeah, you're right, it's all egos.

Walt Sparling

It's just oh yeah. Yeah, and people I like I was on a couple meetings today, and someone had made a mistake, and rather than say anything, I just I amed them and said, Are you sure? And then they're like, Oh, and then they got back and said, Okay, yeah, I meant this, but they caught it, everyone thinks they caught it themselves, which is fine. Now he they looked better.

Alex Tuck

That's right. Yeah, that that's the thing. Oh my gosh.

Project Management As Project Leadership

Alex Tuck

I anyway, I can't wait for the this episode to come out. But we were talking about how it's we call it project management, but it's really project leadership. And I actually use the term project leaders in my organization as much as I can, even though you know the SEO says project management's the better term to use. But we really are leaders in the industry, like we don't manage people, right? Like we don't have you don't have control over the people, and even then, like you can't force people to do stuff, they have to be inspired to do stuff or driven to do stuff in some way. And I think that's the hardest challenge as a project leader, is it's to motivate people to do things when you have no power over them, no functionality. Yeah, no authority at all. But you and but then you're responsible for it too, right? And so it's but it's I mean, that it's the great P like all the great PMs, they are terrific at it, right? They are so good at getting an executive on the same page and a developer or a BA on the same page, and being able to talk across all those different departments and all those different levels is so hard, or talking across continents and which people that have different first languages than you, right? Being able to traverse all of that is so challenging. But the good ones out there, they're so good.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, there's that chameleon aspect of what a PM does is being able to, like with me in construction, the people in the field are a whole lot different than the people in the boardroom. Yep. And you got to be able to translate between them and communicate clearly with them. So there's a lot right there. And then your personality, I think we've talked about this before. Some PMs are very black and white, yeah, and then some P some PMs are gray. I'm a gray PM. I figure out I'm negotiator. We'll do it this way rather than this is the only way. But those people that are black and white, I've seen them be very successful too. So it depends on your audience and your project.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, I would say most of our team is probably a great PM. You have to beat in consulting, but we have a handful of black and white PMs that our clients love because they need a black and white PM.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, just tell me.

Alex Tuck

That's the art, that's an art in itself, is just figuring out like a PM could be great in one environment, but like great in another environment. And so you have to figure out culturally what the right fit is.

Walt Sparling

Yeah. So

AI Disruption And PM Job Market

Walt Sparling

one of the things that I did an interview a few weeks ago and with a couple topics that we talked on was just general industry, what's going on in the PM world, and then of course the big thing, AI. Which AI is now be instead of it being a big thing, it's just it's a thing, it's the normal thing, it's out there, it's everywhere. So, from the industry perspective, I'm seeing a lot of people that are either laid off or somehow transitioning out and they are struggling to find a job.

unknown

Yeah.

Walt Sparling

A lot more. Either that or now they're just being more vocal about it on LinkedIn, because that's where I follow most of the folks. But yeah, it seems like it's getting a little tough out there for some people. What have you seen?

Alex Tuck

It is a brave new world. It's really interesting. So Anthropic just put out their the state uh state of AI impact that it's having on different different industry, different roles within organizations, like, for instance, like management, administration, that's where project management would live. And they talk about the penetration of AI within each of those areas, right? And as you can imagine, on the marketing side, there's been big penetration, right? Probably like 50% penetration into that space. So there are a lot of tasks that could be automated and AI does a decent job of. But then what was surprising to me was it's probably about, I think it was like 25, 30% penetration into the admin space, which it should be much higher. It's only about 30% out of what they estimate to be about 85 to 90% possible AI penetration, right? So most admin, it makes sense, right? Most admin tasks should be able to be automated or AI should be able to take care of some of those things. What was not surprising but funny to me was that on the management spectrum, it was less than 20% penetration, but about 85% of potential penetration by AI.

Walt Sparling

Those are key roles, but you can't. Replace those with AI.

Alex Tuck

They're the ones that pay for the AI, right? So they have to be there. No, but when I talk to my team, I'll show I show it at my team meetings. I'm like, do you see this chart? This is us, right? These two areas, this is us. This gap between where AI is right now with taking parts of the roles of our jobs, that's coming fast. And that's why I think we're starting to see layoffs, right? I don't think we're seeing the pace of layoffs that everyone thought because AI isn't there yet, right? Like people aren't implementing it the same way. We haven't figured it out yet. There's so much cost to it that's getting propped up by the private equity industry. There's so much to talk about with why more jobs aren't getting lost. But that's happening, that's gonna happen, right? It's just a matter of time. Um but what I tell my team though is we think about just our company, not just our company, but just like PMs in general. You better understand AI really well and how to make it how to get it to enable you to do the unique thing that project managers are terrific at, or project leaders are terrific at. And that's the negotiation, the anticipation, the motivating team members. That stuff, like we will always have to do that. And you will always need, in my opinion, I think you'll need a neutral party to play that role of facilitating conversations between the executives and the devs and the BAs and the product team and all these different groups of people. I think you need that glue. It's just you don't need that person taking notes, coming up, like filling out the risk register, like pinging someone in chat to update their task in the thing. Like that stuff's all gonna go away. So I think we're gonna have an opportunity to create higher value for our customers and probably take on more responsibilities. I don't know what that looks like, but I think if you're not adopting AI and fighting against it, if you're trying to fight against AI, I think you're in trouble. Yeah. So what's your take? What are you thinking you're seeing in the industry?

Walt Sparling

And as far as the jobs, I'm seeing what I just shared. It seems like it's tougher. I think companies are being maybe stricter on their hiring. They're they I think a lot may think they're going to replace PMs with AI, so they're hesitant on bringing in bodies, but it's like, no, we can use AI. And what happened is how AI knowledgeable is your current staff? Who's going to create the prompts and the programs and the agents and all that stuff that's going to replace a PM?

Alex Tuck

That's right.

Walt Sparling

You know, give them a year, then be like, oh, now we got to get a PM because it ain't working out. So I I don't know if that's what's going on, but it just it makes me think, boy, I hope I don't lose my job. But what AI is doing, I think it's leveling out, it's getting more and more powerful every month. Some new things coming out, or something's made easier. The hot thing right now seems to be Claude, uh, especially because of the coding. But I'm seeing there each application's coming out with new versions that are doing more things. I still stuck with my or stick with my Chat GBT, Notebook LM. I haven't played with Claude at all, but doing a little bit with Gemini, trying to look for different things, but I tend to get the the professional version. So I really don't need to be spending all that money every month on all these different AI apps.

Alex Tuck

Yeah.

Walt Sparling

I did get something. What's that?

Alex Tuck

I said it's fun though.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, it's fun. It's like I have a whole learning track just on AI, and I try to keep sharp by doing presentations to other folks on how to do things so that it keeps me challenged because I know someone's gonna ask a question I don't know, so I need to learn as much as I can.

Alex Tuck

Yeah.

Walt Sparling

So it's gonna be it's gonna be interesting. I'm getting involved in an AI committee through our account and corporate, and that is gonna be a lot more fun because I have one or two people I know that are really into AI and use it a lot. Most people just barely scratch the surface, and now I'm gonna be part of a group that like all of these people are really into AI. So I can see my knowledge growing exponentially faster because just of that exposure. It's like you are the sum of the five people you hang around.

Alex Tuck

That's right. No, that's so cool. Plug for

Making AI Adoption Actually Stick

Alex Tuck

open table. Like I saw them, the lead program manager and the lead product manager at Open Table did a talk at Agile 2025 last year, and they talked about their AI adoption across the organization. Oh my God, it was remarkable. So they had they kept struggling, like they kept adding new tools, like trying everything. They're like, why aren't people adopting AI across the organization? And they're owned by booking.com. So like they're like part of the booking holding. So they were talking about how, yeah, we might be a startup, a Bay Area startup, but we're not anymore because we're almost like a corporation. But they were talking about how they found these challenges, like legal needed to approve these new AI tools to get done. So they fast tracked that. And then they were like, all right, like starting a committee, just like what you just described, right? Starting a committee, having an open door policy. Okay, we're gonna have these prompt engineers and like developers and all these folks on this call, bring whatever challenge you have, right? And then let's talk about it. And so they created this culture of AI adoption, and they went from something like crazy, like less than 20% to to uh what was it, like 85% adoption rate. It was unbelievable. My uh my lights just cut out, which is hilarious. You gotta keep that, you gotta keep that uh keep that in the show.

Walt Sparling

Fortunately, this is audio only, but I'll explain.

Alex Tuck

Alex is now in the dark. I'm now sitting in the pitch black because it's 615 and it's Vermont, and we're so far north. That's so funny. No, but it was just like so inspiring to see like a big company like that adopting. And to your point, it was like this call being around people that are like adopting AI and challenging things, so fun. Like, so neat.

Walt Sparling

And there's pockets, which I find interesting. I've been in this current role a couple of years, and they have a PMO that that does oversees the standards and the trainings and all that. And one of the things, it's very process heavy, it's a huge company, and it's international, so there's a lot of stuff going on, regulations in different parts of the world, different laws, and etc. And I this stuff is so overwhelming. I want to create some kind of checklist that goes through the project lifecycle, all the different things from initiation to funding to design to execution to closeout. And like all the data's out there, but there's you go into the document library and it's oh my god, I will be here all day and I barely scratch the surface. Yeah, so I started playing around with the in-house LLM and tried to get a nice long prompt. How to how can I put all this together? That didn't play well, so then I took it over to our other company's internal and tried that. Got farther, but not super far. And then I got this invite for this committee, and I had to apply. So I sent in my experience, and then I sent in, they said, give us an idea. And I so I wrote out this idea of what I thought would be a really good tool for the PMs.

Alex Tuck

Yep.

Walt Sparling

And so they set up a one-on-one interview. I got interviewed, they like, yeah, no, we really you're probably one of our more experienced. We're gonna see if would you be interested in a lead role? And I'm like, sure, this will be fun. They go, We really like your idea, so we'll be in touch. They hang up the next day. I get an email from the PMO. Hey, we now have an AI tool for all our processes and all that. And it's this is the stuff that I've been talking about. Yep, and they did this in a vacuum, didn't tell anybody, and then just announced it. And you got another group that's starting a committee that didn't know about it.

Alex Tuck

Oh my god. That's okay.

Walt Sparling

So you guys aren't working together.

unknown

Wild.

Alex Tuck

No, that's that's uh we've been talking about the AI adoption, and I think it depends on what company you're in, depends on what the industry is, all that stuff, right? But if you can create a frictionless environment where you can where you can test and play and ask questions, you can get so much value out of AI today. I the thing I'll caution everyone on, right, is I think there are ethical standards and guardrails and things like that that you really need to think about with AI. And I'm so pro AI, but at the same time, I think we're gonna run, we're constantly running out of capacity, right? And as more and more folks adopt AI, we have to think about okay, how do we make these systems more, these data centers more efficient? And how do we use the right models for the right challenges and all that stuff, right? It's gonna take some time to figure out. But it'll be interesting to see how much did we implement today that adds some value, but then becomes potentially more expensive in the future because the real costs of the tokens and all this stuff are actually gonna be realized. They're gonna it's gonna be the Uber experience again, right? Like Uber was super cheap back in the day, and then all of a sudden now it's 4X and we're all addicted to Uber instead, right?

Walt Sparling

So yeah.

Alex Tuck

Yeah.

Family Flexibility And PM Lifestyle

Walt Sparling

Oh, okay. We've hit on the big ones. We've talked about your project zero. Anything exciting or cool you want to share?

Alex Tuck

Let's see. Two of my kids are are one starting softball, one starting baseball, which is really exciting. It's that season. But not only that, but we also have three of them playing soccer, and then all four of them are running right now. So that is the craziness that that we're dealing with right now. But no, I uh the job's fun, right? I you're the same way, Will. Love the work that you do, right, every single day. But man, I love how the lifestyle and everything around my business allows for me to connect with my family more and it provides me that flexibility. I think that's what's cool about project management. You can go through like these grinding periods of time, right? Where you really have to give 110%. At the same time, you do have some flexibility, right? Like with how you work, there's a little bit of independent work, and I love that about the work that we do, right? Because it's allows for us to be present in our communities and with our families and everywhere else.

Walt Sparling

Yeah. Cool. Good stuff. Good stuff. You just

Return To Office Realities

Walt Sparling

you said something made me think we we just got our goals for the next year from the corporate goals, not our goals.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, sure, sure.

Walt Sparling

But it was like, yeah, we're hybrid, and our the client that I have right now is in office 100%. And that was something they just implemented a couple months ago. And that's which is great because I do construction, so they're gonna need more seats, more office space, more parking. Hey, we got projects for a while to make up for that, but then we got our goals was like we want to try to align with our clients, so we need you to be in the office three days a week now instead of two. So it's three's not bad, but I really two.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, two's awesome. No, and it's crazy because our like our governor here, he's actually quite a popular governor. I think he's very like when it comes to politics, he's the most neutral guy, 75% approval rating, 80% approval rating, highest in the world in the country. But he made everyone go back to work in the state, and the state's the largest employer in the state of Vermont. He made everyone RTO and they didn't like it. And so they sued. And then they realized that it was illegal. And so I I think the number was, I don't know, they made wasted millions of dollars with this return to office, and now it's not happening anymore. Um it is so wild, it is crazy. Yeah. The RTO thing, it's interesting because you could go either way, right? You understand the value of having the face-to-face interactions. I love seeing people in person and shaking their hand. I trust them more just from seeing them in person, but I can do most of my work from here.

Walt Sparling

Yeah, the RTO thing is it's funny because when you dig into the his history of how we ended up with offices and why people are in there and how the office space has changed over the years, and the studies that were done 30, 40 years ago, and how we got to where we're at now with these collaborative spaces that you're sitting on top of your coworker, and we're they're all on Zoom calls talking to each other, and they're all in the same room. It's bizarre. Wow. Just looking at all that is sometimes I'm like, I whatever. I'm just gonna do my job and be thankful that I don't have to be here every day. Yep.

Alex Tuck

Yeah, it's the same thing. Like, I it's that feeling that you just described, I actually haven't felt that in a while. I haven't been on a client site in a conference room where something like that happened in a little while. I know it exists, like my team, some of my team members experienced that, but it's the equivalent of sitting around, like I'm about to go on vacation with my whole wife's side of the family, and I can guarantee you we're gonna be sitting around nine o'clock at night, and there's gonna be like 12 phones out, and everyone's like looking down at the phones, even though like we're all sitting around each other. It's like the heck are we doing, y'all? But yeah, this is fun, Walt. I appreciate it.

Walt Sparling

Yeah,

Closing Thanks And Goodbye

Walt Sparling

thanks for coming on and uh looking forward to maybe having some additional chats down the road. And for everyone else, I appreciate you listening. And we'll see you in the next episode of PM Mastery. Awesome.

Alex Tuck

Thanks again, Walt.

Intro/Outro

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