Ratnadeep: Welcome everyone to another insightful episode of leaders perspective, the podcast where we delve into the world of digital transformation and its impact on leadership, innovation, and growth. I’m your host and a passionate advocate for digital transformation and the co-founder of a company dedicated to harnessing the power of technology to drive change.
Today we are fortunate to have Stanley Feinstein with us. A name that is synonymous with process and project management expertise, Stanley is the president and owner of Project Remedies Inc., a company known for equipping leaders with an unprecedented view into their organization’s operations enabling transformational decision-making with Decades of experience under his belt.
Stanley has pioneered numerous initiatives in the realm of project management. He believes in the power of technology to capture work metrics that provide leaders with the knowledge they need to make strategic and informed decisions. In today’s episode, we will delve into the topic of “How Can Digital Tools Be Used To Capture Work Metrics For Leaders?”
This is an important discussion given a rapidly evolving digital landscape and who better to enlighten us than a veteran like Stanley. As you navigate this conversation we hope to shed light on the importance of metrics-driven leadership, the role of digital tools in facilitating this, and how leaders can adapt to this transformative approach. So without further Ado, let’s dive into our conversation with Stanley Feinstein. Welcome Stanley.
Stanley: Thanks, Ratnadeep.
Ratnadeep: So Stanley, let me like get into the thick of things. We have seen a seismic shift in how the digital landscape is shaping the way we perceive work metrics. How have you witnessed this change in your journey, particularly among the leaders you have worked with?
Stanley: I think the leaders for a variety of reasons don’t implement the processes necessary to capture the metrics. I can tell you stories of leaders that understand but they don’t want to manage. They think that the people are going to automatically want to do this and they don’t implement the processes because the people don’t want to do it. They think it’s just too complex but it’s not. It’s very basic stuff. It’s a very hierarchical relationship.
For example, at a very large I.T operations organization, the director in charge of I.T operations told me that he went and talked to his people (managers) and said if everybody was working hard and everybody gets exceeds expectations, how come we’re having so many problems? And that tells me that the processes haven’t put been put in place to track what is being done, how long it takes, how many people are working on it, is one team doing it better than another team or not. What are the issues?
Another example is an acquisition organization in the U.S. federal government. Everybody wants acquisition to be faster but nobody knows how long it takes. For example, a package goes into legal for a month at the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I asked why does it take a month. The purchasing guy I was talking to said that it goes into legal for a month.
How long did the people in legal spend on each package during that month? An hour? Three hours? Nobody knows. My argument to you is if you knew you could have a conversation about what the issues are and address the issues but if you don’t know, there’s nothing to talk about. Why is it a month? Because the leader wants it to be a month. It’s 2023, we should be able to do better than that.
Ratnadeep: Some of the facts that you said are rather strange. But I guess it is how it is. Thinking about the core metrics, leaders should keep their eyes on them. What comes to your mind and how do you see digital tools playing a role in streamlining the monitoring of these metrics?
Stanley: I was talking to a fellow the other day about documenting your processes. By the way, I used to say design your processes, that’s wrong. The people in the organization have been doing what they know. They know what the processes are. The issue is they haven’t written them down. What you have to do is write them down. And the way you do this is critical. The right way to do it is to bring the people that do the work, who know the processes.
In a conference room, a leader has a big stack of Post-it notes. The leader says to the people who know how to do it, what are all the tasks that are in this process, give them to me one at a time, write them on a Post-It note, and put the Post-it note on a whiteboard.
When all the tasks are defined then ask the people what sequence are these tasks performed in. They tell you the tasks and move the Post-it notes around so that it forms like a Gantt chart. This is the sequence that the work is to be performed in. And then you take that and you put it in a system like ours. Ours is a combination of Process Management, Project Management, Resource Management, Workforce Management, Cost Management, and more. It’s all of these technologies but then you take these processes and you put it in the system.
What’s important is that the reason that you ask them what the processes are is because the system is going to have the status of the tasks. They’re going to look at the process, they’re going to see what the process is. If you tell them what the process is, they’ll say oh you don’t know what the processes are, you haven’t been doing it for a year. I mean whatever it is, it should be right on. It doesn’t matter you have to ask and they have to recognize that that’s theirs. They’ve told you what the processes are and you’re using it.
With a system like ours, the team lead and the people and the workers that work the tasks, are the ones that use the system. We’ve trained the project manager out of it and let the system automate it, using the template to automatically generate the project plan. What’s important about that is from a consistency standpoint if you have. I was talking to a company the other day, they have eight or nine thousand people all over the world doing the same type of work all over the world.
How do you want to be able to compare performance in each of these areas and each of these locations? To compare, the plan has to be the same. If it’s different, then it’s hard to compare. You want it to be the same. So by using the template to automatically generate the project plan, a whole bunch of things happen. One is you eliminate the need to train people on the plan because the system is generating the plan. they don’t have to know the plan and that’s critical. Because how?
Again if you have eight or nine thousand people around the world, how exactly are you going to train these people on the plan? And when you tweak it, the plan isn’t exactly right. We need to take out these stats and put in those tasks and change the sequence a little bit. How do you retrain them? The answer is to automate.
Automate the process as much as possible. That’s what we’ve done. Automation is the key. You have to make it easy.
Ratnadeep: With automation comes transformation. So every transformation comes with its own set of challenges. When leaders favor a metrics-based approach aided by digital tools, generally what are the roadblocks they might encounter, and how do they steer clear of these obstacles?
Stanley: The major roadblock is that people don’t want to give them the information. Early on, I called on a division of User Aircraft Company, where Linton guidance and control systems, where the guy said, “I’m developing knowledge, I’m working at the edge of science. How am I supposed to predict how long this?” And his boss said bologna, “You’re not working at the edge of science.” They come up with every excuse. But the main is to not communicate.
What we’ve done and some people just say screw it “I’m not going to do it”. What we’ve done in our system is when the system creates a project plan you have a planned start date and a planned finish date for each task. So we’ve added this robust escalation and notification capability. During implementation, we set up a hierarchy of notifications.
For example, the day before a task is supposed to start you notify the person responsible that they have a task that’s supposed to start tomorrow. If they don’t start the tas the day after, you notify them again.
And by the way, every time you do this, you log it in an audit log field. You notify them again that it was supposed to start yesterday. If they still don’t start, you know you notify the person, the manager, and the VP or the commander. Whoever picks up the phone and says, “Hey, why am I getting these emails?” ‘How many emails do I get, ‘why am I getting this one, ‘what’s going on down there’.
My argument to you is that as soon as they make that call within five minutes everybody in the organization knows that the leader knows what’s going on. That’s when transformation happens.
I can’t tell you how many conferences I’ve been at where a two-star general, a major general of the army says I want to change the culture. What exactly are you gonna do to change the culture? You got to do something. And by the way, we do this on the start date of a task. We also do it on the end date of the task. So nothing can just drag on or we’re going to forget about it. Because all these emails are going off. The project has to end and the goal of course is to finish more projects on time and within budget.
I used to say that leaders are interested in three things about projects. Are they going to finish on time and a budget? That’s not true. Yes they’re interested in those three things but they’re also interested in the “Are my people in many other things? Are the people working to the standard? Do we have our staffing correct based on the demand? Do I have visibility?” All kinds of things and many more. We have the slide that lists a whole bunch of things that the system tells you that leaders are interested in.
