Hi, this is Brett Harned.
Welcome to PM Matters, a Team Gantt interview series that
raises the voice of the community and explores
what matters to us.
Hi, this is Brett Harned.
I'm here for PM Matters.
And I'm here with Stephen Thomas from White October in Oxford,
UK.
Stephen is a project manager at White October,
and he's organizing the Big Do, which
is a conference for digital project managers
here in Oxford, where the venue is the Cowley Road Methodist
Church.
And we are sitting in one of the back rooms,
getting ready for the event.
So how are you today?
Feeling good, looking forward to the Big Do, all excited.
All the planning's been done.
So yeah, looking forward to a great event.
Me too.
I think it's going to be great.
Me too.
So I want to talk a little bit about what
matters to you as a PM.
To start out, can you just tell us
how you got into project management?
Yeah, I think it's a sort of how does anyone
get into project management.
It was a bit of a haphazard journey.
I guess it starts with literature
and English, which is what I was studying at university.
And one of the modules was about hypertext and digital.
And so the web was still relatively young,
but looking at textual analysis, so that kind
of kindled interest.
And I think people were asking me
at the time, what are you going to do with an English degree?
And I had no idea what I was going to do.
And I think I watched the film Field of Dreams several times.
And there's a character in that and he
makes educational software that helps people solve
their conflicts peacefully.
So I thought, well, that sounds like a good idea.
I'll start telling people that.
And yeah, then I actually thought, well,
how would I do that?
And so the literature angle led me into publishing,
but more-- you know, digital publishing
was really on the rise and education publishing.
And so that got me into kind of managing digital publishing
projects.
And then, very soon I realized that I wanted to get more
on the digital side.
And there were some things that books publishers were doing
digital as an afterthought.
And it was just fairly obvious that digital was
going to the future of things.
So basically, moved around a number of companies
and then was a digital project manager, by any other name
and, after about five of that, sort of set my own business
doing project management consultancy,
before going back into [INAUDIBLE] world.
And now, I manage a range of projects,
from really big CMSes to nice, nifty mobile apps and just
generally love the variety and the experience of it all.
That's exciting.
I didn't know that we had that in common.
I was an English major in college as well.
And my path was very, very in a similar way to you.
What kind of attributes of your career
do think led you to be a good PM?
That's an interesting question.
I guess-- you know, I'm not typically
the most organized person.
I'm, as my wife will say, not necessarily neat and not
necessarily all about process.
But actually, I think there's a kind of creative side
to project management.
And so I enjoy engaging with people.
I enjoy working with teams.
And I really like the idea of kind
of breaking down complex problems into smaller steps.
So something that seems huge and unwieldy, and like,
how do you start something like that?
And I love the glitz of the middle of the apple challenge.
You know, where do you start?
Well, you start somewhere and kind of building from that.
And I think that's the interesting thing about project
management.
You can have a wide variety of personalities and skills.
And they call all be effective at their job.
And it's really nice working a team now at White October,
where there's a bunch of us.
We share some attributes.
But we're all different in many different ways.
We complement each other and learn from each other.
And I think, again, that's the thing
now, with being a digital PM, is an industry that is constantly
changing and moving forward.
So you never stop learning from people
that have been in this industry a long time,
but also from people that are new to it
and bringing fresh ideas and fresh approaches.
Yeah, I love that approach.
So we initially met at DPM UK in Manchester,
where you gave a lightning talk.
And that was kind of about breaking down
traditional ways of presenting and working with contracts.
So I'm curious to know how that topic came up for you.
What made you want to give a presentation about that?
I think it's from the hard learned experience of being
in a fixed-price contract when it's not
going well, and realizing no matter how good you are
as a PM, sometimes, if you're given the wrong set up
or a bad brief and you're locked in,
there's a limit that you can do, apart from damage control
and kind of keep your team motivated
and try and get to end and try and salvage the best that you
can do.
And that just feels wrong.
And the digital software projects
are just full of failures or passable successes.
And I think a lot of that is down to just
all the ways of looking at it.
And there's only so much you can do, as a project manager,
once you're kind of locked into a way of working.
So for me, it was quite liberating to think
beyond that.
And so sitting on one project or activity,
we kind of-- the CEO, Dave Fletcher,
when we were sort of struggling with this model of time
and materials or fixed-price contract.
And it wasn't really working for us or the client.
And so we kind of came up with what
we thought was an original way of working,
which was this sort of price per point model limit.
We later found out that other agencies and other industries
do use it.
But it was then suddenly seeing that change,
how that changed the whole dynamic of the team, how
that changed the relationship with the client,
and it suddenly became, for me, very apparent this is something
that I wanted to share and felt was important.
And it also made me realize, doing that talk,
how we're an industry where essentially
the demand for our services outstrips the supply easily.
So even though there are other agencies and other digital PMs,
they don't always feel like direct competitors.
And in some cases, they are.
But actually, there's a lot that we can learn from one another.
And also, just because we've got a model
that works for our agency doesn't mean
you can apply it to another agency
and it'll work for those different personnel
and different personality types.
So more and more, it suddenly kind of connected
this year that there's a lot to be gained
from being open about the ways that you're working and not try
and to protect your secrets, that it doesn't matter.
Someone might learn from it or take them.
But they're not going to take your business.
And fostering that kind of relationship
then pays dividends because people come back to you
and say, well, I tried that, and this is interesting,
and have you thought about this.
And you grow through that method of learning,
as opposed to-- you know, I have worked in some places
where it's very locked down and very closed.
And you never see outside of the room, so you always think what
you're doing is the right way.
But there's no one saying, hey, there
might be a better way of working here.
Sure.
And I think, too, for our community,
it just helps people be better across the board.
You know, I've spoken a lot about project managers
and how maybe they don't get as much respect
as they should in some places.
I think that happens to be in those places that
are really locked down because there
are no resources for them.
But people like you are starting to step up and create events
like the Big Do and meet ups.
And I think people are starting to learn a lot more, which
I think is really cool.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the [INAUDIBLE],
and some of the talks you've given
and the conferences and events that you started-- but for me,
still, going to events like DPM UK or the things
that you're doing in the States is you meet people,
and actually just to kind of have the support and say,
actually, this job's hard.
And when you hear back, yeah, I struggle with it, too,
and experienced people that you think never suffer a problem,
you realize they're going through the same thing.
And it is a difficult job because there
is-- if it was a set of fixed rules
that you just followed every time,
then anyone do it or it would be automated.
But it's not.
It's a constantly-- you have to get from start to finish,
but the route is always changing and spinning around, so yeah.
Changing process, changing deliverables.
Yeah.
Different cast of characters every time.
There's lots of things that make it difficult. I agree.
Definitely.
So switching gears a little bit, the Q&A series
is called PM Matters.
What's a topic that really matters to you?
I think more and more, I'm think a lot about--
so automation and empathy has been my current--
I'm working with a developer that's-- he's really big
on automation.
And he's kind of inspired me.
And there's this idea empowered laziness, basically.
Like the guy that invented power steering,
he did something great through wanting to be lazier.
Or the person that invented an escalator,
they weren't fitness freaks, but they made something good.
And there's this idea of if you're doing a task time
and time again that's very repressive, why
are you doing that?
And often, I'm doing updates or things
three or four times a week.
And they are pretty dull and boring,
and they don't really have a positive impact me.
Or especially if I'm reminding team members to do something,
it becomes a nagging thing.
I'm constantly having three or four negative interactions
with a team a week.
And it's just going, can you do this?
And this should be-- technology is there to automate that.
So I'm quite interested in what are the stuff, as PMs,
that we can automate so that we're making space
for the more face-to-face, empathic things, where you sit
down with people and you're talking and you're learning
and you actually create something or solve ideas
as a team.
And so, yeah, that's my current thinking,
is how can we automate a lot of the grim process stuff that
needs to be done, but it doesn't actually
need that much thinking about it,
and make more time for the people stuff, the approach
stuff, the kind of, you know, how are we
going to do this task, how we help,
and how can we change the way that we're working.
Building relationships, making connections
makes things a little bit easier on a project?
What are the things that you would automate?
There's a lot of things about time keeping and project
tracking, and there's a lot about that
that's focused on developers.
There's even just some stuff.
So with communications, I'm reminding people
that there's a meeting going on.
They're all calendar invites and stuff,
you know, if this, then that.
We're doing some stuff that's quite nice with-- so
when a developer submits a pull request, like a code check,
making sure that message goes out to various people
and they're pulled into sort of slack.
And there's a bunch of technology
you can use to piece it together.
And there's more that, I think, you could do there.
There's some really interesting stuff
looking at-- even going as far as billing,
that when you actually complete a piece of work,
the minute it's signed off and deployed to a live site,
that that would generate an invoice,
based on your tracking.
And it's just kind of, you know, take away
all that admin pain of going back and looking
in spreadsheets and pulling out numbers.
Because that's part of the job.
But that's not-- I can see a way where
you wouldn't have to do that.
And actually, that kind of work is prone to human error.
So how could you automate your invoicing
or automate your time tracking, based on your habits,
so that you can actually focus more
on these key meetings or key engagements that--
Sure.
Yeah, I love that.
I love the idea of a PM focusing more
on relationships and project strategy
and not having to bogged down by the admin work.
That's cool.
So wrapping up, do you have any last words or imparting words
for any PMs who are watching?
I think, just enjoy your work.
It's sort of broader than if you're not-- life's too short.
And if you're not enjoying your projects or you don't think
there's enough variety or-- project management
should be fun.
It sometimes has a dry reputation.
But I think it's a really fun, creative industry.
And if you don't feel that way, you
should be trying to change it internally
or just making sure you're not taking things too seriously
and enjoying life outside of it.
There's a lot of fun to be had working the teams.
I enjoy it, and I hope other project managers out there do,
too.
Great.
Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day.
I know you're busy getting ready for a conference tomorrow.
Our viewers should check out the Big Do online, as well as
White October.
And they can follow you on Twitter, @dubaussi?
That's right.
Yeah.
Correct.
Great.
Thanks so much.
Thank you, Brett.
Thanks.