The Three Principles for Next-Gen Project Managers

Ever wondered why even the most prestigious project management certifications don't always translate into real-world success? Join me, Mounir Ajam, as I unveil the genesis of the Uruk platform and disclose how it's poised to revolutionize the way we manage projects. Our discussion traverses the three transformative principles that underpin the platform, designed to catapult success rates and shatter the industry's resigned acceptance of project failure.

Embark on a journey through the intricate world of project management as we dissect the necessity of an integrated, adaptable approach. I'll walk you through how the Uruk platform reflects my vision of a methodology that's as dynamic as the industries it serves, ensuring that each project aligns with an organization's heartbeat from the get-go. With a focus on the Uruk platform's ability to navigate the complexities of projects, programs, products, and portfolios, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to pivot from conventional methods to a path of integration and value delivery.

Finally, we're peeling back the curtain on the Uruk platform to reveal its educational and supportive features. Imagine a tool that manages projects and mentors you through every step. Discover how the 'Oru coach' messages, interactive demos, and a responsive chat system transform Uruk into a relentless ally in your project management odyssey. It's not just a platform; it's a movement, a digital mentor, and a testament to a career dedicated to redefining the norms of project management.

Explore more project management insights at www.urukpm.com

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Welcome to the 4pm podcast. My name is Munir Ajam and I'm the founder and CEO of Aruq Project Management. My core passion is project management and community development. I came to you with decades of global experience. I have worked on projects in various industries, countries and roles. In this podcast, I aim to help you and your organization transform how to lead your change initiatives with the 4pm. What are the 4pm? 4pm stands for project program, product delivery and portfolio management. It is all about integrations to deliver value. We want to hear from you, so please share your feedback and suggestions. Enjoy your listening. Good day and welcome to the 4pm podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:14

My name is Munir Ajam and I will be talking today about the three principles that we have adopted in Aruq Project Management to implement our Aruq platform. I will do a quick introduction, with some background, of why we created the Aruq platform, and then I will be talking about the three principles. Now let me just say it out front Obviously, here we're talking about our product. We're talking about the Aruq platform. This podcast might be perceived as a marketing podcast. However, the value of these principles apply independently of the Aruq platform. These are the ones that we have adopted ourselves and obviously others can use the same concept in their system. Whether they want to consider the Aruq platform or not, it doesn't really matter. There is an educational component and primarily this podcast episode. It is educational, so it's not a pure or it is a marketing per se. So the three principles, but before I even mention them, let's talk about some background.

Speaker 1: 2:35

I started my previous company back in 2004, 2005. And basically initially we wanted to be consultancy, but we felt a great need for training. When we were doing training on project management, including certification training, we kept hearing feedback from our customers, from our students and by here we say student meaning professional people that working in an environment but they're taking project management classes and certification and their management and their companies. The same we kept hearing is that great, we understand. From from the student, they would say we understand what you're talking about, we understand these guys and we can even get certified, and many of them do get certified. However, we still do not know how to manage project and in one time one client basically told us a, an executive or a senior manager and a ministry said look money, we've certified 50 people but they still do not know how to manage project. Now, just to be clear. Those people were certified by with other company that was us so it wasn't like a reflection on on the training and even you know the other training company could have done a great job. But basically, even if you take courses with me, if your objective is certification right, I'm going to make sure that I teach you what you need in order to become certified, whereas practical training or applied project based learning is a totally different story.

Speaker 1: 4:13

So the challenge was that a lot of organization feeling like you know, we understand, but we still not sure how to apply, or we still face problem or we don't know how to do a methodology in our organization that is related to our context. These are some of the comments we were hearing. So that was one of the challenges that kept popping in our minds at what's going on, what can we do? How can we help the community? What can we make it? You know, where can we make a difference?

Speaker 1: 4:41

At the same time, we know and and and that was, you know, 20 years ago, but it was happening before and still happening today that projects still fail at a high rate. I mean, and when we say project failure, it could mean project management failure or could mean the actual project fail and we distinguish between the two. If you follow and if you watch our four-dimensional project success or you listen to our podcast on those topics, you will understand that we differentiate between project business objective failure versus a project management failure or success. So many people kept telling us that you know, and we kept seeing the data from technology, from capital project, large, small infrastructure project and all industries and domain projects still have a high degree of failure, at least in their project management area. It's quite common whenever we say we have a new project, executives go into a mode that we're oh okay, we're gonna expect that this project is gonna be over budget or behind schedule. It's become like we take failure for granted and that really bothered us. That because I've been working on project, including mega project, and where I've seen success through success, and I've seen some miserable failure. So I know success is possible and I know what caused failure and I know what are the critical success factors that can help us succeed, obviously with, then my limitation of knowledge and experience. I'm not saying I know it all so, but I've seen it. I've seen success, even on mega project, and so when we hear that there's only one third of mega project are successful, or at least 70 percent of the project suffer project and cost and schedule problem. We wonder why and obviously we start to explore and understand the reason. So these are the challenges we were facing and that led us to think that what can we do about it? So let me pause for a second here and close.

Speaker 1: 6:44

This first part of this podcast is basically by highlighting some of the things that were happening in our environment and around the world. That was a high failure rate, with the lack of understanding of how to build the methodology or apply a methodology, or how can we use certification to help us improve performance and organization. So many of those issues were basically, you know, being cooked in our head and that back it was about 2005, 2006, 2007. At that time mostly I was still in Dubai in doing training we started to think about what can we do? So we had in mind that in order to do something, we have considered or building a methodology. Basically, that something was the idea that how can we launch a project management innovation program focusing on identifying the root causes of problem and coming up with solution. So it's like in our research and development program that we started in my previous company, sukad in Dubai, back in 2007. So with that background, I shared with you on part one we wanted to go to to make a difference. So how do we make a difference?

Speaker 1: 8:07

We felt that is the biggest problem was that people don't understand that these guidance, standards and certification they supposed to be part of an organization project management system. They should help create methodologies to manage project. So we had two major problem a methodology that people were using guide as a methodology, but they're not methodology. You know, they should have some people within the organization. They should have taken those guide and creating the organizational system and methodology in the organization that project manager can use on their project. That wasn't happening, and I mean, obviously that's not the only reason for project failure, but that was one of the challenges we were facing. So we decided to embark on a mission to basically create these methodologies.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Now, when we look at it and we look at what's happening, we felt like we need to decide some principles. So we come up with many principles related to building our methodology and I believe, if I remember right, we had about 11 principles. However, there are two core principles that I want to address today. Now I know this podcast is three principles, so I'll talk about the first two and then I'll bring in the third later. Back in 2007, we were thinking about two principles to be transparent and honest, and that led to our methodology development and the improvement in our methodology. And we have another video talk about the history of the Oru platform as a deep route, deep rooted, basically where we explain the evolution of the Oru platform from the idea that we started with in 2007.

Speaker 1: 9:52

However, basically and today let's focus on that okay, now we need to build the Oru platform or build the methodology. What are the two core principles we have to comply with? And our start was the first one. The first principle we felt like project management, and when we look at project management and when I explain the principle, I will explain the background behind it as well. And the first principle was about we need to integrate project management with business. That's quickly to say what it is.

Speaker 1: 10:27

Now, what does it mean? Well, what we've noticed is a lot of people in practice that they look at project management as fragmented, and it is still fragmented. Today. We have people who manage tasks only, and, of course, we are totally different, so we need to understand and respect our diversity. Some people might need to manage tasks only, that's fine. Some people might manage a stage that's even fine. Some people might need to manage technical project management. Now you notice here if you have been following this episode, we had an episode a few weeks ago about the project management level and respecting our diversity. That will be a useful time to go back and listen to that, because we talk about five levels of practice within the project management community. So you have the different levels of practice.

Speaker 1: 11:14

However, if you look at task management or stage management or technical project management, one thing they miss, especially if you are an owner organization, they miss integrating project management with the rest of the business. They view project management as a technical domain. That's why I call it technical project. By technical project management I don't mean technology, I mean technical, that mean functional, whatever. Focusing on project management being a technical domain, its job is to produce product. That product could be a building, a factory or a new drug or a software, right. So technical again, it doesn't mean technology and software, it means the focus is on producing product. So technical work right To produce the product of the project.

Speaker 1: 12:04

So we notice there's a lot of focus on that, a lot of focus on technical project management, but it's missing the idea of integrating project management with the front end, with business, with the business case, with the feasibility study. You know guide, like the Pumbak guide and other, they talk about project starting with a charter, that what's happening before the charter? Right, there has to be feasibility study. Before the feasibility study, there has to be other things. So that is one part of where we felt project management was missing or basically being fragmented, where the project management people are not tightly integrated with the business people that are deciding on the project and that they want the product of the project. We also notice on the back end that there is not enough integration with between the people who are executing and developing the work and the business people who might need to get ready for operation, so, once they receive the product, what they're gonna do? Right, and that led us to the value delivery methodology that we have developed and, of course, that is what we call level five of when we talk about the PM level.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Now let me summarize this first principle, though the first principle, again, it is about integrating project management with the business aspect of the organization, business and operation right, and that led to a methodology, a standard model that we have developed. That is principle one. Now let's talk about the second principle and following on the idea of respecting our diversity. The second principle was about ensuring that project management, or understanding that project management is not the same across different domain and industries and project sites and complexity and so many other factors. We must respect our diversity I keep repeating that term which mean the methodology must be customizable and adaptable, and the value delivery methodologies that we have today actually started out as something called the customizable and adaptable methodology for managing project CAMP, caa, double MP right. So that was the origin and my books on that on CAMP, version one, version two and version three that was published back in 2017 in the book Project Management Beyond Waterfall and Agile that become the foundation for the Rook platform, right?

Speaker 1: 14:37

So principle number two that the methodology, the project management system, has to be tailored to fit the organizational context. It has to understand that, whether we are managing project in industrial project or real estate project or medical project or technology project or media project that they have some uniqueness. Yes, there's a lot of the processes in common. There's even the idea of a life cycle as an idea, it's common. However, there are some specialization that we need to consider and we must consider, otherwise we don't produce a proper methodological process. So, to repeat, and the principle number one was that we need to create a methodological process to cover the project across the entire life cycle, from idea until operation. And principle number two is about that methodological process must be tailored and customized and adapted to fit multiple variables, such as the organization type, the project type, the project size, complexity, degree of innovation, impact of the project on the organization. There are many variables that affect that. So, in principle number one, we created the methodology. In principle number two, it lead to creating the tailored method.

Speaker 1: 16:06

Now, before I go into principle number three, I need to step back and talk about the Rook platform. Now, the Rook platform, in a way, is not only project management, because there's project management, program management, product delivery management, portfolio management. So it's about the 4 pm. So it's not only about the PM methodology. Yeah, but the project management methodology is core and center of the platform and the foundation of the platform. So obviously we need to use basically these principles, we build them into the platform. Now, here we have to pause, and or we pause as a company when we are creating the Rook platform.

Speaker 1: 16:47

We created the platform, but basically we never really put principle three as a focus item or even use the term principle, the third principle but indirectly we were building it and recently, in a discussion with one of my advisors, it came to light that, look, we are doing principle three. Right, we are building the Rook platform with three principles, but we never really talked about this. You know these first two principles I discussed earlier, we talked about them before, but we never really talked about the third principle, right? So I'm going to keep you anxious for a while to know what the heck is that third principle? I mean, I'll keep you stay tuned for one more minute. So then we? So what I'm saying is that we built the Rook platform with those three principles in mind. Although the third principle was some kind of subliminal, right, it wasn't explicitly.

Speaker 1: 17:41

Maybe that's a better word, and the idea that we came back and we start to look back on our work and not our work only in the Rook platform, it's project management community, and it's very common for us in the project management community to discuss something is very important. We always say that competent project management require three pillars and I think I've already had some an episode on that also in the past. It required three pillars and those are people, processes and tools or technology. So here we start to look back at our platform, said, okay, the platform, obviously it's not a tool, it's technology. Now, why is not a tool? Because a tool usually is a dummy. You have, they give you a template, the algorithm, you do thing. But in our case, we have built the process into the platform. So on a way, we combined the idea of technology and processes together so make the platform include a lot of the policies, the guidelines, the governance, the workflow, the template. So in a way it's a comprehensive system built into a software solution. That's why we call it an integrated digital solution. Okay, so with that in mind, we know for sure that our Rook platform is extensively covering two of those three pillars. We are covering the technology pillar and we are covering the process pillar, process and method pillar.

Speaker 1: 19:13

Then we kept thinking but what about the people? Well, obviously, if I'm, you know, my client, I'm not going to be managing the project for my client, unless some small company wants us to hire us as an outsourced service. We can do that. However, in most situation, the people are going to come from the client. We don't manage them, we don't train them. It's not our responsibility. It's usually in the hand of the customer, right, how they manage their people, train their people, develop their people. All of it within their power was, supposedly was nothing for us to do about this, and I couldn't accept that and my team couldn't accept that indirectly, again, subliminally. We were never conscious about that. So we built into the platform, said what can I do? Yes, that's what we're talking about. And then it bored them to build into a digital solution, into a technology solution, right, what can we do to help improve competence, to focus on, to embed or to incorporate or to address the people side of those three pillars, or the people pillar, right? And by people for us, we mean, we don't, obviously, we're not counting people and bodies, we are looking for competent people.

Speaker 1: 20:28

Now, we've always strongly believe in the idea that competence must be linked to a process. You know most competency-based organization. When they look at competence, obviously they have to define the standards, the baseline. Otherwise, what? How can we define someone is competent, right? So, for example, I am a civil engineer, I have a master degree in civil engineering, but I've never practiced civil engineering after I graduated because I went into project management right. So I'm not a competent civil engineer. Now that's not an insult, I proudly say it. I'm not a competent civil engineer and if I go to, basically if somebody asked me to do some civil engineering work, it will be an ethical for me to accept that work because, again, I'm not competent on that. Why? Because I've lost my training. I did not get it. So competence come was training in the process.

Speaker 1: 21:21

So on project management, if I say somebody is a competent risk manager, I have to have some kind of a criteria of saying that. So we will have to establish a competency baseline that most organizations do that. So when we talk about people, we're talking about competence, right? So here the third principle start to emerge from being implicit to being explicit is that although we don't manage people I mean we don't manage the client people the platform must do everything possible that we can to help increase the level of competence of our client personnel in order for them to elevate their performance. So principle number three is basically enhancing competence to increase performance and as a result of that, is basically increasing the level of project management maturity within an organization.

Speaker 1: 22:29

So what have we done in the root platform to achieve or to deliver on that principle or our promise, right, because to me a principle is a promise. What have we done in that? First, we created a knowledge portal, and that knowledge portal have many things in it, including reference document definition. For example, how do we view the definition of a project or a program or a portfolio? What does it mean when we say captured lessons learned? So there are a lot of educational content, obviously reflecting our philosophy of managing project.

Speaker 1: 23:05

I have published 17 ebooks that I have currently active, 17 ebooks. They are inside the platform so people can go, and some of them include case studies of how they use the methodology pre-ORUG, how they use the methodology on, for example, writing a book project, right, or organizing an event or updating a website. These are projects, so we have case studies and the interesting part is that those case studies were done by employees of my company who have never been a project manager. So basically, they are accidental project manager. You know I have an IT guy or a business development guy or a salesperson and I asked him hey, you learn the methodology and apply it to this project that you have Like. One of them was organizing an event in a different country, so establishing a project in a different country, so establishing a partnership with another organization. All of those case studies actually are in the portal right and the knowledge portal in the platform. So we published them. So that is one part.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Then we also created a community library, but this is empty, because this is for customers as they start to subscribe to the platform and if there's anything they want to share in the community library, basically they can share openly. So it's what we want to share, we put in the knowledge portal, in the group guide, and what maybe our customer want to share, they put it in the community library. Now, speaking of the community library, it's open to every user of a room. Now, how about if a company want to create a community library for their employees only, especially if they are big company, well, we've created something, a module called client library, right? So in this case, the client personnel can save file they want to share with everybody else within that organization only. No one else can see it, right? So in a way, they can share knowledge. We are encouraging our customer to share knowledge and expertise and case studies, either privately, within the company itself or within the client itself, because it could be an NGO, it could be an MPO, it could be a government entity, and also they can share in the community library with all user around the world. So we have knowledge portal, we have a root guides, we have the community library, we have the client library.

Speaker 1: 25:19

What else have we done? We are recording a lot of them, educational demos, and I call them education demos because these are not like guide or click here or user guide. They are educational demos. So in every section where we feel we need to explain something, or at least our philosophy, we record a demo and we will put it on the screen. So whenever a user will log in and they will be seeing that, they will see an icon. If they see an icon for a video, that means there is a video that describes that section.

Speaker 1: 25:51

Then, with every deliverable and every section of the platform, there are places where maybe we need to explain a question or explain a field, and we put there something we call the Oru coach. So we put a question mark and a message where people can go in and click on it and they can read the text or they can listen to it as audio. Those are very narrow focus, basically to the point on this question. What does this mean? For example, the word sector. What does the sector mean? Obviously, in our definition, because they need to use it. In the platform, there will be what we call the Oru coach messages.

Speaker 1: 26:28

Now, one more thing we've done as well is obviously the chat ability to chat with them and create team chat and create and basically people can chat with anybody within their organization or they can create a group for teams to chat with those groups. So we've created a lot of these things to help increase knowledge. So, in a way, the platform is a guide. Basically, if somebody in you to project management, if it's somebody novice, a novice graduate, young person or somebody who have been in a different domain and moving to project management, they go into the platform. If they are willing to take, as soon as they are as a new user, they log in. They will see on their homepage a section called onboarding support and that will give them some of the quick guide to get going. But there was also a knowledge of information Even, for example, right now we are working on a book called project management guide and terminology. It started as a glossary of term and now it's over a hundred page and that will continue to grow as we continue to build the platform. That will be there as well, so that will be used as a reference. Progressive elaboration what does it mean? Let me go look at the guide and you can go. Look at the guide, or BCWS, what does it mean? You can click and go and you can see what the BCWS mean. So we have built extensive knowledge and in the platform to guide even the new users and those who are even experiencing project management. They will find the platform very intuitive and very easy to use. However, even for those, we still advise them to scan through our guide because honestly, proudly, humbly, we say that we are creating something to change the conventional wisdom, to transform how organization manage project and program and portfolio and their product delivery. Okay, we are not saying we invented everything Obviously we, but I believe in the concept of sitting on the shoulder of giant.

Speaker 1: 28:42

I've learned great deal in my career. I dedicated my entire career to project management and I'm 62 years old this month, so obviously I've learned a lot from people who came from me. I've learned from my advisor, people like Mark Rosner, sandra Hoskins, bill Duncan, trevor Nelson and Dr Mihail Sedano and Andrea Nicholas, and these are the people that I work with and I've learned from and in the project management. There are many, many others Adrienne Dooley, right and so we learn from all of these people and what we try to do is take all that knowledge that I have absorbed from people literature, guide, association and working in the trenches, working on projects, small and large, and different roles and capture all that 30 plus years of real life learning and working in this domain, this great domain that I really. It makes me very sad how often executive don't sees the value of this domain that is so critical to them to help organization become basically lead in their industries right, and part of that is because there's so many failures and we failed as a community and association to basically help promote project management to where we make it as indispensable for business or organizational success.

Speaker 1: 30:17

That's what we are trying to do as a project management and through the platform as a technology. So we take all that knowledge and build it into a digital solution that extremely integrated and quite large. However, it's modularized, so if organization need to use only a piece of it. They can, and we're going to create version to make sure for that, and I have an article coming up or probably published by the time you listen to this. They're talking about the project management be failed, so please look for that article. It might be interesting to explain how we use the Ouro platform. So we are building a significant integrated digital solution that is extremely versatile and comprehensive and at low cost.

Speaker 1: 31:13

Now the part of it that is important is that we want to make sure that we deliver on those three principles right. We need to see project as essential as a change initiative that are part of the organization context and they should not be isolated or silenced out. Again. It has to be tailored and adaptive, customized, scalable to fit organizational size, organizational culture, industry, project size, project type. All of these factors and third, people are core for making and sustaining the change in organization. With this, I will end it here and I wish you success today, tomorrow and always.