[00:00:00.170] - Chris
In this episode of great practices. I'm talking with Tom Clement, global vice President of Sales at OpenText, with over 25 years of experience in selling and delivering technical projects. Listen into this episode as Tom discusses the what and why of technology project investments. The best time for a project manager to be assigned to a project, the top three challenges and solutions he has seen when it comes to managing large enterprisewide projects, and the reason why and solutions again, that customer and vendor project managers may undermine each other's work. Plus, you'll hear a couple of war stories about major surprises on projects and Tom's inspirational words about leadership that were so inspirational he even inspired himself.
[00:00:50.370] - Narrator
It's hard to say when something is a best practice, but it's much easier to know when something is a great practice. And that's what this podcast is all about. Interviews with CMO and project management leaders who, through years of trial and error, have discovered their own great practices and are now sharing their insights with you. Now sit back and enjoy the conversation as Chris Kopp uncovers another great practice in this episode.
[00:01:20.090] - Chris
Well, we'd like to welcome everybody to this episode of Great Practices. And technology is always changing and improving. Moore's Law states that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to double every two years. Now, there may be some debate that this prediction is nearing its end, but it very much impacts the complexity of technology projects that are managed by project managers and PMOs. Some projects have become much easier to complete because of the fact that this new technology is on the way and other new cutting edge technology projects that are now possible are taking longer to finish and are more complicated. Well, our guest today is Tom Clement, a 25 plus year technology veteran who knows a thing or two about delivering complex technical projects. Tom, thanks for joining us on Great Practices today.
[00:02:19.850] - Tom
Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here. Chris, great to see you again.
[00:02:24.300] - Chris
So we like to start out, obviously, every episode with telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do. What's your background?
[00:02:31.730] - Tom
Sure, I'm 25 years plus. I'm not going to say the exact number.
[00:02:37.730] - Chris
I was wondering where you're going with that.
[00:02:41.650] - Tom
As a B to B sales leader, I've been a VP of Professional Services for a couple of different companies. I've been a sales director, I've been a major account sales executive. So I've been an individual contributor from a selling standpoint in the major accounts arena. And I'm currently the global vice president of sales at a company called OpenText. And we are the world's foremost provider of enterprise information management solutions. And to be more specific, I've got three platforms, three solutions that we'll talk a little bit about in the context of this interview. I've got something called Identity and Access Management and Active Access, which is a fancy term for consolidating applications. I've got our IoT platform, our Internet of things connecting people systems and things from a supply chain perspective. And then I've got a trade finance business and we offer a really simple way for small and medium sized companies to receive loans based on receivables. It helps them keep their supply chains sufficient and stable in a very disruptive global economy.
[00:04:04.070] - Chris
Nice. So you've been around technology for a long time then?
[00:04:08.670] - Tom
Yeah, I've seen a lot of different lot of different waves.
[00:04:11.350] - Chris
Yeah, for sure. So what are some of the technologies that you are seeing companies investing in now? Like, what's the current trends that people are investing in?
[00:04:20.720] - Tom
It's a great question. I think I'll start with why they're investing and then we'll talk a little bit about technology. Let's go back maybe, I don't know, four or five years, six years. It was the gold rush. Everybody was getting to the cloud. Everybody was moving to the cloud. So in that model, cost neutrality for investments was occurring. It wasn't so much, hey, look, I have to take cost out or even drive revenue. It's I've got to figure out a way to be more efficient and leverage the cloud to do that. And I think we're back now. We're back to the sort of the three pillars for investments. We're increasing revenue, we're taking cost out. And really important now, probably a metric that's driving investments is customer sat.
[00:05:11.190] - Chris
Right.
[00:05:11.810] - Tom
And then from a technology standpoint, the things that companies are focused on and again, I'm going to focus on B to B, business to business transactions, not necessarily business to consumer, although we support that model too. Business process, visibility. So I want better visibility to what I'm doing. I want acceleration of my transactions, of my entire supply chain. It has to be faster in today's world. I need to move a product. It's manufactured outside of a certain country. I need it here. I need to know where it is and what time it's going to be at the dock and on the customer shelf. Consolidation is huge. Now we're going to talk a little bit about that. In my world, consolidating portals driving users at scale into one front door and then getting them access to content, that's something that we do really well as a business. And most of the multinationals are focused on that use case.
[00:06:19.930] - Chris
So we are back to, like you said, just increasing revenue, taking out cost, a little bit more focus or probably a lot more focus on the customer satisfaction right. And value derived from these products.
[00:06:32.000] - Tom
The user experience is so important now.
[00:06:34.540] - Chris
Yes.
[00:06:35.710] - Tom
Here's the reason why. Because there's two things that users need. They need access to information and that access to information can reside in countries. It can be in different languages. It could be user manuals, it could be a vendor that needs access to information. It could be a subsidiary, it could be a consumer that's logging into a site, and it could be a banking customer. So it's not just giving the person access to an enterprise. It's segmenting them down based on their individual identity to the type of information or content that they need to do their job. And when everybody ran to the cloud, talked about that when we started, right. Companies, what did they do? They built different portals, and those portals supported specific user groups. Well, now what the companies are doing is they're saying, wait a minute, here's a great opportunity for us to drive cost out, make things simpler for the user, and have them have real time access to content. Let's have one front door when we create an identity, let's have that identity tie specific to the content they need. And that is a pervasive opportunity for companies at scale to really drive significant cost out of the business.
[00:08:04.960] - Tom
And it ties back to what you mentioned, Chris, which is user or customer adoption and satisfaction.
[00:08:13.150] - Chris
So these projects, they sound huge as far as this is not easy stuff to do. Right?
[00:08:22.020] - Tom
No, it's not. You need a great vendor to do it.
[00:08:25.730] - Chris
What would the typical runway be from, like, just having an initial sales pre sales conversation to actual implementation? What does that look like?
[00:08:34.010] - Tom
Yeah. Three to six months.
[00:08:35.620] - Chris
Okay. All right.
[00:08:36.580] - Tom
Three to six months. Three to six months. And I'm making that statement around the three to six months. It can be much longer than that. So there's obviously exceptions. You could have a sales cycle that could last a year. But the best way to approach this particular use case is to identify the first constituencies, the first groups of users. Say all my vendors, say all my manufacturing partners. Identify a group of individuals and phase this out where I'm at now, we call that a stairway to value. If you wait for a year to start a project, well, you're obviously not taking advantage of today's technology, and you're staying in sort of in motion, but you're sort of treading water. So three to six month runway budgets for these projects, half a million dollars to multiple millions.
[00:09:36.610] - Chris
Okay. Got it. So let's get into the nitty gritty now of the actual project management of these projects and where PMO is getting involved in everything so important. So what do you see as the best time for a project manager to get involved from the vendor, like, when would they be involved in the project? And then also from the customer side of things as far as time?
[00:09:59.140] - Tom
Yeah. So we both know, because we've been doing this a long time, that typically your project managers aren't assigned because most companies don't have the scale to have project management in presale.
[00:10:11.130] - Chris
Right.
[00:10:14.850] - Tom
I don't necessarily agree with that approach. I think the sooner that your project management team, your PMO team, your professional services team, is engaged and involved in the project and it's been proven here. We have the stats to prove it. I've seen it happen in multiple companies. The earlier that you can realistically have a project manager involved in understanding the requirements and understanding what's coming, you can put a more realistic project schedule together. You can put a better project team together. The services organization is going to understand the project in advance and be prepared for it. Your sort of worst case scenario is that you have sales and presales engineering involved in a project. They work on it in isolation. And the first time and we're talking about major projects here, I'm not talking about smaller projects. The first time that the enablement team knows about it is the day that it gets started. That's a bad formula. It does happen. It's happened. We both know that. So you want as early as possible and the handoff project also becomes super critical. And I think another best practice is what I would call the pre project kickoff.
[00:11:38.190] - Chris
Okay, tell us about that.
[00:11:40.210] - Tom
So the sales organization is congratulated for working with a customer to identify the value. They put a business case together to justify the spend. Let's call it application consolidation at scale. Everybody's on board. What you want to do is you want to engage your project team. They already know that the project is coming. They already have a point of view. They were involved in the statement of work or even they wrote that statement of work. They were involved in it. And I like to do a pre project kickoff. Let's have one more call before we get started and let's make sure we're aligned. It's not the official start. If we need to make any last minute changes before we say go and now the clock is ticking and the project schedule is official, I'd rather have a call in advance of that than doing it the day that the clock starts, if you will. Now, does that create extra work for people? A little bit. Is it worth it? I've seen it too many times. It really makes a difference from both sides.
[00:12:49.270] - Chris
It's almost like a pre flight checklist, right? I mean, you're going to go down this list and just kind of make sure everything is right. And it's like, oh, if there's an adjustment that needs to be made to a flap, you're going to do that right before you take off. And that's the time to do it.
[00:13:02.480] - Tom
When you can make that's a great analogy. That's exactly what I'm talking about. The pilot doesn't go through the checklist while he's in the air. And so you're right. Think about it. They do systems checks too. They do a technology check, and if something's wrong with the airplane, they don't start the flight.
[00:13:20.110] - Chris
Yeah, that's right.
[00:13:20.930] - Tom
So why start the project if we're not quite ready yet? You're only going to have that opportunity once we're started. We can't say the project is not underway. So I like that model. We use that as a best practice. A lot of companies do. I've seen it done, and it seems to really make a difference.
[00:13:41.640] - Chris
And I guess the downside or the tricky side of getting a project manager involved early, maybe too early, is that it doesn't take off right. And then you've wasted some time and you've wasted some resources. But I just think you have to I think you have to consider that that's going to be a risk and maybe just even kind of account for that. As far as that being a potential.
[00:14:03.850] - Tom
Here'S a good example. So RFP award. So RFPs can be really large projects. The business gets awarded the RFP. We're not under contract yet, but we've been awarded the business. Is that a good time for project management to get engaged and involved? I think that's enough of a definitive go. It doesn't mean you're in contract yet. You may not end up moving forward, but that's a great time and it's low risk.
[00:14:37.630] - Chris
Yeah.
[00:14:38.300] - Tom
From a project management standpoint.
[00:14:39.760] - Chris
Yeah. It's like a letter of intent. We intend to move forward. There's a lot of stuff that could happen, but we're ready to go. So that's a great suggestion right there. Okay, so now this project is taking off, right? What challenges do these types of technical and technology projects present to project managers and PMOs on either side? What have you seen as far as those challenges?
[00:15:05.410] - Tom
So let's look at the top three. And my top three might not be your top three, but the top three that came to mind for me were sharing alignment on the statement of work. So that's number one. And we've talked about that before. That can be a real problem. And that's the time to be in the details because you're talking about project timelines, you're talking about managing cost, you're talking about resource allocation. And do we really have that interlocked specifically related to what's in writing at this point? There's going to be that number two is making sure major milestones are agreed upon in advance. So we have eight go lives scheduled over the next ten months. Are we going to have QA resources allocated and available as an example? It's one really important segment of a project like that. Are they available and scheduled? Well, they're only available for five of the ten go lives. Okay, so we've identified that in advance. And then the biggest value add managing project governance. Is everyone on board and aware from the sponsoring executive, to the C level executive, to the customers service delivery organization. Typically it and business combined for things like application consolidation.
[00:16:48.440] - Tom
Do we have representatives there? And has everybody agreed on steering committee quarterly business reviews in a long project? Sometimes quarterly business reviews fall off to the wayside.
[00:17:04.990] - Chris
Right.
[00:17:05.550] - Tom
And the project governance tends to fade out in a long project. And that can really be a formula for problems.
[00:17:13.850] - Chris
Yeah, people just lose interest. I think that's what happens over time and it's just not the next great thing that's going on. And they've kind of moved on to other stuff, but this still needs to be done. Now I want to go back to that. Sow as far as a challenge goes, what have you seen that companies will do with an Sow? It's like, do they just kind of just kind of blow through the thing quickly, not put a lot of thought into it? What have you typically seen there?
[00:17:43.270] - Tom
No, I think that typically the Sow is written with the customer, obviously. So we've been through multiple iterations of that statement of work. We're now totally aligned, and the project timelines and the costs and everything's been agreed to. But there have been in every project probably ever in the history of mankind, especially a large enterprise. We're talking about enterprise project management here. Strategic, very large, multinationals. There are changes that start to take place, and there's a number of reasons why. And that's where a great project manager and a PMO office or a program manager really have to isolate those changes and call them out and address them. Because here's the big dissatisfier that's related to statement of work changes cost overruns. So I'm a CIO. I'm a CTO. I have an expectation of a project being delivered at a certain date. I've allocated cost out from my budget. I've validated those costs with a rock solid business value engineering assessment, sometimes for a project of that size. And now the costs are overrunstart and that CTO CIO is put in a position to go ask for more budget. And that can be really problematic because right now the wave that we're in is budgets are extremely tight.
[00:19:30.390] - Tom
I haven't seen this kind of emphasis on tight financial controls. Not that that doesn't happen all the time. I'm not suggesting that. But just in particular, extremely tight financial controls are a necessity. And this is where that statement of work interlock is going to be so important.
[00:19:55.460] - Chris
Right.
[00:19:57.710] - Tom
I don't think companies mind investing incrementally as long as it's known in advance and it's tied back to that business case and there's a compromise and the vendor shows flexibility and the end customer understands what the changes are and how it's going to be impacting the business. That's a very complicated undertaking. And a great project manager lines up all those resources, makes sure that they're all advised, writes a mini business case, if you will, sort of a mini thesis that's attached to that statement of work, presents it to both sides and gets agreement on it.
[00:20:36.940] - Chris
To your point, it's like within that Sow, what's in the Sow may be 100% accurate. It may have the right level of detail. It may have everything that is needed there, but what's not there. Right? I mean, that's the piece that our business changed. Exactly.
[00:20:54.770] - Tom
We agreed on this. Go live with this deliverable and our business has changed and so you're our vendor, but we have to make a change. And when the vendor project manager says, but wait a minute, this was what was written in the Sow and we have to stick to this schedule, that's where things start to go sideways. There has to be critical thinking, there has to be flexibility on the part of the project team.
[00:21:27.680] - Chris
So as far as the milestones go so your point with the milestones and agreeing upon the major milestones in advance, that's really just more of a planning mechanism, right, to make sure that you got the right people lined up at the right time to do the right things that have been agreed upon.
[00:21:44.070] - Tom
Well, also, let's highlight a use case. Let's say that you're going to, let's say a company has 1000 trading partners, 1000 suppliers in their ecosystem, and you've decided in your Statement of work that you're going to segment the suppliers, but you didn't get into a level of detail around which suppliers are more important than others from a business standpoint, right? So your top 25 suppliers drive 86% of your revenue. And the way the Statement of Work was written was, it was written that they all are equal, but the customer comes back to you, the project team, and they say, we changed our minds. Instead of having ten go lives, we're only going to have three because we've got to get the 86% of revenue. We have to address those suppliers first. The business is involved, they weren't as involved as they should be and now they're demanding that we get those top suppliers on board first. But that number of suppliers is different than what's written in Statement of work. That's an accommodation that you have to make work. You know why? Because it makes sense to do it that way. It wasn't caught in the Sow and we've got to figure out a way to realign our resources.
[00:23:13.770] - Tom
Maybe we need to front load QA resources for the first phase and accommodate the request of the customer. It changes the dynamics of the business case. It has to be done now. That way that makes sense and we need to be flexible to accommodate that kind of ask.
[00:23:35.050] - Chris
And to your point earlier, it takes creativity and imagination thinking outside of the box from the project manager's perspective sometimes like, no, not part of the plan, we're not going to do it inflexible, but that's not going to work anymore by any stretch of the imagination. So it's good to keep that in mind. So let me ask you this. I think we've seen it over the years. Sometimes customer, vendor, PMS or PMOs, maybe they kind of go at each other a little bit, maybe kind of sabotage each other every now and then. Why do you think this happens and how can this be overcome?
[00:24:17.490] - Tom
Company and vendor working independently. We talked about highlighting chapter and verse I think that's a problem. I think it's appropriate from a baseline standpoint with a project. Here's what we agreed to. It's okay to go back to the chapter and verse, but a willingness to change it is so important because as soon as that willingness is communicated inwardly through the customer, the unwillingness to change, I think that's a real problem. Right. It could be something really simple too, Chris. It could be the vendor sends a dashboard, a monthly dashboard to the project, and it just happens that this monthly dashboard is also the same dashboards that's used for QBR, so you have a different audience. So now you have your sponsoring executive and a couple of other executives that are attending the call. And the team has been working together, and they've seen the same dashboard every month, and the dashboard is red, and the sponsoring exec jumps on the call, and the whole dashboard is red. Projects late, resources aren't available. I'm not in any way suggesting that we need to change the color that hide a problem. What I'm suggesting is that shouldn't be a surprise for the first time or the customer themselves.
[00:25:42.210] - Tom
They didn't know the dashboard was going to be read. They didn't have a pre meeting to discuss the issues, and they didn't say to the customer, what's your opinion? Do you want to declare the project red? And should we go in together and communicate why? And the customer says, yes, I think we should declare the project red. I haven't had a chance to communicate with everyone, but we have to hold the line here. I've seen it happen many times where I've gone into been asked to join a team to go in and explain a situation to a particular customer. And I'm like, why is this dashboard so red? And then we've got to sit down with your peers and my peers and talk about this first. Let's make sure we're all locked in together, and that'll save you an incredible amount of escalating and a lot of time. A lot of unnecessary churn can be avoided with that approach.
[00:26:43.180] - Chris
So I'm hearing no surprises, right? That's got to be the key. And what are some of the things that you're seeing that can help prevent these surprises from happening?
[00:26:56.870] - Tom
A cadence of communication that is established. Delivering bad news is just as important as delivering good news. A great project manager does that. A great program management office manages risks along with milestones, highlights risks in every meeting because there always are going to be designates those risks and describes them accurately. I've seen risks described in project management meetings as burning red that really weren't. I've seen risks that are described in project management meetings that should have been burning red that weren't. And so I think that management, project management, program management, senior management, and executive management is very difficult. It's very difficult to communicate all of this to so many different people with so many moving parts. But I can tell you, Chris, yourself included, I can tell you the great project managers have a way of making sure that that is accomplished.
[00:28:22.450] - Chris
Yeah, exactly. I'm going to tell you a story about a surprise I found out a number of years ago, if you're okay with that.
[00:28:29.240] - Tom
Sure.
[00:28:29.680] - Chris
I'd love to hear it. To the point of working closely with vendor project managers. I was sitting in a steering committee meeting, and I was a project manager. I was the vendor project manager for a customer. And this was many years ago, just starting out my project management career. And on that dashboard, there was a line that said Accomplishments, and it says, replaced vendor project manager. And I was looking at this. Well, I didn't think that their project manager was that bad. And then I got to reflecting, and I said, Wait a second, that's me. And that was the first time I heard about it. So I think that's what you're talking about. I think that's what you're talking about with no surprises, right?
[00:29:17.680] - Tom
Yeah. I don't know if the audience wants to hear war stories. We have so many. I showed up as a brand new VP of Professional Services for North America, for a company. I found out about this particular project that had some challenges. And I was asked to fly to New York City to meet with a customer. And I called the sales executive, and I said, what's going on? What's the reason? I said nothing. It's good. We're okay. You're the new guy. They want to discuss their issues and their challenges. They want to meet you. So I went up to the 63rd floor of a building that overlooks Central Park and walked into this gigantic conference room. Big oak desk, huge windows, magnificent. And at the end and it was like the desk was like, a lot longer. It seemed a lot longer than it was. It seemed like it was 100ft long. And we sat on one end, me and professional. I was professional service salesperson, and it was seven lawyers, and they were not happy.
[00:30:23.880] - Chris
Right.
[00:30:25.290] - Tom
And the long story short is we turned that project around. We put good project governance in place. I sat with the customer every week for four or five months. We put a realistic project schedule back together that was agreed upon, and they ended up shaking our hands. And we celebrated the success of a project that's still going today many years ago, remarkably. I just talked to that particular customer I hadn't talked to in years. He called me yesterday, and we had a great conversation just out of the blue. So that's an example of discipline. Project principles were the only thing that was lacking in that project. And there was such a big divide between their understanding of where we were and our adherence to an. Sow without flexibility, that's what created their need to think that they needed to have lawyers involved. Lawyers didn't need to be involved, and we worked it out.
[00:31:33.170] - Chris
Well, again, it just highlights the fact, like you said, a cadence. Regular meetings, regular communication, working side by side between the two companies. Right. Just kind of making sure that there's no surprises. Well, Tom, this has been a great conversation. As we wrap things up, is there anything else you'd like to cover that you think will help project managers, PMO leaders, rise to the challenge of managing increasingly complex projects?
[00:32:00.750] - Tom
Yes, absolutely. So, in closing, the definition of leadership applies to great project managers, to all project managers. And the definition of leadership is the ability to influence and inspire others to accomplish objectives by providing purpose, guidance, and direction. And that definition doesn't have a title in it. It doesn't matter. When you're the project manager on a project, people expect you to lead. They want you to lead.
[00:32:37.620] - Chris
That's right.
[00:32:38.710] - Tom
And the great project managers, they come onto calls and everybody lines up. And they have such an important role in the success, not only of a project, but of the company's financial posture. A great PMO organization, a great project management team is so critical, and every single one of them are leaders.
[00:33:06.490] - Chris
Man, that's, like, inspirational.
[00:33:08.910] - Tom
I'm inspired by it.
[00:33:11.470] - Chris
You're inspired by your own words.
[00:33:15.230] - Tom
It gets my blood flowing. I can tell you where I'm at. Now, our project management team, they're unbelievable how good they are, because these are really complicated consolidating. Ten or twelve portals with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of users, and distinguishing which back end systems need to be connected and which use cases and content, and doing that at scale and doing it on time and doing it in a cost efficient way is incredibly complicated. And there are project managers all over the world that are great at that. And you know what, Chris? Every single one of those people is a leader.
[00:33:56.340] - Chris
Yes. And the project management is exciting because it's not just about time cost scope anymore. It is about delivering value. You know that's that's what you are. You are delivering value. You're making sure that that project is implemented in its operations and that there's an ROI on that. And like you said, that affects the company's bottom line.
[00:34:18.790] - Tom
No doubt.
[00:34:20.450] - Chris
All right, Tom. Well, thanks for coming on today. This was a great conversation, and we look forward to talking to you soon.
[00:34:27.050] - Tom
Thank you so much. Really enjoy the conversation.
[00:34:29.500] - Chris
All right, see you.
[00:34:30.540] - Tom
Yeah, take care.
[00:34:34.310] - Chris
Well, that was another great episode of Great Practices, and we certainly do appreciate Tom joining us today and sharing his insights and great practices with us. What were some of these great practices that we can take away from today's episode? Well, here's some things that stood out to me. First of all, why are companies investing in technology projects? Comes down to those three pillars of investment increase revenue, take cost out, and customer. Satisfaction. So that's a big deal when it comes to making those decisions around which technologies to invest in. And really, ultimately, it's increasing better visibility, acceleration of transactions, consolidation, and just being able to make sure that that user experience is so good for those that are using these new technologies that are implemented. I loved his point about when to assign a project Manager. He brought up the point about the fact that they always do a pre project kickoff. So this is when sales are congratulated for identifying this value delivering project with this customer. And this is when it's kind of like that pre flight checklist that says, do we have everything in place? Are we ready to go? Are we ready for takeoff?
[00:35:58.810] - Chris
And if not, you can make some adjustments here because you haven't quite taken off the runway yet, but you're beginning to taxi to begin to do that takeoff. So I like the fact that this is just one final reality check before everybody is committed and they then launch this project. As far as the best time to get a Project Manager assigned to a technical project, I like the point that he brought out. Like, once you find that you've been awarded that project, you've got that RFP Award, that's probably the best time because there's going to be a high probability that this project is going to take off, that it is going to start. And it'll be a good enough time and long enough time, long enough runway for the Project Manager to really become familiar with all that needs to be done. What about the challenges that he has seen over the years when it comes to technology projects and managing them? Well, the first one ensuring that there's alignment on a statement of work. That's the time to be into the details. That's the time to make sure that you've accommodated and you've expected as much as can possibly be known in phase one of the project at that moment in time.
[00:37:22.770] - Chris
But you have to have that flexibility to understand that, you know, what business needs may change. This project may take three to six months, but the business is going to change over that time. So if you're six months into it and you find out the fact that there has to be a change, need to be flexible as far as that goes, making sure that major milestones are agreed upon in advance, that was his second challenge. And then finally a really strong project governance. That was the third thing that he's seen that is a challenge. And if it's done right, it really will make a project and a technology project successful. I thought this was interesting about why is it that sometimes project managers PMOs from one organization, the customer and the vendor may kind of go or may kind of get at odds at times. And really what he said, it comes down to the fact that they were just working independently. They're doing their own things. They're disconnected. That's when they go back to the chapter and the verse of the sow. And they really kind of forget about the spirit of what this project is all about, and they get down to that letter of the law, which may not be relevant anymore.
[00:38:38.770] - Chris
So again, it's that cadence of communication. It's the fact that delivering bad news quickly is even much better than delivering good news, managing risks along with milestones, and really describing them accurately. If those two project teams from the vendor and from the customer are working together on those things, there won't be any of those surprises, and that will absolutely mitigate those two project teams going at each other. So we'd like to thank Tom Clement again for being on today and taking time out of his schedule and coming on this episode of Great Practices. Do you have a great practice you'd like to share? Go to thepmoleader.com click on Explore, click on Great Practices podcast and fill out the form at the bottom of the screen. Someone will get in touch with you shortly. Also, be sure not to miss a single episode by subscribing to Great Practices on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like what you hear, we've absolutely had some great guests on. Be sure to share this with your manager, your colleagues, and anybody else that you think would benefit. Thanks again for listening to this episode of Great Practices, and keep putting Great Practices into practice.
