Education Project Management

[Warning: graphic violence/drug-use referenecs in video: not suitable for impressionable audiences]

I am NOT a grunch/death metal fan. Yet, this song struck a chord (pun intended), when it played on the radio. 

The Michigan campus is quite decentralized, which is reflected in the diverse ePortfolio efforts, tools, and approaches. Through the excellent work of Carrie Luke and her team at the library, there was an ePortfolio summit last year to bring a central tone to the conversation on campus. The tide for centralized services seem to be rising with shared services being rolled out in the areas of IT and Finance. Instructional support may go that route as well, and ePortfolio stakeholders need to keep this impending trend in mind. The campuses are also easing into a new LMS, Canvas, which has more native features to support ePortfolios, as compared to the flavor of Sakai currently in use. With the White House's push for competency based education and workforce development, more programs are expected to turn to ePortfolios and other tools that evaluate performance - especially federally funded education, training, and mentoring programs.

The Michigan campus in general has a dynamic history of ePortfolios, our flagship website is at http://www.mportfolio.umich.edu/. I currently work in training & mentoring of clinical & translational researchers: ePortfolios are highly tailored and personalized for scholars. We are focussed on authentic assessments through methods such as OSCEs (objective structured clinical examination), reflection writing, and more. The newest conversation on the campus is happening at the Digital Education Institute sponsored by the provost: http://digitaleducation.umich.edu/

Towards a Results Accountability-based Program Charter Template

As a certified professional, jargon is my default setting. I have to work on making stuff plain language for non-engineers (pretty much the rest of my world.) Last year I helped establish a PMO, and an important part was the program management template for our unit, which could use a little more plain language.

A great way to synthethize RA learning is to start modifying the program charter I…

Situation

After having reviewed the textbook, seen the first 20 minutes of Mark Friedman’s hour long talk in Toronto, and scanned implementations in Wales, New Zealand, I was itching to get my hands dirty and do something. Anything.

Task

I picked two things important to me: professional development and elder parents care, neither a crises, and both requiring long term planning and sustained…

There is a lot of talk on rapid failure. However, if failure is not sowed back quickly, fertilized by a sense of urgency in the soil of good culture, it becomes a candidate for cover up.

My first national scale, multimillion dollar project had completed it's first major milestone: hosting a national conference. Complacency from the success seemed to be getting better of the team. An error in procurements for the next meeting did not show itself until about 6 weeks before the next national meeting. The error meant a few 10s of thousands of dollars worth of expense or sacrifice in features. 

I was glad to have read (and listened) Kotter's book Sense of Urgency twice in 2014: Once in May, and then again in Fall. Converting the failure into a story, finding an external artifact to fight against, the team started coming together as one force against all odds to prevent further slip ups. Inspired by the determination to make the best of the situation, people put their game faces on and started delivering high quality productivity within a week, well in advance of the national conference. 

Sponsor engagement is crucial to project success. 

We knew about a council meeting being held by our sponsor, NIH NCATS. However, when it became apparent there was a live webcast watching opportunity, our leadership, managers, and staff dropped everything to see Petra Kaufmann present live.

There is a legend that has been retold many times: an expert called in to troubleshoot. Spents some time looking around. Does a little tweak and charges a healthy consulting fee. Appalled client asks for an itemised receipt and gets 1% for tweak, 99% charge for knowing what/where to tweak.

This Lincoln quote is quite close in principle. In the above case the tool is the mind really, which has been sharpened with a lifetime of experiences. This supplies a temporal component to the value being supplied. But what if the value is not temporal? Spatial? Here:

The 110F heat of the summer of 2000 was made even more intense in the broom closet of a factory floor of a major manufacturing facility. I was in there, against my will. 

Several minutes earlier I was sent there to look for my missing clipboard by some of the union workers who had befriended me on my first day of internship. I wasn't sure if this was a hazing ritual or pre-mediated murder. 

Previous attempts at work-study and time-study were major fiascos with the unionized workforce and the quality department made sure never to cross paths with workers of Plant 7, the pilot site for the last disaster in quality control. I was in Plant 7 on day 1 of my internship, to take a look at the "problem" and submit proposals. Within 15 minutes I was scoped out by the floor force, within 30, locked in the broom closet.

Being physically short and slow, and yet ambitious, I had learnt how to deal with bullies. Back in high school, I held the highest public position in student government, which meant little except for a colorful sash and being locked into classrooms when gangs broke out into fights ~ and keep me from alerting the authorities.

I drew on my extensive experience in being locked up with a gang of thugs outside and decided to meditate on the issue at hand. My department sponsor wanted ideas about operation quality measurement and try my best not to die. An industrial engineer's dream come true. 

I made an attempt to engage my captors in a conversation about their work and how I, there for just a 3 month internship, can tell management things that the industrial engineers wouldn't dare say. Speak truth to power, if they shared their thoughts with me. 

I had made sure to converse in the local language. The information flowed through the smelly door in a frenzy: Plant 7's floor, unlike an assembly line,  could make a single, giant boiler for 6 months or 3 tiny ones over a week.  Boilers were custom designed. Work was being rated on assembly line standards and there were constant quarrels between the Quality, Marketing, and Sales departments, which agreed on just one thing: the problem was not their department. 

The quality department, my home base, had figured out measurement of final quality on parts, but was wrangling with the issue of monitoring operations. The worker's 

KPIs were hard to set, harder to measure consistently, difficult to communicate and vulnerable to being gamed by the hacker worker. Years later while studying dashboards in a Benchmarking practices class in Ann Arbor MI, I realized my unsolved mystery was not localized to sweaty broom closets and reality shy quality departments in boiler manufacturing factories. I discovered advanced techniques like data envelopment analysis and other econometrics which helped measure dissimilar production units. But it wasn't until this year that the coin finally dropped.

KPIs are never the answer in a batch or custom order production facility. Uniform metrics are an operation metric system, PDCA style, where you introspected on "A" from the previous cycle to "P" the next cycle. Rinse and repeat. In the organizations of today, which live in chaos, uncertainty and missed opportunities, a better method was invented at Intel in the 1970s. OKRs or Objectives and Key Results.

OKRs accomodate total lack of similarity of work, yet create tight integration with strategic goals for governing dynamic organizations. John Doerr, formerly of intel, introduced OKRs to Google and it became a part of the search giant's fabric permanently in 1999. 

Leadership desires a dashboard to monitor, tweak, accelerate and brake an organization which moves like a glacier over plains of time. KPIs are the metrics that feed into dashboards for enterprises that are evolve into chimera-like creatures but expected to run like horses of Arabia.

It's time for organizations to embrace chaos and monitor it. Leave the control to the change leaders, which can emerge at any level in the organization. 

OKRs are great for organizations which cannot afford the time to organize work into neat little projects with team building. However if work has to be accomplished as teams, OKRs may not be sufficient. Roles and responsibilities, rough budgets, and authorization is important for work evaluation. Basically a story card or a charter.

Another key thing to remember is that OKRs are not to be used for people performance measurement.

More on OKRs:

How Google sets goals: Google Ventures workshop

Culture change comes LAST not first in major org changes

Vision is under communicated, can never be over communicated