Our Approach to Project Management

by Seth Sinclair, Member

There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.  It’s essential to remember, however, that in every successful journey some steps are more important than others—and the very first step is the most important of all.  Start out in the wrong direction, and your thousand-mile journey can easily require covering twice that distance to complete, and take much longer than you’d imagined.

Project management operates under the same principle.  Even the most difficult and complex projects begin with small steps and tasks to bring about their successful completion.  And just as our intrepid traveler would benefit from a map, projects tend to be more successful when those who are charged with accomplishing the mission know, as early as possible in their journey, what route they will use to get the results they seek.

Every project we take on is unique in some way and, to a degree, a venture into the unknown.   Further, projects are inevitably constrained by time, money, scope, and quality.  How do you achieve your objectives in light of these challenges? 

Our approach is to spend time with our clients in the earliest phases of project initiation defining desired outcomes, measureable success criteria, and other critical project characteristics.  We capture this information in a Project Charter, a broad but brief document that serves as valuable communications and planning baseline.  Some of the items recorded in the charter include business needs, significant deliverables, dependencies, stakeholder expectations, and major risks.

We do this because we know that projects fail in the beginning, not in the end.  By talking through what we are being asked to do before we begin, we are able to  achieve our client’s desired outcomes.  Like our intrepid traveler, it’s easy to correct one small misstep; but the further we go in the wrong direction, the harder it is to reach our true destination. 

Some clients, we know, are fearful of asking us, or any consulting group, to participate in their project management process.  They fear that consultant involvement will add considerably to the cost of accomplishing their mission—especially when the task they need to accomplish is not perceived as complex. 

One of the things Sinclair is really good at, however, is scaling our project management participation to the appropriate size and scope of the project.  We believe, as does the Project Management Institute (an organization of professional project managers of which I am an accredited member) that the amount of project management should be equal to the scope of the project. We work hard to ensure the level of our project management participation is scaled to meet our clients’ needs.

Our success is defined by our clients’ satisfaction in meeting their desired project outcomes. From simple tasks to complex missions, we’ve learned that the path to success is much smoother when we use project management to map out the route before we start.

The Lessons of Weinergate

by Everett A. Chasen, Associate
 

As I write this, Anthony Weiner has just resigned his seat in the United States Congress, and it can hopefully be said that our (not very) long national obsession with Mr. Weiner and his Twitter account is coming to an end.  When a national personality flames out as spectacularly as Mr. Weiner has, there are always lessons leaders can learn—and nearly always, those lessons are in the area of communication.  This case study is no exception.

Mr. Weiner’s biggest failure is one that is extremely common, perhaps universal, when political scandal occurs.  He failed to observe the very first rule of communications in a crisis: provide reporters, and by extension the public, with the facts, as quickly as they are known.  In this case, the former Congressman knew all the facts as soon as the issue surfaced.  Instead of admitting his responsibility and beginning a course of therapy, as he ended up having to do, he kept the story alive through increasingly impossible-to-believe prevarications.  Once people know you’ve lied to them, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to regain their trust—which is why people are still digging for more dirt on Mr. Weiner.

It is very true that in many scandals, the phrase “it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” applies.  Providing the facts as quickly as they are known has other advantages, however—it enables you to fight another day, and eventually to win, because the truth is on your side.  It allows you to defend yourself in the court of public opinion instead of retreating (as Weiner briefly did) into the evasive netherworld of “no comment.”  And it allows you to make rapid and truthful corrections, even of your own previous statements.  In my experience, the initial story always changes some in any crisis.  New information is learned, new explanations develop, and what seemed to be the whole story turns out to be, at best, only partially correct.  If you’ve been honest with the public, and stuck to the facts, they will generally accept that your understanding has changed.  If not, they won’t.

There is, however, another lesson even the best communicators can learn from Mr. Weiner’s difficulties, and that is that the ever-increasing velocity of what has been called the “24-hour news cycle” has taken another quantum leap forward, thanks to Twitter.  Much has been made of the changes cable news and internet news sources have made to the speed of information delivery.  There is now a constant need to fill pages of untold numbers of news outlets with information, and endless numbers of would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins trying to break the next Watergate scandal.  Some are smart and informed, others are not: some are extremely ethical, others less so.  But nearly all of them now have Twitter accounts, and now provide regular comments on the news of the day in the 140-character constraint the format requires.  Mature and sober reflection, even among columnists paid to provide that kind of perspective, may soon be a thing of the past.

This additional compression of the news cycle will make the task of communication specialists (or public relations people, for those not up with the current lingo) even more important.  It’s still a bad idea to speak before facts become known—but since whatever information is provided will be chewed on rapidly and endlessly, it becomes more important to have your facts right, and presented properly, as quickly as possible. 

Spokespersons with experience in dealing with the news media are any organization’s best bet for getting its story told quickly and accurately—but leaders should be trained in the art of public speaking and media relations as well, because the public’s demands for accountability usually requires them to eventually ‘face the music’ themselves.  It may be too late for Congressman Weiner, but it is not too late for others to learn how to communicate in a crisis.  It’s an important skill—one that leaders must be taught before an emergency takes place, not on the fly, in order to be effective.

  

  

Bringing New Veterans into Federal Civil Service

by Patricia McKlem, Associate

In 1944, with the end of World War II in sight, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law an act of great importance to America’s veterans: the Veterans’ Preference Act.  At the signing ceremony President Roosevelt said, “I believe that the Federal Government, functioning in its capacity as an employer, should take the lead in assuring those who are in the armed forces that, when they return, special consideration will be given to them in their efforts to obtain employment.” 

In the sixty-seven years since the law took effect, federal agencies have repeatedly been urged to hire more veterans; to support the Department of Defense’s efforts to help servicemembers as they transition into civilian life; and to match the skills these men and women have acquired while serving our nation with the needs agencies have to accomplish their missions.

There is general agreement that the government has a moral and legal obligation to ensure veterans have appropriate and proper access to government jobs upon their separation from the military, especially those who have been injured or made ill in service to our nation.  To demonstrate the current Administration’s commitment to this obligation, in 2009 President Obama issued an Executive Order titled “Employment of Veterans in the Federal Government” (click here to read it). 

The order requires every Federal agency to create an Operational Plan for promoting employment opportunities for veterans; establish a Veterans Employment Program Office; provide mandatory annual training to agency human resources personnel and hiring managers on veterans employment; and work with the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) to apply technology designed to assist transitioning servicemembers and veterans with disabilities. 

The Feds Hire Vets website, operated by the Office of Personnel Management (www.fedshirevets.gov) is a unique new resource for both HR people and veterans, linking them together to make veterans aware of vacancies for which they might be qualified, and making HR people aware of their responsibilities to support returning veterans’ applications.  The website also has a section listing the statutes and regulations HR specialists can use to hire veterans.   Many HR specialists are not aware of some of these.

Despite all these efforts, however, many veterans are still having difficulty qualifying for jobs in both government and the private sector.  The head of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) recently testified before Congress that while the federal government is proud that veterans make up nearly 25 percent of their workforce, “when we remove the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security from that total, the number of veterans employed by the federal government plummets to an average of less than 10% per department.”

Why have the White House’s current efforts—and, quite frankly, the efforts of every Administration since the Second World War—met with such limited success? I am convinced there is a clear link between the qualifications standards Federal human resources professionals use to evaluate applicants for Federal jobs and the difficulties returning veterans have in obtaining Federal employment. 

Federal HR professionals are trained to use qualification standards to identify applicants who are likely to perform successfully in the Federal workforce, and to screen out those who are unlikely to do so.  These standards represent minimum job requirements and are designed to be easy to understand and use—but they are related to specific job qualifications and do not take into account the many skills soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and coastguardsmen develop through successful performance of their duties.

A good HR specialist understands that their responsibility to veterans is to look for reasons to qualify, not disqualify them, and to make a special effort to find ways the candidates have demonstrated the knowledge, skills and abilities for the position to which they have applied. However, the sheer volume of applications HR specialists receive nowadays for most positions makes that difficult, especially given the severe time constraints under which they regularly operate.

What’s needed is to build a bridge between service members’ actual experience and OPM’s job qualifications statement, so that military experience can be better understood and will qualify them for Federal positions for which they have already developed the skills—or those for which their experience will make it easy for them to learn what’s needed.  My experience as a Federal manager and member of the Senior Executive Service has shown that everything goes back to these qualification standards: if an HR professional finds an applicant does not meet those standards, no amount of veterans preference will get that employee a Federal job.

It might also be possible to provide training to HR professionals to allow them to better understand Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) descriptions, which the Army and Marines use to identify and describe specific jobs soldiers and Marines do (the Air Force uses Air Force Specialty Codes for this purpose, and the Navy uses the Navy Enlisted Classification, or NEC, system.)  Or it might be possible to revise and standardize the system of military job identifiers so that they accurately reflect the service member’s experience and use terminology that is more consistent across all branches of service, and have greater congruence with OPM’s system.

VA has an opportunity to take the lead on this initiative.  Building this bridge will require significant effort on the part of DoD and OPM, with extensive input from VA, the Department of Labor, other Federal agencies, and veterans service organizations like IAVA.  However, the task offers the prospect of success in an area that other approaches have failed to address throughout the years—and, at the very least, would add an important arsenal to the tool box of Federal HR managers in their continued efforts to demonstrate to America’s veterans that the government is an employer of choice for those who have served our nation while in uniform.  An organization like Sinclair Advisory Group, with personnel who have long experience in working with HR regulations and with veterans, might be the ideal “honest broker” to spearhead the process.

SAG to help VA Become More Data-Driven

by Everett A. Chasen, Associate

When Eric K. Shinseki became Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2009, he brought President Obama’s vision to transform VA into a 21^st century organization with him.  The Secretary established sixteen ‘transformational initiatives,” designed to create a Department that is people-centric, forward thinking, and results-oriented.  One of those initiatives is to “use evidence and data in decision making on a more regular basis.”  At the request of VA Under Secretary for Health Randy Petzel, Sinclair Associate Albert (Al) Washko is helping to realize this initiative throughout the Veterans Health Administration.

Washko, who was the Director of the VA Nebraska-Western Iowa Health Care System from 2003 until his retirement last March, has a long track record of successfully using data to improve performance at the health care facilities both within and outside of government and VHA region he has managed.  Among those facilities were VA’s Northeast Region, which he directed from 1985 to 1989; VA’s Albany Medical Center, which he also directed; and the New England Deaconess hospital in Boston, where he was both the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer.  At Nebraska, Al and his staff developed a field analytics model designed to increase the use of data at every level throughout the facility.

Among the staff’s initiatives was creating a series of five University-based courses to improve the analytic capabilities of higher-level staff.  More than 150 VA employees throughout the nation have already signed up for one or more of these courses, which are Internet-based and ten weeks in duration.  Front-line staff was also trained in data analysis by being paired with a higher-level advisor who provided advice, support and guidance on the subject on a regular basis. 

As CEO of the health care system, Washko met regularly with each of the system’s many management teams.  At those meetings, he made it clear that good data was an essential component of the facility’s decision-making processes, and that data was regularly reported from teams (which included employees from all segments of the medical center) to senior managers. Now, as a Sinclair Associate, Al will work with senior managers at other VA hospitals to institute evidence-based decision-making at their facilities, based on the Nebraska model.

VA has just awarded a contract to SAG to provide coaching and leadership support to help make other VHA facilities more data-driven.  Under the terms of the contract, Al will help senior managers at twelve VA facilities throughout the nation to implement the Omaha model for approximately one year.  If this proves successful, VA and SAG hope to roll out the project to the entire nation.

Washko will make a presentation on this project at VHA’s next Senior Management Conference in August, and will work with VHA to select the “early adopter” pilot sites following that discussion. “Because this project is attached to the Secretary’s Transformation Initiatives, it already has a lot of visibility and enjoys a lot of support,” he says.  “I think we’re filling an important need for the organization.”  

What Leaders Should Expect From Their HR Departments

by Gary Rossio, Associate

What should a leadership team expect from its Human Relations staff and leadership—and what should HR staff be able to deliver?  That’s the question I recently attempted to answer as a guest speaker at a leadership conference for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) HR managers and supervisors.  I thought my response might be interesting to others, as well.

HR employees need to be, and to perceive themselves as being, an important part of their organization’s mission—in VHA’s case, as members of their facility’s patient care team. Their vital mission is to find and keep the kinds of people who will build a successful patient care culture throughout the organization on behalf of the patients they help serve.  

They can best do this by helping organization leaders create a consistent culture in which successful employees are rewarded, and appropriate accountability is provided for those who do poor work. Fairness in these daily efforts helps build morale, which has a direct impact on patient care and on an organization’s best asset, its people, who can then not only contribute, but thrive.

Too often in the past, I have felt that senior HR employees believed their role was to “protect” their directors and other supervisors from unions and lawsuits and difficult situations leading to inaction by supervisors and management.  Conversely, exceptional HR work and sound professional advice led to successful patient care goal accomplishment.   

In my experience, “protection” was never necessary--but balance and fairness always is. As a VA Medical Center CEO for sixteen years, I always wanted—and needed—to know which options, retrainings, systems improvements, Douglas factors, and innovative solutions could come to bear in each case.   Good leaders need sound advice and expertise: not protection.

This is a time of great pressure on all Federal employees, especially those who are entrusted with leadership responsibilities.  Demands for performance and accountability are rising, while resources are shrinking.  Add to that an increasingly litigious workforce and the accelerated pace of retirement among those with the kind of experience that is invaluable in dealing with complicated HR issues, and it is clear that managers and patient care teams who do not have a solid and savvy HR advisors are in deep trouble.

Sound advice, technical support, and the ability to spot, hire and help retain talented people—that’s what a good HR department, at the Department of Veterans Affairs or in any organization, should be able to provide.  Not only should VA HR departments see themselves as part of the patient care team, but they should also understand that they are key to any good organization’s patient care success.  For despite all the technological advances that have been made in the world recently, no one has yet found a way to create or maintain a successful organization without good people, a workforce in which everyone makes meaningful contributions to accomplishing the mission, and a winning culture.

This may sound like “new age” thinking, but it’s not.  It’s just a request for exceptional leadership in an important area at a time when it is most needed.  Having a strong HR staff and dynamic HR leadership is the surest way to obtain the ingredients for the kind of up-tempo patient care team VA patients have earned and of which VA staff can be proud.