GA 553 | The Art of Project Management with Annette Johnston

Because they had each other's back. To me, that's the difference. If they're like that, then when the project's over, everybody will hoist their favorite beverage and be glad they were part of the team and have good memories of it instead of hoisting their favorite beverage and saying, thank goodness that's over.

Today I am excited to welcome Annette Johnston to the show. Now Annette, as you'll hear, has a really diverse, strong background, engineering background, chemical engineering, worked at some really top notch companies over her career and now spends a lot of her time working in the sort of project management world and helping other project managers be better. And so today we kind of get into many different topics on project management, which I think is really cool for all of us. In sort of the Lean world and Six Sigma world, we're all doing projects to some extent. But I think sometimes it's good to talk to people who are like, they're really good at managing projects and see what we can learn from them. And so we sort of begin with like, like what she talks about, like a technical project. So we talk about like, what does that mean and what's different between it and say a project that might be more compliance oriented. But then towards the end, some of my favorite part was I was asking her about like, what are the, some of the habits that good project managers have and then also what about behaviors that project managers that are successful, like what behaviors do have or did they demonstrate? And so I thought that was some really interesting conversation. Really. I learned a lot from it and I hope you will too. Now, show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 553. Also just scroll down on the app, whatever you're listening on, and you'll be able to connect with Annette over on her website, LinkedIn and all that good stuff. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Annette, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am well, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling in from the Chicago area in the U.S. okay.

All right. Yeah. I lived in Libertyville, Illinois for several years. I worked at Motorola up there back in the day. My wife is from Westchester. Are you familiar with where Westchester is?

I'm familiar with all of those. I have lived in this area most of my life. I graduated from Homewood Flossmoor High School.

Okay.

And I came back to the area after college and I still live in Highland Park.

Okay.

And I worked for decades okay. At Abbott Labs in North Chicago.

Got it.

Libertyville, sort of right there on the edge there.

Yep, yep. Very good park.

Yeah.

Yeah. Nice. Okay, well, hey, Annette, you know the drill. We like to get things going out of the gate with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, the quote I have I can't attribute to anyone in particular, but it's something we often would say within our teams, which is we never have time to do it right, but we always have time to do it over.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. What's that mean to you?

Well, we would always look at the timeline for everything we should do in order to start when we want to start to meet whatever the business requirement is. And in order to do that, we would either have to do things in parallel or skip doing some things in order to meet the timeline. And inevitably we had trouble with that. So either we had to be better about when we started thinking about doing a project or we had to think about the complete deliverable. You've heard this the other way. There's like three components to a project. The cost, the time and the quality of the product. If you're looking at the timeline and you're deciding to start a project.

And.

You want to meet the timeline, you're going to have to give up on some of the quality. Otherwise you're going to have to say we're going to do it over. Which happens.

Yeah. Got it. Okay. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself. We know where you live and where you've worked, but tell us a little bit about your background and then how you got into the sort of the line of work that you're in. And what is that line of work?

Well, I'm a trained chemical engineer, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. And after working for some time in specialty chemicals for agriculturals, I actually worked on Roundup for Monsanto. I moved to Chicago when Monsanto still existed and then I moved to Abbott Labs mostly to come back to be close to family in Chicago. And I started as an engineer working on project engineer kind of projects, installing equipment, building facilities, qualifying equipment, all those sorts of things. And that sort of evolved into actually using the equipment and developing processes for scale up, actually scaling up some custom small molecule pharmaceuticals in very small quantities, usually for safety testing at first. And then I moved into the device division of Abbott Laboratories where, where I thought things were in small qualities on the pharmacy side and the pharmacide had gone off to become AbbVie. But Abbott remained as the medical device manufacturer and I worked on even smaller quantities, a very special sauce that goes into the kits for doing blood testing. And I started to become a project manager to develop either to develop and improve the process for the materials that go into those kits to improve the business process around it, like safety, stock and supplies costs like that. That was the beginning of my lean life, was that sort of improvement. And moved into working on product launches and doing and looking at the whole process of doing a product launch and the lessons learned behind doing that. And that's when I retired and then I went and worked as a contractor at other small pharma companies working on developing, actually setting up their projects and working on their development and GMP runs kind of depended on where their contract was and the development process for that particular pharmaceutical. And now I am looking to teach new project managers what I've learned from all those years of doing these projects.

Awesome. Okay, well, so today, Annette, maybe the theme of the episode is going to be really talking about a technical project plan, setting it up, executing it, that sort of thing. But maybe I always like to start with just definitions when we say a technical project plan, like what do you mean? And give it maybe an example or two.

A technical project often involves a research and development stage where there is some risk that the final product will not be ready or may not be ready in the way you expect in the time frame because it's still under development at the time the project starts. And that enough may or may not be known about the product to scale it up to the level you want to scale it up for the business need for the actual first lot to stock, first product for sale amounts because you haven't finished development yet. And in the process of not doing development, you don't know necessarily, you think you know, but you haven't tested yet what the most important scale up parameters are. So these are all, I guess, technical. I'm of course thinking of them in terms of chemistry often, or biology or biochemistry. But you could I think, apply this to even a mechanical device or an electronic device, something you're still developing that you don't have all you're pretty sure it's going to go fine. And of course now you have to commit to a time frame when that development's going to be over and think about the risks if the development isn't over. What is your insurance? What are you going to do to keep on the scale of timeline you're supposed to have for the launch date that you've committed to?

So to be precise, we're talking about Creating something new, right?

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

So even if it's, even if it's an extension of something that exists, it's still new. Because usually the assumption you'll make is, oh, I'm going to test it. I'm going to show that it's equivalent to the thing that exists already. But you haven't done that yet.

Yeah.

And you might find it isn't. Yeah, you don't know until you test it.

Okay, got it. All right, so putting yourself in the project manager's shoes, like what are some of the things that he or she can be doing to sort of keep this very complex project a lot of moving pieces, keep it on track.

Well, I think it's, make it part of your standard work, I guess, as a project manager to maintain some important relationships. You already know that you have to, to maintain the relationship with your team. You're, you probably already have a communication plan, how often you're going to meet who sends emails to who, who sends reports to who. But the relationship that you should focus on more than maybe you think is the relationship with the sponsor of the project. Because sometimes the sponsor of the project, you have to understand why, why they're the sponsor of the project. Are they the sponsor of the project because it was just assigned to them and it's one they have to do among others, or is it something that's very important to them and they feel it's very important to their visibility in the corporation or even the small company or the world. Why is the project important to them or why not? And then you can operate from there. When you're going to manage the risks associated with the project, if you know that the visibility is the most important thing and therefore it is very important to them that this project be delivered at the quality and the time they want, then you're going to spend a long time with them talking about the insurance you might have to buy in order to make sure that that project comes in on time and when, what is the escalation plan? Because sometimes these sponsors are high level executives, hard to reach, may not even be in the same country where you're working, but you need to find them in hours because again, it's affecting their visibility. They have to always be able to speak to what's going on when anyone asks them as soon as something happens. So you have to find them right away and tell them. So when you talk with them, you just set up that system to make sure they know the insurance so that they can step in and say, okay, this Terrible thing happened. But we planned for this and this contractor stepping in, this equipment is available. The secondary supplier will be called whatever the insurance was and they are able to make that speech themselves because it's important to them to be able to make that speech themselves. If you have a sponsor where the project is not that important, then the communication up front with the sponsor, when you show the timeline is these are the risks. And if the project is going to fall behind, do we accept that the project is going to fall behind because this other one is the priority and we're going to have to, you know, there's, there's like a 40% chance or a 70% chance that this project may not come in at the time I'm, I'm giving you. Is that an issue for you or are we going to say, okay, this is a lower priority? We accept that.

Yeah.

If you're the project manager of that project, you as personally need to think about how long you want to manage that project. But you know it now and you won't find yourself embarrassed and reporting at the end of the year. Well, you know, I didn't, ended up not having the resources I needed to finish and so I couldn't finish. Which still doesn't have good optics for you as a project manager. So I think one of these conversations, relationship with the sponsor is key to understand how you're going to get support and how to support them.

Yeah, one, one question I have. We were actually even internally here at Gamba Academy talking about this recently. We got a lot of different projects going on and a lot of the same resources working on said project. So, you know, do we want to pause one so we can focus on the other, that sort of thing. And one of the things that we were wrestling with is the role of project management or program management, whatever you want to call it in, like early on, like determining, like, should we do this thing? Like, so what do you think? What's the role in project or program management, product management, whatever you want to call it, on helping the organization? Not that the project manager has got to make the decision because what do they know? They may not be an expert in that topic. Right. I mean, there's other people in the company who need to be involved. But how do you, how have you seen companies go about making decisions on like go no go on this particular idea?

Well, there's the business point of view and then there's some advice I would give to the project manager. If they have, say often they are not assigned till after the projects are chosen. But of course, when the projects are looked at as a portfolio, it's going to be from the value to the business in terms of some kind of revenue or some kind of risk reduction or cost reduction. And that's pretty much how they're going to be chosen because it's like, you know which ones most affect the bottom line. I think if you are the project manager and in time and you can share the risk register and the probability of the risks and the cost of the risks, if you want to maintain the milestone dates, you must maintain for the revenue side of the or the cost saving side of the project, it might be helpful to look to compare risks between projects. Is the project that you want to do, do you already have the equipment to build it or are you going to have to buy the equipment to build it? Do you already have the team that knows how to design it or are you going to, is there some part of it that you really don't understand and you're going to have to bring someone else in? Whatever the, whatever the risks are is, you know, what is, you know, does this regulatory feel there's only a 50% chance it's going to be approved on the first pass because of some clinical trial question? So I think you need to share the risk register as well as the revenue or cost savings when you do the ranking.

Gotcha. Gotcha. No, that makes a lot of sense. What about when you're dealing with, you just mentioned compliance, like what makes a project with compliance different than what we've been talking about?

Usually if something has to be compliant, there has to be documents that show it is compliant. The documents often have to show that the people that did the work were qualified to do the work, that the material that was used to make the product was suitable, that the equipment that was used to make the product was suitable, that the process that was used with the people and the equipment and the materials was reliable within a certain error, like a six sigma error, within a certain acceptable error, and that its efficacy, there's always a safety and efficacy. If it's an FDA filing is, is shown in the clinical trials within a certain error margin. So there's always tails, I get that. But for the most part it's shown to be effective. So when you're doing an operations project, a manufacturing project, the thing that often surprises new managers is the documents that are needed to get started. Because you're going to say, oh, we're going to have chemicals and if you're going to make a pharmaceutical on a certain day and you've even worked on ordering them and they're in stock and they've been tested to be the right quality to get started. But in order to be compliant, they have to have come from a supplier that has been considered acceptable by you, by the company you're working for. And usually they have to show that they will tell you and they have a quality system that will trip for you any changes in the quality of the material they're sending. If they have their own quality events for making your product, they tell you like there's more to it than just testing the product to see that it meets specifications. And then there's the documents around the tests themselves. The tests have to follow certain linearity, precision, accuracy, person to person variability testing in order to show that the test that's even being used to show that the product can be released, either the starting material or the product made itself is acceptable because the method has been shown to be acceptable.

Yeah, you're speaking to the Six Sigma world now. You're talking gage R and R and all this kind of stuff, all that sort of thing about that.

Yeah, exactly. And then the instruments that are on the equipment itself and the materials of construction of the equipment itself, the air quality and the suite around the equipment itself, all of those things have been shown to be suitable for the product that you're making. That is, they're calibrated in the range that you're going to use for the process that you're going to use. You have shown that the process that you're using will produce a product with this spec when all of those instruments are used in a certain range. So you have this process, it's usually called the process qualification document. And there is all of the analytical method qualifications. If you're going to go person to person, it becomes a validation, but that's usually at a larger scale. You have to have the supplier qualification, you have to have the specifications for all the products and the specifications for all the starting materials. All of the starting materials. That would include the filters used, if there's filters, any of the supplies, any of the solvents. And what often trips up new project managers is making sure they have accounted for all of those documents. Because the documents have a time cycle of their own. They have a draft cycle, they have a review cycle, and they have an approval cycle. And if there are three approvers, up to 10 approvers, you've got to give each of those approvers time to approve the document and still have the document in place in time to Start when you want to start. So it's the documents for a compliant project that often may take more lines if you're going to do usually a waterfall timeline, then the actual manufacturing, receiving materials, production steps. So many more documents.

Right.

Because of that.

Okay, so I want to switch gears just a little bit maybe to sort of begin to wrap things up. But you know, we've talked a lot about technical stuff and documents and in some relationship stuff with, in particular with a project sponsor. But I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about. I really have maybe part A and part B of this final question. Part A is are there any sort of habits that a project manager should, should have, should develop, should, should, you know, work on, if you will, to, you know, be successful and to have everybody involved in that project working together in harmony. So habits. But then also part B would be, what about any sort of like, behaviors of the project manager as far as, like, they're not necessarily personality, because I don't think it matters if you're introvert, extrovert or whatever. You know, you, you make it work, whoever you are. But, but are there other sort of behavioral characteristics of a, like the best project managers that you've ever worked with? Like, was there something that, that they had that just, you know what I'm saying? So maybe habits and behaviors, those are the, maybe the two things that I'd like to, to focus on.

Yes. Well, in terms of setting up the project, part A, I think it's important to talk to as many people as you can, as early as you can to get a handle on what all the documents are, because as I said, there are usually more documents than activities in that timeline. And you can develop rapport with the people that are going to tell you that if you do your training with diligence when you start, because you will find that there's going to be quality training, either it's ISO training or FDA training, EME training that will tell you what documents they normally generate for a certain type of project. And you just take your notes and you say, well, I assume it's going to be this, this and this for that, that and that, and come to a meeting with the leader that's going to work with you on that project or who's going to ass someone from their team with that list of documents. So that's pretty easy. On the quality side, where it gets more challenging to make sure you have all the documents is now to go find the manufacturing and the maintenance department for the equipment you're Planning to use and to understand what sort of cycle they use to clean the equipment. Is there a downtime to maintain the equipment? What do they do to calibrate equipment? Just get them to tell you everything they know about the space and the equipment you're going to use so that you have a good start for knowing all the documents. But while you're at it, then comes the part B, which is the, I think it's already a lean leader habit, which is you are starting to trying to make a personal connection because now you want to build trust with them. They, you, you want them to feel like you're going to have their back when you plan this project so that nobody that's involved at the highest level of the project just, you know, ends up holding the bag if things go south. And that you're trying to understand from all of them how to incorporate everything in the risk register everything in the document list to be sure you are respecting their time and how they work with each other so that they feel like they can trust you, that you have your back. And in time, then they will feel like if you're a true lean leader, great project manager that you have, you have built an environment where they have each other's backs. That is, when a document isn't going well, the quality person will tell you, but they will copy in the person and the team that can help them most to get it back on track instead of waiting for the next status meeting to tell you that, well, I just, I, this didn't happen, so I can't finish it. No, they have each other's backs, so they're more proactive. And by the time we come to the meeting, we're talking about what happened and what are the action items to move on. Even if it did affect, you know, milestone dates because they had each other's back. To me, that's the difference. If they're like that, then when the project's over, everybody will hoist their favorite beverage and be glad they were part of the team and have good memories of it instead of hoisting their favorite beverage and saying, thank goodness that's over.

Yeah, yeah, no, I, I agree 1,000%. I mean, the best project managers that I've seen in my career are those who are, they're not, they're, they're definitely not like pushovers or anything like that. But they're also not, you know, bulls and china shop kind of thing, right? And they're this sort of, you got to have that tension, that positive tension, that creative tension. What do you want to call it? But also like you said, that trust that people see them coming, they're like, oh yes, here comes the truth and I'm going to bring my truth to them and we're going to work together and, and everyone's trying to win together instead of sometimes you can see finger pointing and you know, wow, we would have hit it. But you know, Annette and her team, you know, they, they let us down, you know.

But if you find out birthdays and habits from some, some of the personal aspects of some of these committee members or team members, you can be able to predict and prepare for vacations, leaves of absence where there's going to be team not available for whatever reason because you've developed more of a personal trust relationship with the team as much as you can. Because often it is the sudden loss of a team member that. Yeah, for a perfectly legitimate reason. But you, you, you did not anticipate it, that now you have to recover from which is more difficult, I think.

Yeah, wonderful. Good stuff. So Annette, if folks wanted to, to connect with you personally, what would be the best way?

I would invite them to come to my website, aaj projectconsulting1word.com there you can link with me to get an email. I have a free course. It's a little long, it's 40 minutes long about this topic if you'd like to see it or you can sign up for my next course.

Okay. All right, we'll link up to your website in the show notes. And I guess, are you on LinkedIn and all the rest of it?

I am on LinkedIn and so is my website. Yes.

Okay, perfect. So we'll get all the links and we'll put them all in the show notes. So everybody just scroll down on your app and let's go connect with Annette. And hey, thanks for coming on. This has been a lot of fun.

I've had fun too. Thanks very much.

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