nus-iss learning day 2017 - future skills for project managers

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FUTURE SKILLS FOR PROJECT MANAGERS

DIGITAL CAPABILITY NEEDED, DEADLINE YESTERDAY!

11 August / TAN LIONG CHOON

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OUTLINE

• The Changing Business & IT Landscape

• Future of Project Management & Skills to meet the Challenges of the Future

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Volatility - the nature, speed and size of change are unpredictable.

Uncertainty - an inability to determine the course of future events.

Complexity - the outcome of an action cannot be predicted by simple

analysis.

Ambiguity - key characteristics of a situation can be interpreted in different

ways.


Disruptive Technology

• When is a Technology considered disruptive?

• Speed i.e. the rate at which it is adopted. E.g. The electric

car, though new and considered to have great potential to

replace the fuel-driven cars, is slow in adoption and did not

really cause much disruption to the car market.

• Totality i.e. how much of the old is replaced by the new,

including adding new performance attributes that adds value

to the end-users

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“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles. Facebook,

the world’s most popular media owner, produces no content. Alibaba,

the world’s most valuable retailer, owns no inventory. And Airbnb, the

world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.

Something interesting is happening.” – Tom Goodwin, Havas Media

Adapted from: Disruptive Technologies. Understand, Evaluate, Respond by Paul Armstrong


Changed and Changing –A Sampling

• The Changing Landscape• Project Scoping & Requirement in a digital world –

Pretotyping, Product Thinking/User Research, Design Thinking

• Design & Testing - A/B Testing

• Transition to Operations – DevOps, continuous integration

• Cyber-Security – Zero Day

• New Normal in Development approaches/practices – Agile (SCRUM, KANBAN)

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• Future Skills and Future of Project Management• Back to Basic

• Skill development strategy


PROJECT SCOPING & REQUIREMENT IN AN INCREASINGLY DIGITIZED WORLD

PRETOTYPING, PRODUCT THINKING/ USER RESEARCH, DESIGN THINKING …

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Pretotyping – This is not a typo error!

• Term and concept of pretotyping was originally developed by

Alberto Savoia in 2009 while working at Google as Engineering

Director and Innovation Agitator.

www.pretotyping.org

If you are not failing

every now and again,

it’s a sign that you are

not doing anything

very innovative –

Woody Allen

http://www.albertosavoia.com/


Pretotype -> Prototype -> Product

www.pretotyping.org


Product Thinking - Do People Want the Product?

Concept of MVP

• Is it a version 1 of a product?

• Is it a cheaper version of a product (least set of features)?

• Is it a functional prototype of a product?

Source: Validating Product Ideas - Through Lean User Research By Tomer Sharon


Product Thinking - Do People Want the Product?

The key Idea behind the Concept of MVP

• An MVP is a version of a new product that allows the team to collect the maximum amount of validatedlearning about the customers with the least amount of effort.

• It is a series of experiments or research activity to help you learn about your customer. It is a product prototype with a minimum functionality enough for you to learn about the customer.

Techniques of answering the question:

Concierge MVP

Fake Doors Experiments

…Adapted from: Validating Product Ideas - Through Lean User Research By Tomer Sharon


Product Thinking – Concierge MVP

• A concierge MVP is an MVP where you manually provide the

functionality of the product to the customer and guide your user

through the solution to a problem. It is less wasteful, simpler

and more effective.

Example: Open Snow is a startup from Boulder, Colorado. It’s a team of

meteorologists who specialize in weather forecast for skiing resorts. They

solve the problem of non-existent, specific, and detailed snow sport

forecast. Skiers invest in a lot of money, time, and effort in planning ski

trips. These trips might be canceled due to wrong weather reports about

the area, or skiers going ahead with the trip only to find that the weather

does not permit the sport activity.

Instead of investing time and money to build a primitive version of the app

or website, it visit ski resort to ask people who are interested in the service,

they provide it free (at first) via email. When eventually the ask customer to

pay the service and people actually does pay, it validates their assumption

of what people want.



Product Thinking – Fake Door Experiment

• It is a MVP where you pretend to provide a product, feature or

service to a webpage or app visitor.

Without developing anything yet, you communicate to the visitor

that this feature exist and ask them to act on it. If they do, you

know they want it and its time you start working on developing it.

Example: A grocery store is thinking about developing a

grocery shopping app and wants to know if customers are

interested or not. It then creates a button “Download our

shopping app.” on its website to find out and gauge the

interest level of its online customers.



Product Design – A complaint

“Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your

website, AA.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to

fly your airline again….If I were running a company with the

distinction and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed-

no, ashamed- to have a website with a customer experience as

terrible as the one you have now.

…

Your website is abusive to your customers, it is limiting your revenue

possibilities, and it is permanently destroying the brand and image of

your company in the mind of every visitor.

**The customer, even offered, in his letter, a better user interface that is

Minimal, clean, useful.

A frustrated customer wrote a complaint to American Airlines (AA):


Consequently, AA redesign their website which looks like what the

complainer proposed. (AA.com as at Dec 2016)


Design Thinking

• No common and fixed definition

• Think of it as an approach to solving problem involving:

• Use of market research info that is user-driven with emphasis on user experience

• Expanded boundaries of both problem definition and solution

• Engaging partners in co-creation

• Involves conduct of real-world experience as opposed to analysis of historical data


Understanding Design Thinking


E.g. “Desired Paths” and Design

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If you don’t offer “low friction” in your designs,

someone else will.

A college campus that let people walk where they want – their

“desire paths” – and then used that to smartly pave those

locations that were the “low friction” routes that people

wanted to take.

Similarly, in product design, you should live like your

customer, observe them in the real world, and then learn from

what they actually do.- Tom Hulme at TED conference 2016


Customer Empathy is Key to Design

• Drop The Old - Designing customer experience based on

legacy language, technology and processes that predates

the lives of these digital/connected generation of customers.

• Empathise with The New - One that caters to the preferences,

expectations and behaviours of Digital Native

“Amazon’s Jeff Bezos - while surveying Amazon’s “Hot 100 Bestseller list”:

“Hey, why do we stop at 100? This is the internet! Not some newspaper

best seller list. We can have a list that goes on and on”.

Jean-Louise Constanza, CEO, Orange Valleez;

“For my one year old daughter, A Magazine is an iPad that does not

work. it will remain so for the rest of her life”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk


DESIGN-TEST

A/B TESTING

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A/B Testing – Selling Homes – Do you highlight financials or features?

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8000 emails were

sent to potential

customers to

market the home.

50% use version

A and 50% uses

version B. One

version has

33.8% more

success.

(receiver opened

email)

Version A or B?

Adapted from www.behave.org

https://www.behave.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Home-Union-B-1024x639.jpg

https://www.behave.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Home-Union-B-1024x639.jpg


TRANSITION TO OPERATIONS

DEVOPS

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IMVU Inc. – a social entertainment company whose

products allow users to connect through 3-D

avatar-based experiences.


Coping with Rollout Frequency Demand of Today & the Future

How often does IMVU Inc. deploy new software?

• Quarterly?

• Monthly?

• Weekly?

• Daily?

• IMVU deploys new code 50 times a day on average.

• Does continuous integration. Developers commit early & often.

• A commit triggers an execution test suite.

• IMVU has 1000 test files, distributed across 30-40 machines – test

suites take ~9 minute to run.

• Once a commit passed all its tests, it will automatically sent to

deployment – code is moved to 100s of machines in the cluster.*at first, code is made live on a small no. of machines and sampling program examines the

results.


One Definition of DevOps

• DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring quality.

• Quality means suitability of use by stakeholders include end-users, developers and system administrators.

• Quality includes availability, security, reliability, maintainability, compatibility (e.g. with devices/platforms) etc.

• Passing a set of automated test cases

• Testing the change with a limited set of users in the production environment

• Monitoring closely the deployed code change for a period time (e.g. live trial period)

**Note - The Delivery mechanism must also be of high quality e.g. reliability, repeatability

Adapted from: DevOps – A software Architect’s Perspective (Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Limng Zhu


DevOps life cycle processes

Requirements Development Build Testing Deployment Execution

Treat

operations

personnel as

1st class

stakeholders.

Get inputs

when

developing

requirements.

Small teams.

Limited

coordination.

Unit tests.Build tools.

Support

continuous

integration.

Automated

testing.

User

Acceptance

Testing.

Deployment

tools.

Support

continuous

deployment.

Monitoring.

Responding

to error

conditions.

Adapted from: DevOps – A software Architect’s Perspective (Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Limng Zhu)


CYBER-SECURITY

ZERO DAY

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© 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved#ISSlearn © 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved© 2016 National University of

Singapore. All Rights Reserved31

In Space, No One can Hear You Scream


You have:

Source: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/hospitals-in-england-turning-away-patients-shutting-down-it-systems-following-major-

cyberattack/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=23961581494219079837236885332263


Security & Threat Modelling

Microsoft Threat Model: STRIDE Spoofing identity. Illegal accessing and then using another user’s

authentication information, such as user name and password.

Tampering with data. Malicious modification of data.

Repudiation. Repudiation threats are users who deny performing an

action without other parties having a way to prove otherwise.

Information disclosure. Exposure of information to individuals who

are not suppose to have access to it.

Denial of service. DOS attacks target the service availability to valid

users.

Elevation of privilege. An unprivileged user gains privileged access

and have sufficient access to compromise or destroy the system.

**Each of the above can be linked to the violation of one of

the “CIA” Triad. (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability)

Threat Modelling is an integral part of Security

Development Lifecycle process.


CIA Triads ++

© 2016 National University of


CISSP terminology:

“safeguards,”

countermeasures put

in place to mitigate

possible risks.


NEW NORMAL IN PROJECT APPROACHES

AGILE, SCRUM, KANBAN …

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Agile Scrum

Kanban

Its no more “Why

Agile?”, but Why

Not Agile!


The Standard’s Org has Joined Hands

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#ISSlearn


IS TRADITIONAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT STILL RELEVANT?

BACK TO BASICS

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Project Management will Evolve

• As project environment grows in complexity, Fundamentals becomes even more important.Hence, the reminder on Back to the Basics• Project Management is becoming a basic skill for

everyone. i.e. even your users and average stakeholders

• Project Managers need to reinforce the basics with new adaptions e.g. Vision and Project Leadership, Approach, Design process & techniques

• New Expectations on Project Managers• Move up the value chain

• Widen the knowledge range and new tool to execute PM roles

e.g. new communication tools Skype for Business, Slack, Webex)

• Ability to learn new skills and Continuous Learning39


Back to Basics – Vision and Project Life Cycle

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Position / Role Vision Role Project Lifecycle

CEO, Board Vision to Inspire Long-term Objectives

(investment cycle)

Corporate vision & value

phase

Portfolio Mgr Vision to maintain competitive

advantage (economic cycle)

Corporate requirement

phase

Sponsor, Project

steering comm.

Vision to implement Business case Business case phase

Project Manager Vision to implement project charter Project feasibility and project

definition phase

• Clear leadership ensures project decisions are aligned with

corporate strategy. It avoid individuals applying their own decision

rules such as:

• FIFO, LIFO

• Squeakiest wheel

• Boss’s whim (or most politically correct), Loudest demand

• Easiest (or Least risky to do)

• Most likely to lead to raises and promotion

Adapted from : Project Management Leadership: Building Creative Teams by Rory Burke and Steve

Barron


Power of Vision and Powerful Visionaries

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Computerisation era (80s) : Bill Gates has the vision of seeing a personal

computer on everyone’s desk even when only a few large companies had

mainframe computers

Internet era (90s) : Jeff Bezos has the vision of “The everything store” and was

the pioneer in online retailing - “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric

company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything

they might want to buy online.”

Social Media Revolution era (Noughties) : Mark Zuckerberg – “… the most

important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give

people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.“ – Feb 2017https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-

community/10154544292806634

Dawn of Digital era : ?

Facebook original “vision” back in 2005: "I think Facebook is an online directory for

colleges...If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your

name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.“http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-2005-early-interview-2012-5/?IR=T


Amazon Business Transformation from Retail into a Technology Company

Andy Jassy is a Harvard Business School grad asked to head

Amazon’s AWS service.

Andy Jassy’s AWS vision statement:

“to enable developers and companies to use Web Services to

build sophisticated and scalable applications”.

“We tried to imagine a student in a dorm room who would

have at his disposal the same infrastructure* as the largest

companies in the world.”….

E.g. storage, processing, bandwith, payment …

Adapted from “The Everything Store - Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon” by Brad Stone


• Meetings held frequently – daily or weekly

• Everyone has 1 minute to talk

• Each team member addresses the following:

• Finished: What have I completed since the last meeting

• Acknowledgements: Who make my job easier (praise and recognition)

• Still outstanding: What I am working on now?

• Trouble spots: What difficulties am I encountering?

• Enlightenment: What have I learned?

• Requests: What do I need?

Back to Basics - FASTER Meetings

Provides:

• Status update

• Self and Peer recognition

• Builds understanding of responsibilities of others

• Opportunity for Lead to re-allocate tasks

www.sai-iowa.org/FASTERMEETINGS.docx

Want your meetings to build team spirit, improve cooperation, and increase productivity?


Back to Basics - Risk Management & Problem Solving

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Known Unknown

Known Not really a problem e.g.

Scope creep & changes.

Solution: consider AGILE

approach, setup Change

Control Board, ,,,

Technical Design Activity

e.g. Accepted User interface

design Options: wireframe/

prototyping, A/B testing, etc

Unknown Methods & Procedure.

e.g. software defects

Solution: Conduct testings –

unit-testing, integration/

system testing, UAT, agile

continuous integration, …

Consider User Research,

Pretotype, POC, pilot trial,

Ethnography,

then design solution

e.g. Technical feasibility,

benchmarking performance

targets

Solution

Ris

k /

Pro

ble

m

© 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved#ISSlearn © 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved(Total Slides=8) T:\S-ITSM-F\OM\Module 1 v3.pptx © 2016 National University of



#ISSlearn


CONCLUSION

CALL TO ACTION

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Call to Action

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• How should we prepare for the future?

• Where do we start building the skills?

• Is there a strategy to adopt?


Amazon Transformation Revisited

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How did Amazon morphed from a Retail Store (selling books)

into a radically different seller of high tech infrastructure?

• Sometime in 2003: Bezos come to know of a book “Creation” by Steve

Grand. (a developer of video game Creatures where players guide and

nurture intelligent organism on computer screens).

• Steve Grand’s book highlight that the approach to creating intelligent life

is “to focus on designing simple computational building block, called

primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behavior emerge.”

Adapted from: The Everything Store - Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

• From this “building block” idea, Amazon started creating “computing”

primitives by breaking down their tech infrastructure into the smallest,

simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them

with as much flexibility as possible. E.g. storage, bandwidth, processing,

payment… and the S3 and AWS was borned.


• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(Harper & Row, 1990).

Dan Pink Recommended Reading (1)

“We’ve all had those moments. We’re working on something

with such total absorption that we seem to enter a higher state.

It’s not only that time passes quickly; it’s that we lose a sense

of time itself. It’s not just that we’re focused; it’s that we’re

scarcely aware of the boundary between ourselves and the

world.

Csikzentmihalyi calls such exquisite experiences flow.

And in this landmark book, he unpacks what flow is and how

we can experience it more often.

I’ve recommended this book so many times that I can even

pronounce the author’s last name. Repeat after me: Chick-

SENT-me-high.”

http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Daniel-Pink-Required-Reading?gko=03bfe

http://www.harpercollins.com/9780061339202/flow

http://cgu.edu/pages/4751.asp


• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne

Lamott (Pantheon, 1994).

Dan Pink Recommended Reading (2)

“This one isn’t obviously a business book, but it actually

contains the secret to effective performance. Lamott, a well-

known novelist, describes a moment in her youth when her 10-

year-old brother had to write a report for school about birds.

He’d had the assignment for a couple of months, but, of

course, waited until the night before the deadline to begin.

Panicked, he sought advice from Lamott’s father, who told him:

“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Whenever

I’m stuck — which is pretty much all the time — I think of this

book and that lesson. Then I take it bird by bird.”

http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Daniel-Pink-Required-Reading?gko=03bfe

http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/97395/bird-by-bird-by-anne-lamott/

https://www.facebook.com/AnneLamott


Call to Action – cont’d

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• Where do we start building the skills?

• What is the strategy to adopt?

Be

curious


THANK YOU

[email protected]

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Breaking News


Product Community of Practice (PCoP)

• ISS will launch the inaugural Product Community of Practice (PCoP) in the 4th

quarter of 2017

• Objectives of the PCoP:

- To gather like-minded professionals and industry thought leaders who share a common passion for product management

- Crowd source wisdom to facilitate an understanding and insights to better manage challenges in the product management domain

- Facilitate networking and exchange of ideas

• Format of PCoP will vary and will include:

- Talks and sharing

- Panel Discussions

• Please indicate your interest by providing us with your contact details


Poor Design – The IT Response

“I like to think I’m decent at what I do, and I know the others I work with

here are all pretty good. The problem with the design of AA.com, however,

lies less in our competency (or lack thereof as you point out in your post)

and more with the culture and processes employed here at American

Airlines.

The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out

among many different groups, including, for example, QA, product

planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project

planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site,

and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its

content and functionality….

It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as

you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part,

and I think that is what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably

because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done

organisations….


Business Meets Design – The Response cont’d

Our Interactive Marketing group designs and implement fare sales and

specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group

pushes content without much interactions with us. ….

The company fired the designer, saying that he violated a non-

disclosure agreement.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/6531610/American-airlines-worker-fired-for-replying-to-web-user-

complaint.html

Oh, and don’t forget AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own

little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of

autonomy in how their domains are run). … Anyway, I guess what I’m saying

is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that

reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means…


Additional Reference slides

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A/B Testing (or “split testing”)- also called “Optimisation”

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Which design gets 40% more campaign sign-ups?

Adapted from A/B Testing - The most powerful way to turn clicks into customers by Dan Siroker, Pete

Koomen

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