May 27, 2025 • 43 mins
This month, we're exploring one of the biggest shifts in the modern workplace: the move toward project-based work.
Companies are organizing their efforts around short-term, goal-driven initiatives rather than long-term roles. This evolution means that project management is no longer just a specialized function—it's becoming a core skill for everyone. Knowing how to lead a team, manage deadlines and deliver results is essential in today's fast-moving and cross-functional environment.
But equally important is skills agility—the ability to adapt quickly, learn continuously and apply your talents across different teams and challenges. In a project-based world, the most valuable professionals are the ones who can shift gears and thrive in any setting.
To talk about this important topic, we’re delighted to welcome instructor Nate Crews.
Read the transcript @https://bit.ly/4jjrQmw
Learn more about UC Berkeley Extension @https://bit.ly/43PdzcI
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(00:03):
NATE CREWS (00:06):
I'm an advocate of do not let go of your legacy
knowledge, but you need toembrace the new knowledge of how
to do agility, how to thinkfrom a product-high standpoint
in delivering systemsgoing forward.
Those who are flexible andwilling to try new things out,
and become better atit, will be employed.
Those that stay stagnantin the old ways will not.
(00:28):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JILL FINLAYSON (00:32):
Welcome to the Future of Work podcast,
with Berkeley Extensionand EDGE in Tech
at the University ofCalifornia, focused
on expanding diversityand gender equity in tech.
EDGE in Tech is part of theInnovation Hub at CITRIS,
the Center for IT Researchin the Interest of Society
and the Banatao Institute.
UC Berkeley Extension isthe continuing education arm
(00:53):
of UC Berkeley.
This month, we're exploringone of the biggest
shifts in the modernworkplace, the move
toward project-based work.
Companies areorganizing their efforts
around short-term, goal-driveninitiatives, rather than
long-term roles.
This evolution means thatproject management is no longer
just a specializedfunction, it's
(01:14):
becoming a coreskill for everyone.
Knowing how to lead a team,manage deadlines, and deliver
results is essential in today'sfast-moving and cross-functional
environment.
But equally important isskills agility, the ability
to adapt quickly, learncontinuously, and apply
your talents across differentteams and challenges.
In a project-based world, themost valuable professionals
(01:36):
are the ones who can shiftgears and thrive in any setting.
To learn moreabout this, we turn
to Nate Crews, aresults-oriented senior Agile
transformation leader and coach.
He has demonstrated successin leveraging technology
to enhance business operationsand to impact the bottom line.
Nate is also a respectedleader at empowering
(01:57):
cross-functional teams todrive organizational success
and surpass corporate goals.
As an instructor, heteaches and coaches
students in businessand technology
concepts for theUniversity of California,
Berkeley Extension and theCaltech Center for Technology
and Management, as well ascorporate clients worldwide.
Welcome, Nate.
NATE CREWS (02:17):
Thank you for that amazing presentation.
I need to hang outwith you more often.
[LAUGHING]
JILL FINLAYSON (02:21):
I'm looking forward to it.
So take us back--
what did project managementuse to mean at work,
and when did you firstrealize that that approach was
starting to break down?
NATE CREWS (02:32):
For me, project management in the past
used to be about order.
So it was about gettinga person well skilled
and to be able tobreak down a project
into fundamental components,organize it, plan for it,
assign people assignments,and coordinate all
its deliverables at the end.
(02:53):
And the key wordthere is deliverables.
So the focus was, how canI take these resources
and a set of raw materialand end up with deliverables?
Now, those are great things,but sometimes the deliverable,
based on the fact that we mayhave started this project six
months ago, may not bevaluable now, as far as what
we need to do here.
(03:14):
We have to change our focus.
And that pivot shouldbe from deliverables
to value and outcomes.
We're not so much concernedwith deliverables so much.
It's outcomes and value.
Because you needto generate value.
Because, once youdeliver to the client,
they need to goout and exploit it
for their businesspurposes, which
takes us to a differentparadigm in how we look at work.
(03:36):
So we also, now, need to look atnot just the deliverable itself,
it's the flow of value.
The flow of value has adifferent set of sequences.
And, as you hadmentioned before,
the outcomes that theyexpect for value are quicker.
We're right in the centerof the Fourth Industrial
Revolution with all thisemerging technologies,
and our customersare very demanding.
(03:58):
They want results now, and theywant better, faster, cheaper.
And they don't want towait six or seven months.
And, also, if somethingchanges, they want to change it,
even if it's latein the process.
So we've got ademanding environment,
a swell of new technologieshas enabled us,
and just a changing marketplaceand just complex solutions
(04:18):
that need to be delivered here.
So one of the things-- andyou might ask yourself, well,
why is this important?
It's a survival mechanism.
Those that arethoughtful, long-term
learners and can incorporateinto their skill set, those
who are flexible and willing totry new things out and become
better at it, will be employed.
(04:39):
Those that stay stagnantin the old ways will not.
JILL FINLAYSON (04:43):
This is an incredible, very succinct way
of saying that better, faster,quicker, and more agile,
being able to adaptto technology, that
seems like the driving force onwhy the old project management
systems didn't work.
You said there were,like, 40 skills
they used to teachpeople who got certified
in project management?
NATE CREWS (05:04):
Yeah, it was approximately--
there's 49 processesthat used to be
in the old version of theold PMBOK that we used to do.
It helped you initiateprojects, to plan for projects,
to execute on projects,to monitor and control.
And the PMP used to focus onhow well you could traverse
each one of thoseprocesses and to be
(05:24):
able to identify what theinputs were, the outputs were,
and the transformativeprocesses that you
use to take theinputs to the outputs.
So that's how youpassed the PMP before.
I think the latestedition of the PMP,
the focus has changedto value delivery.
So how do we generate value?
And it goes through and itlooks at the various value
(05:46):
streams that you need to be ableto navigate and guide people
through, as project manager.
And we're guiding peoplethrough, not commanding,
controlling, and tellingpeople what to do.
Because, a lot of thetimes, to be successful,
the knowledge resides inthe people doing the work.
And the successfulproject manager
now needs to be more of acoach or a thought provoker,
(06:09):
to think of new ideas andto also manage relationships
amongst the team.
So they are supportingthings you need to do.
It's, how do you understand whatis valuable to the customer?
And that's where agilitycomes into the play.
Agile-- the main tenetof agility, at least
in my mind-- some mayagree with or disagree--
is about customer centricityand rapid delivery
(06:31):
of value to those customers.
So understanding whatthe customer wants,
when they want it, and do,to the best of your ability,
deliver that value.
Now, I try to stayaway from the word
fast because sometimespeople think, well,
and they're going to bedoing it twice as fast.
No.
Sometimes deliveringvalue quicker
is delivering it incrementally,and sometimes delivering
(06:53):
is going through anddoing Lean engineering
and taking out the waste.
If I take out the waste, whatI deliver to the customer
is 100% viable todelivering value.
And that's rapid deliveryof value for the customer.
We have to use adifferent set of mindsets.
Some of the agilitymindsets come into play.
I think the mindset aroundproduct development comes in.
(07:13):
Instead of focusing onthe coordination-- that's
the project activities--we want to focus on,
how do I maximize thedelivery of this product
for the end customer, in atimeline within the metrics
that he's looking for?
JILL FINLAYSON (07:27):
So we're still using some of these tools,
but the mindsethas really changed.
And the mindsethas really shifted
to this customer-centricand adaptable mindset.
NATE CREWS (07:40):
And an adaptable mindset is one of the things
that I teach my studentshere, and when I first
get into the class, is thatthere are several practices
around agility, many of them.
But if you want to have aquantum leap in the performance,
you have to change your mindset.
And the mindset we talkabout is a growth mindset,
to be able to incorporatein the process--
not a very popular word--failure, failing fast,
(08:02):
in small increments.
Because failure is-- success isa way of learning, but failing
in small quantities, also,is another way of learning.
JILL FINLAYSON (08:10):
Can I ask, how does failing in small amounts
get you fasterdelivery of value?
NATE CREWS (08:16):
You do experiments in small increments.
Let's say you want to go look atthe flow of how a call center is
looking at various screensto address a problem,
and you don't know theright order of what
those screens should look like.
You've tried to do it.
You've done chalk talks.
You've doneengineering analysis.
And, really, there'sno definitive order.
Well, an experiment.
(08:37):
Let's say we had threescreens, A, B, C. Well,
you may tell somebody togo off for three hours
and build out the executionof screens of B, C, A.
And you tell somebody else tobuild out a screen of C, B, A.
And we look at the results.
Now, the result is, like,nah, that doesn't work.
That is a failurebecause it doesn't
(08:58):
fit the needs of what we did.
And we found out throughexploration of that.
I'm saying in small increments,doing little tiny experiments.
And experiments have been partof our culture for many years.
If you look at Thomas Edison,he failed thousands of times.
Where did he end up?
With the light bulb.
And Walt Disney wentbankrupt three times
in some of his attempts toget the most wonderful place
(09:20):
in the world to go to.
So failure isn't somethingthat's foreign to us.
It's just, we've been told thatthe expectation is you have
to be perfect the first time.
And that gets us into alignmentof things of normality.
But if you want to startto extend it and do things
better, faster, cheaper, wehave to think out of the box
and try some things thatwe normally wouldn't do.
JILL FINLAYSON (09:40):
I think that was a good example, sort
of contrasting theold-school project
management with the newer.
So in the old school,it was, try something
for longer periods of time oryou just stuck with the plan.
And what you're suggestingnow is that sort of waterfall,
one thing following theother, doesn't work anymore.
(10:00):
And I'm curious if youcan say more about why
it doesn't work anymore?
NATE CREWS (10:05):
I am not against waterfall.
I think waterfall hasbeen an amazing thing,
has done some amazingaccomplishments over time.
It has its time, and it hasits purpose, even today.
As you have more complexembedded systems here--
when you're dealing witha government for military
applications, you've got 1,000contractors and very complicated
(10:27):
algorithms.
If you're doing biotech, theseare complicated algorithms.
There is a place forwaterfall because they
mandate to have certain thingsto be done sequentially,
in a certain order andway of things of doing it.
However, a lot of the thingswe're developing here,
particularly in software,falls into the complex area
of a lot of uncertainty.
(10:48):
If we are uncertainabout what we need to do
and we need to exploreto come up with ideas--
you try something.
It works.
Then, you build on that and youtry it and you build on that.
If something doesn't work, thenyou pivot to something else.
So I think the projectmanager of today
needs to recognizeand respect some
of the deliveries ofwaterfall and, also,
to be able to dothat transformation,
(11:10):
to help people learnhow to do things
from an Agile perspective.
Because that's theway of the future.
JILL FINLAYSON (11:16):
What stands out to me-- and for people who maybe
are new to projectmanagement, waterfall
meaning an orderof events, looking
at dependencies, something hasto happen before the next thing
can happen.
Why is that useful in some casesand less useful in other cases?
NATE CREWS (11:33):
Let me ask you a question-- if someone
was building a nuclearplant in your neighborhood,
would you want them todo a lot of experiments
to figure out whatthey needed to do,
or would you want to gothrough a nice, orderly process
because of what was atrisk is catastrophic?
So there's stillsome applications
that we need todo very mindfully
and meticulously to get done.
(11:54):
Satellite systems,ground systems, these
are some things that stillneed to be done meticulously.
But within it, those components,there might be some software
that I can iterate, todevelop, to be better outcomes
or I could iterate on alogistics of how we order and do
things from a supplychain standpoint.
My thing that I'man advocate of,
(12:16):
do not let go of yourlegacy knowledge,
but you need to embrace the newknowledge of how to do agility,
how to think from aproduct-high standpoint
in delivering systemsgoing forward.
JILL FINLAYSON (12:26):
And it sounds like there's
an overarching objective andtimeline that needs to be met,
but, within that, you can addsome Agile practices in the
how to meet each oneof those milestones.
NATE CREWS (12:38):
You can do it from a standpoint
of an entire framework.
There's a lot of Agilepractices that you can do.
As a project manager, you needto sit down with the customer.
Again, that's customercentricity, listening to them,
listening to their problem,listening to their boundaries
and understandingwhat's going on.
Sometimes, those of us whoget excited about Agile--
I certainly do-- and Iwould want to get into Agile
(13:00):
because it's a fun environmentand a lot less regimented.
But if the customerhas some constraints
and needs to maintainold legacy systems,
I need to listen to them andcome up with some solutions
to say, hey, I may do a littlebit of waterfall and somewhat
of agility for rightnow, to what you are.
I try to be proficientin knowledge
of all the frameworks, allthe organizational development
(13:23):
activities, all the thingsabout developing people.
And then, I listento the customer.
And I use that knowledgebase to get there.
But the thing is thatI go through and have
acquired this knowledge.
And I think that's somethingabout the project managers,
you have to be a constant,lifelong learner.
And I also want toadvocate, on your job,
(13:44):
you should be spending80% of your job
doing your job, another 20%on how I can become better
and staying aheadof what's coming out
on the new place or area.
What's going on in AI?
What's going on incloud computing?
Because those things come in.
When they come in, theycome at you immediately.
And you say, well,I'm still up to speed
in the old way ofdoing things here
and I'll have to get caught up.
(14:05):
And, see, you'renot a player then.
But, if you've beenthinking about it
and acquiring knowledge, stayinga little bit ahead of what
you're actuallydoing at your company
right now, when those thingscome in-- because they will
eventually come in becausewe are an evolving society
here-- you are ready.
So you've got to alwaysbe thinking and probing
on that 20%.
JILL FINLAYSON (14:24):
So you've brought up
a number of terms, Scrum, Agile.
What are thesedifferent terminology,
that people might hear whenthey hear about Agile project
management, andwhat do they mean
and why are theredifferent words?
Are there differentmethodologies?
What are we hearing here?
NATE CREWS (14:40):
So Agile, really, is a set of behavior
that are focused on us, one,delivering rapid delivery
of value for the customer,through the collaboration
of multiple people, withdifferent skill sets
and that goesthrough and do things
in an iterative way, where theydo things in small increments,
(15:01):
get feedback on thatincrement, and then we
make adjustments along theway to get things done.
So Agile focusesin on innovation,
definitely workingcollaboratively with people,
and, also, deliveringvalue to the customer
in a prioritized way.
So one of the things, firststeps, on an Agile project
is they have arole of a customer
(15:23):
role, that's part of the team,that's called a product owner.
They work actively with theirexecutives or their stakeholders
to identify-- what is theproblem that we need to fix;
what opportunitywe need to exploit;
what does that realize,with respect to a solution;
and what are the featuresassociated with that solution;
and then get fromthem a sense of,
(15:44):
what is the priorityof delivering these?
That priorityfactor that you put
on all these featuresand stories, also,
is a way of deliveringthings faster to your client.
Because if I deliver to theclient what they want the most,
that's acceleratedvalue to the client.
Because if I focuson what you're
most important about, oryour biggest pain point,
that's another way ofdelivering value to the client.
(16:07):
So agility is justa way of behaving
to deliver a customerthat focus on feedback.
It looks atinnovation, constantly
looking at ways of improving.
A lot of the projectmanagement approaches
think about improvingthrough lessons learned,
but we put that inknowledge repositories.
Agility activelysays, now, what we've
(16:28):
learned that we could dobetter, what can we actively,
now, employ, in our nextiteration, to become better?
JILL FINLAYSON (16:34):
So if agility is the umbrella,
where do words like Scrum--
and what are some otherwords that people hear?
NATE CREWS (16:41):
Scrum is a framework of delivering--
it was primarily for software--for delivering projects
that had a definitive role of aproduct owner, who was a value
maximizer from the business.
You would figure out what wasimportant from the business,
from value.
You have a Scrum Master, thatwas not a project manager.
Imagine there's a person on theteam that has no authority--
(17:03):
this is what theframework says--
but you convince peopleon doing the right thing
through suggestions.
You ask the Socratic questions.
OK, I see you're doing x and y.
What if you tried--
what about Z?
Have you everthought about that?
You use suggestionsand ways of thinking
to try to navigate withthem in a thought process,
to have them think aboutthings differently.
(17:24):
So I've given them suggestionson how to self-organize.
I've given them somesuggestions on how to improve
and how you can estimatethe size of work, how
we work together respectfully.
So my job is, really,to sit and observe
and to give them someguidance on some things
(17:46):
that I use on my pastexperience, the fact
that I've been through it,I've worked on projects,
I've seen things go well andseen things go not so well.
So I'm able to say, hmm,you're on a good path,
and I can encourage youto stay on that path.
Or, if I see you on a paththat's heading for the cliff,
I say, can we sit down andhave a side discussion on this?
(18:07):
And let me pass on whatmy thoughts are on there
and then see whatyou think about it.
In other words, I'mnot telling them, stop,
go in a different direction.
I say, let's sit downand let me talk with you.
Because we don't want to give upthe power of self-organization.
In today's market,the knowledge workers
have all the skill setson how to get things
(18:27):
built along the way,so we don't want
to take that away from them.
We also want to give them someinfluence and some suggestions
that keep them working in areasonable direction, that
will get the outcomesthat were expected.
JILL FINLAYSON (18:42):
If I were to play the devil's advocate here,
you talk about theteams being really
responsible fordelivering the product.
Can they just doAgile on their own,
or is there a reasonwe need a Scrum Master?
NATE CREWS (18:55):
Well, good question.
I would say, at some point--
that's what I wouldconsider to be nirvana.
But most of us have beenindoctrinated and, dare I say,
brainwashed, into workingin an environment where
we have a project managertelling us what to do,
and that's why weneed a Scrum Master.
Sometimes, when yousay, OK, self-organize,
(19:15):
it's like, OK, what's that?
Sometimes, you need somebodyto give you the examples
and work you throughsome exercises,
to grow those skill sets in yourmind on how to self-organize.
That's what the ScrumMaster is there for,
is to help stimulatethe thinking
towards working togethercollaboratively to get
(19:36):
work done.
JILL FINLAYSON (19:37):
So somebody who can be almost at the 10,000-foot
level can look across teams,because the people who are
in the team are kindof in the weeds.
NATE CREWS (19:46):
Well, I think we have Scrum coaches
at different levels.
There's coachesat the team level,
that kind of gives perspectiveon how to work as a team.
And they also wouldinterject some things
from higher levelsthat would help
the people at the tacticallevel do their jobs.
There are coaches atthe enterprise level,
that kind of talks about,how do I do agility at, shall
(20:08):
we say, a program level, whichis a grouping of projects
together.
Because one of the things thatmost Agile frameworks suggest
is working in teams--
well, particularly Scrum--of teams of up to 10 persons.
Now, that gets to bekind of problematic
for some organizations, let'ssay an aerospace company,
(20:29):
like a Boeing orNorthrop Grumman
that have hundreds ofthousands of employees,
and to have them work insize of teams of 10 only
could be a little problematic.
But you can scale it up inprogram and have 10-person teams
report up to a program level andhave hundreds of people working
together here.
JILL FINLAYSON (20:48):
Yeah.
I think this is interesting.
So you've worked withso many different teams.
Would you say-- is thereone myth about Agile that
maybe drives you crazy orthat you see out there?
NATE CREWS (20:59):
Well, one of the things I feel about Agile,
it is the elixir for allproblems within development
teams.
It's like, it solvesall the problems.
All the errors will go away.
And, in reality, the peopleproblems still exist.
Agile is just a-- we call itWOW, a new Way Of Working.
So we still have toaddress those people issues
(21:22):
and try to synchronizethem, or to convince
them to work in a differentway of working, along the way.
And you're going to have peoplewho are reluctant to do it.
Some people will be on board.
Some people will tryto do it their way.
Some people want to workin isolation by themselves.
Some people are goingto be good team members.
We have to corral all thosedifferent mindsets together
(21:42):
to be a good, functioning team.
And we also need to recognizethe Tuckman-Jensen model,
that a great teamdoesn't happen overnight.
They have toevolve, and you have
to let them make mistakes andlearn how to become better
at working together.
And, eventually, theywill get it, over time.
The thing is, we don't want thattime period to be 12 months.
(22:02):
We want to be able to-- us toreconcile how to work together
successfully as a team.
JILL FINLAYSON (22:07):
To make that more concrete, since you have
worked with a lotof teams, is there
an example you can give wherethe team had to rethink how they
work together and thenthey got-- this new Agile
mindset finally clicked?
NATE CREWS (22:19):
Let's just say it was
a complex system of deliveringon systems that I supported,
and they tried to deliver it inyour normal waterfall approach.
And they lost many man yearsof development, hundreds
of millions ofdollars, in trying
to do it in a sequential way.
And then they said,OK, let's try--
(22:40):
let's restart thisprogram over again,
and we want to integratesome Agile work here.
And instead of-- let's let theteam members give us some more
guidance, or let's delegatesome of the decisions down
to the team membersand let them decide
on how the work getsdone along the way.
And we'll break things upinto smaller increments.
And what happens was, afterreintroducing that program
(23:03):
over again and usingsome Agile principles
and using a deliverysystem, they
were able to get that projectdone in half the time,
and save money on it,than before, because it
was a solutionthat was considered
to be complex, not complicated.
Complex is when you have a lotof uncertainty and you go along
(23:26):
and you have to-- the solutionhas to evolve over time.
Complicated is justdoing something
that has a lot ofmoving parts with it.
This solution thatwe were talking about
was new technologiesthat we didn't know about
and we had to figureout along the way.
That is the sweetspot of agility,
because it allows us to figureout and do some experimentation.
(23:48):
Now, we probably did not as muchexperimentation as I would like.
When we tried to bring upthe topic of experimentation,
it was tough to get seniormanagement to buy into it.
But we did buy in to,let the knowledge workers
come up with how weshould approach this.
Because the people whohave done it before,
that's got the war scars andthe knowledge and the success
things, learn how to do this.
(24:08):
And we came out witha better outcome.
And, also, because we workin an Agile standpoint,
we didn't have to go backup to upper management
to make decisions.
We had everybody onthe team empowered
to make-- even a customerrepresentative-- to help make
decisions, so we didn't have tohave that delay of going back up
and ask for approval.
We had somebody empoweredto make those decisions
(24:29):
as part of the team.
JILL FINLAYSON (24:30):
You bring up a good point, though,
that sometimes you might wantto do something in a more Agile
way, but your executive teamisn't necessarily on board.
What have you seen thatworks for change management?
It sounds a little bitlike just showing the value
in time savings andclient satisfaction,
but that doesn'tnecessarily mean
they're going to change theway they've been doing things.
NATE CREWS (24:53):
So the thing is, first
of all, that's where we getback to customer centricity,
knowing your customer.
There's some things thatwe ask people to do.
One is called the empathymap, which is, what
does the customer think about?
What's their likes,their dislikes?
What do they see?
What have they heardout in the marketplace?
So you get a good understandingof who that person is.
How do they like information?
(25:13):
How do they don'tlike information?
All right?
And then, you sit down andhave a discussion with them
about the currentsituation and get
a sense of their risk profile.
How much risk to trysomething new are
they willing to invest in?
Now, some people say,I really don't want
to go that far with agility.
And I said, OK, tell youwhat-- what if I showed you
(25:34):
an approach in agilitythat eliminated
the waste in yourexisting systems?
We're not going to changeany of the software.
We're going to go in andsee what is redundant,
what have we over-processed, andremove out the waste elements.
And then, you go throughand you demonstrate to them.
They said, wow thatwas pretty good.
Is that all about agility?
No, that's just a little part.
You want to hear something else?
(25:55):
In other words, you've got tobring them-- some customers,
the appetite to newinnovations aren't that large,
so you have to walkthat walk with them.
Now, some may want to say,hey, I'm like a poker player,
I'm all in, try new technology.
You know, slow down, Joe.
We've got to thinkabout this methodically,
on how we're doing it.
There's cultural issues.
There's technology issues.
(26:16):
We've got to slow down.
We can't get this done tomorrow.
Let's think aboutit and slow it down.
So you need to understandwho are the decision makers
and how you can best supportthem, in this journey,
to become more agile.
JILL FINLAYSON (26:27):
It sounds like the risk profile
that you mentioned earlieralso comes into play.
How do you bring them inon a low-risk experiment,
before leveling it up?
NATE CREWS (26:35):
You've got to do a lot of listening.
You've got listeningwith your ears
and listening with your eyes.
How do you listenwith your eyes?
You observe people, whenyou bring up topics, and see
what their responses are.
And you've got to bea good people reader
and understand where they'reat and try to come up
with ways of suggestions.
(26:55):
You also need to-- whatwe call in the Agile space
clean language-- you also needto understand their language
and speak the problem tothem in their language.
So if you're trying to convincea financial person to sign off
on agility, you mayhave to go and delve
into the ROI andthe payback periods
and those things of doingthings a certain way.
(27:18):
If I have somebodywho's in quality,
you would talk about howquality can be enhanced in it.
So you need to understand whoyou're talking to along the way
here, to become a better personhere in being a change agent.
JILL FINLAYSON (27:29):
That sounds like a good job skill
to have, full stop, the abilityto both listen, to understand
how to put things in thelanguage that people understand
and what is the value to them.
NATE CREWS (27:41):
Yes.
And that's what I believe thattomorrow's project managers need
to be--
we should just callthem change agents
because they need to knowso many different things.
And project management willbe a component, but not
the overall componentof everything they do.
JILL FINLAYSON: Let's say more about (27:56):
undefined
that because I like this ideaof having change agents in more
roles.
Oftentimes, whenpeople hear Agile,
they tune out because they'relike, that's for the techies.
Where do you see Agileplaying in other jobs?
NATE CREWS (28:10):
Agile is playing into finance.
Now, that bringsanother dimension.
Because in finance, howcan I better apportion
the company's assets toget the best value here?
So that brings in dataanalytics because you
bring in data that helps usmake better decisions faster
and quickly, in smallerincrements here, along the way
(28:31):
here.
In HR, the agilityhas changed HR around
because now you have to gorecruit a new generation
of people to come work for you.
And there's a newgeneration to come in.
You can say, hey, I belong tothis big, monolithic engineering
firm, and if you come onboard and you're sharp,
you've got a good skill set,we promise you almost lifetime
(28:54):
employment.
Well, I don't like that.
I want to work with my friends.
And if I can'tfind a place where
I can work with a startupwith my friends, I mean,
I'm going to be a barista downhere at minimum wage for a while
till I get to a workwhere I like it at.
And you say, what?
Lifelong great employment,that-- the paradigms
of what the new workforcelooks for is different.
JILL FINLAYSON (29:15):
Let's talk about some of those skill
sets that peopleare going to need.
So you're talking about leadingwhen you're not a leader.
You're talking about doingexperiments and taking
risk and failure.
What are some ofthe skills you need,
if you're going to incorporateAgile into how you do your work?
NATE CREWS (29:33):
Well, Agile, you need to first start at the mind.
A lot of peoplestart with-- there's
a lot of differentpractices you can do.
You can pair, you can dotest-driven development,
and there's a wholeslew of practices.
Your mindset, you'vegot to believe
that some of the things that,normally, you wouldn't have done
before might bepossible, and you're
willing to do thingsand experiment
to see if it could work.
(29:55):
So when are you going to havethis growth Agile mindset?
You also need tohave an understanding
of what the big picture is.
We need people that play welltogether, that learns together.
JILL FINLAYSON (30:06):
Well, when we started out,
we were talking about how oldsystems of project management
were kind of tellingpeople what to do.
Here's your job, here'syour deliverable.
And now, we're trying to getthem to almost innately do
the right thing, but sometimesthat involves coaching.
How do you actuallyeffectively coach people
so that they can thrivein this Agile workplace?
NATE CREWS (30:27):
Well, first of all, you get to know them.
You've got to know what theirskill sets are, their desires.
And, also for mycoaching framework,
I look at people in fourdimensions, on will and skill.
Somebody is lowwill, low skill, that
means that they don'thave right skill set
and they really havebeen beaten down
and probably have struggledwith a job situation.
I've got to increasetheir will and attitude,
(30:49):
but I also need to feed themideas in small increments
and, also, situationally,almost tell them,
now, you go off and work onthis for the next week or so,
and let's look atwhat the outcome is.
OK?
Now, if we have what'sconsidered to be low skill,
high will, thoseare amazing people.
Those are, typically, the newpeople coming into the company.
They are excitable.
(31:10):
You can teach them.
They're putty in your hands.
And you can have that.
Then, there's some peoplewith high skill and high will.
Those are thosehigh-powered people,
that just grab amazinglycomplex functionality
and they could go with it.
You want to get them in thehands of some people that
are going to challenge them.
You have high skill,low will, that's
a person who's probably had somemajor failure when they got put
(31:30):
in the leadership role, and theyoperate with alligator arms,
and what we are goingto do is what I know
I won't get in trouble with.
I'll just do this, I'llcollect my paycheck, go home,
and my family will be happy.
Don't need to promote me again.
You put me up at the top--
I got stung once.
Don't worry about it.
Then, you just tellthem, hey, let's
look through the frontwindshield going forward here.
What you did in the pastis not indicative of what
(31:53):
you could do in the future.
So, sometimes, you've gotto work with people along--
and everybody's journey, andthe length of the journey,
is different.
As a coach, you've gotto believe in people
and be willing to work withthem because you believe
that they are a good person.
JILL FINLAYSON (32:07):
And I think you've said, in other occasions,
too, as somebody in a job, youneed to stop following recipes
and start thinking like a chef.
How does this relate to whogets promoted in the past, who
gets promoted now, and whatdoes the skills agility
mean in that chef analogy?
NATE CREWS (32:25):
To become a chef-- if you go and look
at that analogy, some peopletoil in many different kitchens
to become a chef, right?
And they work underpeople who are mean
and give them harshfeedback, but they
evolve a skillset of knowing how
to listen to someone--they can walk up
to the table of a customerand say, what kind of meal
do you want tonight?
What would make you happy?
(32:46):
And with that meal, Ithink-- with a nice Merlot
to go along with that.
What do you think?
I have some suggestions.
Because you dothings organically
because you have learnedthese things over time here.
So you have to become a chef.
You're tomorrow'sproject manager.
Now, so thoseproject managers that
currently exist, one of theinteresting things about being
a project manageris that things never
(33:08):
go the way it wassupposed to and you
have to deal with some goodthings and a lot of bad things
and overcome them.
And you have, what Icall, Spidey senses
and understand, well, oh, yeah.
I remember when Iprogrammed before.
We can't do that.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
So you stay awayfrom those things
that you think would be bad.
Now, if you take thatskill set and some
of your organizationalskills that you've
(33:30):
been able to acquirefrom previous,
and now you start reallyhaving an open mind
to learning technology--
I mean, going outon the internet
and coming up to speed on AIor taking a course from AI.
At any given time, myself,I have four classes--
I have a data analytics coursegoing, an AI course going on,
and I also am finishing upa second doctorate degree.
(33:52):
Because I want to haveknowledge, as an instructor,
to stay ahead of thepeople I need to teach.
JILL FINLAYSON (33:58):
Let's talk more about AI.
Since you've brought it up,this is a great opportunity
to say, how is AI beingused in project management?
Is it makingproject work easier?
How have you used it?
NATE CREWS (34:10):
Well, AI, first of all,
you've got to believein it as a good partner.
You can't be afraid of it.
A lot of people are afraid.
Well, AI is going toreplace us someday.
In reality, what'sgoing to really replace
you is the guy who canreally master using AI.
That's the person who'sgoing to replace you.
So the thing is you needto become comfortable
with AI applicationsand use them to augment.
(34:31):
Within projectmanagement, there's
a certain skillset that I always
thought of it as drudgery,coming up and balancing
a budget, coming up with yourplan from a budget standpoint,
within the parametersthey give you.
Well, AI can go throughmultiple scenarios
to help you come up with variousideas that you can look at
and to choose fromin seconds, where
(34:52):
it would take you hours to do.
Or, if you are goingthrough on a project plan,
leveling out resourceson your plan,
resources where everybody'ssomewhere between 40,
50 hours of work--
I mean, that's alot of late nights.
It's a lot of weekends.
And you're goingthrough the plan.
Your eyes get bad.
But, in some tools, youhit the level button,
and it pushes you outyour plan for five years,
(35:13):
and all the resourcesare 40 hours.
That's not good.
You need to go throughand do what-if scenarios,
to meticulously, surgicallyadd work here, take some work
from people along, and to getit into a nice framework that
works.
AI capabilities of today'stools can help you with that.
Also, they can help youwith some suggestions
for decision making.
If you go in and useChatGPT and give them
(35:36):
a set of parameters here, theycan come up with and give you
some suggestions.
The one thing Iwould tell you please
don't do, do not uniformlytake the outcome of AI
and say, OK, that's the answer.
Because AI pulls thingsfrom many different places
in the universe, andsome of those resources
are blatantly false.
JILL FINLAYSON (35:53):
I like the use for scenario planning.
Because you canchange the inputs,
you can change theoutputs, you can
see what different scenariosmight look like, of,
if we run into a problemwith some supply chain issue,
how would that impact things?
NATE CREWS (36:07):
What could be the possible offensive resolution?
Or, you could dorisk management.
You're starting a big,complex project here,
for some kind ofstate-of-the-art plane.
What are the risks?
There's risks allover the place.
They could give yousome ideas around risks
that you never didthought of, that
could later on be the gotchasof why your project failed.
So they are a good partner,if used in the right way.
(36:30):
But that's where theproject manager's sense of--
I call those Spideysenses, understanding how--
what would work well, ornot so well, in the culture
that you're working in?
Who are the people that we have?
What kind of skill setdo they need to have?
How do we need to train them, orhow do I need to up-skill them,
over the course of my project,for us to be successful?
So project managerswho have been around
have some innateskill sets that make
(36:50):
them perfect to be thechange agents of the future.
But, sometimes, we getto a fixed mindset.
I'm good at what I'm doing here.
And why should I think aboutsome of those other things?
I'm good at this.
I'm going to ride it out.
Well, if you ride it out,it may be a short journey
because, in today'smarketplace, it's
like you were a-- you're anexpert eight-track player
producer.
JILL FINLAYSON (37:10):
[LAUGHING]
NATE CREWS (37:11):
You'd be really not doing so well right now.
JILL FINLAYSON (37:14):
That's a good transition
to asking the question, ifyou're not currently a project
manager, but you want tomove into project management,
from, perhaps, anindividual contributor
role, what would be the firststeps that you would take?
NATE CREWS (37:27):
You have to want to be a person that
wants to evoke change.
And, in that evoking change, youwant to do it through people.
And you get a thrill of doingit from the role of being
a projects manager/coach changeagent of the future here.
But, in order to do it inthe future, like I said,
you're going to have to learnhow to be a better coach,
(37:48):
and you have to have abouta 50% understanding of most
of the current technologygoing on and how
you might want to strategizeor implementing them
for the solutionof your customers.
JILL FINLAYSON (38:00):
As a person who's coached a lot of people,
how do you help themfigure out their career
path or their career goals?
And do you have a favoritemoment as a coach?
NATE CREWS (38:09):
To answer your first question, I don't.
Because, as a coach, my jobis not to give you answers.
I'm supposed to go through anintellectual journey with you,
a dance, per se.
And it's structured.
Like, if you and Iwere talking, Jill,
and we would come down andsit down and say, Jill,
how are you doing today,you'd say, fine, right?
What do you want to talk about?
And you'd bring up a topic.
And I'd say, well, why isthat topic important to you?
(38:32):
And then, I might ask you, OK.
In the future, how wouldyou like that problem
to go away or transform intosomething else that would
be more acceptable to you?
And then, we would go throughand have ideas or options
that not--
I generate-- I wouldcome up with new avenues,
through our discussion,for you to think about,
but you come up with the ideas.
Because if I tellyou what to do,
(38:53):
then you hold me accountable.
In the coachingprocess, I need to have
you hold yourselfaccountable and you come up
with the options.
I am there to guideyou along the way.
I'm long in thetooth and old, but I
work with some amazingyoung people that
have worked in theAgile space and have
done some collaborativecoaching with them.
I would think thatI have given them
(39:14):
some guidance on howto be better coaches,
and they helped mebe better coaches.
So I would say there's not aone person that I helped grow.
I have people in the past--
I talked to onejust the other day--
sometimes, when I talk tohim, he even mentors me.
We do reverse mentoring, as Irun into ideas and thoughts.
He's now a program managerof an IT company here.
I'm very proud of him.
(39:34):
He's got a wonderful wife.
He's got childrengoing off to college.
His daughter's at anIvy League school,
and she's going to be a doctor.
And to think from theburgeoning from him--
well, first of all, hemade one good choice,
he married a great wife here.
He came to one of theparties at my house--
and I still teasehim about that--
and they walked in together andthey had on matching sweaters.
(39:57):
And I pulled him aside.
I said, you know, you're abrave man to walk in front of me
in here like that today.
But you know what?
That was a symbol of himhaving a great partnership,
that he went forwardto go forward.
So, I mean, I have people thatI work with along the way.
I try, right now, to dosome teaching and interject
and give them more thanwhat they asked for.
I work within the scripts andthe syllabus that we have here,
(40:19):
but if they ask for more, ifpossible, I would do that.
And I also say that,after the course is over,
the relationship doesn't end.
I'm here to supportyou, if you need that.
Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
We can set up some time to work.
So the coaching thingis believing in people
and watching them grow.
And you just smile.
You don't take credit for it.
You just say, hey, I helped themalong the way and that was good.
JILL FINLAYSON (40:42):
That's a couple of good, really great, tips
right there, which is toask for help and give help.
Do you have anyother final words
of advice on how skillsagility can help someone
future-proof their career?
NATE CREWS (40:54):
Always think about what's
coming next on the horizon.
Always think about, how doI get to customer delight?
How do I need tochange my behavior?
How do I need tochange the results?
How do I need towork with people?
How do I need to go aboveand beyond to help with that?
Now, if you are a person who hasmastered the customer delight
job, I would saythat you're not going
(41:15):
to have a problem keeping ajob or getting new assignments.
The work will come to you.
Understanding the differencebetween output and--
outcomes and values.
Values and outcomes is thenew language of the day.
And we switchedfrom KPIs to OKRs,
which is talking about leadingindicators versus lagging
(41:36):
indicators.
There's a lot-- there'sa whole lot of things
you need to grasp onto.
And you need to grasp ontoto being a lifelong learner.
I would say I'm anuber-lifelong learner.
And then, as you're inthis tunnel of learning,
you get into thattunnel and realize,
the further you go inthat tunnel, the more
further away thattunnel gets for you.
But you just keep going,until you get to the end.
(41:56):
Because, along that journey,you become more knowledgeable,
more valuable and helpful,for others along the way.
JILL FINLAYSON (42:01):
Thank you so much, Nate.
I really appreciate all ofthe advice and insights.
And, with that, Ihope you have enjoyed
this latest in a longseries of podcasts
that we'll be sendingyour way every month.
Please share with friendsand colleagues who
may be interested in taking thisfuture of work journey with us,
and make sure to check outextension.berkeley.edu to find
a variety of coursesand certificates
(42:23):
to help you thrive in thisnew working landscape.
And to see what's comingup next at EDGE in Tech,
go ahead and visithdi.berkeley.edu.
Thanks so much forlistening, and I'll
be back next monthto discuss how
emotional and cognitiveresilience will
be key to thriving inan AI-powered world.
The Future of Work podcastis hosted by Jill Finlayson,
produced by Sarah Benzuly, andedited by Matt DiPietro, Natalie
(42:46):
Newman, and Alicia Liao.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(00:03):
NATE CREWS (00:06):
I'm an advocate of do not let go of your legacy
knowledge, but you need toembrace the new knowledge of how
to do agility, how to thinkfrom a product-high standpoint
in delivering systemsgoing forward.
Those who are flexible andwilling to try new things out,
and become better atit, will be employed.
Those that stay stagnantin the old ways will not.
(00:28):
[MUSIC PLAYING]
JILL FINLAYSON (00:32):
Welcome to the Future of Work podcast,
with Berkeley Extensionand EDGE in Tech
at the University ofCalifornia, focused
on expanding diversityand gender equity in tech.
EDGE in Tech is part of theInnovation Hub at CITRIS,
the Center for IT Researchin the Interest of Society
and the Banatao Institute.
UC Berkeley Extension isthe continuing education arm
(00:53):
of UC Berkeley.
This month, we're exploringone of the biggest
shifts in the modernworkplace, the move
toward project-based work.
Companies areorganizing their efforts
around short-term, goal-driveninitiatives, rather than
long-term roles.
This evolution means thatproject management is no longer
just a specializedfunction, it's
(01:14):
becoming a coreskill for everyone.
Knowing how to lead a team,manage deadlines, and deliver
results is essential in today'sfast-moving and cross-functional
environment.
But equally important isskills agility, the ability
to adapt quickly, learncontinuously, and apply
your talents across differentteams and challenges.
In a project-based world, themost valuable professionals
(01:36):
are the ones who can shiftgears and thrive in any setting.
To learn moreabout this, we turn
to Nate Crews, aresults-oriented senior Agile
transformation leader and coach.
He has demonstrated successin leveraging technology
to enhance business operationsand to impact the bottom line.
Nate is also a respectedleader at empowering
(01:57):
cross-functional teams todrive organizational success
and surpass corporate goals.
As an instructor, heteaches and coaches
students in businessand technology
concepts for theUniversity of California,
Berkeley Extension and theCaltech Center for Technology
and Management, as well ascorporate clients worldwide.
Welcome, Nate.
NATE CREWS (02:17):
Thank you for that amazing presentation.
I need to hang outwith you more often.
[LAUGHING]
JILL FINLAYSON (02:21):
I'm looking forward to it.
So take us back--
what did project managementuse to mean at work,
and when did you firstrealize that that approach was
starting to break down?
NATE CREWS (02:32):
For me, project management in the past
used to be about order.
So it was about gettinga person well skilled
and to be able tobreak down a project
into fundamental components,organize it, plan for it,
assign people assignments,and coordinate all
its deliverables at the end.
(02:53):
And the key wordthere is deliverables.
So the focus was, how canI take these resources
and a set of raw materialand end up with deliverables?
Now, those are great things,but sometimes the deliverable,
based on the fact that we mayhave started this project six
months ago, may not bevaluable now, as far as what
we need to do here.
(03:14):
We have to change our focus.
And that pivot shouldbe from deliverables
to value and outcomes.
We're not so much concernedwith deliverables so much.
It's outcomes and value.
Because you needto generate value.
Because, once youdeliver to the client,
they need to goout and exploit it
for their businesspurposes, which
takes us to a differentparadigm in how we look at work.
(03:36):
So we also, now, need to look atnot just the deliverable itself,
it's the flow of value.
The flow of value has adifferent set of sequences.
And, as you hadmentioned before,
the outcomes that theyexpect for value are quicker.
We're right in the centerof the Fourth Industrial
Revolution with all thisemerging technologies,
and our customersare very demanding.
(03:58):
They want results now, and theywant better, faster, cheaper.
And they don't want towait six or seven months.
And, also, if somethingchanges, they want to change it,
even if it's latein the process.
So we've got ademanding environment,
a swell of new technologieshas enabled us,
and just a changing marketplaceand just complex solutions
(04:18):
that need to be delivered here.
So one of the things-- andyou might ask yourself, well,
why is this important?
It's a survival mechanism.
Those that arethoughtful, long-term
learners and can incorporateinto their skill set, those
who are flexible and willing totry new things out and become
better at it, will be employed.
(04:39):
Those that stay stagnantin the old ways will not.
JILL FINLAYSON (04:43):
This is an incredible, very succinct way
of saying that better, faster,quicker, and more agile,
being able to adaptto technology, that
seems like the driving force onwhy the old project management
systems didn't work.
You said there were,like, 40 skills
they used to teachpeople who got certified
in project management?
NATE CREWS (05:04):
Yeah, it was approximately--
there's 49 processesthat used to be
in the old version of theold PMBOK that we used to do.
It helped you initiateprojects, to plan for projects,
to execute on projects,to monitor and control.
And the PMP used to focus onhow well you could traverse
each one of thoseprocesses and to be
(05:24):
able to identify what theinputs were, the outputs were,
and the transformativeprocesses that you
use to take theinputs to the outputs.
So that's how youpassed the PMP before.
I think the latestedition of the PMP,
the focus has changedto value delivery.
So how do we generate value?
And it goes through and itlooks at the various value
(05:46):
streams that you need to be ableto navigate and guide people
through, as project manager.
And we're guiding peoplethrough, not commanding,
controlling, and tellingpeople what to do.
Because, a lot of thetimes, to be successful,
the knowledge resides inthe people doing the work.
And the successfulproject manager
now needs to be more of acoach or a thought provoker,
(06:09):
to think of new ideas andto also manage relationships
amongst the team.
So they are supportingthings you need to do.
It's, how do you understand whatis valuable to the customer?
And that's where agilitycomes into the play.
Agile-- the main tenetof agility, at least
in my mind-- some mayagree with or disagree--
is about customer centricityand rapid delivery
(06:31):
of value to those customers.
So understanding whatthe customer wants,
when they want it, and do,to the best of your ability,
deliver that value.
Now, I try to stayaway from the word
fast because sometimespeople think, well,
and they're going to bedoing it twice as fast.
No.
Sometimes deliveringvalue quicker
is delivering it incrementally,and sometimes delivering
(06:53):
is going through anddoing Lean engineering
and taking out the waste.
If I take out the waste, whatI deliver to the customer
is 100% viable todelivering value.
And that's rapid deliveryof value for the customer.
We have to use adifferent set of mindsets.
Some of the agilitymindsets come into play.
I think the mindset aroundproduct development comes in.
(07:13):
Instead of focusing onthe coordination-- that's
the project activities--we want to focus on,
how do I maximize thedelivery of this product
for the end customer, in atimeline within the metrics
that he's looking for?
JILL FINLAYSON (07:27):
So we're still using some of these tools,
but the mindsethas really changed.
And the mindsethas really shifted
to this customer-centricand adaptable mindset.
NATE CREWS (07:40):
And an adaptable mindset is one of the things
that I teach my studentshere, and when I first
get into the class, is thatthere are several practices
around agility, many of them.
But if you want to have aquantum leap in the performance,
you have to change your mindset.
And the mindset we talkabout is a growth mindset,
to be able to incorporatein the process--
not a very popular word--failure, failing fast,
(08:02):
in small increments.
Because failure is-- success isa way of learning, but failing
in small quantities, also,is another way of learning.
JILL FINLAYSON (08:10):
Can I ask, how does failing in small amounts
get you fasterdelivery of value?
NATE CREWS (08:16):
You do experiments in small increments.
Let's say you want to go look atthe flow of how a call center is
looking at various screensto address a problem,
and you don't know theright order of what
those screens should look like.
You've tried to do it.
You've done chalk talks.
You've doneengineering analysis.
And, really, there'sno definitive order.
Well, an experiment.
(08:37):
Let's say we had threescreens, A, B, C. Well,
you may tell somebody togo off for three hours
and build out the executionof screens of B, C, A.
And you tell somebody else tobuild out a screen of C, B, A.
And we look at the results.
Now, the result is, like,nah, that doesn't work.
That is a failurebecause it doesn't
(08:58):
fit the needs of what we did.
And we found out throughexploration of that.
I'm saying in small increments,doing little tiny experiments.
And experiments have been partof our culture for many years.
If you look at Thomas Edison,he failed thousands of times.
Where did he end up?
With the light bulb.
And Walt Disney wentbankrupt three times
in some of his attempts toget the most wonderful place
(09:20):
in the world to go to.
So failure isn't somethingthat's foreign to us.
It's just, we've been told thatthe expectation is you have
to be perfect the first time.
And that gets us into alignmentof things of normality.
But if you want to startto extend it and do things
better, faster, cheaper, wehave to think out of the box
and try some things thatwe normally wouldn't do.
JILL FINLAYSON (09:40):
I think that was a good example, sort
of contrasting theold-school project
management with the newer.
So in the old school,it was, try something
for longer periods of time oryou just stuck with the plan.
And what you're suggestingnow is that sort of waterfall,
one thing following theother, doesn't work anymore.
(10:00):
And I'm curious if youcan say more about why
it doesn't work anymore?
NATE CREWS (10:05):
I am not against waterfall.
I think waterfall hasbeen an amazing thing,
has done some amazingaccomplishments over time.
It has its time, and it hasits purpose, even today.
As you have more complexembedded systems here--
when you're dealing witha government for military
applications, you've got 1,000contractors and very complicated
(10:27):
algorithms.
If you're doing biotech, theseare complicated algorithms.
There is a place forwaterfall because they
mandate to have certain thingsto be done sequentially,
in a certain order andway of things of doing it.
However, a lot of the thingswe're developing here,
particularly in software,falls into the complex area
of a lot of uncertainty.
(10:48):
If we are uncertainabout what we need to do
and we need to exploreto come up with ideas--
you try something.
It works.
Then, you build on that and youtry it and you build on that.
If something doesn't work, thenyou pivot to something else.
So I think the projectmanager of today
needs to recognizeand respect some
of the deliveries ofwaterfall and, also,
to be able to dothat transformation,
(11:10):
to help people learnhow to do things
from an Agile perspective.
Because that's theway of the future.
JILL FINLAYSON (11:16):
What stands out to me-- and for people who maybe
are new to projectmanagement, waterfall
meaning an orderof events, looking
at dependencies, something hasto happen before the next thing
can happen.
Why is that useful in some casesand less useful in other cases?
NATE CREWS (11:33):
Let me ask you a question-- if someone
was building a nuclearplant in your neighborhood,
would you want them todo a lot of experiments
to figure out whatthey needed to do,
or would you want to gothrough a nice, orderly process
because of what was atrisk is catastrophic?
So there's stillsome applications
that we need todo very mindfully
and meticulously to get done.
(11:54):
Satellite systems,ground systems, these
are some things that stillneed to be done meticulously.
But within it, those components,there might be some software
that I can iterate, todevelop, to be better outcomes
or I could iterate on alogistics of how we order and do
things from a supplychain standpoint.
My thing that I'man advocate of,
(12:16):
do not let go of yourlegacy knowledge,
but you need to embrace the newknowledge of how to do agility,
how to think from aproduct-high standpoint
in delivering systemsgoing forward.
JILL FINLAYSON (12:26):
And it sounds like there's
an overarching objective andtimeline that needs to be met,
but, within that, you can addsome Agile practices in the
how to meet each oneof those milestones.
NATE CREWS (12:38):
You can do it from a standpoint
of an entire framework.
There's a lot of Agilepractices that you can do.
As a project manager, you needto sit down with the customer.
Again, that's customercentricity, listening to them,
listening to their problem,listening to their boundaries
and understandingwhat's going on.
Sometimes, those of us whoget excited about Agile--
I certainly do-- and Iwould want to get into Agile
(13:00):
because it's a fun environmentand a lot less regimented.
But if the customerhas some constraints
and needs to maintainold legacy systems,
I need to listen to them andcome up with some solutions
to say, hey, I may do a littlebit of waterfall and somewhat
of agility for rightnow, to what you are.
I try to be proficientin knowledge
of all the frameworks, allthe organizational development
(13:23):
activities, all the thingsabout developing people.
And then, I listento the customer.
And I use that knowledgebase to get there.
But the thing is thatI go through and have
acquired this knowledge.
And I think that's somethingabout the project managers,
you have to be a constant,lifelong learner.
And I also want toadvocate, on your job,
(13:44):
you should be spending80% of your job
doing your job, another 20%on how I can become better
and staying aheadof what's coming out
on the new place or area.
What's going on in AI?
What's going on incloud computing?
Because those things come in.
When they come in, theycome at you immediately.
And you say, well,I'm still up to speed
in the old way ofdoing things here
and I'll have to get caught up.
(14:05):
And, see, you'renot a player then.
But, if you've beenthinking about it
and acquiring knowledge, stayinga little bit ahead of what
you're actuallydoing at your company
right now, when those thingscome in-- because they will
eventually come in becausewe are an evolving society
here-- you are ready.
So you've got to alwaysbe thinking and probing
on that 20%.
JILL FINLAYSON (14:24):
So you've brought up
a number of terms, Scrum, Agile.
What are thesedifferent terminology,
that people might hear whenthey hear about Agile project
management, andwhat do they mean
and why are theredifferent words?
Are there differentmethodologies?
What are we hearing here?
NATE CREWS (14:40):
So Agile, really, is a set of behavior
that are focused on us, one,delivering rapid delivery
of value for the customer,through the collaboration
of multiple people, withdifferent skill sets
and that goesthrough and do things
in an iterative way, where theydo things in small increments,
(15:01):
get feedback on thatincrement, and then we
make adjustments along theway to get things done.
So Agile focusesin on innovation,
definitely workingcollaboratively with people,
and, also, deliveringvalue to the customer
in a prioritized way.
So one of the things, firststeps, on an Agile project
is they have arole of a customer
(15:23):
role, that's part of the team,that's called a product owner.
They work actively with theirexecutives or their stakeholders
to identify-- what is theproblem that we need to fix;
what opportunitywe need to exploit;
what does that realize,with respect to a solution;
and what are the featuresassociated with that solution;
and then get fromthem a sense of,
(15:44):
what is the priorityof delivering these?
That priorityfactor that you put
on all these featuresand stories, also,
is a way of deliveringthings faster to your client.
Because if I deliver to theclient what they want the most,
that's acceleratedvalue to the client.
Because if I focuson what you're
most important about, oryour biggest pain point,
that's another way ofdelivering value to the client.
(16:07):
So agility is justa way of behaving
to deliver a customerthat focus on feedback.
It looks atinnovation, constantly
looking at ways of improving.
A lot of the projectmanagement approaches
think about improvingthrough lessons learned,
but we put that inknowledge repositories.
Agility activelysays, now, what we've
(16:28):
learned that we could dobetter, what can we actively,
now, employ, in our nextiteration, to become better?
JILL FINLAYSON (16:34):
So if agility is the umbrella,
where do words like Scrum--
and what are some otherwords that people hear?
NATE CREWS (16:41):
Scrum is a framework of delivering--
it was primarily for software--for delivering projects
that had a definitive role of aproduct owner, who was a value
maximizer from the business.
You would figure out what wasimportant from the business,
from value.
You have a Scrum Master, thatwas not a project manager.
Imagine there's a person on theteam that has no authority--
(17:03):
this is what theframework says--
but you convince peopleon doing the right thing
through suggestions.
You ask the Socratic questions.
OK, I see you're doing x and y.
What if you tried--
what about Z?
Have you everthought about that?
You use suggestionsand ways of thinking
to try to navigate withthem in a thought process,
to have them think aboutthings differently.
(17:24):
So I've given them suggestionson how to self-organize.
I've given them somesuggestions on how to improve
and how you can estimatethe size of work, how
we work together respectfully.
So my job is, really,to sit and observe
and to give them someguidance on some things
(17:46):
that I use on my pastexperience, the fact
that I've been through it,I've worked on projects,
I've seen things go well andseen things go not so well.
So I'm able to say, hmm,you're on a good path,
and I can encourage youto stay on that path.
Or, if I see you on a paththat's heading for the cliff,
I say, can we sit down andhave a side discussion on this?
(18:07):
And let me pass on whatmy thoughts are on there
and then see whatyou think about it.
In other words, I'mnot telling them, stop,
go in a different direction.
I say, let's sit downand let me talk with you.
Because we don't want to give upthe power of self-organization.
In today's market,the knowledge workers
have all the skill setson how to get things
(18:27):
built along the way,so we don't want
to take that away from them.
We also want to give them someinfluence and some suggestions
that keep them working in areasonable direction, that
will get the outcomesthat were expected.
JILL FINLAYSON (18:42):
If I were to play the devil's advocate here,
you talk about theteams being really
responsible fordelivering the product.
Can they just doAgile on their own,
or is there a reasonwe need a Scrum Master?
NATE CREWS (18:55):
Well, good question.
I would say, at some point--
that's what I wouldconsider to be nirvana.
But most of us have beenindoctrinated and, dare I say,
brainwashed, into workingin an environment where
we have a project managertelling us what to do,
and that's why weneed a Scrum Master.
Sometimes, when yousay, OK, self-organize,
(19:15):
it's like, OK, what's that?
Sometimes, you need somebodyto give you the examples
and work you throughsome exercises,
to grow those skill sets in yourmind on how to self-organize.
That's what the ScrumMaster is there for,
is to help stimulatethe thinking
towards working togethercollaboratively to get
(19:36):
work done.
JILL FINLAYSON (19:37):
So somebody who can be almost at the 10,000-foot
level can look across teams,because the people who are
in the team are kindof in the weeds.
NATE CREWS (19:46):
Well, I think we have Scrum coaches
at different levels.
There's coachesat the team level,
that kind of gives perspectiveon how to work as a team.
And they also wouldinterject some things
from higher levelsthat would help
the people at the tacticallevel do their jobs.
There are coaches atthe enterprise level,
that kind of talks about,how do I do agility at, shall
(20:08):
we say, a program level, whichis a grouping of projects
together.
Because one of the things thatmost Agile frameworks suggest
is working in teams--
well, particularly Scrum--of teams of up to 10 persons.
Now, that gets to bekind of problematic
for some organizations, let'ssay an aerospace company,
(20:29):
like a Boeing orNorthrop Grumman
that have hundreds ofthousands of employees,
and to have them work insize of teams of 10 only
could be a little problematic.
But you can scale it up inprogram and have 10-person teams
report up to a program level andhave hundreds of people working
together here.
JILL FINLAYSON (20:48):
Yeah.
I think this is interesting.
So you've worked withso many different teams.
Would you say-- is thereone myth about Agile that
maybe drives you crazy orthat you see out there?
NATE CREWS (20:59):
Well, one of the things I feel about Agile,
it is the elixir for allproblems within development
teams.
It's like, it solvesall the problems.
All the errors will go away.
And, in reality, the peopleproblems still exist.
Agile is just a-- we call itWOW, a new Way Of Working.
So we still have toaddress those people issues
(21:22):
and try to synchronizethem, or to convince
them to work in a differentway of working, along the way.
And you're going to have peoplewho are reluctant to do it.
Some people will be on board.
Some people will tryto do it their way.
Some people want to workin isolation by themselves.
Some people are goingto be good team members.
We have to corral all thosedifferent mindsets together
(21:42):
to be a good, functioning team.
And we also need to recognizethe Tuckman-Jensen model,
that a great teamdoesn't happen overnight.
They have toevolve, and you have
to let them make mistakes andlearn how to become better
at working together.
And, eventually, theywill get it, over time.
The thing is, we don't want thattime period to be 12 months.
(22:02):
We want to be able to-- us toreconcile how to work together
successfully as a team.
JILL FINLAYSON (22:07):
To make that more concrete, since you have
worked with a lotof teams, is there
an example you can give wherethe team had to rethink how they
work together and thenthey got-- this new Agile
mindset finally clicked?
NATE CREWS (22:19):
Let's just say it was
a complex system of deliveringon systems that I supported,
and they tried to deliver it inyour normal waterfall approach.
And they lost many man yearsof development, hundreds
of millions ofdollars, in trying
to do it in a sequential way.
And then they said,OK, let's try--
(22:40):
let's restart thisprogram over again,
and we want to integratesome Agile work here.
And instead of-- let's let theteam members give us some more
guidance, or let's delegatesome of the decisions down
to the team membersand let them decide
on how the work getsdone along the way.
And we'll break things upinto smaller increments.
And what happens was, afterreintroducing that program
(23:03):
over again and usingsome Agile principles
and using a deliverysystem, they
were able to get that projectdone in half the time,
and save money on it,than before, because it
was a solutionthat was considered
to be complex, not complicated.
Complex is when you have a lotof uncertainty and you go along
(23:26):
and you have to-- the solutionhas to evolve over time.
Complicated is justdoing something
that has a lot ofmoving parts with it.
This solution thatwe were talking about
was new technologiesthat we didn't know about
and we had to figureout along the way.
That is the sweetspot of agility,
because it allows us to figureout and do some experimentation.
(23:48):
Now, we probably did not as muchexperimentation as I would like.
When we tried to bring upthe topic of experimentation,
it was tough to get seniormanagement to buy into it.
But we did buy in to,let the knowledge workers
come up with how weshould approach this.
Because the people whohave done it before,
that's got the war scars andthe knowledge and the success
things, learn how to do this.
(24:08):
And we came out witha better outcome.
And, also, because we workin an Agile standpoint,
we didn't have to go backup to upper management
to make decisions.
We had everybody onthe team empowered
to make-- even a customerrepresentative-- to help make
decisions, so we didn't have tohave that delay of going back up
and ask for approval.
We had somebody empoweredto make those decisions
(24:29):
as part of the team.
JILL FINLAYSON (24:30):
You bring up a good point, though,
that sometimes you might wantto do something in a more Agile
way, but your executive teamisn't necessarily on board.
What have you seen thatworks for change management?
It sounds a little bitlike just showing the value
in time savings andclient satisfaction,
but that doesn'tnecessarily mean
they're going to change theway they've been doing things.
NATE CREWS (24:53):
So the thing is, first
of all, that's where we getback to customer centricity,
knowing your customer.
There's some things thatwe ask people to do.
One is called the empathymap, which is, what
does the customer think about?
What's their likes,their dislikes?
What do they see?
What have they heardout in the marketplace?
So you get a good understandingof who that person is.
How do they like information?
(25:13):
How do they don'tlike information?
All right?
And then, you sit down andhave a discussion with them
about the currentsituation and get
a sense of their risk profile.
How much risk to trysomething new are
they willing to invest in?
Now, some people say,I really don't want
to go that far with agility.
And I said, OK, tell youwhat-- what if I showed you
(25:34):
an approach in agilitythat eliminated
the waste in yourexisting systems?
We're not going to changeany of the software.
We're going to go in andsee what is redundant,
what have we over-processed, andremove out the waste elements.
And then, you go throughand you demonstrate to them.
They said, wow thatwas pretty good.
Is that all about agility?
No, that's just a little part.
You want to hear something else?
(25:55):
In other words, you've got tobring them-- some customers,
the appetite to newinnovations aren't that large,
so you have to walkthat walk with them.
Now, some may want to say,hey, I'm like a poker player,
I'm all in, try new technology.
You know, slow down, Joe.
We've got to thinkabout this methodically,
on how we're doing it.
There's cultural issues.
There's technology issues.
(26:16):
We've got to slow down.
We can't get this done tomorrow.
Let's think aboutit and slow it down.
So you need to understandwho are the decision makers
and how you can best supportthem, in this journey,
to become more agile.
JILL FINLAYSON (26:27):
It sounds like the risk profile
that you mentioned earlieralso comes into play.
How do you bring them inon a low-risk experiment,
before leveling it up?
NATE CREWS (26:35):
You've got to do a lot of listening.
You've got listeningwith your ears
and listening with your eyes.
How do you listenwith your eyes?
You observe people, whenyou bring up topics, and see
what their responses are.
And you've got to bea good people reader
and understand where they'reat and try to come up
with ways of suggestions.
(26:55):
You also need to-- whatwe call in the Agile space
clean language-- you also needto understand their language
and speak the problem tothem in their language.
So if you're trying to convincea financial person to sign off
on agility, you mayhave to go and delve
into the ROI andthe payback periods
and those things of doingthings a certain way.
(27:18):
If I have somebodywho's in quality,
you would talk about howquality can be enhanced in it.
So you need to understand whoyou're talking to along the way
here, to become a better personhere in being a change agent.
JILL FINLAYSON (27:29):
That sounds like a good job skill
to have, full stop, the abilityto both listen, to understand
how to put things in thelanguage that people understand
and what is the value to them.
NATE CREWS (27:41):
Yes.
And that's what I believe thattomorrow's project managers need
to be--
we should just callthem change agents
because they need to knowso many different things.
And project management willbe a component, but not
the overall componentof everything they do.
JILL FINLAYSON: Let's say more about (27:56):
undefined
that because I like this ideaof having change agents in more
roles.
Oftentimes, whenpeople hear Agile,
they tune out because they'relike, that's for the techies.
Where do you see Agileplaying in other jobs?
NATE CREWS (28:10):
Agile is playing into finance.
Now, that bringsanother dimension.
Because in finance, howcan I better apportion
the company's assets toget the best value here?
So that brings in dataanalytics because you
bring in data that helps usmake better decisions faster
and quickly, in smallerincrements here, along the way
(28:31):
here.
In HR, the agilityhas changed HR around
because now you have to gorecruit a new generation
of people to come work for you.
And there's a newgeneration to come in.
You can say, hey, I belong tothis big, monolithic engineering
firm, and if you come onboard and you're sharp,
you've got a good skill set,we promise you almost lifetime
(28:54):
employment.
Well, I don't like that.
I want to work with my friends.
And if I can'tfind a place where
I can work with a startupwith my friends, I mean,
I'm going to be a barista downhere at minimum wage for a while
till I get to a workwhere I like it at.
And you say, what?
Lifelong great employment,that-- the paradigms
of what the new workforcelooks for is different.
JILL FINLAYSON (29:15):
Let's talk about some of those skill
sets that peopleare going to need.
So you're talking about leadingwhen you're not a leader.
You're talking about doingexperiments and taking
risk and failure.
What are some ofthe skills you need,
if you're going to incorporateAgile into how you do your work?
NATE CREWS (29:33):
Well, Agile, you need to first start at the mind.
A lot of peoplestart with-- there's
a lot of differentpractices you can do.
You can pair, you can dotest-driven development,
and there's a wholeslew of practices.
Your mindset, you'vegot to believe
that some of the things that,normally, you wouldn't have done
before might bepossible, and you're
willing to do thingsand experiment
to see if it could work.
(29:55):
So when are you going to havethis growth Agile mindset?
You also need tohave an understanding
of what the big picture is.
We need people that play welltogether, that learns together.
JILL FINLAYSON (30:06):
Well, when we started out,
we were talking about how oldsystems of project management
were kind of tellingpeople what to do.
Here's your job, here'syour deliverable.
And now, we're trying to getthem to almost innately do
the right thing, but sometimesthat involves coaching.
How do you actuallyeffectively coach people
so that they can thrivein this Agile workplace?
NATE CREWS (30:27):
Well, first of all, you get to know them.
You've got to know what theirskill sets are, their desires.
And, also for mycoaching framework,
I look at people in fourdimensions, on will and skill.
Somebody is lowwill, low skill, that
means that they don'thave right skill set
and they really havebeen beaten down
and probably have struggledwith a job situation.
I've got to increasetheir will and attitude,
(30:49):
but I also need to feed themideas in small increments
and, also, situationally,almost tell them,
now, you go off and work onthis for the next week or so,
and let's look atwhat the outcome is.
OK?
Now, if we have what'sconsidered to be low skill,
high will, thoseare amazing people.
Those are, typically, the newpeople coming into the company.
They are excitable.
(31:10):
You can teach them.
They're putty in your hands.
And you can have that.
Then, there's some peoplewith high skill and high will.
Those are thosehigh-powered people,
that just grab amazinglycomplex functionality
and they could go with it.
You want to get them in thehands of some people that
are going to challenge them.
You have high skill,low will, that's
a person who's probably had somemajor failure when they got put
(31:30):
in the leadership role, and theyoperate with alligator arms,
and what we are goingto do is what I know
I won't get in trouble with.
I'll just do this, I'llcollect my paycheck, go home,
and my family will be happy.
Don't need to promote me again.
You put me up at the top--
I got stung once.
Don't worry about it.
Then, you just tellthem, hey, let's
look through the frontwindshield going forward here.
What you did in the pastis not indicative of what
(31:53):
you could do in the future.
So, sometimes, you've gotto work with people along--
and everybody's journey, andthe length of the journey,
is different.
As a coach, you've gotto believe in people
and be willing to work withthem because you believe
that they are a good person.
JILL FINLAYSON (32:07):
And I think you've said, in other occasions,
too, as somebody in a job, youneed to stop following recipes
and start thinking like a chef.
How does this relate to whogets promoted in the past, who
gets promoted now, and whatdoes the skills agility
mean in that chef analogy?
NATE CREWS (32:25):
To become a chef-- if you go and look
at that analogy, some peopletoil in many different kitchens
to become a chef, right?
And they work underpeople who are mean
and give them harshfeedback, but they
evolve a skillset of knowing how
to listen to someone--they can walk up
to the table of a customerand say, what kind of meal
do you want tonight?
What would make you happy?
(32:46):
And with that meal, Ithink-- with a nice Merlot
to go along with that.
What do you think?
I have some suggestions.
Because you dothings organically
because you have learnedthese things over time here.
So you have to become a chef.
You're tomorrow'sproject manager.
Now, so thoseproject managers that
currently exist, one of theinteresting things about being
a project manageris that things never
(33:08):
go the way it wassupposed to and you
have to deal with some goodthings and a lot of bad things
and overcome them.
And you have, what Icall, Spidey senses
and understand, well, oh, yeah.
I remember when Iprogrammed before.
We can't do that.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
So you stay awayfrom those things
that you think would be bad.
Now, if you take thatskill set and some
of your organizationalskills that you've
(33:30):
been able to acquirefrom previous,
and now you start reallyhaving an open mind
to learning technology--
I mean, going outon the internet
and coming up to speed on AIor taking a course from AI.
At any given time, myself,I have four classes--
I have a data analytics coursegoing, an AI course going on,
and I also am finishing upa second doctorate degree.
(33:52):
Because I want to haveknowledge, as an instructor,
to stay ahead of thepeople I need to teach.
JILL FINLAYSON (33:58):
Let's talk more about AI.
Since you've brought it up,this is a great opportunity
to say, how is AI beingused in project management?
Is it makingproject work easier?
How have you used it?
NATE CREWS (34:10):
Well, AI, first of all,
you've got to believein it as a good partner.
You can't be afraid of it.
A lot of people are afraid.
Well, AI is going toreplace us someday.
In reality, what'sgoing to really replace
you is the guy who canreally master using AI.
That's the person who'sgoing to replace you.
So the thing is you needto become comfortable
with AI applicationsand use them to augment.
(34:31):
Within projectmanagement, there's
a certain skillset that I always
thought of it as drudgery,coming up and balancing
a budget, coming up with yourplan from a budget standpoint,
within the parametersthey give you.
Well, AI can go throughmultiple scenarios
to help you come up with variousideas that you can look at
and to choose fromin seconds, where
(34:52):
it would take you hours to do.
Or, if you are goingthrough on a project plan,
leveling out resourceson your plan,
resources where everybody'ssomewhere between 40,
50 hours of work--
I mean, that's alot of late nights.
It's a lot of weekends.
And you're goingthrough the plan.
Your eyes get bad.
But, in some tools, youhit the level button,
and it pushes you outyour plan for five years,
(35:13):
and all the resourcesare 40 hours.
That's not good.
You need to go throughand do what-if scenarios,
to meticulously, surgicallyadd work here, take some work
from people along, and to getit into a nice framework that
works.
AI capabilities of today'stools can help you with that.
Also, they can help youwith some suggestions
for decision making.
If you go in and useChatGPT and give them
(35:36):
a set of parameters here, theycan come up with and give you
some suggestions.
The one thing Iwould tell you please
don't do, do not uniformlytake the outcome of AI
and say, OK, that's the answer.
Because AI pulls thingsfrom many different places
in the universe, andsome of those resources
are blatantly false.
JILL FINLAYSON (35:53):
I like the use for scenario planning.
Because you canchange the inputs,
you can change theoutputs, you can
see what different scenariosmight look like, of,
if we run into a problemwith some supply chain issue,
how would that impact things?
NATE CREWS (36:07):
What could be the possible offensive resolution?
Or, you could dorisk management.
You're starting a big,complex project here,
for some kind ofstate-of-the-art plane.
What are the risks?
There's risks allover the place.
They could give yousome ideas around risks
that you never didthought of, that
could later on be the gotchasof why your project failed.
So they are a good partner,if used in the right way.
(36:30):
But that's where theproject manager's sense of--
I call those Spideysenses, understanding how--
what would work well, ornot so well, in the culture
that you're working in?
Who are the people that we have?
What kind of skill setdo they need to have?
How do we need to train them, orhow do I need to up-skill them,
over the course of my project,for us to be successful?
So project managerswho have been around
have some innateskill sets that make
(36:50):
them perfect to be thechange agents of the future.
But, sometimes, we getto a fixed mindset.
I'm good at what I'm doing here.
And why should I think aboutsome of those other things?
I'm good at this.
I'm going to ride it out.
Well, if you ride it out,it may be a short journey
because, in today'smarketplace, it's
like you were a-- you're anexpert eight-track player
producer.
JILL FINLAYSON (37:10):
[LAUGHING]
NATE CREWS (37:11):
You'd be really not doing so well right now.
JILL FINLAYSON (37:14):
That's a good transition
to asking the question, ifyou're not currently a project
manager, but you want tomove into project management,
from, perhaps, anindividual contributor
role, what would be the firststeps that you would take?
NATE CREWS (37:27):
You have to want to be a person that
wants to evoke change.
And, in that evoking change, youwant to do it through people.
And you get a thrill of doingit from the role of being
a projects manager/coach changeagent of the future here.
But, in order to do it inthe future, like I said,
you're going to have to learnhow to be a better coach,
(37:48):
and you have to have abouta 50% understanding of most
of the current technologygoing on and how
you might want to strategizeor implementing them
for the solutionof your customers.
JILL FINLAYSON (38:00):
As a person who's coached a lot of people,
how do you help themfigure out their career
path or their career goals?
And do you have a favoritemoment as a coach?
NATE CREWS (38:09):
To answer your first question, I don't.
Because, as a coach, my jobis not to give you answers.
I'm supposed to go through anintellectual journey with you,
a dance, per se.
And it's structured.
Like, if you and Iwere talking, Jill,
and we would come down andsit down and say, Jill,
how are you doing today,you'd say, fine, right?
What do you want to talk about?
And you'd bring up a topic.
And I'd say, well, why isthat topic important to you?
(38:32):
And then, I might ask you, OK.
In the future, how wouldyou like that problem
to go away or transform intosomething else that would
be more acceptable to you?
And then, we would go throughand have ideas or options
that not--
I generate-- I wouldcome up with new avenues,
through our discussion,for you to think about,
but you come up with the ideas.
Because if I tellyou what to do,
(38:53):
then you hold me accountable.
In the coachingprocess, I need to have
you hold yourselfaccountable and you come up
with the options.
I am there to guideyou along the way.
I'm long in thetooth and old, but I
work with some amazingyoung people that
have worked in theAgile space and have
done some collaborativecoaching with them.
I would think thatI have given them
(39:14):
some guidance on howto be better coaches,
and they helped mebe better coaches.
So I would say there's not aone person that I helped grow.
I have people in the past--
I talked to onejust the other day--
sometimes, when I talk tohim, he even mentors me.
We do reverse mentoring, as Irun into ideas and thoughts.
He's now a program managerof an IT company here.
I'm very proud of him.
(39:34):
He's got a wonderful wife.
He's got childrengoing off to college.
His daughter's at anIvy League school,
and she's going to be a doctor.
And to think from theburgeoning from him--
well, first of all, hemade one good choice,
he married a great wife here.
He came to one of theparties at my house--
and I still teasehim about that--
and they walked in together andthey had on matching sweaters.
(39:57):
And I pulled him aside.
I said, you know, you're abrave man to walk in front of me
in here like that today.
But you know what?
That was a symbol of himhaving a great partnership,
that he went forwardto go forward.
So, I mean, I have people thatI work with along the way.
I try, right now, to dosome teaching and interject
and give them more thanwhat they asked for.
I work within the scripts andthe syllabus that we have here,
(40:19):
but if they ask for more, ifpossible, I would do that.
And I also say that,after the course is over,
the relationship doesn't end.
I'm here to supportyou, if you need that.
Reach out to me on LinkedIn.
We can set up some time to work.
So the coaching thingis believing in people
and watching them grow.
And you just smile.
You don't take credit for it.
You just say, hey, I helped themalong the way and that was good.
JILL FINLAYSON (40:42):
That's a couple of good, really great, tips
right there, which is toask for help and give help.
Do you have anyother final words
of advice on how skillsagility can help someone
future-proof their career?
NATE CREWS (40:54):
Always think about what's
coming next on the horizon.
Always think about, how doI get to customer delight?
How do I need tochange my behavior?
How do I need tochange the results?
How do I need towork with people?
How do I need to go aboveand beyond to help with that?
Now, if you are a person who hasmastered the customer delight
job, I would saythat you're not going
(41:15):
to have a problem keeping ajob or getting new assignments.
The work will come to you.
Understanding the differencebetween output and--
outcomes and values.
Values and outcomes is thenew language of the day.
And we switchedfrom KPIs to OKRs,
which is talking about leadingindicators versus lagging
(41:36):
indicators.
There's a lot-- there'sa whole lot of things
you need to grasp onto.
And you need to grasp ontoto being a lifelong learner.
I would say I'm anuber-lifelong learner.
And then, as you're inthis tunnel of learning,
you get into thattunnel and realize,
the further you go inthat tunnel, the more
further away thattunnel gets for you.
But you just keep going,until you get to the end.
(41:56):
Because, along that journey,you become more knowledgeable,
more valuable and helpful,for others along the way.
JILL FINLAYSON (42:01):
Thank you so much, Nate.
I really appreciate all ofthe advice and insights.
And, with that, Ihope you have enjoyed
this latest in a longseries of podcasts
that we'll be sendingyour way every month.
Please share with friendsand colleagues who
may be interested in taking thisfuture of work journey with us,
and make sure to check outextension.berkeley.edu to find
a variety of coursesand certificates
(42:23):
to help you thrive in thisnew working landscape.
And to see what's comingup next at EDGE in Tech,
go ahead and visithdi.berkeley.edu.
Thanks so much forlistening, and I'll
be back next monthto discuss how
emotional and cognitiveresilience will
be key to thriving inan AI-powered world.
The Future of Work podcastis hosted by Jill Finlayson,
produced by Sarah Benzuly, andedited by Matt DiPietro, Natalie
(42:46):
Newman, and Alicia Liao.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Popular Podcasts
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com