• The Technical Program Management Podcast & Interviews

  • By: Mario Gerard
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The Technical Program Management Podcast & Interviews

By: Mario Gerard
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  • The Technical Program Management Podcast with Mario Gerard
    Copyright The Technical Program Management Podcast 2017
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Episodes
  • TPM Podcast with Rhea – Episode II Part III

    TPM Podcast with Rhea – Episode II Part III
    Mar 7 2023
    Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your host, Mario Gerard. This is part three, the final part of how to run a large-scale program. Our conversation with Rhea, if you have in third part one and two, definitely check that out before you go ahead and listen to this part. I hope you enjoy it. Continue listening. Talking about that trend. What are the most common pitfalls you see people make, or, or people need to watch out for? Rhea Frondozo: So, as a breath TPM, one of the things that I know that has happened to not only me, but the TPMS that I manage is when you work on a large-scale program, you're working with a lot of different functional area owners, and it's your job to hold them accountable for getting their work done. But a lot of times when you come in as the TPM and you come in as such a strong lead, they want to be able to rely on you instead to get the work done and for you to solve their problem. The issue with this is when you're at breath TPM, you have so many different areas that you are managing, that if you were to do the work for everyone, instead of holding them accountable, ultimately you will fail. And so, it's really important as a breath TPM, to make sure that you understand your scope, your responsibility, your accountability, and figure out who it is that you need to rely on to do what work and hold them to that. Mario Gerard: Yeah. And sometimes you don't have the right people, what I’ve done in those kind of situations and say, Hey, talk to your senior leadership within your organization, and if you want, I will recommend somebody within that larger organization who I think can go ahead and do this for you, but you don't step in and help fix somebody else's problem, because then it becomes your problem. And then they kind of walk away. So, you want your pocs or your functional area owners to kind of own their space and to work on the problem and then get back to you on the milestones on how they're doing on it rather than you are running those smaller programs. Rhea Frondozo: Right. And this is where that judgment call is really necessary. Like how much you step in to help them get them on the right track versus you continue ensuring that they keep on track versus you doing it yourself. Mario Gerard: And where you step into help sometimes. Because sometimes they don't have a very strong lead and then you might go in to reactivate that program or put it on the right track and then ensure that you're monitoring it to some degree, but you're not actually going and doing all the work. Rhea Frondozo: And this is where trying to figure out kind of that line between how much you go in and try and help yourself versus how much you invest instead in making an escalation to leadership to ask for the help that you need. And so again, this comes down to a judgment call of where you spend your time as a TPM to make sure that your program as a whole is successful. Mario Gerard: Yeah. I think, I think one of the key things which I’ve learned, I am working at OCI was to always reevaluate where I'm spending my time. This is on literally on a daily basis or on a weekly basis. Like where am I spending most of my time? And is it the right place I'm spending that time, is this what I'm required to do? And is this for the necessity of the program? And is it good at help the long-term success of the program? Rhea Frondozo: Right. Because I think goes to a second point to make about a potential pit fall that a breath TPM may have. It's knowing when, when to rely on an SME versus is doing something yourself. Right? So it's important to, for us as TPMS to understand a problem at hand, but knowing how deep do you need to go in that problem and how deep you need to go in the solution versus making sure that you're pulling in the right people to do it, or just being the person that vets, are we solving it in the right way or solving the right problem. Because at the end of the day,
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    20 mins
  • TPM Podcast with Rhea – Episode II Part II

    TPM Podcast with Rhea – Episode II Part II
    Mar 7 2023
    Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your host, Mario Gerard. This is part two of the second series with Rhea, where we are talking about how you run L scale programs. If you haven't listened to part one of how you run large-scale programs, definitely check it out before you start this particular podcast, because this is a continuation of that. Hope you enjoy it. See you on the other side. Bye. One of the things to keep in mind when we design how we communicate in a log scale program. So, we spoke a lot about communication. But how do you design a communication plan for a large-scale program. Rhea Frondozo: So, you know, I think what it comes down to is making sure that you understand who you need to communicate with at what frequency at what level of communication, for what purpose and using what mechanism. So that's a lot of things I just said, right? But let's break that down. You're going to have a variety of different stakeholders who are going to need different levels of communication at different frequencies. So, if you, for example, are communicating with executives, you're going to need to be able to produce, you know, very concise executive summaries. Maybe it's going to be in a report or maybe it's going to be an executive status meeting, and it's going to be at whatever frequency that they feel that they need to be informed at, versus when you are actually managing the program with people who are say, POCs, the point of context, you're going to be wanting to have maybe status meetings where you're working through issues that they bring up. Maybe you're going to have a program tracking page where you're tracking the different, you know, initiatives that teams are working on. And you have a way that you can gather the variety of statuses that they bring to the table and risks that they bring to the table that you can discuss as a team. Or maybe there are people who just need to be informed, and they're not maybe working on the project, but maybe you want something like a newsletter where you're keeping people informed on a regular basis of what's happening with your program. Should they, you know, have an ask that comes to them later, they're not in the dark about why this is coming. So, there's definitely a lot of different potential for communication mechanisms, through emails, newsletters, status meetings, Wiki pages. It really just comes down to making an assessment of, like I said, who needs to know what, when and how do you deliver that. Mario Gerard: Yeah, I think it's a very complex, you know, we've tried to do it with some, some kind of confluence pages, which has the objective, the mission, the risks that we are going through right now and all the deliverables and milestones and the people who are responsible. So, it's kind of a table which shows who has what milestones hit when they're going to hit those milestones. Are they red, green, or yellow for those milestones? So, somebody can take a look at it at one view and see like, you know, where we are in those plans. And I think cadence is really important in all of these things. So, you have executor level meetings where you're just giving them status or you're sending it to them via email. Then you have different levels of meetings with different types of stakeholders across the board. So, it's kind of important for you to design that and to recalibrate it. Rhea Frondozo: Right, right. Mario Gerard: You have to recalibrate. Rhea Frondozo: Right. Cause I think one of the things to mention is that depending on what stage you are in a program, the frequency of communication to your stakeholders can change. In the beginning you may spend a lot of time talking to your executive sponsors or the leadership to try and get buy-in. And at that point, maybe you're, haven't even engaged with POCs yet, but once the project goes into execution mode, maybe you're working, you know, on a weekly or even biweekly basis with the POCs workin...
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    31 mins
  • TPM Podcast with Rhea – Episode II Part I

    TPM Podcast with Rhea – Episode II Part I
    Mar 7 2023
    Mario Gerard: Hello, and welcome to the TPM podcast with your post Mario Gerard. This is going be a podcast with Rhea. Rhea and I worked together at OCI running large scale programs. We've split this into a three-part series, and we're primarily focusing on how we run large scale programs at tech organizations. So, stay tuned and listen in and definitely check out all the three parts to the series. And so, this is Rhea's co expertise, and this is what I’ve been doing as well for the last four years at the Oracle cloud infrastructure team. It's definitely a very unique type of a role, unique type of people who get involved in running large scale programs. And generally, there aren't many large-scale programs which are run within organizations, right? So, I'm going to ask Rhea some questions and I’ll probably add to that as well. So, the first primary question for our listeners Rhea, what is a large-scale program? How do you define a large-scale program? Rhea Frondozo: So typically, I'd say that a large-scale program is a program that spans multiple organizations. So, you’re looking at a program that maybe ranges from hundreds to thousands of developers or engineers, all working towards a very complex goal. Mario Gerard: Yeah. I just feel that that needs to kind of sink in, right? So, the programs they've run, like we've had to move like 200 teams, which takes two years. If you calculate the manpower that's required to do some of these initiatives. There are literally thousands or tens of thousands of manners of work. And so that's like so complex. Do you think about it? Rhea Frondozo: Yeah, I would say when you frame it that way, and you think about the complexity that comes with a large program, it may be the case that as a TPM, you're interacting with a core set of stakeholders. Maybe it's like 20 to 30 core stakeholders, but the multiplier under that for how many people that they are working with, how much direction that they are giving to an entire organization, it can be pretty mind blowing to know that you're trying to move a ship that has so many people all trying to row in the same direction. It's pretty incredible. Once you see the amount of effort that that takes. Mario Gerard: And this is I think, where we also differentiate depth TPMS versus breadth TPMS, you want to speak of little bit about that? Rhea Frondozo: Yeah. So, you know, as you mentioned, these large-scale programs are often run by a breadth TPM because these are going to be the TPMS who work across multiple organizations. They're going to have maybe pocs that point of context that they interact with across maybe functional different organizations and teams. Whereas a depth TPM, they're going to go deep in a particular organization or team scope of ownership. And so, they're going to maybe work more directly with the engineers on a single team and understand their problem space much more closely. Whereas the breadth TPM is going to rely on functional area owners to be the subject matter experts in that space. But they're the ones pulling these different functions together to solve a much larger, bigger picture problem. Mario Gerard: Yeah. And if you want to read more about the depth versus breadth TPMS, I’ve written a good blog post about it with my experience working at OCI. So, you should definitely go check that out. So, coming back to the skills required as a TPM, what do you think are the main skills that a TPM needs to have to run this kind of large-scale initiatives? Because I feel like the breadth TPMS definitely have a different type of problem that they're dealing with than a depth TPM, right? Rhea Frondozo: Yes. So, I would say first and foremost, when you're dealing with these large skill programs, a breath TPM absolutely must have excellent communication skills. They must be crisp. They must be clear. They must be concise. If you think about the levels of communication that are required for a breath TPM.
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    29 mins

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