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 working through issues as they arise.

Yeah. Sometimes you end up even in daily cadences, you know. People will have what we call war rooms. If there’s a big problem at hand that, you know, you need all hands-on deck to work on. Maybe you’re pulling in people on a daily basis, but you also don’t want to have to keep everybody on a daily basis because you may do that unnecessarily and burn people out or you may finally solve the problem and not need that.

And so, it’s really important as the TPM to constantly evaluate what communication do you need reevaluate. Do you still need that and make adjustments accordingly depending on how the program’s going?

Mario Gerard: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. The next question I have is what are the type of blockers that one comes across when you’re executing these kinds of large programs?

Rhea Frondozo: So, there’s a lot of different kind of blockers that you may run into, but I think that you can categorize them in a couple different ways. So, I think one really basic one that you often hear about are going to be scheduled delays, you know, for one reason or another, it could be somebody underestimated how long it was going to take to complete something. I mean, engineers and developers are notorious, I’d say for underestimating, how long it takes them to complete something.

And as a program manager, you typically know that you should ask for confidence levels or understand, you know, what the associated risks are and include buffers. Nothing is ever as easy as we think it will be. And if you think something’s going to be hard, it’s probably even harder than you think. Other issues that can cause scheduled delays could be things that are out of your control, whether it’s things like external dependencies that you’re counting on, like supply chains, you know, expecting hardware deliveries at a certain time, or maybe you have creditors that you’re expecting to get scheduled for looking at the products that you’ve built and assessing your clients.

Other things I could call it, scheduling delays, or just maybe you thought that you knew a solution to a problem, and it turns out you were wrong, and you have to redo it. And that can cause a scheduling delay. So, there’s a multitude of things that can cause scheduling delays. You know, other things that I’ve seen can be, you know, a misinterpretation of requirements.

A lot of times you’re trying to move fast and move in an agile approach for service delivery. But sometimes what you find out is the requirements that you thought that you were working against were actually wrong. And this is where it becomes important to fail fast and figuring out if you’ve done it wrong and redoing it can be another reason why your program is blocked, and you need to reset expectations on how to regroup on a program and come up with a solution that meets the expected requirements.

Another one I think that I mentioned, you know, like I said, technical or architectural challenges, sometimes we make the wrong assumptions for how we were going to solve a problem. And these are things that when you’re working on a problem, that’s in a space that is unchartered territory. You may be trying things for the first time and realizing that your assumptions were wrong, and you’ve got to restart or redo it.

Mario Gerard: And when you think about it as a scale at which we are operating, I think it becomes increasingly difficult. When you think about like the architectural solution that we came up with, which impacts I think like say 50 teams need to go do the particular thing, they go do it and then it doesn’t actually work.

Rhea Frondozo: Yeah. I mean, I actually have seen this happen at some of the most expensive levels I could have ever imagined where, you know, we built a whole cloud region and then realized we did it wrong and had to rebuild the entire region and that we couldn’t salvage all the work that had been done yet to start from scratch. I mean, it happens, it’s a very costly mistake, but you know, like I said, when you’re an uncharted territory, sometimes you just don’t know what you’re up against.

Mario Gerard: Other problems I can think about like one or two, which are like scope just keeps getting added to this particular large program. Because one people see, oh, these guys are running this large program and they kind of like hitch their wagon or say, hey, if you’re doing that, you need to do this as well, but you probably don’t need to do. And they kind of, as a TPM, you probably need to ensure that you’re maintaining and managing the scope of a large program.

Rhea Frondozo: Yeah. I mean, scope creep is real, right. A lot of times what you end up seeing is what you plan for and what you are resourced for is different than when you start executing, you know, people want you to deliver on. And so, you end up, you know, if you go beyond the scope of what you’ve been sized for, you end up resource constraint. And then this can cause a lot of different things in terms of scheduling delays, missed deliveries. And so yeah, scope creep is definitely something that a TPM has to keep their eye on.

Mario Gerard: And in these kinds of large pr