NUS-ISS Learning Day 2017 - Future Skills for Project Managers

© 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved
#ISSlearn
FUTURE SKILLS FOR PROJECT
MANAGERS
DIGITAL CAPABILITY NEEDED, DEADLINE
YESTERDAY!
11 August / TAN LIONG CHOON
1

© 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved#ISSlearn © 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved
OUTLINE
• The Changing Business & IT Landscape
• Future of Project Management & Skills to
meet the Challenges of the Future
3

Volatility - the nature, speed and size of change are unpredictable.
Uncertainty - an inability to determine the course of future events.
Complexity - the outcome of an action cannot be predicted by simple
analysis.
Ambiguity - key characteristics of a situation can be interpreted in different
ways.

Disruptive Technology
• When is a Technology considered disruptive?
• Speed i.e. the rate at which it is adopted. E.g. The electric
car, though new and considered to have great potential to
replace the fuel-driven cars, is slow in adoption and did not
really cause much disruption to the car market.
• Totality i.e. how much of the old is replaced by the new,
including adding new performance attributes that adds value
to the end-users
5
“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles. Facebook,
the world’s most popular media owner, produces no content. Alibaba,
the world’s most valuable retailer, owns no inventory. And Airbnb, the
world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
Something interesting is happening.” – Tom Goodwin, Havas Media
Adapted from: Disruptive Technologies. Understand, Evaluate, Respond by Paul Armstrong

Changed and Changing –
A Sampling
• The Changing Landscape
• Project Scoping & Requirement in a digital world –
Pretotyping, Product Thinking/User Research, Design
Thinking
• Design & Testing - A/B Testing
• Transition to Operations – DevOps, continuous integration
• Cyber-Security – Zero Day
• New Normal in Development approaches/practices – Agile
(SCRUM, KANBAN)
6
• Future Skills and Future of Project Management
• Back to Basic
• Skill development strategy

PROJECT SCOPING & REQUIREMENT IN
AN INCREASINGLY DIGITIZED WORLD
PRETOTYPING, PRODUCT THINKING/ USER
RESEARCH, DESIGN THINKING …
7

Pretotyping – This is not a typo error!
• Term and concept of pretotyping was originally developed by
Alberto Savoia in 2009 while working at Google as Engineering
Director and Innovation Agitator.
www.pretotyping.org
If you are not failing
every now and again,
it’s a sign that you are
not doing anything
very innovative –
Woody Allen

www.pretotyping.org

Pretotype -> Prototype -> Product
www.pretotyping.org

Product Thinking - Do People
Want the Product?
Concept of MVP
• Is it a version 1 of a product?
• Is it a cheaper version of a product (least set of features)?
• Is it a functional prototype of a product?
Source: Validating Product Ideas - Through Lean User Research By Tomer Sharon

Product Thinking - Do People
Want the Product?
The key Idea behind the Concept of MVP
• An MVP is a version of a new product that allows the
team to collect the maximum amount of validated
learning about the customers with the least amount
of effort.
• It is a series of experiments or research activity to
help you learn about your customer. It is a product
prototype with a minimum functionality enough for
you to learn about the customer.
Techniques of answering the question:
 Concierge MVP
 Fake Doors Experiments
 …
Adapted from: Validating Product Ideas - Through Lean User Research By Tomer Sharon

Product Thinking – Concierge
MVP
• A concierge MVP is an MVP where you manually provide the
functionality of the product to the customer and guide your user
through the solution to a problem. It is less wasteful, simpler
and more effective.
Example: Open Snow is a startup from Boulder, Colorado. It’s a team of
meteorologists who specialize in weather forecast for skiing resorts. They
solve the problem of non-existent, specific, and detailed snow sport
forecast. Skiers invest in a lot of money, time, and effort in planning ski
trips. These trips might be canceled due to wrong weather reports about
the area, or skiers going ahead with the trip only to find that the weather
does not permit the sport activity.
Instead of investing time and money to build a primitive version of the app
or website, it visit ski resort to ask people who are interested in the service,
they provide it free (at first) via email. When eventually the ask customer to
pay the service and people actually does pay, it validates their assumption
of what people want.

Product Thinking – Fake Door
Experiment
• It is a MVP where you pretend to provide a product, feature or
service to a webpage or app visitor.
Without developing anything yet, you communicate to the visitor
that this feature exist and ask them to act on it. If they do, you
know they want it and its time you start working on developing it.
Example: A grocery store is thinking about developing a
grocery shopping app and wants to know if customers are
interested or not. It then creates a button “Download our
shopping app.” on its website to find out and gauge the
interest level of its online customers.

Product Design – A complaint
“Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your
website, AA.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to
fly your airline again….If I were running a company with the
distinction and history of American Airlines, I would be embarrassed-
no, ashamed- to have a website with a customer experience as
terrible as the one you have now.
…
Your website is abusive to your customers, it is limiting your revenue
possibilities, and it is permanently destroying the brand and image of
your company in the mind of every visitor.
**The customer, even offered, in his letter, a better user interface that is
Minimal, clean, useful.
A frustrated customer wrote a complaint to American Airlines (AA):

Consequently, AA redesign their website which looks like what the
complainer proposed. (AA.com as at Dec 2016)

Design Thinking
• No common and fixed definition
• Think of it as an approach to solving problem
involving:
• Use of market research info that is user-driven with
emphasis on user experience
• Expanded boundaries of both problem definition
and solution
• Engaging partners in co-creation
• Involves conduct of real-world experience as
opposed to analysis of historical data

Understanding Design Thinking

E.g. “Desired Paths” and Design
20
If you don’t offer “low friction” in your designs,
someone else will.
A college campus that let people walk where they want – their
“desire paths” – and then used that to smartly pave those
locations that were the “low friction” routes that people
wanted to take.
Similarly, in product design, you should live like your
customer, observe them in the real world, and then learn from
what they actually do.
- Tom Hulme at TED conference 2016

Customer Empathy is Key to Design
• Drop The Old - Designing customer experience based on
legacy language, technology and processes that predates
the lives of these digital/connected generation of customers.
• Empathise with The New - One that caters to the preferences,
expectations and behaviours of Digital Native
“Amazon’s Jeff Bezos - while surveying Amazon’s “Hot 100 Bestseller list”:
“Hey, why do we stop at 100? This is the internet! Not some newspaper
best seller list. We can have a list that goes on and on”.
Jean-Louise Constanza, CEO, Orange Valleez;
“For my one year old daughter, A Magazine is an iPad that does not
work. it will remain so for the rest of her life”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk

DESIGN-TEST
A/B TESTING
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A/B Testing – Selling Homes – Do you
highlight financials or features?
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8000 emails were
sent to potential
customers to
market the home.
50% use version
A and 50% uses
version B. One
version has
33.8% more
success.
(receiver opened
email)
Version A or B?
Adapted from www.behave.org

TRANSITION TO OPERATIONS
DEVOPS
24

IMVU Inc. – a social entertainment company whose
products allow users to connect through 3-D
avatar-based experiences.

Coping with Rollout Frequency
Demand of Today & the Future
How often does IMVU Inc. deploy new software?
• Quarterly?
• Monthly?
• Weekly?
• Daily?
• IMVU deploys new code 50 times a day on average.
• Does continuous integration. Developers commit early & often.
• A commit triggers an execution test suite.
• IMVU has 1000 test files, distributed across 30-40 machines – test
suites take ~9 minute to run.
• Once a commit passed all its tests, it will automatically sent to
deployment – code is moved to 100s of machines in the cluster.
*at first, code is made live on a small no. of machines and sampling program examines the
results.

One Definition of DevOps
• DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the
time between committing a change to a system and the
change being placed into normal production, while
ensuring quality.
• Quality means suitability of use by stakeholders include end-
users, developers and system administrators.
• Quality includes availability, security, reliability, maintainability,
compatibility (e.g. with devices/platforms) etc.
• Passing a set of automated test cases
• Testing the change with a limited set of users in the production
environment
• Monitoring closely the deployed code change for a period time
(e.g. live trial period)
**Note - The Delivery mechanism must also be of high
quality e.g. reliability, repeatability
Adapted from: DevOps – A software Architect’s Perspective (Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Limng Zhu

DevOps life cycle processes
Requirements Development Build Testing Deployment Execution
Treat
operations
personnel as
1st class
stakeholders.
Get inputs
when
developing
requirements.
Small teams.
Limited
coordination.
Unit tests.
Build tools.
Support
continuous
integration.
Automated
testing.
User
Acceptance
Testing.
Deployment
tools.
Support
continuous
deployment.
Monitoring.
Responding
to error
conditions.
Adapted from: DevOps – A software Architect’s Perspective (Len Bass, Ingo Weber, Limng Zhu)

CYBER-SECURITY
ZERO DAY
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© 2016 National University of
Singapore. All Rights Reserved
31
In Space, No One can Hear You Scream

You have:
Source: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/hospitals-in-england-turning-away-patients-shutting-down-it-systems-following-major-
cyberattack/?ftag=TRE684d531&bhid=23961581494219079837236885332263

Security & Threat Modelling
Microsoft Threat Model: STRIDE
 Spoofing identity. Illegal accessing and then using another user’s
authentication information, such as user name and password.
 Tampering with data. Malicious modification of data.
 Repudiation. Repudiation threats are users who deny performing an
action without other parties having a way to prove otherwise.
 Information disclosure. Exposure of information to individuals who
are not suppose to have access to it.
 Denial of service. DOS attacks target the service availability to valid
users.
 Elevation of privilege. An unprivileged user gains privileged access
and have sufficient access to compromise or destroy the system.
**Each of the above can be linked to the violation of one of
the “CIA” Triad. (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability)
Threat Modelling is an integral part of Security
Development Lifecycle process.

CIA Triads ++
© 2016 National University of
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CISSP terminology:
“safeguards,”
countermeasures put
in place to mitigate
possible risks.

NEW NORMAL IN PROJECT
APPROACHES
AGILE, SCRUM, KANBAN …
35

Agile Scrum
Kanban
Its no more “Why
Agile?”, but Why
Not Agile!

The Standard’s Org has Joined Hands
37

#ISSlearn
IS TRADITIONAL PROJECT
MANAGEMENT STILL RELEVANT?
BACK TO BASICS
38

Project Management will Evolve
• As project environment grows in complexity,
Fundamentals becomes even more important.
Hence, the reminder on Back to the Basics
• Project Management is becoming a basic skill for
everyone. i.e. even your users and average stakeholders
• Project Managers need to reinforce the basics with new
adaptions e.g. Vision and Project Leadership, Approach,
Design process & techniques
• New Expectations on Project Managers
• Move up the value chain
• Widen the knowledge range and new tool to execute PM
roles
e.g. new communication tools Skype for Business, Slack, Webex)
• Ability to learn new skills and Continuous Learning
39

Back to Basics – Vision and Project
Life Cycle
40
Position / Role Vision Role Project Lifecycle
CEO, Board Vision to Inspire Long-term Objectives
(investment cycle)
Corporate vision & value
phase
Portfolio Mgr Vision to maintain competitive
advantage (economic cycle)
Corporate requirement
phase
Sponsor, Project
steering comm.
Vision to implement Business case Business case phase
Project Manager Vision to implement project charter Project feasibility and project
definition phase
• Clear leadership ensures project decisions are aligned with
corporate strategy. It avoid individuals applying their own decision
rules such as:
• FIFO, LIFO
• Squeakiest wheel
• Boss’s whim (or most politically correct), Loudest demand
• Easiest (or Least risky to do)
• Most likely to lead to raises and promotion
Adapted from : Project Management Leadership: Building Creative Teams by Rory Burke and Steve
Barron

Power of Vision and Powerful
Visionaries
41
Computerisation era (80s) : Bill Gates has the vision of seeing a personal
computer on everyone’s desk even when only a few large companies had
mainframe computers
Internet era (90s) : Jeff Bezos has the vision of “The everything store” and was
the pioneer in online retailing - “Our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric
company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything
they might want to buy online.”
Social Media Revolution era (Noughties) : Mark Zuckerberg – “… the most
important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give
people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.“ – Feb 2017
https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-
community/10154544292806634
Dawn of Digital era : ?
Facebook original “vision” back in 2005: "I think Facebook is an online directory for
colleges...If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your
name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.“
http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-2005-early-interview-2012-5/?IR=T

Amazon Business Transformation
from Retail into a Technology
Company
Andy Jassy is a Harvard Business School grad asked to head
Amazon’s AWS service.
Andy Jassy’s AWS vision statement:
“to enable developers and companies to use Web Services to
build sophisticated and scalable applications”.
“We tried to imagine a student in a dorm room who would
have at his disposal the same infrastructure* as the largest
companies in the world.”….
E.g. storage, processing, bandwith, payment …
Adapted from “The Everything Store - Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon” by Brad Stone

• Meetings held frequently – daily or weekly
• Everyone has 1 minute to talk
• Each team member addresses the following:
• Finished: What have I completed since the last meeting
• Acknowledgements: Who make my job easier
(praise and recognition)
• Still outstanding: What I am working on now?
• Trouble spots: What difficulties am I encountering?
• Enlightenment: What have I learned?
• Requests: What do I need?
Back to Basics - FASTER Meetings
Provides:
• Status update
• Self and Peer recognition
• Builds understanding of responsibilities of others
• Opportunity for Lead to re-allocate tasks
www.sai-iowa.org/FASTERMEETINGS.docx
Want your meetings to build team spirit, improve cooperation,
and increase productivity?

Back to Basics - Risk Management &
Problem Solving
44
Known Unknown
Known Not really a problem e.g.
Scope creep & changes.
Solution: consider AGILE
approach, setup Change
Control Board, ,,,
Technical Design Activity
e.g. Accepted User interface
design Options: wireframe/
prototyping, A/B testing, etc
Unknown Methods & Procedure.
e.g. software defects
Solution: Conduct testings –
unit-testing, integration/
system testing, UAT, agile
continuous integration, …
Consider User Research,
Pretotype, POC, pilot trial,
Ethnography,
then design solution
e.g. Technical feasibility,
benchmarking performance
targets
Solution
Risk/Problem

© 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved#ISSlearn © 2017 National University of Singapore. All Rights Reserved(Total Slides=8) T:S-ITSM-FOMModule 1 v3.pptx © 2016 National University of
45

#ISSlearn
CONCLUSION
CALL TO ACTION
46

Call to Action
47
• How should we prepare for the future?
• Where do we start building the skills?
• Is there a strategy to adopt?

Amazon Transformation Revisited
48
How did Amazon morphed from a Retail Store (selling books)
into a radically different seller of high tech infrastructure?
• Sometime in 2003: Bezos come to know of a book “Creation” by Steve
Grand. (a developer of video game Creatures where players guide and
nurture intelligent organism on computer screens).
• Steve Grand’s book highlight that the approach to creating intelligent life
is “to focus on designing simple computational building block, called
primitives, and then sit back and watch surprising behavior emerge.”
Adapted from: The Everything Store - Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
• From this “building block” idea, Amazon started creating “computing”
primitives by breaking down their tech infrastructure into the smallest,
simplest atomic components and allow developers to freely access them
with as much flexibility as possible. E.g. storage, bandwidth, processing,
payment… and the S3 and AWS was borned.

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(Harper & Row, 1990).
Dan Pink Recommended Reading (1)
“We’ve all had those moments. We’re working on something
with such total absorption that we seem to enter a higher state.
It’s not only that time passes quickly; it’s that we lose a sense
of time itself. It’s not just that we’re focused; it’s that we’re
scarcely aware of the boundary between ourselves and the
world.
Csikzentmihalyi calls such exquisite experiences flow.
And in this landmark book, he unpacks what flow is and how
we can experience it more often.
I’ve recommended this book so many times that I can even
pronounce the author’s last name. Repeat after me: Chick-
SENT-me-high.”
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Daniel-Pink-Required-Reading?gko=03bfe

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne
Lamott (Pantheon, 1994).
Dan Pink Recommended Reading (2)
“This one isn’t obviously a business book, but it actually
contains the secret to effective performance. Lamott, a well-
known novelist, describes a moment in her youth when her 10-
year-old brother had to write a report for school about birds.
He’d had the assignment for a couple of months, but, of
course, waited until the night before the deadline to begin.
Panicked, he sought advice from Lamott’s father, who told him:
“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Whenever
I’m stuck — which is pretty much all the time — I think of this
book and that lesson. Then I take it bird by bird.”
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Daniel-Pink-Required-Reading?gko=03bfe

Call to Action – cont’d
51
• Where do we start building the skills?
• What is the strategy to adopt?
Be
curious

THANK YOU 
ISSTLC@nus.edu.sg
52
Breaking News

Product Community of Practice
(PCoP)
• ISS will launch the inaugural Product
Community of Practice (PCoP) in the 4th
quarter of 2017
• Objectives of the PCoP:
- To gather like-minded professionals and
industry thought leaders who share a common
passion for product management
- Crowd source wisdom to facilitate an
understanding and insights to better manage
challenges in the product management
domain
- Facilitate networking and exchange of ideas
• Format of PCoP will vary and will include:
- Talks and sharing
- Panel Discussions
• Please indicate your interest by providing us
with your contact details

Poor Design – The IT Response
“I like to think I’m decent at what I do, and I know the others I work with
here are all pretty good. The problem with the design of AA.com, however,
lies less in our competency (or lack thereof as you point out in your post)
and more with the culture and processes employed here at American
Airlines.
The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out
among many different groups, including, for example, QA, product
planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project
planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site,
and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its
content and functionality….
It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as
you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part,
and I think that is what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably
because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done
organisations….

Business Meets Design – The
Response cont’d
Our Interactive Marketing group designs and implement fare sales and
specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group
pushes content without much interactions with us. ….
The company fired the designer, saying that he violated a non-
disclosure agreement.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/6531610/American-airlines-worker-fired-for-replying-to-web-user-
complaint.html
Oh, and don’t forget AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own
little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of
autonomy in how their domains are run). … Anyway, I guess what I’m saying
is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that
reach into a lot of interests. It’s not small, by any means…

Additional Reference slides
56

A/B Testing (or “split testing”)
- also called “Optimisation”
58
Which design gets 40% more campaign sign-ups?
Adapted from A/B Testing - The most powerful way to turn clicks into customers by Dan Siroker, Pete
Koomen

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