Friday, December 09, 2005
Chief Learning Officers (CLO's) and the Fire Drill
One of my Newsgator smart-feeds is a search for "Project Management." This frequently turns up stories that people are writing about how to perform better as a project manager. Today, one of the articles pointed to: "CLO Examines Project Management Techniques for Adaptive Action."
CLO stands for Chief Learning Officer. As I work in training, I was interested in what CLO's do. I ran a Google search on Chief Learning Officer and discovered CLO Magazine. Heck, this might be a good job for my boss. As I thought about the significance of CLO's pushing better project management methods, I recalled a self-assessment that I had made and set aside.
Not long ago, I was asked to teach a Project+ class to a room full of experienced project managers--many with experience that in ways exceeded my own. They were all defense contractors, and many were former military. As classes proceeded, it seemed to me that some of the material about team building and team management seemed a little "liberal" to some of them. While I stuck to my guns on the points in the text book, once the class was over I dwelt at some length on how what I taught might be at odds with a military culture and how I might have made the class better.
For one, while today's corporate cultures seek diversity, the military thrives upon conformity. I often include in my lesson the story about Alan Turing and ask students to assess how the course of WW II might have been different if the British had been more efficient at filtering homosexuals out of their government services. I did not include it in this class once I realized that a perceived liberal bias might already be impeding the learning of more basic principles of project management.
One conclusion I came to, as to how to make the class better, was that I missed an opportunity to recognize in the ex-military hands something that they did well that could improve project management methodologies being taught. That thing is the drill.
Military people do not wait until a crisis occurs to determine whether or not they have the right training, processes, and tools to successfully manage the crisis. They not only plan their countermeasures, but they test them... Repeatedly.
It occurred to me that in some environments one might even involve stakeholders in such drills. Create a phantom set of requirements, walk through the various steps of creating a project, then analyze and critique performance.... It would have helped if I had recognized their instinct to do such training, praised it, and generated more discussion concerning their strengths.
CLO stands for Chief Learning Officer. As I work in training, I was interested in what CLO's do. I ran a Google search on Chief Learning Officer and discovered CLO Magazine. Heck, this might be a good job for my boss. As I thought about the significance of CLO's pushing better project management methods, I recalled a self-assessment that I had made and set aside.
Not long ago, I was asked to teach a Project+ class to a room full of experienced project managers--many with experience that in ways exceeded my own. They were all defense contractors, and many were former military. As classes proceeded, it seemed to me that some of the material about team building and team management seemed a little "liberal" to some of them. While I stuck to my guns on the points in the text book, once the class was over I dwelt at some length on how what I taught might be at odds with a military culture and how I might have made the class better.
For one, while today's corporate cultures seek diversity, the military thrives upon conformity. I often include in my lesson the story about Alan Turing and ask students to assess how the course of WW II might have been different if the British had been more efficient at filtering homosexuals out of their government services. I did not include it in this class once I realized that a perceived liberal bias might already be impeding the learning of more basic principles of project management.
One conclusion I came to, as to how to make the class better, was that I missed an opportunity to recognize in the ex-military hands something that they did well that could improve project management methodologies being taught. That thing is the drill.
Military people do not wait until a crisis occurs to determine whether or not they have the right training, processes, and tools to successfully manage the crisis. They not only plan their countermeasures, but they test them... Repeatedly.
It occurred to me that in some environments one might even involve stakeholders in such drills. Create a phantom set of requirements, walk through the various steps of creating a project, then analyze and critique performance.... It would have helped if I had recognized their instinct to do such training, praised it, and generated more discussion concerning their strengths.
