Adapting Skills to Project-Based Work

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Nate Crews: I'm an advocate of do not let go of your legacy knowledge, but you need to embrace the new knowledge of how to do agility, how to think from a product-high standpoint in delivering systems going forward. Those who are flexible and willing to try new things out, and become better at it, will be employed. Those that stay stagnant in the old ways will not. 
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Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast, with Berkeley Extension and EDGE in Tech at the University of California, focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech. EDGE in Tech is part of the Innovation Hub at CITRIS, the Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute. UC Berkeley Extension is the continuing education arm of UC Berkeley.

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 learn more about this, we turn to Nate Crews, a results-oriented senior Agile transformation leader and coach. He has demonstrated success in leveraging technology to enhance business operations and to impact the bottom line. Nate is also a respected leader at empowering cross-functional teams to drive organizational success and surpass corporate goals. As an instructor, he teaches and coaches students in business and technology concepts for the University of California, Berkeley Extension and the Caltech Center for Technology and Management, as well as corporate clients worldwide. 

Welcome, Nate. 

Nate Crews: Thank you for that amazing presentation. I need to hang out with you more often. [LAUGHING] 

Jill Finlayson: I'm looking forward to it. So take us back-- what did project management use to mean at work, and when did you first realize that that approach was starting to break down? 

Nate Crews: For me, project management in the past used to be about order. So it was about getting a person well skilled and to be able to break down a project into fundamental components, organize it, plan for it, assign people assignments, and coordinate all its deliverables at the end. And the key word there is deliverables. So the focus was, how can I take these resources and a set of raw material and end up with deliverables? 

Now, those are great things, but sometimes the deliverable, based on the fact that we may have started this project six months ago, may not be valuable now, as far as what we need to do here. We have to change our focus. And that pivot should be from deliverables to value and outcomes. We're not so much concerned with deliverables so much. It's outcomes and value. 

Because you need to generate value. Because, once you deliver to the client, they need to go out and exploit it for their business purposes, which takes us to a different paradigm in how we look at work. So we also, now, need to look at not just the deliverable itself, it's the flow of value. The flow of value has a different set of sequences. 

And, as you had mentioned before, the outcomes that they expect for value are quicker. We're right in the center of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with all this emerging technologies, and our customers are very demanding. They want results now, and they want better, faster, cheaper. And they don't want to wait six or seven months. And, also, if something changes, they want to change it, even if it's late in the process. So we've got a demanding environment, a swell of new technologies has enabled us, and just a changing marketplace and just complex solutions that need to be delivered here. 

So one of the things-- and you might ask yourself, well, why is this important? It's a survival mechanism. Those that are thoughtful, long-term learners and can incorporate into their skill set, those who are flexible and willing to try new things out and become better at it, will be employed. Those that stay stagnant in the old ways will not. 

Jill Finlayson: This is an incredible, very succinct way of saying that better, faster, quicker, and more agile, being able to adapt to technology, that seems like the driving force on why the old project management systems didn't work. You said there were, like, 40 skills they used to teach people who got certified in project management? 

Nate Crews: Yeah, it was approximately-- there's 49 processes that used to be in the old version of the old PMBOK that we used to do. It helped you initiate projects, to plan for projects, to execute on projects, to monitor and control. And the PMP used to focus on how well you could traverse each one of those processes and to be able to identify what the inputs were, the outputs were, and the transformative processes that you use to take the inputs to the outputs. So that's how you passed the PMP before. 

I think the latest edition of the PMP, the focus has changed to value delivery. So how do we generate value? And it goes through and it looks at the various value streams that you need to be able to navigate and guide people through, as project manager. And we're guiding people through, not commanding, controlling, and telling people what to do. 

Because, a lot of the times, to be successful, the knowledge resides in the people doing the work. And the successful project manager now needs to be more of a coach or a thought provoker, to think of new ideas and to also manage relationships amongst the team. So they are supporting things you need to do. It's, how do you understand what is valuable to the customer? 

And that's where agility comes into the play. Agile-- the main tenet of agility, at least in my mind-- some may agree with or disagree-- is about customer centricity and rapid delivery of value to those customers. So understanding what the customer wants, when they want it, and do, to the best of your ability, deliver that value. 

Now, I try to stay away from the word fast because sometimes people think, well, and they're going to be doing it twice as fast. No. Sometimes delivering value quicker is delivering it incrementally, and sometimes delivering is going through and doing Lean engineering and taking out the waste. If I take out the waste, what I deliver to the customer is 100% viable to delivering value. And that's rapid delivery of value for the customer. 

We have to use a different set of mindsets. Some of the agility mindsets come into play. I think the mindset around product development comes in. Instead of focusing on the coordination-- that's the project activities-- we want to focus on, how do I maximize the delivery of this product for the end customer, in a timeline within the metrics that he's looking for? 

Jill Finlayson: So we're still using some of these tools, but the mindset has really changed. And the mindset has really shifted to this customer-centric and adaptable mindset. 

Nate Crews: And an adaptable mindset is one of the things that I teach my students here, and when I first get into the class, is that there are several practices around agility, many of them. But if you want to have a quantum leap in the performance, you have to change your mindset. And the mindset we talk about is a growth mindset, to be able to incorporate in the process-- not a very popular word-- failure, failing fast, in small increments. Because failure is-- success is a way of learning, but failing in small quantities, also, is another way of learning. 

Jill Finlayson: Can I ask, how does failing in small amounts get you faster delivery of value? 

Nate Crews: You do experiments in small increments. Let's say you want to go look at the flow of how a call center is looking at various screens to address a problem, and you don't know the right order of what those screens should look like. You've tried to do it. You've done chalk talks. You've done engineering analysis. And, really, there's no definitive order. Well, an experiment. 

Let's say we had three screens, A, B, C. Well, you may tell somebody to go off for three hours and build out the execution of screens of B, C, A. And you tell somebody else to build 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 failure because it doesn't fit the needs of what we did. And we found out through exploration of that. 

I'm saying in small increments, doing little tiny experiments. And experiments have been part of 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 went bankrupt three times in some of his attempts to get the most wonderful place in the world to go to. 

So failure isn't something that's foreign to us. It's just, we've been told that the expectation is you have to be perfect the first time. And that gets us into alignment of things of normality. But if you want to start to extend it and do things better, faster, cheaper, we have to think out of the box and try some things that we normally wouldn't do. 

Jill Finlayson: I think that was a good example, sort of contrasting the old-school project management with the newer. So in the old school, it was, try something for longer periods of time or you just stuck with the plan. And what you're suggesting now is that sort of waterfall, one thing following the other, doesn't work anymore. And I'm curious if you can say more about why it doesn't work anymore? 

Nate Crews: I am not against waterfall. I think waterfall has been an amazing thing, has done some amazing accomplishments over time. It has its time, and it has its purpose, even today. As you have more complex embedded systems here-- when you're dealing with a government for military applications, you've got 1,000 contractors and very complicated algorithms. If you're doing biotech, these are complicated algorithms. There is a place for waterfall because they mandate to have certain things to be done sequentially, in a certain order and way of things of doing it. 

However, a lot of the things we're developing here, particularly in software, falls into the complex area of a lot of uncertainty. If we are uncertain about what we need to do and we need to explore to come up with ideas-- you try something. It works. Then, you build on that and you try it and you build on that. If something doesn't work, then you pivot to something else. So I think the project manager of today needs to recognize and respect some of the deliveries of waterfall and, also, to be able to do that transformation, to help people learn how to do things from an Agile perspective. Because that's the way of the future. 

Jill Finlayson: What stands out to me-- and for people who maybe are new to project management, waterfall meaning an order of events, looking at dependencies, something has to happen before the next thing can happen. Why is that useful in some cases and less useful in other cases? 

Nate Crews: Let me ask you a question-- if someone was building a nuclear plant in your neighborhood, would you want them to do a lot of experiments to figure out what they needed to do, or would you want to go through a nice, orderly process because of what was at risk is catastrophic? So there's still some applications that we need to do very mindfully and meticulously to get done. Satellite systems, ground systems, these are some things that still need to be done meticulously. 

But within it, those components, there might be some software that I can iterate, to develop, to be better outcomes or I could iterate on a logistics of how we order and do things from a supply chain standpoint. My thing that I'm an advocate of, do not let go of your legacy knowledge, but you need to embrace the new knowledge of how to do agility, how to think from a product-high standpoint in delivering systems going forward. 

Jill Finlayson: And it sounds like there's an overarching objective and timeline that needs to be met, but, within that, you can add some Agile practices in the how to meet each one of those milestones. 

Nate Crews: You can do it from a standpoint of an entire framework. There's a lot of Agile practices that you can do. As a project manager, you need to sit down with the customer. Again, that's customer centricity, listening to them, listening to their problem, listening to their boundaries and understanding what's going on. 

Sometimes, those of us who get excited about Agile-- I certainly do-- and I would want to get into Agile because it's a fun environment and a lot less regimented. But if the customer has some constraints and needs to maintain old legacy systems, I need to listen to them and come up with some solutions to say, hey, I may do a little bit of waterfall and somewhat of agility for right now, to what you are. 

I try to be proficient in knowledge of all the frameworks, all the organizational development activities, all the things about developing people. And then, I listen to the customer. And I use that knowledge base to get there. But the thing is that I go through and have acquired this knowledge. And I think that's something about the project managers, you have to be a constant, lifelong learner. 

And I also want to advocate, on your job, you should be spending 80% of your job doing your job, another 20% on how I can become better and staying ahead of what's coming out on the new place or area. What's going on in AI? What's going on in cloud computing? Because those things come in. When they come in, they come at you immediately. And you say, well, I'm still up to speed in the old way of doing things here and I'll have to get caught up. And, see, you're not a player then. 

But, if you've been thinking about it and acquiring knowledge, staying a little bit ahead of what you're actually doing at your company right now, when those things come in-- because they will eventually come in because we are an evolving society here-- you are ready. So you've got to always be thinking and probing on that 20%. 

Jill Finlayson: So you've brought up a number of terms, Scrum, Agile. What are these different terminology, that people might hear when they hear about Agile project management, and what do they mean and why are there different words? Are there different methodologies? What are we hearing here? 

Nate Crews: 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, with different skill sets and that goes through and do things in an iterative way, where they do things in small increments, get feedback on that increment, and then we make adjustments along the way to get things done. So Agile focuses in on innovation, definitely working collaboratively with people, and, also, delivering value to the customer in a prioritized way. 

So one of the things, first steps, on an Agile project is they have a role of a customer role, that's part of the team, that's called a product owner. They work actively with their executives or their stakeholders to identify-- what is the problem that we need to fix; what opportunity we need to exploit; what does that realize, with respect to a solution; and what are the features associated with that solution; and then get from them a sense of, what is the priority of delivering these? 

That priority factor that you put on all these features and stories, also, is a way of delivering things faster to your client. Because if I deliver to the client what they want the most, that's accelerated value to the client. Because if I focus on what you're most important about, or your biggest pain point, that's another way of delivering value to the client. 

So agility is just a way of behaving to deliver a customer that focus on feedback. It looks at innovation, constantly looking at ways of improving. A lot of the project management approaches think about improving through lessons learned, but we put that in knowledge repositories. Agility actively says, now, what we've learned that we could do better, what can we actively, now, employ, in our next iteration, to become better? 

Jill Finlayson: So if agility is the umbrella, where do words like Scrum-- and what are some other words that people hear? 

Nate Crews: Scrum is a framework of delivering-- it was primarily for software-- for delivering projects that had a definitive role of a product owner, who was a value maximizer from the business. You would figure out what was important from the business, from value. You have a Scrum Master, that was not a project manager. 

Imagine there's a person on the team that has no authority-- this is what the framework says-- but you convince people on 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 ever thought about that? You use suggestions and ways of thinking to try to navigate with them in a thought process, to have them think about things differently. 

So I've given them suggestions on how to self-organize. I've given them some suggestions on how to improve and how you can estimate the size of work, how we work together respectfully. So my job is, really, to sit and observe and to give them some guidance on some things that I use on my past experience, the fact that I've been through it, I've worked on projects, I've seen things go well and seen things go not so well. So I'm able to say, hmm, you're on a good path, and I can encourage you to stay on that path. Or, if I see you on a path that's heading for the cliff, I say, can we sit down and have a side discussion on this? And let me pass on what my thoughts are on there and then see what you think about it. 

In other words, I'm not telling them, stop, go in a different direction. I say, let's sit down and let me talk with you. Because we don't want to give up the power of self-organization. In today's market, the knowledge workers have all the skill sets on how to get things built along the way, so we don't want to take that away from them. We also want to give them some influence and some suggestions that keep them working in a reasonable direction, that will get the outcomes that were expected. 

Jill Finlayson: If I were to play the devil's advocate here, you talk about the teams being really responsible for delivering the product. Can they just do Agile on their own, or is there a reason we need a Scrum Master? 

Nate Crews: Well, good question. I would say, at some point-- that's what I would consider to be nirvana. But most of us have been indoctrinated and, dare I say, brainwashed, into working in an environment where we have a project manager telling us what to do, and that's why we need a Scrum Master. 

Sometimes, when you say, OK, self-organize, it's like, OK, what's that? Sometimes, you need somebody to give you the examples and work you through some exercises, to grow those skill sets in your mind on how to self-organize. That's what the Scrum Master is there for, is to help stimulate the thinking towards working together collaboratively to get work done. 

Jill Finlayson: 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 kind of in the weeds. 

Nate Crews: Well, I think we have Scrum coaches at different levels. There's coaches at the team level, that kind of gives perspective on how to work as a team. And they also would interject some things from higher levels that would help the people at the tactical level do their jobs. There are coaches at the enterprise level, that kind of talks about, how do I do agility at, shall we say, a program level, which is a grouping of projects together. 

Because one of the things that most Agile frameworks suggest is working in teams-- well, particularly Scrum-- of teams of up to 10 persons. Now, that gets to be kind of problematic for some organizations, let's say an aerospace company, like a Boeing or Northrop Grumman that have hundreds of thousands of employees, and to have them work in size of teams of 10 only could be a little problematic. But you can scale it up in program and have 10-person teams report up to a program level and have hundreds of people working together here. 

Jill Finlayson: Yeah. I think this is interesting. So you've worked with so many different teams. Would you say-- is there one myth about Agile that maybe drives you crazy or that you see out there? 

Nate Crews: Well, one of the things I feel about Agile, it is the elixir for all problems within development teams. It's like, it solves all the problems. All the errors will go away. And, in reality, the people problems still exist. Agile is just a-- we call it WOW, a new Way Of Working. So we still have to address those people issues and try to synchronize them, or to convince them to work in a different way of working, along the way. 

And you're going to have people who are reluctant to do it. Some people will be on board. Some people will try to do it their way. Some people want to work in isolation by themselves. Some people are going to be good team members. We have to corral all those different mindsets together to be a good, functioning team. 

And we also need to recognize the Tuckman-Jensen model, that a great team doesn't happen overnight. They have to evolve, and you have to let them make mistakes and learn how to become better at working together. And, eventually, they will get it, over time. The thing is, we don't want that time period to be 12 months. We want to be able to-- us to reconcile how to work together successfully as a team. 

Jill Finlayson: To make that more concrete, since you have worked with a lot of teams, is there an example you can give where the team had to rethink how they work together and then they got-- this new Agile mindset finally clicked? 

Nate Crews: Let's just say it was a complex system of delivering on systems that I supported, and they tried to deliver it in your normal waterfall approach. And they lost many man years of development, hundreds of millions of dollars, in trying to do it in a sequential way. And then they said, OK, let's try-- let's restart this program over again, and we want to integrate some Agile work here. And instead of-- let's let the team members give us some more guidance, or let's delegate some of the decisions down to the team members and let them decide on how the work gets done along the way. And we'll break things up into smaller increments. 

And what happens was, after reintroducing that program over again and using some Agile principles and using a delivery system, they were able to get that project done in half the time, and save money on it, than before, because it was a solution that was considered to be complex, not complicated. 

Complex is when you have a lot of uncertainty and you go along and you have to-- the solution has to evolve over time.

Complicated is just doing something that has a lot of moving parts with it. This solution that we were talking about was new technologies that we didn't know about and we had to figure out along the way. That is the sweet spot of agility, because it allows us to figure out and do some experimentation. 

Now, we probably did not as much experimentation as I would like. When we tried to bring up the topic of experimentation, it was tough to get senior management to buy into it. But we did buy in to, let the knowledge workers come up with how we should approach this. Because the people who have done it before, that's got the war scars and the knowledge and the success things, learn how to do this. And we came out with a better outcome. 

And, also, because we work in an Agile standpoint, we didn't have to go back up to upper management to make decisions. We had everybody on the team empowered to make-- even a customer representative-- to help make decisions, so we didn't have to have that delay of going back up and ask for approval. We had somebody empowered to make those decisions as part of the team. 

Jill Finlayson: You bring up a good point, though, that sometimes you might want to do something in a more Agile way, but your executive team isn't necessarily on board. What have you seen that works for change management? It sounds a little bit like just showing the value in time savings and client satisfaction, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to change the way they've been doing things. 

Nate Crews: So the thing is, first of all, that's where we get back to customer centricity, knowing your customer. There's some things that we ask people to do. One is called the empathy map, which is, what does the customer think about? What's their likes, their dislikes? What do they see? What have they heard out in the marketplace? So you get a good understanding of who that person is. How do they like information? How do they don't like information? All right? 

And then, you sit down and have a discussion with them about the current situation and get a sense of their risk profile. How much risk to try something 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 you what-- what if I showed you an approach in agility that eliminated the waste in your existing systems? We're not going to change any of the software. We're going to go in and see what is redundant, what have we over-processed, and remove out the waste elements. 

And then, you go through and you demonstrate to them. They said, wow that was pretty good. Is that all about agility? No, that's just a little part. You want to hear something else? In other words, you've got to bring them-- some customers, the appetite to new innovations aren't that large, so you have to walk that 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 think about this methodically, on how we're doing it. There's cultural issues. There's technology issues. We've got to slow down. We can't get this done tomorrow. Let's think about it and slow it down. So you need to understand who are the decision makers and how you can best support them, in this journey, to become more agile. 

Jill Finlayson: It sounds like the risk profile that you mentioned earlier also comes into play. How do you bring them in on a low-risk experiment, before leveling it up? 

Nate Crews: You've got to do a lot of listening. You've got listening with your ears and listening with your eyes. How do you listen with your eyes? You observe people, when you bring up topics, and see what their responses are. And you've got to be a good people reader and understand where they're at and try to come up with ways of suggestions. 

You also need to-- what we call in the Agile space clean language-- you also need to understand their language and speak the problem to them in their language. So if you're trying to convince a financial person to sign off on agility, you may have to go and delve into the ROI and the payback periods and those things of doing things a certain way. If I have somebody who's in quality, you would talk about how quality can be enhanced in it. So you need to understand who you're talking to along the way here, to become a better person here in being a change agent. 

Jill Finlayson: That sounds like a good job skill to have, full stop, the ability to both listen, to understand how to put things in the language that people understand and what is the value to them. 

Nate Crews: Yes. And that's what I believe that tomorrow's project managers need to be-- we should just call them change agents because they need to know so many different things. And project management will be a component, but not the overall component of everything they do. 

Jill Finlayson: Let's say more about that because I like this idea of having change agents in more roles. Oftentimes, when people hear Agile, they tune out because they're like, that's for the techies. Where do you see Agile playing in other jobs? NATE 

Nate Crews: Agile is playing into finance. Now, that brings another dimension. Because in finance, how can I better apportion the company's assets to get the best value here? So that brings in data analytics because you bring in data that helps us make better decisions faster and quickly, in smaller increments here, along the way here. 

In HR, the agility has changed HR around because now you have to go recruit a new generation of people to come work for you. And there's a new generation to come in. You can say, hey, I belong to this big, monolithic engineering firm, and if you come on board and you're sharp, you've got a good skill set, we promise you almost lifetime employment. 

Well, I don't like that. I want to work with my friends. And if I can't find a place where I can work with a startup with my friends, I mean, I'm going to be a barista down here at minimum wage for a while till I get to a work where I like it at. And you say, what? Lifelong great employment, that-- the paradigms of what the new workforce looks for is different. 

Jill Finlayson: Let's talk about some of those skill sets that people are going to need. So you're talking about leading when you're not a leader. You're talking about doing experiments and taking risk and failure. What are some of the skills you need, if you're going to incorporate Agile into how you do your work? 

Nate Crews: Well, Agile, you need to first start at the mind. A lot of people start with-- there's a lot of different practices you can do. You can pair, you can do test-driven development, and there's a whole slew of practices. Your mindset, you've got to believe that some of the things that, normally, you wouldn't have done before might be possible, and you're willing to do things and experiment to see if it could work. So when are you going to have this growth Agile mindset? You also need to have an understanding of what the big picture is. We need people that play well together, that learns together. 

Jill Finlayson: Well, when we started out, we were talking about how old systems of project management were kind of telling people what to do. Here's your job, here's your deliverable. And now, we're trying to get them to almost innately do the right thing, but sometimes that involves coaching. How do you actually effectively coach people so that they can thrive in this Agile workplace? 

Nate Crews: Well, first of all, you get to know them. You've got to know what their skill sets are, their desires. And, also for my coaching framework, I look at people in four dimensions, on will and skill. 

Somebody is low will, low skill, that means that they don't have right skill set and they really have been beaten down and probably have struggled with a job situation. I've got to increase their will and attitude, but I also need to feed them ideas in small increments and, also, situationally, almost tell them, now, you go off and work on this for the next week or so, and let's look at what the outcome is. OK? 

Now, if we have what's considered to be low skill, high will, those are amazing people. Those are, typically, the new people coming into the company. They are excitable. You can teach them. They're putty in your hands. And you can have that. 

Then, there's some people with high skill and high will. Those are those high-powered people, that just grab amazingly complex functionality and they could go with it. You want to get them in the hands of some people that are going to challenge them. 

You have high skill, low will, that's a person who's probably had some major failure when they got put in the leadership role, and they operate with alligator arms, and what we are going to do is what I know I won't get in trouble with. I'll just do this, I'll collect 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 tell them, hey, let's look through the front windshield going forward here. What you did in the past is not indicative of what you could do in the future. So, sometimes, you've got to work with people along-- and everybody's journey, and the length of the journey, is different. As a coach, you've got to believe in people and be willing to work with them because you believe that they are a good person. 

Jill Finlayson: And I think you've said, in other occasions, too, as somebody in a job, you need to stop following recipes and start thinking like a chef. How does this relate to who gets promoted in the past, who gets promoted now, and what does the skills agility mean in that chef analogy? 

Nate Crews: To become a chef-- if you go and look at that analogy, some people toil in many different kitchens to become a chef, right? And they work under people who are mean and give them harsh feedback, but they evolve a skill set of knowing how to listen to someone-- they can walk up to the table of a customer and say, what kind of meal do you want tonight? What would make you happy? And with that meal, I think-- with a nice Merlot to go along with that. What do you think? I have some suggestions. Because you do things organically because you have learned these things over time here. So you have to become a chef. You're tomorrow's project manager. 

Now, so those project managers that currently exist, one of the interesting things about being a project manager is that things never go the way it was supposed to and you have to deal with some good things and a lot of bad things and overcome them. And you have, what I call, Spidey senses and understand, well, oh, yeah. I remember when I programmed before. We can't do that. No, no, no, no, no, no. So you stay away from those things that you think would be bad. 

Now, if you take that skill set and some of your organizational skills that you've been able to acquire from previous, and now you start really having an open mind to learning technology-- I mean, going out on the internet and coming up to speed on AI or taking a course from AI. At any given time, myself, I have four classes-- I have a data analytics course going, an AI course going on, and I also am finishing up a second doctorate degree. Because I want to have knowledge, as an instructor, to stay ahead of the people I need to teach. 

Jill Finlayson: Let's talk more about AI. Since you've brought it up, this is a great opportunity to say, how is AI being used in project management? Is it making project work easier? How have you used it? 

Nate Crews: Well, AI, first of all, you've got to believe in it as a good partner. You can't be afraid of it. A lot of people are afraid. Well, AI is going to replace us someday. In reality, what's going to really replace you is the guy who can really master using AI. That's the person who's going to replace you. So the thing is you need to become comfortable with AI applications and use them to augment. 

Within project management, there's a certain skill set that I always thought of it as drudgery, coming up and balancing a budget, coming up with your plan from a budget standpoint, within the parameters they give you. Well, AI can go through multiple scenarios to help you come up with various ideas that you can look at and to choose from in seconds, where it would take you hours to do. 

Or, if you are going through on a project plan, leveling out resources on your plan, resources where everybody's somewhere between 40, 50 hours of work-- I mean, that's a lot of late nights. It's a lot of weekends. And you're going through the plan. Your eyes get bad. But, in some tools, you hit the level button, and it pushes you out your plan for five years, and all the resources are 40 hours. That's not good. You need to go through and do what-if scenarios, to meticulously, surgically add work here, take some work from people along, and to get it into a nice framework that works. AI capabilities of today's tools can help you with that. 

Also, they can help you with some suggestions for decision making. If you go in and use ChatGPT and give them a set of parameters here, they can come up with and give you some suggestions. 

The one thing I would tell you please don't do, do not uniformly take the outcome of AI and say, OK, that's the answer. Because AI pulls things from many different places in the universe, and some of those resources are blatantly false. 

Jill Finlayson: I like the use for scenario planning. Because you can change the inputs, you can change the outputs, you can see what different scenarios might look like, of, if we run into a problem with some supply chain issue, how would that impact things? 

Nate Crews: What could be the possible offensive resolution? Or, you could do risk management. You're starting a big, complex project here, for some kind of state-of-the-art plane. What are the risks? There's risks all over the place. They could give you some ideas around risks that you never did thought of, that could later on be the gotchas of why your project failed. So they are a good partner, if used in the right way. 

But that's where the project manager's sense of-- I call those Spidey senses, understanding how-- what would work well, or not so well, in the culture that you're working in? Who are the people that we have? What kind of skill set do they need to have? How do we need to train them, or how do I need to up-skill them, over the course of my project, for us to be successful? 

So project managers who have been around have some innate skill sets that make them perfect to be the change agents of the future. But, sometimes, we get to a fixed mindset. I'm good at what I'm doing here. And why should I think about some 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's marketplace, it's like you were a-- you're an expert eight-track player producer. 

Jill Finlayson: [LAUGHING] 

Nate Crews: You'd be really not doing so well right now. 

Jill Finlayson: That's a good transition to asking the question, if you're not currently a project manager, but you want to move into project management, from, perhaps, an individual contributor role, what would be the first steps that you would take? 

Nate Crews: You have to want to be a person that wants to evoke change. And, in that evoking change, you want to do it through people. And you get a thrill of doing it from the role of being a projects manager/coach change agent of the future here. But, in order to do it in the future, like I said, you're going to have to learn how to be a better coach, and you have to have about a 50% understanding of most of the current technology going on and how you might want to strategize or implementing them for the solution of your customers. 

Jill Finlayson:: As a person who's coached a lot of people, how do you help them figure out their career path or their career goals? And do you have a favorite moment as a coach? 

Nate Crews: To answer your first question, I don't. Because, as a coach, my job is not to give you answers. I'm supposed to go through an intellectual journey with you, a dance, per se. 

And it's structured. Like, if you and I were talking, Jill, and we would come down and sit 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 is that topic important to you? And then, I might ask you, OK. In the future, how would you like that problem to go away or transform into something else that would be more acceptable to you? 

And then, we would go through and have ideas or options that not-- I generate-- I would come up with new avenues, through our discussion, for you to think about, but you come up with the ideas. Because if I tell you what to do, then you hold me accountable. In the coaching process, I need to have you hold yourself accountable and you come up with the options. I am there to guide you along the way. 

I'm long in the tooth and old, but I work with some amazing young people that have worked in the Agile space and have done some collaborative coaching with them. I would think that I have given them some guidance on how to be better coaches, and they helped me be better coaches. So I would say there's not a one person that I helped grow. 

I have people in the past-- I talked to one just the other day-- sometimes, when I talk to him, he even mentors me. We do reverse mentoring, as I run into ideas and thoughts. He's now a program manager of an IT company here. I'm very proud of him. He's got a wonderful wife. He's got children going off to college. His daughter's at an Ivy League school, and she's going to be a doctor.

And to think from the burgeoning from him-- well, first of all, he made one good choice, he married a great wife here. He came to one of the parties at my house-- and I still tease him about that-- and they walked in together and they had on matching sweaters. And I pulled him aside. I said, you know, you're a brave man to walk in front of me in here like that today. But you know what? That was a symbol of him having a great partnership, that he went forward to go forward. So, I mean, I have people that I work with along the way. I try, right now, to do some teaching and interject and give them more than what they asked for. I work within the scripts and the syllabus that we have here, but if they ask for more, if possible, I would do that. 

And I also say that, after the course is over, the relationship doesn't end. I'm here to support you, if you need that. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. We can set up some time to work. So the coaching thing is believing in people and watching them grow. And you just smile. You don't take credit for it. You just say, hey, I helped them along the way and that was good. 

Jill Finlayson: That's a couple of good, really great, tips right there, which is to ask for help and give help. Do you have any other final words of advice on how skills agility can help someone future-proof their career? 

Nate Crews: Always think about what's coming next on the horizon. Always think about, how do I get to customer delight? How do I need to change my behavior? How do I need to change the results? How do I need to work with people? How do I need to go above and beyond to help with that? Now, if you are a person who has mastered the customer delight job, I would say that you're not going to have a problem keeping a job or getting new assignments. The work will come to you. 

Understanding the difference between output and-- outcomes and values. Values and outcomes is the new language of the day. And we switched from KPIs to OKRs, which is talking about leading indicators versus lagging indicators. There's a lot-- there's a whole lot of things you need to grasp onto. 

And you need to grasp onto to being a lifelong learner. I would say I'm an uber-lifelong learner. And then, as you're in this tunnel of learning, you get into that tunnel and realize, the further you go in that tunnel, the more further away that tunnel gets for you. But you just keep going, until you get to the end. Because, along that journey, you become more knowledgeable, more valuable and helpful, for others along the way. 

Jill Finlayson: Thank you so much, Nate. I really appreciate all of the advice and insights. 

And, with that, I hope you have enjoyed this latest in a long series of podcasts that we'll be sending your way every month. Please share with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this future of work journey with us, and make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find a variety of courses and certificates to help you thrive in this new working landscape. And to see what's coming up next at EDGE in Tech, go ahead and visit hdi.berkeley.edu. 

Thanks so much for listening, and I'll be back next month to discuss how emotional and cognitive resilience will be key to thriving in an AI-powered world. The Future of Work podcast is hosted by Jill Finlayson, produced by Sarah Benzuly, and edited by Matt DiPietro, Natalie Newman, and Alicia Liao.

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