The Art of Project Management: Creativity, Connection and Joy at Work

Transcript

JIM DIGBY

Project management is an art form. There’s just no question about it. It is an art form. This is my new pursuit: How can I help take these skills and perhaps pass them on to the next generation of people doing what I do for a living?

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Hi everybody. This is Projectified ®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

International Project Management Day is on the 6th of November, so let’s celebrate by having project leaders explain how they’re using their skills to bring some joy into the world.

I’m joined by two project leaders with really fun jobs. We’ve got Liliana Gómez Castrejón, a project manager at The LEGO Group in Herning, Denmark, and Jim Digby, a project manager and tour and production director at Show Makers in Philadelphia, which produces events around the world. He’s toured with acts like LINKIN PARK, Genesis and Avril Lavigne. Both Lily and Jim have PMI’s PMP (Project Management Professional)® certification .

Lily and Jim, thanks for joining us.

JIM DIGBY

Thanks for having us, Steve.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

Thank you for inviting us.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

All right. I want to start by finding out how both of you got into project management and specifically into these really fun corners of project management. Lily, let’s start with you.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

Okay. Well, I realized I’ve been a project manager almost all my life. It started when with my family because my family has great ideas. They always want to do a lot of things—vacations, concerts, baby showers, birthdays—but they never had a plan. So I was always making the plan, making the vision board, making sure [of] the purpose and the theme, the resources, scheduling everything. And then in university, I studied industrial engineering, and when we had to make some tech projects, I was the one organizing the project, getting the procurement, making the timeline, and making sure everybody was doing all right, team building. So I realized I’ve always done it. But professionally, I started in logistics, and I was more supply chain managing. But then I looked at projects, and then it started interesting me.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Okay, so 9-year-old Lily was making a risk register for vacations.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

Yes. The first time I let my parents plan the vacation, they didn’t book any hotels. We would go in the middle of the night looking at three hotels. They were fully booked. I was traumatized by that at 11 years old. So after that I took over the planning.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

And then what about LEGO? So somehow this career in logistics and then projects landed you at a really fun company?

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

It was really lucky. Immediately when I moved to Denmark, I applied to LEGO, and LEGO was really starting to grow up a lot, so they were hiring a lot. And I started in engineering, so I was assisting projects, mainly building factories and especially traveling a lot from Denmark to Mexico to build a factory.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

And then Jim, why project management? How project management, and then you’re making a career in rock and roll?

JIM DIGBY

It’s interesting. It must be a common denominator for us because like Lily, I told my mom I wanted to be an architect when I was six or seven years old, and I wanted to have 12 carpenters and five plumbers and listed the teams that would be working around me as we built things. And somehow, here I am.

So I’ve always worked in the entertainment business one way or another. It was fifth grade, at 10 years old, when I had a teacher see me for the first time and offer me the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies for the May Day Parade and the technician, which equated to rolling out some speakers, I think at that time. And I was fortunate to grow up in an era when the arts were widely funded in school. And so that gave me a space to go learn the craft at that age and work on the stage at that age. And I happened to be very technically inclined. This technical aptitude led to some theater and arts work in the nightclub business, which led to a technical director role, a little bit of film school. And then I landed the first tour as a technical director, which led to Genesis and working for other musical artists and slowly journeyed up the food chain to stage manager and then production manager, which is the equivalent to project manager.

And then I found PMI and PMP late in my career, but embraced it wholeheartedly because it was, “Oh, geez. I’m already doing all these things, but now I know that there’s a process for them. Let me figure out what that looks like.” That’s how I landed here.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s an interesting point of comparison. So you found your field first. What did you encounter that made you sense or intuit that the project management training or just that toolkit would be useful in the work you were doing?

JIM DIGBY

I was helping to produce the first ever live international concerts in Saudi Arabia. In the second year of that, 2019, there was a gentleman at the table in all of our meetings who was taking copious notes, and out of curiosity one day, I asked him what he was doing. And he told me that he was the project manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers on these government-led projects. And I’m like, “Well, what is that?” He gave me the understanding of what PMI and PMP was. I told him what I was doing, and he said, “You’re absolutely a project manager.”

If I were to try to take my skillset and describe it to someone else prior to PMP, I’d say things about my music touring and those experiences, and they might not translate at a corporate headquarters. But take all of those skills and turn that into PMP, and now suddenly it translates in a tremendous number of places.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Lily, kind of an opposite path. You were already a project manager. What makes LEGO a unique environment in which to be a project leader, and how did your skills translate? In what ways were you challenged.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

LEGO is all about developing people and so on. So after a few months, they offered me, “Do you want to get [PMP] certified?” So I got certified, and it was eye-opening to get certified and learn a framework and also a logic. And yeah, it definitely made my life… not easier because work is always challenging. But yeah, it made me solve some problems easier.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

In what ways do you think project management skills, whether acquired through that PMI process or just generally through your career, [which] skills are most important to enabling you to be effective in your role?

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

I will say it’s strategic leadership, also stakeholder management and communication management. Strategic [leadership] because we always need to look at the big picture and make a plan long term. Not compromise the long term for the short term, right?

And then stakeholder [management] was a game-changer for me because before having a framework, I will sometimes, I don’t know, forget to involve some people or forget to make a clear overview. After the training, I started to be very logical and also very visual. I always make visual stakeholder overviews. And yeah, make sure I didn’t forget anyone. And then the communication plans to know how we are going to communicate and for what reason. And if it’s [to] inform or if it’s also [to] consult decision makers, etc.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Jim, how about you? What’s the project management skill or a couple of skills that are most useful to you?

JIM DIGBY

It’s a very loose industry that has very few requisites for anyone in the positions of authority. And therefore you see all manner of organizations and organisms operating the different artists on the road or operating the different events. But I find that stakeholder management and comms management have been significantly helpful for me. We hire a wide variety of human types, and we say, “Hey, today you are the carpenter,” or whatever the role might be. It’s 16-hour workdays in a lot of cases. So that scope document and being able to help people understand what’s expected of them and how to measure their own success and giving them North Stars has become a super helpful tool from the toolbox of PMI for sure.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s a great segue into the next topic I wanted to broach, which is a challenge that you faced that was significant, and what the solution was? How PM (project management) discipline enabled you to get there?

JIM DIGBY

One of the greatest tools that I use consistently—and sometimes forget to use—is, as Lily said, it’s stakeholder management. And the responsibility [is] not just to manage the stakeholders down the ladder from you, but also to manage the management stakeholders and those up the ladder from you so that everyone has the information necessary to be a part of the project decisions. And who needs to be a part of those project decisions? Having a framework for that, which didn’t exist prior to my journey with PMI, having a framework for that has helped me to be more diligent and respectful and conscious that I have a need to pass information both up and down the food chain. And that has led to easier days.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Yeah. Great. Lily, how about for you?

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

Resource management, which I don’t like the title—I like to call it leadership—has been the biggest challenge. Because when I was junior and just got the (PMP) certification, I thought a lot about planning resources’ hours and aligning the resource availability and so on. And also my leadership style. Especially when I started first in engineering, I wanted to fit the traditional leadership styles that are more traditionally male-characteristic-oriented. And I didn’t feel natural. I didn’t feel strong in that. With the years, I decided to embrace more my authentic self, my leadership style, and it is very caring, very personal, and for me, it’s important that everybody feels good.

Trust is my main pillar, and that everybody plays and have fun, especially in my field of work. Well, our purpose is to create play experiences, so also when we work, I make sure we have fun and that we have opportunities for playing. Today I work in design, so I need to make sure that design teams are always inspired.

It’s not enough to have an organized project, organized resources and so on. We also need to go on inspirational trips. We need to make sharing sessions with other design teams or even with other organizations. We need to think out of the box and to play. And sometimes, when the teams are stuck, we just need to go for a walk and talk, and have a little play and get out of the office.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

So when I think LEGO, first, I think colorful and fun and playful and creative. But also it’s a company that has been around for many, many decades and probably had some ways of doing things. So when you did get in there and decide, “You know what? No, it’s time for a little Lily personality and vision and spark to come in,” was there any friction there? What did that look like to sort of make that change happen?

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

It depends from team to team. So what I struggle [with] more is in the operational teams. It was a bit of a struggle because there is a way to make things. And now that I work in design, they are more risk-taking, but also because we create trust, right? What has made a shift in the Lily style, as you call it, is always opening up for opportunities. We follow in the design disciplines is a diamond. Diverge, converge. Diverge, converge. That is very, very important in our processes.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

You’re working with creatives, and just your own personal embrace of creativity. How does that affect the way that you lead both these particular teams and your philosophy on and approach to project management generally?

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

I do project management with the scope, cost, quality, all the PMI framework. I need to do it, but the magic is to make it invisible because maybe it’s not so interesting for the creative teams. And on top of that, I need to make sure that they are stimulated, that they have spaces for creativity, innovation. It would be super normal to see me running around, preparing workshops with toys, with [LEGO] bricks, with different materials for inspiration or for some explorations that we want to do when we are opening up the funnel for innovation. I will also be organizing sharing sessions with other departments or with other external creative teams so we can share and learn and inspire each other.

JIM DIGBY

I think I’m going to bring LEGOs to the office. It sounds like a great opportunity to get people to remember to play, and it’s such an important thing to remember. I think we, Lily and I, share an interesting role as project managers in that we work in a space where the art form is collaborative. In my instance, you have the musicians, they write the music. They create the idea for what the sound is going to be, but then all of those supporting roles, of which I, mine is one. And in our case, there are a hundred or more on tour with us. In all of those supporting roles, we are all collaborative artists that help to execute the vision along the way. I could go through the list of team members and their scopes and say “You are an artist” to everyone on the team. The chef that cooks the food for us, the bus drivers, the truck drivers, every member of the team in our sense contributes to the delivery of the art.

And I think it sounds like LEGO does the same thing where everybody has a chance to have a voice and bring their vision to the table. And I think leading a team in that way where their artistic ideas see the light of day—and then potentially get actioned if they’re great—that too is an art form. And I think that’s what good project managers are doing on a day-to-day basis.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What’s the coolest project that each of you have been a part of and helped to execute? I’ll wait for whoever’s the most excited to talk about theirs to go first.

JIM DIGBY

Lily.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

I’ve launched a lot of cool products, of course, and experiences and many things that always made me so proud. But of course I will choose something that I like, and for me, fashion is so important. So I was very excited when I was project manager for an all collaboration that we had with Adidas and Levi’s. So when we engage in a brand partnership to make fashion with Levi’s, [it’s] a lot of beanies, hoodies, and denim jacket with LEGO elements on it. And we made in-store activations.

And also with Adidas, a lot of shoes. I have a collection of like 10 pairs of shoes, Adidas by LEGO. For me, that was super cool because we had never done it before, and I really like going [through] innovation—things that we’ve never done, in the future, and then making it happen is very, very, very cool for me.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Jim, how about you for a signature project?

JIM DIGBY

Building the LEGO Death Star. No. There’s this instant kind of gratification that comes on every show day when the house lights go out and the audience cheers and the band takes the stage. There’s a joy in that, and I think the human that I’ve become thrives on that instant gratification. The world of live gives you that sense of completion.

Coming full circle and bringing project management back to my most consistent client, LINKIN PARK—who I’ve been with for 24 years now—and being able to use those resources to ensure that this chapter of their career journey operates as efficiently as possible and has the healthiest mindsets on the team. And everyone throughout the stakeholder chain, top to bottom, is feeling respected and seen, and their work is being able to be accomplished in a manner that satisfies themselves as well as the needs of the artist. I don’t want to oversell it, but I’m blessed to have found PMI and to have been able to stitch together something that I was chaotically doing prior to project management in a way that I feel is, “Oh, okay. Now I understand why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What makes each of you most proud to be a project manager? This could be impact, it could be team, leadership, culture. Take your pick, but what are you most proud of?

JIM DIGBY

What we’re building is a healthy culture on tour, and that is a long, far cry from where the business has come from. And I’m most proud that, in the case of this current project I’m on. We’ve got a third of the team, it’s super young, under 30 years old. Some people are touring for the very first time. They’re in environments that are safe and healthy, and I believe they feel safe and secure. My RFPs go out to the vendors requesting, “Look, we are a safe environment for all types of humans. Please be creative and get us all types of humans.”

We do everything we can to demonstrate you are actually valued here. You are seen here. And in a lot of cases, it’s the first time. They love the business, but this is the first camp they’ve ever been in that feels safe for them, and they’re all growing. So as our team matures, it’s super satisfying to see people spread their own wings and become a better version of themselves or a more skilled version of themselves, and to see new opportunities open up for them and to see their confidence grow. That’s, for me, the most satisfying part of it.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

I have two layers to this. On the personal side, I’m proud to create play opportunities, right? And professionally, my purpose is to connect with people and to create spaces of trust, psychological safety, and also forming innovative environments, making sure we create spaces where we connect with different functions. Diverse creating environments where we are diverse teams coming together to create new ideas. I find that super stimulating, and I’m proud when we create ideas and we actually produce some innovation.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Both of your jobs are so awesome. Thank you for walking us through both of them as we celebrate International Project Management Day. Yeah. Jim and Lily, thanks again so much for joining us.

JIM DIGBY

Thanks, Steve. It’s been a pleasure.

LILY GÓMEZ CASTREJÓN

Thank you, Steve.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

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