Welcome to the everyday p.m. podcast, the podcast, where we discussed project management principles for your everyday life. My name is Ann campea and I'm a certified project / program manager with several years. Working for the very different Industries. Healthcare retail consumer goods Tech. I'm now in marketing I'm so excited to welcome. Mmm, my very special guest and returning to the podcast, Donna Gregorio, who is a veteran of corporate IT project management.
She's also a published author college, grad, school instructor and well-respected Conference speaker. Now, Donna, I've had an opportunity just this past fall to see you speak in person. I'm so excited. Now, have you back on the podcast to speak more on a topic that you actually came forward to me to propose which is measuring customer experience to drive Innovation. So before we dig, To that topic. Why don't you take a brief moment to introduce yourself to our audience?
Well, hi and thanks again for having me on a podcast, love participating in what you're doing and making advances for RPM industry and everyone in the audience. Thanks so much for tuning in to listen today. As an said, I am a veteran, IT project manager. I am a department head at the Mitre Corporation and Bedford Massachusetts where Iraq on the pmo office, where we run, we helped execute on the most. Significant and most important
projects in our division. I started out my career as a software developer and moved into software designing both user interface and software design and then I gradually moved into project management and that's been for the past 20 years or so that I've been and I'm involved in project management and been a great career and I documented some of my challenges and Experiences in Vietnam, I booked the successful project manager, but I'm here today to talk about some new
thoughts and ideas that are recently becoming important in my organization. So excited about talking about customer experience and helping to drive Innovation. So I want to I do want to take like 2 minutes, done it to praise you because when you first came on the podcast, we talked about this book so please do check out. The episode as well because it's all about, just all of the things that you had to go through to get this book
published. What the book is about how useful and practical can be for project managers very recently. You did an episode for us on roadmapping and creating your strategic roadmaps and I got to see you speak at the PMI Global conference which was incredible. I was like a fan girl in the
audience saying. I know that person and I since we've met If for those project managers that are listening and thinking what is the trajectory of a p.m. you go into a p.m. role, what happens then, like how do you move about the industry? How do you climb the ladder Donna for you? Like you to me is like the trajectory for me. I mean, Donna does things that I'm looking forward to doing like, being a graduate school instructor? It's like one of the, my bucket
list things, right? Being an executive position and Being there and kind of working with the portfolio working with the c-suite, level 2 to make those decisions on behalf of the organization. You talked about that again in the roadmapping episode, you're doing that, you wrote a book on project management. I just there's just so much that you've done in your career already known as the. I thought I wanted to take just like 2 minutes to praise you.
Because for those that are looking for somebody to say like hey how can I model my career off of somebody who's done some of the things that I'm To sit in Donna, you are that for me. So every time you get on the podcast, I'm so honored to have you share another one of your, you know, bits of knowledge with me and my audience and selfishly just with me because I absorb it and take it all in and I go use it at my organization.
But for those that are listening to, I think Donna would be a great example of somebody that you would look to to kind of model the way for you. So, back to the topic at hand I think everyone in the audience knows how challenging it is to be a project manager. There's always challenges they're always what ifs. What if we had only done if we
had thought about this? If we had prepared better if we had planned better and I think if you if you looked at the most successful project managers that you know of and I asked them what are the five of six things that you always do on every project that you work on? I bet they could tell you what
Five or six things are. So now that they consistently do they consistently execute on and they are they are those the most successful project managers that you've seen your in your view point and, you know, you try to mimic those people as much as you can. And I think that over the years, I've worked with so many project managers that I've, I've learned what those things are. And I think helping to share some of those things without Others is is really what it's
all about. So, let's break this topic down because I would guess that maybe the first part of this topic is something that you have either done yourself, or you've seen your predecessors, or those that have mentored you do, which is understanding customer experience, right? So when it comes down to a project, you're really creating a project from start to finish to ultimately feed into some sort of either end, user customer experiences what I would have. Engine.
So in your opinion Donna why is it important for us to measure customer experience? So I think that we've been very good over the years at measuring customer experience, with respect to a particular product and I think we have a lot of metrics that we can collect about a particular products success. So we can say, how many users do we have? How many customers do we have? How many clicks do we do? We get how many thumbs? Zup, do we get on the product? How many comments do we do?
We get on the product, how many, how many times are we getting complaints to the service desk on particular product? How many times do we have an outage for a particular product? So, I think that we've been very good over the years and tracking all those things. We talked about customer experience, you're really talking about the sentiments and the opinions of an overall. Experience that the customers
having. So example of that would be how well is your it organization supporting you in the work that you have to do on a day-to-day basis. So, that's really end-to-end. How, what's the boot up time? On my computer? Isn't fast enough? It is the response time for some of the key applications that I'm using. Is it fast enough did? I am I running into problems with many of my eye? It products. Am I running into successes? And is it supporting me in the way?
I expect? I have a certain expectation. You and I TR telling me that you're supporting me in a certain way. Are you really doing what are we really supporting people? The way we expect to be supporting them? They delighted with our responses. They delighted with the products that they're using as a whole not just on an Basis, but on an overall basis, you know, one example I could give of customer experience is the, the idea, we've all gone out to dinner,
right? And the process of going out to dinner, you pick a restaurant, you look at the menu online before you go, you get to the restaurant. There's a long line, you can go into the restaurant, you see, get seated, the service, the food quality, in this Ambience, there's entertainment, there's the check process and paying the bill processing, the Whole experience. If the food is really good, that's only one piece of the
whole experience. And and so, when someone tells you all that restaurant is great, you should try it. It's because they had an overall great experience from beginning to end, not just in one particular area. So if you think about the, it customer journey and the customer experience. And you think about Amazon as being a great customer experience example. From beginning to end, you're getting a great overall
experience. Why aren't we and it, and why aren't we as project managers being more serious about collecting that customer experience? So I think that's really what we're talking about. We talk about the energy, it takes to collect individual product experiences much easier to do what we're talking about in an overall customer experience often comes from Not just talking with people, but also from surveys and things like that where we can get the overall experience that were
expecting from our customers. Yeah, I mean, I don't think people wake up and say, hey, I'm going to create a shitty project or product today, you know, and put and just leave that and never never touch it again. I think obviously to your point, I think you spoke about it, but this is applicable across all Industries, even think about Hospitality, right? And the quality of service that you have to provide, Your
customer. It's not just a one-time thing if they're staying there for a duration of time. If you're at a hotel then you want to make sure everything they're experiencing around them is the best quality. And that experience is something that becomes very memorable for them. I think they are. Another great example is, probably like, right, people go back to a specific type of Technology because they trust in that product and they trust and experience.
And you started to touch upon something that I think is interesting. Eating because now we understand why it's important to measure customer experience. We want to make sure that we're looking at quality and that were kind of there at the service of our customers and making sure our product or whatever. We're putting out there. As is going to be the best version of it that it can be.
Now you talked about surveying is that the only tools that you recommend when it comes to measuring customer experience or their other tools that you've utilized to be able to do so Well, I could tell you a great story and a great example of this. We have an IT steering committee that consists of a number of Vice Presidents across the organization. And we have regular meetings with this. It steering committee on a
quarterly basis. And so at one of our more recent meetings in the fall, one of the vice presidents spoke about at the very beginning of the meeting even before. we started to talk about Investments and what we're working on and and what, what she's interested in particular and she spoke up and she said, you know, why why would talking about investing in new technologies when you can't even get the basics, right? So, I was in a meeting last week and, and such and such a room
and the Wireless Flint out. And here, we're at telling people to come into the office and they have better wireless service in there at their house. Then we can even give them in the building. So why can't you fix the
wireless? That's that's that's one of the biggest problems that I'm saying and and some of the other vice president has chimed in and he said Well I can't ever get the search the search capabilities to work right for me, every time I use search, I get responses back from 1995, I get these old documents that the that don't even apply to, they have the word in the title, but that's about it that the rest of it doesn't even apply. So why is your search so bad?
Like why can't you get wireless right? And why can't you get searched, right? And so guess what happened this year? We Have a whole multimillion-dollar project on upgrading our wireless and we have another Mill month. Multi-million dollar project to upgrade our search capabilities because of that meeting because of those two vice-presidents. We went out and surveyed, random people across the company, specifically about Wireless and specifically about search.
Because those are two things that we heard from the vp's wanted to make sure. That in fact, those really problems And we did some research in our help desk and found that there were a lot of effect of problems, highlighted with respect to those two things. So, it's interesting that when you give people the opportunity to speak up and this was an opportunity at this, it steering committee review. We start to talk about was spending a million here. We're looking at zero trust
we're looking at ransomware. We're doing artificial intelligence doing all these great things. Eggs and the VP select. Yeah, that's all great. Terrific. But how about how about getting the basics? Right, everyone, his attention right? So that there isn't a customer experience problem. I am a customer. I go into a meeting with some very important sponsors and not the wireless doesn't work. What how does that make us? Look right? As a company that's the meeting
has to be canceled. And rescheduled, that's a problem and the same thing with search. So, If you can step back and look at some of these problems. Now, you start to think about where do we want to invest money in supporting projects? Do we really want our investments to go towards artificial intelligence which is the latest and greatest hot new thing or do we want to go back to the basics and make sure that that are basics of being
covered? And you know, we try to balance our investments just like everyone does, right? If you have your own set of financial planning, You want to invest some in stocks and some of mutual funds, everybody knows those kinds of things, it is the same thing in an IT environment. You've got so much money to spend, you want to spend some of it on new technologies and you want to spend some of it on making sure that the rest of your Basics are running
correctly. And so that customer experience that you're able to glean, not just from vp's, but from others, in the company is really how you're helping too.
Strategize and as project managers, it seems like we're being asked more and more to talk about strategy to help in decision making especially at that c-suite level if we're working with the CIO or or the CEO or others at that level, we need to be able to talk their language and and provide recommendations not only on how much it would cost to fix wireless. Which, of course is often something we are asked as PMS. How much will this Wireless
products that? It cost me to buy new equipment and to resources and and, and get the labor done and how long will it take? Who us? But in addition to, that doesn't make sense to make that investment. And how do we as project managers collect that customer experience. I do think part of it is through these kinds of meetings and other parts of it is to reach out to customers and specific areas when we're hearing their problems through. Either service desk tickets or through some of these
conversations were having. And of course, the other way, I don't know about you but my company does a lot of service and the kinds of questions that they're asking. Sometimes our don't make sense or sometimes they're not as significant as it could be. So why not help with some of the surveys to try to collect those customer experience information.
I know that our service desk again, Mike My company is a good-sized 10,000 employees and every time there's a ticket that the service desk submits that you get from an employee that a survey gets sent out. So, we sent out a survey every single time, there's an incident. So why not capitalize on that survey and ask the right questions? How are your how was your experience? Is there an area where you believe it could be better supporting you some of those
kinds of questions? I love I love that example. Donna and how Often does your organization of that size? How often do you put out a survey like that? Yeah, there's a survey. So is this a sir every time someone submits an incident of any kind? So my cell phone broke, or I can't get email to work right on my VTC connection is down, or I need my securid tokens. So I can log into the something, whatever the reason is we get
all these help desk tickets. So, Services tickets, every time a ticket is submitted that a They get sent out. And so we're now trying to craft the surveys, in a way that we can better collect this customer experience and we're thinking about putting together, this is all new for us. Now, this year, we're thinking about working on a customer dashboard, that gives Executives a sense of customer satisfaction with our overall, it performance, and it would be
targeted in different areas. So again, how is the wire? His opinion, what's the opinion on our overall structure? Where are we having problems? Then you start to dive into some of these other areas as I mentioned, if someone doesn't like what their experiences with wireless, then we start to look at the tickets around Wireless, we started to research more and reach out to our friendly partners and ask them how things
are working out. So we're, we've got our ways of collecting customer experience, but there are tools that you can Can purchase that we don't have one yet, but there are tools you can purchase that will track some of these survey results for you. In a very nice. Analytical view. We're trying at the moment to build of that into our own systems ourselves and see how
successful we are that. But sure, I think it's a new a new experience for us. So we're still trying to figure it out but certainly those comments that we heard definitely drove where our investment money is to go, you know, The barriers that I remember seeing in terms of opening up those types of questions to an organization, is your opening up those types of questions through an organization, right, which means you're you should expect to get
feedback and we are we sometimes you live in a culture where people don't want to get feedback, so they would rather not even survey the organization to know what's broken. And just kind of just operate as status quo, For the duration of however, long that person is in a position of authority.
So I think just the sheer fact that your organization has said, you know what, let's just start to ask people like what's going on across the organization and really start to hone in on what are those issues that will inform some of either to your point lower budget? Things that can be fixed pretty quickly or some of those things that may lead to much more Grand
strategic. Egypt projects that you maybe were unaware of until you ask somebody that question, but I think there's just in my experience. I've seen kind of varying levels of asking for feedback and the kind of conscious awareness of like if I ask somebody for the feedback I better be prepared. To not just hear the feedback but have to probably address the feedback in some way. And so Donna did you kind of did any of that come up for you as
you started to roll this out? Out with your organization and I know you said this is fairly new. So I'm just curious if any of those feelings had come up, it is fairly new. But I can give you another example that I think illustrates some of Hawaii talking about. And, and so, last year there had been some Rumblings about our travel experiences. Again, during covid-19 a lot of travel that was happening. So a lot of things around travel were put on hold. But last year, there was an
effort to really do an exam. Action of the vendors that we had in place to help us booked trips and the systems we have in place to expense our travel, Etc. So we, there were a lot of Rumblings from people who had been traveling prior to covid about the whole overall process. So we gathered some heavy Travelers people who have been doing a lot of traveling, pretty covid. We put them all in a room and we walk through the actual process of Of of planning a trip booking a trip.
Then when you're actually on the trip, the issues that you run into and then when you come back from the trip expensing with trip and getting your reimbursement, what the whole experience, right? That's not just one system, right? There's many systems involved in the travel experience, documented It All, We described it all. We had it as a moderator that we hired to help us walk through the whole process. And as a result of that, these innovative ideas started, To
come out. So, I think, when you talk about how to collect the the, the information I think, sometimes you just hear it from people. Oh, I want to Triple was terrible. Oh, I'm going on this trip and I couldn't, I didn't get my money back. It took two months to get my money reverse. Why is that? Oh, because of these forums, oh, I had you start to hear it. So there's there's a general feeling that travel has been a problem. Or there's a general feeling that wireless is a problem.
Everybody rolls their eyes when they say A. Oh, I'm I'm going to use this to BTC, robot, and everyone rolls their eyes and says, oh, that that room doesn't work. Ever stops here and the Groundswell about some of these issues, right? So maybe you don't necessarily need to do a real survey to collect data about that problem because you everyone knows it's a problem.
I'm sure everyone in the audience can probably think of over the last 10 years, some of these kinds of issues that have come up at their companies that have Four star are employed with management that we really need to. We need to make an improvement here and wireless and search are two examples of those things that we're really looking at right now because of the feedback that we've been hearing and and so you want to be able to do what matters, right?
You really want to understand why do we need to innovate in these areas because want to invest money where you'll get the greatest impact will get the greatest customer. Summer satisfaction and so how you figure out what those areas that are well we'll just do a i because everyone's doing that or we'll just look at ransomware because that's cybersecurity,
it's really important. And everyone thinks that's important is this this total agreement that we should be looking at, cyber security issues. Everyone agrees with that but maybe we have got that pretty good. And we're all set over there for the time being, we really need to look more carefully in this
other area. So again, as a project Manager, if you're helping to strategized and decide where those investment dollars should go and you're helping your CIO with some of those decisions and you're looking at architecture, diagrams, and you're looking at the current spend and what you're currently investing money in and how do you want to shift that over the next three years? These are some of the things that will help you in making those decisions decision-making.
Always has to be supported with facts and with Backing data and so the decision-making process really does require some of this research. And and inquiring with with some of your heavy users, where are they seeing problems? And where can they address those problems?
I yes, I love that. And I think that, you know, project managers often feel like they are not part of driving Innovation. When, in fact, you're you can be the key driver of What the Innovation needs to be and that's simply simply put you listen to your customers.
You listen to your team. Don is saying, hey, somebody told me this and then somebody else told me this and then all of a sudden five people have told you something in a very similar space of something that needs course-correcting and then now you've got your problem statement. So it's just you can absolutely be involved and not just managing and measuring the customer experience but also driving whatever that innovative.
Commendation can be. And so I just want to make sure this audience knows no matter what level of project management you're in. Whether you're just entering into a p.m. role and you're very new or you can be several years into it. You do have an active voice in
this whole process. That Donna is speaking about, and I think that one of the best things about being a p.m. is this idea of power skills, which is called now, right, 20:23 PMI has called, Skills which, you know, encompasses, emotional intelligence, listening, active, listening, all of those things. Those are all things we do. So, when you're listening to Donna's example of well, how did she figure out that that needed to be the project for her organization?
Well, guess what? People were just telling it sounds like people were just telling you that and Donna, you listened, and you said, you know what? Let's let's just make this a very simple process. Ask some people how they're feeling capture that data
presented. Attitude leadership and then you got a project boom there it is. And so to break it down, you can also be an active voice, no matter what position of the company you're in because I am sure that as a p.m. you're hearing things day after day, whether it's directly correlated to the project Iran or hearing other people on other teams complaining about something that's been going on on their project that they can't figure out how to solve.
So all of that kind of just leads to this idea of driving Innovation and so dotted. What you were saying was kind of getting me old motivated and inspired. Because I want to make sure everybody has a say in this, including the p.m. and the p.m. probably is the most important piece of making sure that Innovation actually pushes through and gets executed. Well, I have a couple of comments on that one. Yeah, absolutely.
I think I think often as project managers we sit back and we listen and we absorb and we take notes and we collect data and that's it. And we're not driving The project we're not, we're not focused on what the next thing should be. We're not, we're not taking charge and we're not, we're not asking the right questions and I think that's a mistake and I again to your appointment and everyone in this audience, whether you're a new project
manager or otherwise, it's time for you to stand up and speak up and ask the right questions and and think strategically in a way with Were you saying should we really be working on? This is this something we should be investing money and I'm hearing these issues. This is a recommendation that I have. And I think often especially for early career professionals, it's very difficult to speak up in a
room. Full of people who've been at the company for a long time and feel like you're being heard and I in my experience, that's that's one of the best ways for us to to come up with these kinds of Ideas and you know the other the other thing that I want to talk about is driving Innovation. What does that mean? So we've been innovating for years. This is not anything new. I think people like to talk about Innovation as being important, you know, very
recently. But this isn't, this is anything to a lot of what we used to call it process Improvement, right? We used to say, let's look at a process. Let's examine the as it is, right? Let's let's document. The as is process, draw our journey map or Complex flow chart or whatever, it might be a Vizio, whatever. It might be, let's examine the as is and then let's come up with a to be of improving that process. So we've been doing Innovation
like that for many, many years. I think the kinds of innovation that we're talking about doing. So, yes, we know we have a Wi-Fi problem. Yes. We know we have a sort of problem, but how do we fix those problems? How do we make things better if we just buy new hardware, and or do we just start over with a new product? Or the things that we can do to make the current Wi-Fi or the current search better.
And I think being Innovative means that we ask the right questions and we look at things in a different Viewpoint that maybe we weren't looking at before. One example, I can give is the public release system that we have at Mitre where government-funded operation and and all of our documents that go out to the public need to be approved for public release. And that's a very time. Consuming process because it has to go through multiple levels of approval up to the vice president.
So how can we make that faster? Well, what they did was, they came up with a way to publicly publicly released an individual such as myself in a particular topic area. And now anything I do four year that goes out to the public is publicly approved by me as long as I am trustworthy enough. My material won't be anything that's outside of project management. Then that's what I am allowed to
publicly release. And this has been up the process for people to share information at Mitre across across so many other opportunities than they might have done otherwise which it was a much more of a painstaking process that's Innovative. So now we didn't have to take the process and make it faster. We took the process and actually changed it and It wasn't easy to do and it was someone who came up with a great idea, that's Innovation.
And so that's an example of what we're talking about here. How can we take Wi-Fi, or how can we take search? Those are the two examples I've been mentioning, but whatever the example is, in your organization and really think from an Innovative standpoint, how can we change it and do it
differently? So that it's better and I got to think a lot of what we do in project management, these documents these Journey Maps, these Flowcharts and we maybe we work with business analysts are chief Engineers or whoever the people are and we sit down and we the whiteboarding that we've we're so used to doing those are the those, the opportunities to innovate and that's really where the power of innovation comes into play. This is, it's just, it's a flow.
What you broken down for us? In this episode is a flow. You start with measuring the customer experience while really understanding who your customer is measuring. That experience, Donna spoke about surveys interviews, just having conversations with people letting people know that you're listening, then taking what that feedback is capturing that data. And then ultimately also opening it up to a, you said you had
like a committee, right? A diverse committee that meets regularly on this stuff because then you get voices from outside of probably that problem space, that can really just look at it objectively and give you probably some of the more creative ideas. How to solve that problem or how to kind of to your Point Drive Innovation, actually change something and make it completely different. And often times that leads to much more successes in that
particular process. Or in that example, you described on how would that you were even doing things like that. Like you opened up that space for not just Donna but everybody else who wanted to go out and do something similar, right? So I think that's such an incredible example that you shared with us. It makes sense the way. That you led up to that and and I think that it's a good reminder for project managers to know that you can absolutely be a part of driving that process.
So Donna, any other words of wisdom to share on this topic? You start out by collecting the customer. Experience. In addition to those individual product metrics, this is in addition to that the sentiment the overall feeling of the satisfaction of the customer, has identify areas. We need to make those improvements and then strategically place those on a
road map. If you're A position where you can, you are doing road maps with your your management and say, this is what we want to fix Wi-Fi. This is when we want to fix search as examples and then then you start asking the questions, then you start to innovate you documenting the as a system you're saying how can we change
it so that it's better. So those are really the steps that we kind of talked through today, collecting that customer experience and then draw helping using that to help you drive where your Putting your Innovation investments. In every time you join the podcast on. It's like a master class in a different area of project management and I am just so lucky to listen to this.
I honestly think that if you put all the episodes together that you've come on to the everyday p.m. for that, that in itself is going to give you such a good core, understanding of how you can expand in your project management role. So, thank you for bringing this topic to the everyday p.m. Donna. I'm just again, very honored, anytime you can come on and speak to our audience. So I think Donna that will do it for you. And I in this installment of the everyday p.m. podcast.
If folks want to continue this conversation or talk about your book or anything else that you've got going on, where can they find you online? Well, and thanks again so much for having me. I love what you're doing with the podcast. Keep up the great work. We're so proud of all of your episodes and they can find me. My website is Donna Gregorio.com, and I'm also out there on LinkedIn. We're happy. Happy to chat with anyone about these topics and others.
So, thanks again in. Yeah, absolutely. And you can thank you Donna for continuing to support the everyday p.m. podcast. And for those listening, you can also support this podcast. We are on every podcasting platform. Apple podcast, Google play Anchor Spotify. You name it. Just search for the everyday p.m. while you're there. Give us a great review. Five stars. If you can do it and leave us a comment on what you thought
about this episode. You can also watch the video version of Don. And I speaking about this very topic on my YouTube channel, youtube.com forward slash and campea. While you're there, like this video, subscribe to the channel and click the bell for notifications of when new content goes up. Thanks so much for For joining Don, and I and this installment of the everyday p.m. podcast. And until next time, take care.