Pre Interview questions

• How do I pronounce your name?
  Purr like a cat and Rhine like the river
• How do you spell your name?
  Robert Perrine
• Do I use this name, a nick name or a formal name during the interview?
  I prefer Robert at this time in my life.
• Do you have a website you would like me to mention?
  http://robertperrine.biz
  Newly updated and I would love to have feedback regarding it
• Do you have an email address that I should mention?
  robert@RobertPerrine.biz (updated in 2007)
• Are there any question that I should not ask you?
  Weather predictions are most problematic
• Are there any topics that you would like me to avoid?
  Not that I can think of right now – but I would like to focus on the professional areas and avoid discussing my personal life during the interview
• Are there any topics that you specifically want to discuss?
  The relationship between Portfolio, Projects (with an emphasis on PMP), Customer Satisfaction and Operations (with an emphasis on ITIL). That quadrangle is the focus of my career right now. Of those, my weakest area is the Customer Satisfaction topic – so I intend to focus on it next year.
• Do you have any questions before we start?
  Are you going to use a tape recorder or video recorder?
• Please remember, that we can stop at any time, regroup and pick up the interview from where we were.
  Thank you.

About Robert Perrine (1-2 mins)

• Robert, you have been in the IT business for about 30 years. Tell us a little bit about your career.
  I began work in Civil Engineering and still value the formality of project management required to do government work. My area of specialization is in process-and-procedures. That specialization evolved over time as I saw opportunities to fill a need that aligned well with my personality. By focusing on how to make IT work I have been able to transition across multiple industries. And each change in industry allows me to validate the common themes. So, while my title is Sr. Project Manager, I actually manage very few projects. Instead I manage the portfolio and try to orchestrate the effort to achieve the higher level objectives.
• What do you do in your current position?
  I am responsible for an initiative to restructure the Infrastructure Hosting division in Ameriquest. Our division is a service provider within Ameriquest. Our customers are the business units in Ameriquest that need IT. So we provide floor space in data centers to IT “customers” that want to put their servers somewhere. We also provide SAN (server attached storage) and NAS (network attached storage) disk space and a variety of other services to IT. My role is to offer advice and guidance as we reshape our service offerings to align with the ITIL framework.
  My main focus is to fit the work we identify in our Portfolio into the strategy to move us forward. One of the key components in our Portfolio is Projects, some are big but most are really small. We use Projects to introduce change in a controlled manner. Next we need to assess the impact of that change and the need for additional change by measuring our Customer Satisfaction. That is a work in progress and we are going to focus on upgrading our measuring and reporting processes in 2006. Finally, this feeds back into Operations. Operations are stable and repeatable.
  We introduce change through ITIL tools for continuous improvement and we introduce change through Projects. My job it so try to fit the pieces together to get the result we want.
• How did you get your current position, and how does ITIL play into that?
  I first encountered ITIL about 7-years ago and several of the ITIL initiatives I have seen produced inadequate results. When it was my turn to try the ITIL initiative at my last employer I achieved some success by leveraging my position as manager of the PMO. While my results were not spectacular we at least demonstrated improvements in operational efficiency – as compared to the type of degradation I had seen elsewhere.
  That effort was enough to convince my employer to split the bill with me for the training required for the “Managers Certification in IT Service Management”. That investment was partly at my expense and partly reimbursed because we both saw the future opportunities that could come from a more focused effort on ITIL.
  Unfortunately for that company, it was too late. They had already made a few key business decisions that went bad. But having the ITIL-SM certification opened the door to my new opportunity at Ameriquest. Having the “Managers” certification was a prerequisite. But it also helped that I had worked with my new boss at a previous job and he saw they type of work I could do.
• Where you involved in ITIL before you and I prepared to take the PMP or did you get into ITIL afterwards?
  I have seen ITIL around for many years but I was generally on the periphery. My focus in January 2004 was on the PMP. Then I focused on the ITIL Foundation certification in the summer of 2004 and on to the ITIL Managers certification in the fall of 2004. Since then I have tried to keep current in each of those areas while also trying to gain master in portfolio management. This is an evolution that means that my next focus area is going to be on metrics. Perhaps that will give me a chance to get into Six-Sigma. But even if it doesn’t, it is the interrelationship between those four areas that drives IT and my current trajectory is to integrate those four topics: Portfolio, Projects, Metrics and Operations.

• Is ITIL just another IT project management methodology?
  ITIL and Project Management are mutually exclusive. The PMI definition of projects includes the words “temporary and unique”. ITIL is all about Operations. And Operations are supposed to be “repeatable and consistent”.
  ITIL wisely avoids the topic of project management and recommends pulling from other areas of expertise. Since ITIL was packaged by the British government, they recommend “PRINCE2” – the British standard for Project Management – Projects IN a Controlled Environment, version 2.
  The challenge is to take a “repeatable and consistent” set of Operations and restructure them into a better format. You need Projects to do the work of changing Operations.
• Where do ITIL and PM overlap and where do they differ?
  ITIL is similar to PM in that both have an established “body of knowledge”. For project management it is the PMBOK. For ITIL it is the British guides on “Best Practices”. Both “BOKs” are divided into sections. PMBOK has Knowledge Areas. ITIL has Disciplines. Both have inputs, outputs, tools and techniques, but the PMBOK actually fits those pieces together. ITIL just drops them about in a loose collection and leaves it to the implementation team to assemble the parts.
  The two overlap because they have common needs, like Change Management. ITIL describes Change Management as it relates to hardware, software and documentation. PMBOK describes Change Management as it relates to projects and products. Interestingly, several sentences in the current PMBOK are a word-for-word match to the same sections in ITIL. There is a clear overlap on Change Management, Configuration Management and Release Management.
  Both also overlap in their need to pull from other bodies of knowledge such as quality and process improvement. Both quote Deming on “Plan – Do – Check – Act”. Both describe Ishikawa and other typical quality tools.
  Where they differ is in ITIL's focus on the administration of IT hardware and software. PMs are typically focused on projects. Our team at Ameriquest needs PMs to both speak PMBOK for projects and ITIL for things that are not projects.
• Tell us about the 10 ITIL disciplines.
  Here’s a quick run through. More information about each is available on my web site and in the ITIL books.
  Incident Management – restore normal operations as quickly as possible.
  Problem Management – find the underlying cause and devise changes that will ensure it never happens again.
  Change Management – accept the fact that change is part of life and then strive to minimize the adverse impact from making necessary changes.
  Configuration Management – document the assets and define the relationships between them.
  Release Management – package lots of little changes into bundles to make the process more efficient and effective.
  Service Level Management – serve as the single-point-of-contact from the customer – the person that pays the bills – into the other ITIL disciplines.
  Service Desk – not a discipline but I’m mentioning it here to contrast it with Service Level Management. The Service Desk is the single-point-of-contact for the users of the IT services. ITIL makes a clear distinction between users – like the project team – and the Customer – who is more like the Project Sponsor.
  IT Financial Management – do the bookkeeping for IT and help IT figure out what benefit the company is getting from the expenditures.
  Capacity Management – measure everything that is useful and use that data to proactively manage the resources to avoid shortages.
  Availability Management – closely aligned with Capacity in that Availability is also doing a lot of measurements. The distinction is that Availability is focused on whether or not a service is responding in a timely manner while Capacity is focused on the underlying performance of the infrastructure.
  IT Service Continuity Management – supports the corporate Business Continuity Management process and ensures that appropriate IT resources are available when required. Typically this is most evidenced through Disaster Recovery, but ITSCM is also responsible for planning to avoid disasters.
• How does ITIL help a company to match their IT delivery to business needs and user requirements?
  First, ITIL defines roles and assigns responsibilities to those roles. Two key roles are the Service Level Manager and the Service Desk Manager. The Service Level Manager is the single-point-of-contact for the customer – sponsor. This means there is a clearly defined channel for communication with the customer. Similarly the Service Desk is the single-point-of-contact for the user community. Giving those roles the responsibility for communicating means the customer and users have a chance to influence IT.
  Second, ITIL incorporates planning into the disciplines. Many IT shops are reactive. ITIL makes the role managers responsible for proactive planning. And one of the key inputs into these planning exercises is the business forecast.
  And thirdly, ITIL makes it a point to emphasize the importance of metrics. The ITIL hierarchy of metrics is Critical Success Factors built upon Key Performance Indicators which build upon defined metrics which are based on measurements. Those metrics feed into the process improvement loop. Deming gets credit here, just like he does in the PMBOK, for the Plan > Do > Check > Act cycle. And Check is all about metrics, including feedback.
  Thus, when running properly, ITIL is a self-correcting system. Feedback from the customers and users is used to adjust the disciplines until they are sufficiently aligned.
• Is ITIL used in a particular industry? If not, is one particular industry dominating?
  I have not seen dominance in any particular industry. Doing ITIL, however, requires a focused effort, sufficient funding and a sustained commitment. It is difficult for a small shop to devote the time it takes and fund the initiative with faith that it will eventually pay off. It is also difficult for a large company to get everyone on the same page for a long enough time to make it work. The most successful deployments that I have heard of are in mid-sized shops that are self-contained. Our efforts at Ameriquest, for example, are focused on just one division. We are already six months into the effort and expect to spend another twelve months just focusing on the process within our own division.
  In that respect, ITIL is very much like a PMO. You can create a PMO in any company. But in small companies the PMO might be an excessive overhead for the benefit it delivers. And in very large companies the PMO can stifle innovation and become a bureaucracy.
• Is ITIL used worldwide?
  Absolutely. The USA is actually one of the last countries to see the benefit. I have been told it is a regulatory standard in Britain, predating our SOX regulations. ISO is also in the process of incorporating it into the 9000 series.
• What does the ITIL Service Manager certification do for you?
  The certificate itself does two things. First, it certifies that I know enough about ITIL to be able to pass the test. I have encountered many people claiming to be ITIL experts. Passing the test means that I know something about what I am talking about. Thus it helps separate the blowhards from the people that have actually put time into studying the subject. Second, it allowed me to get the job that I now have. My boss knew the value of the certificate and made it a prerequisite for the position.
• What other ITIL certifications are there?
  There are two. The ITIL Foundation certification is a no-prerequisite entry point. Companies are starting to require the ITIL Foundation certification for new hires. It is actually a fairly easy test compared to the PMP exam.
  The other ITIL certification is the Practitioner’s Certification. That certification, however, is not widely sought because it only covers one discipline. How much would it be worth to you, for example, to be certified on Initiation, but have no certification on Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling or Closure?
• Why should a certified project manager consider becoming ITIL certified?
  It is valuable if you play on both sides of the fence. It would also seem like a good route to take if you want to move upward in management because it allows you to bridge from the project side over to operations. For me it was a natural progression as my career has alternated between being a functional manager and a project manager. I want to do the best I can at whatever I do and getting ITIL certified helps me do operations at a higher level just like the PMP helped round out my understanding of what the industry thinks project management is supposed to be.
• Is there and ITIL professional organization, like the PMI?
  Yes, it is called ITSMF – the IT Service Managers Forum. A local chapter formed in San Diego about a year ago and a local chapter formed in LA about six-months ago. Nothing in Orange County yet, but it shouldn’t be too much longer before one forms here.
• When I originally read up on ITIL, I came across the following statement. Can you tell me how ITIL can do all of this?
  ITIL can help with IT provision by providing:
    - Better Customer Service: ITIL will deliver better services which are tailored to the needs of the customer
    - Better Cost Effectiveness: ITIL assists organisations in providing a quality IT service within a business environment affected by budgetary constraints but also growing user expectations.
    - Better Motivation and Productivity: ITIL encourages staff to view IT Service Management as a recognised professional skill, ultimately increasing effective performance.
  The big three in our ITIL initiative are Operational Efficiency, Customers Satisfaction and Quality of Service. Essentially all ITIL benefits come from the same source as project management benefits do – communications. The ITIL roles define who is doing what and who is responsible for what. This eliminates a lot of friction and tends to eliminate gaps. Also, as I mentioned earlier, ITIL has built-in communication specialists – the Service Level Manager and the Service Desk Manager. Think of it the same way you do project management. Yes, anyone can run a project whether or not they have a charter or a schedule. But, arm someone with a charter and a schedule and there is a higher likelihood of success.
• Why should a company consider using ITIL?
  Operational Efficiency, Customer Satisfaction and Quality of Service are three points that come to mind. But underneath that there is a consistency. IT staff move around. As more and more shops adopt ITIL there is less and less need to re-train people when you hire them. And if your new staff gets up to speed more quickly and your established staff have clearly defined roles and responsibilities then your employees are more productive.
• Can you give me an example where ITIL will help a company to improve their IT’s focus on business needs?
  ITIL can help if for no other reason that the fact that the Service Level Manager is integrated in IT as a representative for the customer. Thus the SLM is a customer mole in the IT shop and an IT advocate in the customers’ home. IT has a long history of ignoring the customer because he/she is “not technical”. It is much harder to ignore the SLM, especially when the SLM has the authority to yank your chain and send your team off to work on a Service Improvement Program – a mini-project to address something that bothers the SLM.
• How does a company implement ITIL?
  I have seen two approaches. The big-bang approach requires a strong ITIL proponent who is willing to ignore all the alarm bells that go off as the entire organization is restructured in a very short time frame. In my experience, that approach will fail because it takes time to change the culture. And until the culture changes any set of processes and procedures that get dropped on top of the existing culture are doomed.
  My preference is to change the culture. I came into Ameriquest, for example, and started up a round of ITIL training classes. I taught every class the first time through. I then recruited some of those students to teach specific subjects the next time through. We are on the third round now and our division no longer looks to me as the only ITIL expert. Instead, it is my team that has the expertise. Our goal for next year is to build depth within our division so the company will look to our division for expertise. Then, we might be able to propagate this outward far enough in Ameriquest that other companies will come over and see ITIL engrained in our culture.
  It’s not that different from trying to get PMI into the company’s culture. Do you still encounter resistance to writing a project charter? And yet you persevere and by doing so you are changing the culture.
  By the way, the phrase that I find best fits this approach is “Kinetics”. Build systems that perpetuate outward instead of building static systems that only perpetuate themselves. Don’t build a set of documents and expect everyone to love them. Build the understanding of why we need documents and let the team create documents that fit their needs. For example, I gave my team a simplistic template to use for our Root Cause Analysis form. A few months later it came back to me with our corporate logo, a completely different font scheme and highlighting that alternated between muted yellow and fire-engine red. What that meant is that my template had transitioned from me to my team and over to the system administrators in our division. And those system administrators adopted it and made it their own. Kinetics – put something in motion and then let go of it.
• How did ITIL impact your company?
  I’ll give you four illustrations on this.
  I worked for an oil company where an ITIL expert came in and, in my opinion, strangled innovation because his view of ITIL was that everything had to be centrally controlled.
  I worked for a service provider where we used ITIL as a framework but our real measuring stick was SAS 70 – “Statement on Auditing Standards #70”. SAS 70 predates SOX and is a very expensive external audit that your company must undergo to be accredited to do business with certain financial institutions. We used ITIL to help define processes and procedures. By following processes and procedures we breezed through each of our six-month check-ups. And that meant the difference between doing business with some very big customers or loosing those customers.
  I then worked on a project at an Automobile manufacturer. I did not yet have my Service Manager certification so I was a junior on the project. That project floundered because the company insisted they wanted to implement all of ITIL all at once. The initiative died.
  Now I am in my fourth implementation and this time I am the Service Manager. With Ameriquest ITIL is allowing us to change the culture within our division. And by changing the culture we are changing the quality of service we deliver to our internal customers. We can see the effects and several of our customers have come forward to say they see the difference it is making.
• How does ITIL impact your life as a manager & project manager?
  ITIL with PMP means that I spend half of my time on operations, half my time on managing the portfolio and half – well now you can see why I have very little time left for projects.
• How do your workdays differ than before ITIL?
  ITIL is all about teamwork. It takes a large number of discipline managers to implement ITIL. Those are roles, not full time jobs. So every one of the project managers in our team has at least one ITIL role. What this means to me is that I spend my time teaching a lot of classes and assisting other people. My priority is to build the team so that we have strength in each role. This means my “deliverable” is expertise inside the head of another person. And that is a hard deliverable to complete. So, while I am very IN-flexible when I have a schedule to meet, being the ITIL Service Manager means I am constantly acting opportunistically – I work with a very loose time frame and look for openings to nudge someone along in the right direction. It’s organic. I need to grow knowledge not pound out deliverables.
• Just to be clear, since ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library, a non-IT project manager, say a construction PM, will very likely not get in too close contact with ITIL, right?
  The framework is actually transportable, but all the illustrations are computer centric. Thus you are correct. ITIL only cares about computers and it only works with large IT staff. But underneath it is really a management framework.
• What is the difference between ITIL and CMM levels 1-5
  The few times I have explored CMM it seems very focused on software development. ITIL excludes software development just like it excludes projects. ITIL is only concerned with administering the systems and farms out project work to PRINCE2 or PMI. ITIL accepts in software from development as releases and runs them through change management. But ITIL does not care where the release came from. And based on my limited knowledge of CMM that is as much as I can safely say.

• How did you get interested in project management?
  I stumbled into project management while working for a Civil Engineering company. I understood schedules and knew how to communicate. I became a “project expeditor”. I continued studying project management and filled that role while holding many different titles such as “Product Manager”.
• What value do you see in the PMP certification?
  Personally, I found the test preparation very useful because I thought I knew project management. All I really knew, however, was the parts of it that I had seen. I have not yet worked for a company that does more than minimal compliance with Risk Management or Quality Management. I have never worked for a company that uses anything more complex than MS Project for scheduling. For example, when my last employer planned the rollout for the management services on Primavera’s web servers we used MS Project to do the scheduling. Studying for the PMP, going to the PMI dinners and networking with other project managers has exposed me to a lot more variety.
  As for the other side of that question, we sometimes hire a PMP and sometimes we want someone that can grow into a PMP. We want PMPs just like we want people that are ITIL certified because it means that we all speak the same language. I can ask for a WBS and get something that looks like a WBS.
  Of course, not all PMPs know what a WBS is. And in that respect I am sometimes disappointed that good project managers don’t take their PMP study time as an opportunity to grow. I am so committed to that cause that I spend lots of Saturday’s helping with the PMI-OC PMP Workshops. Getting the PMP should be a learning experience, not just a checkbox.
• What is there beyond the PMP certification?
  I’ve heard of companies that give pay raises once someone becomes PMP certified.
  Otherwise, everyone needs to make a choice. Is learning a continuous process or just something that happens sporadically.
• What university degree can be pursued instead of the PMP?
  I have numerous friends that never finished college and yet they are excellent project managers. Degrees and certifications are for two different purposes. A degree is a very time consuming effort but it gets you exposed to a wide breadth of knowledge. A certification is more surgical – more focused – and thus more achievable in a short time.
• Why should a young PM become a PMI member?
  To get exposed to a whole lot more of what project management is all about.
• How has the PMI / PMP helped you as a project manager?
  I really look forward to the once a month dinner meeting and once a month PMO-LIG breakfast meetings. If for no other reason than to have the opportunity to realize that my joys and frustrations are shared by lots of other people who also enjoy being totally responsible for things over which you have absolutely no control.
• What do you think of the CAPM?
  I have recommended it to a couple people as an entry point but I have not yet met any one that went that route.

1. What was your favorite project?
   My last project at my prior employer was a “life-or-death” for the company project. We were heading into bankruptcy. We had a couple potential customers that could save the company. My challenge was to port our Microsoft based web application over to Linux – before the company went out of business. We succeeded and that company is now profitable again and should soon come out of bankruptcy. The challenges we faced were that no one knew the language we chose. The majority of the developers were in India but one was in Ireland and the rest were in Irvine. And the work force kept shrinking with every round of layoffs. We found ways to use the multinational force to our best benefit. We found ways to use the teams’ knowledge in other areas to shorten the learning curve on the new language. And we built a team and a product we were all very proud of – before we all got laid off.
2. What project would you like to have managed?
   A vacation.
3. What is your favorite project management book?
   The Bible. No need to look any further to see that every project ever conceived has one thing in common – people. And people have been doing the same things to their projects and to their project managers for a very long time.
4. What is the topic of the next seminar that you are planning to attend?
   I had not been to an ATS before. When I do have free Saturdays I have a tendency to devote them to the PMP workshops. But I really look forward to coming back here again soon.
5. What is the best way to make a project fail?
   Assume the status reports you get are accurate.
6. How do you like to celebrate a successful project?
   Celebrate? Success? My whole career has been spent getting tossed into the middle of bad projects, trying to turn them around and then just as success is in my grasp getting pulled off that one and tossed into something even worse. I tend to celebrate virtually by reading lots of emails from the project team thanking me for whatever I did that finally let them wrap it up.
7. In your projects, where do you focus most of your attention in order to be successful?
   To me the most important PM skill is team building. One of my managers used to say that our department specialized in fire fighting by day while being arsonists at night. A troubled team is its own worst enemy. One of my most recent failures came about because the developers had no buy-in into the project. We had so much in-fighting that we burned through five project managers and two sponsors in seven months. I tried to support the effort without ever being the project manager myself but the lack of buy-in killed the project just a few days after rollout.
8. If you weren’t a project manager, what would you like to be?
   I’ve tried that already and I just end up back in the same spot over and over again. PM must be in my genes.
9. What is the one thing that a project manager cannot live without?
   One of my favorite quotes comes from Rousseau: "Imperceptibly we fall into perilous situations, from which we can no longer extricate ourselves without heroic efforts which appall us; and at last we fall into the abyss, reproaching God, 'Why hast thou made me so weak?' But, in spite of ourselves, He replies to our consciences, 'I have made you too weak to save yourself from the abyss, because I made you strong enough not to fall into it.'" A project manager needs to always remember that he or she is 1) utterly dependent on God, 2) strong enough to do what is required and yet 3) always on the edge of failure.
10. And finally, the oldest question in project management:
    What is more important in a project manager: project management expertise or industry expertise?
    Project Management expertise. I’ve been in engineering, construction, distribution, manufacturing, software, oil, retail, and most recently in the service industry. A project is a project. Having industry expertise helps you assess who to believe but if you actually know more than your resource does then you need to get a different resource.