The "how hard could it be" series: Project Management

Welcome to the IFail to Learn podcast where we think that failing is the best way to learn. We explore various topics using stories, interviews, and learnings in hopes that you too can rethink how you feel about failing. Together we can learn to be better failures. I'm your host, Israel Vega, and I fail to learn. Shads off tonight, but in our last episode we talked about failing to be calm and we were really looking at different ways to lose your cool, ways to keep your cool and ways to kind of calm yourself down and we explored the phrase calm down with a phrase that kind of sets me off a lot, makes me uncom. In this episode, we're going to be adding to a series that we had called How Hard Could It Be, where we talked to people in various industries and an attempt to gain insights on their hobbies, careers, jobs, basically, we're looking for failure everywhere to give you an idea that different places can have different types of failures and we want to learn from them. So today we're talking to previous guests. We spoke to this guest on the How Hard Could It Be series, How To Start a Band, and we wanted to invite him back to talk about his day job this time, Mr. Ramon Rivera. Hey Ramon. Hey, Israel, how are you? I'm doing okay. Thank you for coming back on the show. We had a great time when we talked about your band experience. We wanted to make sure that we brought you back because the audio on that one wasn't very good. That was my fault, I couldn't edit it out, but today we have a better connection, does that right? Testing one, two, three. What do you think? Are we good today? We failed last time, so we'll do it again. That's right. In this series, where we talk about How Hard Could It Be, in this case, we want to talk about your real job, which you're a project manager. So what is project management, how did you get into it, and tell us a little bit about it. Sure. So what is project management, I attended a seminar a couple years back, trying to sharpen my skills as a project manager, and the facilitator kind of put it in an extreme definition for what project management is, but basically a project manager makes dreams come true. You know, that's the way he defined it, and I go that's kind of profound, it's kind of deep, it might be kind of heavy, slightly over exaggerated, but when you break it down, there isn't a thing that's been built, an idea that's been made, a concept that's been put into practice that didn't start by a dream first, and that's what we do, we're kind of the architects of putting pen to paper and making things a reality. And so, you know, in its simplest term, you know, I make dreams come true, or at least I'm one of those. I love it. So you're almost making project management cool, like do you think, for example, myself, I'm in IT, and no one really knows what I do, no matter how much I explain it, no matter how much I try, no one really knows what I do, and there's times where I wonder what I do for a living. In your case being a PM, like, is being a PM cool? I think so. I've been doing it for quite a long time, so I would say, I don't know how cool I am, but I think the profession is itself, and you can almost tell by its marketability, you know, and when you look at how many, you know, different industries you can do project management in, you know, it's definitely something that's, it's hot, it's in the man, right? So, you know, yeah, yeah, I definitely think that they were cool. And the ultimate coolness is, you know, our certification, right? And it's project management professional, PMP. Yeah, that one's kind of a big deal, that one's kind of a big deal, right? There's a set of certifications that you can get in this profession. Talk to us about that. Like, how does that work? How long to take to study for that? Well, my, my story, you talk about failing to learn, it was, it was, you couldn't describe it any better from my long journey to become jokingly, I call myself a PIMP, the PMP. So, back in the early 2000s, I was in telecom industry and it's kind of funny. The whole journey of, you mentioned, is it cool to be a project manager and, you know, at one point in time, it was almost taboo to say you were a project manager, or I think we were seeing is very expendable. And when they were looking to, to trim the fat and do cuts, you're like, you could take or leave a project manager. And so it was so taboo that my manager at the time had the unique foresight to say, we're not project managers. We're going to then a term just to have everybody in doubt. We're going to call ourselves service readiness engineers. So we weren't project managers, we were engineers, you know, and everybody was like, that's great, but what does that mean? You know, like we do readiness, defined readiness, right? It's so ambiguous and can be so big. And I think she actually created a, or had us create like this document, which talked about everything we did. And if we actually did everything that was in that document, you know, I don't think I would have ever slept or eaten because there was so much packed in there, right? But you know, hindsight being of 2020, she was just creating, you know, the need, you need us because look at all of this that we do, you know, and so, so yeah, it's funny. Within a few years, you know, that that that thought process flipped in a dime. And not only were we project managers, she wanted us to be the best project managers and get certified as project managers. So we talk about what that journey entails. And really, to become a project management professional, you have to, you do schooling, right? There's obviously, you know, the, the book knowledge that you have to, to have and. And those classes are pretty intense from lunch time. So I looked it up and I tried to see if, you know, wait, can I be a, can I be a pimp? Can I be a pimp? And it's kind of a big deal. Like, there's a lot of, a lot of classes, can you talk to us about that? Yeah, you know, you have to go through an extensive training. That's one of the requirements. You have to have 40 hours worth of training. We actually, when I first attempted, and I think I remember this to the year, I first attempted to get my project management certification in 2009. And we split it up over two week period. So it was for two weeks, we spent half our days, you know, going through the project management book of knowledge, the pinback, and, you know, getting all the knowledge required in 40 hours of training before you could even apply to take your certification and the pinback. That sounds like a weird dance, like I'm going to do the pinback. Well, I was dancing all right. You know, and it's literally kind of our Bible of project management. And the exam itself is very, it's very literal. Like, there's no room for ambiguity, there's no, you know, splinting, I kind of do it this way. If you don't, and when you're taking the exam, follow the pinback to the letter of the law, your answer is wrong. And that's, that was one of the most difficult, difficult things about taking the exam. There were a lot of answers that were kind of right. But you had to find the answer that was most right. And it's very different than any other test I've taken. And the worst thing is the longer you've had been a practicing project manager, the less likely your instincts were going to lead you to the right answer. Oh, so the more reality, if you will, the more reality goes away from the academic. Correct. You know, it really starts to, to understand, we, we in project management, dealing in a lot of a gray area, right? And, and, and when you're taking the exam, there's no gray area, you know, and so that's what made it so difficult. So as I mentioned, my journey started in 2009, and, you know, and, and I took this class and the biggest mistake I've made was I didn't like buckle down and meet really after the class and study and try to take the exam. I let some time go by and then I was almost like peer pressured, some of my peers were getting their, their certifications. I'm like, all right, it's been a few months now, all right, Ramon, you know, put your application through and, and take, take this exam. And even the filling out of the application itself took several weeks. You needed a project manager just to manage your project management test? Just even applied to take the test, you know, because you had to prove that you had hours of, of practical experience in, in several of the key areas of project management, and, uh, you had to call out what projects you worked on when they started, when they ended, you know, and they had to, they had to be a point of contact like reference to, to prove that you, indeed, let a project, and this is, you know, the, the different disciplines that you had experienced, and so, uh, you know, there are several of my peers that their applications got rejected after initial submissions. So that process took a while. And then, uh, Oh, so there's like a Jedi console that looks at these applications and basically, says that you're okay to take the test, like you're not even certified at this point. You're just trying to put in an application to take the test. That's right. That's right. Even that is not a simple process. The exam itself is, uh, five recalls like three and a half hours. It was, uh, over 200 questions. It's a timed exam, um, you know, uh, I was trying to remember here. It's not scored on a percentage. So you have to pass to get a passing, uh, a grade, if you will, score for each discipline. So, you know, long story short, I did not pass my exam in 2009, but I had a higher score than a friend of mine who did. He passed exam and I didn't. Oh, so what, what was your area that you needed more, more, more work on or you needed? You were bad at which, which one were you bad at, which one were you best at? You know, it was risk management was one of the areas that I, that I grade, graded lower in at that time, you know, uh, the project planning portion of it, you know, I rated higher. But, you know, different areas are weighted differently. And so, um, yeah, I actually got a higher score than a buddy of mine, but he passed exam and I didn't. And, you know, I spent several months, you know, studying for the exam and, uh, it was just so much effort to do it. And actually when I completed the exam, I completed it with probably like 45 minutes to an hour left. And I actually felt pretty confident that I did really well with it. And you know, I almost had to do a double take when it said, you did not pass the exam, you know, and it was kind of devastating and my initial response to that was, you know, I'm going to buckle down. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to take this exam again and, you know, I can't believe I failed, you know, but, um, but then, you know, a couple of weeks went by and I thought about all the effort it took to do it. And I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm in no hurry to take this exam right now, you know. And so. So we should have had you on last week's episode where I failed to be calm because that's a very calm and measured approach. Uh, I would have been like stupid exam, stupid test. This is not my fault that they graded me wrong, like I would, I would have lost it. I did feel that internally, trust me. I did. I did definitely feel that and, um, but, uh, you know, daily life kept going on. You have family obligations, you have work obligations and I just couldn't muster up their energy to, to take the exam again, you know. And so then, um, yeah, not just days, turned into months, turned into years and I never went back to take my exam. And then, uh, as you well know, the telecom industry, especially in the US, is, is, is, is not very prosperous, you know, uh, over time, a lot of, uh, the job functions were, were being shipped overseas and if you can't very evident to me that, uh, my, my, uh, time in telecom was not too much longer. And I said, you know what I'll do is I, a certification would make me more marketable. Uh, once they let me go, then I'll have the time to study and retake my exam. And, um, and, and that's kind of what happened. So back in, in 2018, you know, I, I was finally part of that list of, of people that they let go. Um, the one benefit was, uh, because my, my job was shipped overseas, I was, I qualified for a grant and I was able to study and actually build up my skill set and, and even though I had so many years worth of experience and project management, I really didn't have the peltz on the wall, you know, I didn't have the certifications. So I went ahead and, and, uh, took some courses and I got my, uh, I till foundations, I got certified Scrum Master, I got Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt and then I retook the project management professional course again, which is now several iterations later, we're talking 10 years later, right? When I took the course. So even though I was familiar with it, there were some things that had changed. And I'm like, well, it's probably a good time to learn it. And, uh, in the process, I was also interviewing for a job and I, and I landed a job in, in, uh, a completely different industry, a different field, I was in, uh, healthcare and, uh, I came on board and it turns out that they were, they had a major push for their project managers to have their project management certification. And, uh, I, I had already taken the class and I had already studied, but I was aware that they had kind of like a cohort. They had lunchtime meetings where people get together and they kind of study as a group and they, they were going to try to push forward to get their certification. Well, I was ahead of the game a bit. So I, I think I was with the company for about a month. And I, I took the, the, the PMP again. And believe it or not, is he almost 10 years to the day? I failed a game. Oh, no, I failed a second time. I would have thought that on your second time around, you'd have like had more experience. You, you would have taken it more, not more serious, but you would have more, more wisdom and you going into it with them, you know, just a different point of view. What happened the second time that you, was it the same areas or was it different areas this time? It was different areas, you know, ironically, with that much more experience, it also, again, I didn't learn my lesson the first time around. And, you know, I, I knew I had to study and know the book. But they also made the tests more difficult. You know, one thing I learned is they throw in like 20 questions that you're not even meant to get right. They're not even graded on them. It's, and they, and they were very, very tricky questions. It was like random questions like, like, toilet paper, uh, roll, what is it? Roll over a roll under, like those kind of questions. It was, it was even, it was even trickier than that. So they'd give you a question that's like, let's say six sentences long, right? So they'd say like, uh, the sky's blue, the grass is green. You know, when you go to the kitchen, you know, the, the ceiling is white. And then, and the very last question, the sentence would say, what is two plus two? Yes. And, and, and you're like, wait a minute. So you, you, you let me on the path of, this is something color related and maybe I should, this observational, but in the end, you had a math equation for me. You know, so I, they, they were doing certain things that kind of, kind of tried to trick you, you know, and your thought process. And again, keep in mind, you're being timed in all of this, right? And so, um, you know, I, I, I, I, I failed and it was amazing. I actually had the original data. And I, I want to see those literally one day off from what I originally took the test. And then this time, you talk about being calm, I was calm and I was more methodical. And I said, you know what, I, I, I, I can't, I can't let this beat me. This is now like my, my, my white whale, you know, I go, did you wait another year just so you can take it on the same day again to see if it was just bad, you, you, oh, no, I didn't that. But that's funny. I probably could have done that. But what I decided was I'm like, you know what, maybe they're safety in numbers. Maybe, maybe we can learn from each other. And I joined a cohort is, you know, lunchtime group that, that studied. And um, after failing a couple of times, one of the things I learned was erase your instinct when you answer questions, right? Just don't, don't, don't go by. If you don't remember this contextually, then don't answer it by your instinct. You know, you have to find like really break down each word. You know, what did they call out? What did the book say about that? That's, that was one thing I learned. The second thing I learned was when they give me these seven, eight sentence questions, read guys blue, this guy's blue. The water is wet. What did you feed the cat exactly what I started to do was when I, when I saw several sentences, I always started at the end first. What's the question? Then, you know, the final question, then I read back, I would go back and read the whole question, but I wanted to know what they, what they were asking for first, so I could know what to ignore. The other thing I realized was there, there were always multiple choice and there was always four questions, you know, four or five questions. There was always two, you could eliminate right away. And it always came down to, there was always two that were, it could be A or it could be C. So that was the other thing is which two, can I eliminate right off the bat and then which is the most correct between the other two, you know, avoid it, look for words I said always or never, because those are absolutes, right? Those were a key indicator as well as to why one of the answers could be wrong or right. So I started learning techniques. The other thing I really, what really helped me was, I took practice tests. I didn't, because it takes effort and work to do, to take practice tests, right? And each practice test was like a three and a half, four hour practice. So that's a commitment. Like you're, you know, they call it sometimes getting in the gym and putting, you know, putting in your reps. So in this case, you're, you're getting your 10, right? You're, you're basically like, if this is your white whale, you're, you're not going to fail this the next time around. You got it. I'm like, I had to learn, you know, what it was that I did wrong previously. And then, you know, figure out, you know, approach, you know, and a gain plan to succeed. The other thing that I became really good at is there is a fair amount of information that you had to memorize. And you're allowed a scratch piece of paper, you know, before, and you can, you can jot down notes. And what I got into the habit of doing every day that I practice is I would do a brain dump on my cheat sheet, whether it was equations. You know, it was definitions. It was concepts. I had a routine that I would do a brain dump as fast as I could. And my brain dump would take me somewhere between 15 to 20 minutes. But you would do that like right before you took the test. So essentially, it was fresh in your mind. You're calm. You're not in the moment. You're kind of just jotting down ideas, things that you know you need to remember. Exactly. It wasn't even just when I did my practice exams. I would do it every day before I studied so that it became a second nature. And the other thing I realized that it would do for me is it would center me. Like if I had a stressful day at work or, you know, and something else is on my mind, doing the brain dump would force me to focus and recall. And almost was like a warmup of my before I actually got into studying the material or before I actually took a practice exam. And I'd go get the letters, give the room to Joe, great analogy before your exam. And the other thing is it kind of called me as well. You know, and it got me, it got my rhythm going before I actually started taking the exam. And then getting back to taking practice exams, the thing I realized was when I took my first practice exam, you know, it took me four hours. Like I barely finished exam, right? And I felt so overwhelmed like, oh my God, my brain's going to burst and, you know, I needed some time to recover. Then I took this, I took it again, right? And it was rough. It's four hours of time commitments, you know? But it wasn't as bad. Then I took it again because one thing I didn't mention was there was a money back guarantee if you failed the exam, but you had to score 80% on a practice exam at least once. And in my practice exams, I was falling just below 80. And you know, so I took the practice exam four times and four days before taking the exam. And each time I would do it four hours, four shorter and shorter and shorter, it's almost like, you know, being a training for a marathon, you know, and I got it or what was that? Basketball. What's his name? Alan Iverson. Practice. You're talking about practice, but Alan, I have to say it worked because in four hours is like no big deal. At the last time I did it, I got my 80%, you know, I finished and you know, with like, you know, 30 minutes to go. And you know, I was like, you know, four hours wasn't that bad, you know, and I got into the rhythm. I kind of understood the type of questions they would ask. I got my brain downed great. And you know, I felt ready and prepared for the exam until exam day. We're on the edge of our seats now. All right. So third time a charm, please third times a charm, right? I get in. But what happened here, so you have to check in like your phone, your watch, they put in a locker, you know, they give you like a, I'm trying to think what they gave me. So they gave me like a piece of paper and but it wasn't, it actually wasn't a piece of paper. They gave me like a dry erase. And I was used to a pencil and a paper. And I did have the option to take the exam at home. But I heard horror stories about people having network issues in the middle of the exam. And I'm like, you know, I can imagine a four, your four hours into an exam and all of a sudden your network, you know, network drops or, you know, some blip, some blip happens. I've had that happen to me taking exam. Yeah, like they want to hit submit and like, you know, the what page is timed out or, you know, just, you know, so I'm like, I'm not going to even deal with that. I'm going to go into an exact exam room. So so I get in there, I give them all my stuff, they give me this, this dry erase, you know, and I sit down and I got my technique, right? And my brain kept requiring me drawing out a grid. And I had like little, you know, I had like a little initials that I would write that meant something to me, you know, but but I had it, you know, it's a pretty exhaustive grid that I would draw out as part of my brain dump. And I'm going through my brain dump and and love behold, I get to the end. Something doesn't align right. And I'm like, okay, something's not right in my brain dump. And I'm looking like I do this every time this is routine, granted the clock is ticking, right? Clock is ticking. And then, um, but my brain dump is not right. So I start to panic, you know, and I and I, I start, I actually start to sweat. And I figure out what I did wrong, but my sweat falls on dry erase and it, it like smears the whole dry erase. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I can, but I have, if I have to have my brain dump. And so I waste about 28 minutes trying to get my brain dump down. Wipe it your brow and, and I'm sweating all over this dry erase. And I'm like, all right, Ramon, you got to get it together. You got to get, you got to now, you know, that your, your, your clock is, you just wasted what normally is 15 minutes for you and you just spent almost 30 for your brain dump, right? So, so I go and I start taking to exam. And the first four or five questions, I'm just panic, I, I'm reading the question over and over. It's not sinking in. And, and it's causing a panic in my head. You know, so now I'm, I'm having a, I'm like, take it, and I'm just telling myself, take a deep breath, relax, you know this, you got this, let's go through it, right? And the other thing is, and taking so many exams, you know the pace that you have to be, right? So I'm going along, and it took me, I would say a good five or 10 questions where I'm like, all right, now your pace is back, you're, you're doing good, you know, you're, you're able to answer your questions. So I'm going through the exam and I'm answering them. I'm feeling good, but I'm about 40 questions behind where I should be at this point in time. And I'm like, you're doing well, but you're going to have to start answering the questions quicker. You know, and I had my routine. That's a long question. Read the last sentence first, not read the whole thing. So did you do the normal, did you do the normal project management thing where you just add people? I, you know, you remember an old show called vermin said, I may be dating myself, but, but essentially, it was a TV sitcom where this guy is named as Herman, and he literally had all these different personalities, and there were people who were inside of his head. And so he had his sensitivity person and he had his, his, you know, rough, rough guy that was in there and they'd argue inside of his brain. So it was multiple people in his head. And I think early on, I had a bunch of people in my, in my head, and they were kind of fighting with each other. And it was. What was that cartoon? Wasn't that a cartoon? It was. Yeah, it's very, very similar to inside out. So what I started realizing was, if I didn't speed up, I'm not going to finish the exam in time. And I mean, it got to the point where like I needed roughly like, I would say two to three minutes to answer a question. The only way I could finish exam is to answer two questions a minute, because of my early delay. So you answered C for everything. I was, I was locked in like I've never been. I was literally seen. I would skip the whole. I'm reading the whole thing. I would read the last question and instead of trying to work through multiple answers, I was, as soon as I saw the right one, I was clicking it. I was clicking it. I was clicking it. I wound up finishing the exam with less than a minute left. Oh, and I had no clue if I passed, because of the whole panic and then me having to call myself down and then I was going too slow and then I had to speed myself up. You know, I felt like I was locked in and I was knocking it out. But I'm like, I'm probably not going to pass, you know. And the first thing it tells you when you finish exam is, you know, if you want to take a survey, it doesn't even give you the results. It asks you if you want to take a survey like, yeah, that's the last thing I want to do right now. I'll do a survey. Well, because they know they want you to get to results, you're going to throw the chair and not fill out the survey. You kept there, right? And I've been here before. I've been here before. Twice before. I want to take the survey. You know, and then I get the rejection, right? So, you know, I do want to take the survey, you know, and then, you know, this screen pops up and it's like, you're not completed exam. You know, at this point in time, you want to congratulate you, you pass exam. And I'm, and I, and I stop and I smile and I look in the room and I'm like, did I just pass to six in this most stressful thing I've ever been through my life, ran it. But first of times I took it, I finished early and I thought it was kind of easy. And in this time, I mean, I, I, I just floated out that room. I don't even, I don't even remember my feet touching the floor, you know, people there, they didn't know my backstory. They didn't know what I'd gone through to try to get this exam, but they were happy for me. Um, and to tell you the truth, it motivated me to teach others how to pass this exam. I go, I know how to pass this exam and I know why most people don't pass this exam. So you know, obviously, I was a static that I finally got my degree. I became a pimple. I had a pimple party and, um, I came back to, to, to my bosses at, you know, in the healthcare industry and I said, you know what? I want to lead cohorts, I want to help others get their project management certification. So over the next 18 months, I led, I want to say the cohorts lasted roughly three months. So I think I led four to five cohorts and I helped 30 plus people get their certifications. Dude, that's amazing. That's amazing. So like for myself working with project managers, I have, um, we work with them a lot, right? And there's times where you get a project manager kind of like yourself where you've gone through the certifications, you understood all the different methodologies. You've been on projects and you've done that. There are other people who call themselves project managers and they don't know the difference between programs and projects like they, like it's that basic. What do you do when you work with like untrained PMs? Do you look at them funny? Do you feel like superior or like do you ever work with untrained PMs? How does that work? You know, it's, it's very rare and, and I will say this, I didn't, I didn't stay in the, in the healthcare industry too long. So after I got my certification and, you know, and, and I have to say that the company I was with at the time, they did true project management. I mean, we practiced it daily. When I was in telecom, you know, and I always equate project management, especially the pinback methodology to the alphabet, you know, there's letters A through Z, right? To me, the pinback teaches you A through Z, that the, of the project management, right? And, and where I was at in telecom, we probably out of the letters alphabet, we probably did A through H, you know, so there was a lot of project management that I didn't have the experience of actually doing. You know, I was very strong. So is it flavors like, like help me, help me with that? Is it flavors of project management? Is it just, I think it's a, it's a, this old, it's a span of a span of control you had. Like, I had little visibility of budget, so I didn't handle budget. You know, I didn't really allocate resources when I was in telecom. It was more the planning and, and the, you know, the monitoring, controlling and delivering, but there were several disciplines within complete project management. I didn't have a lot of experience in or any experience, you know, in, in healthcare when I was in, in that industry, they were very strict. Like, we wanted to follow the pinback to the letter and still. You were like at M, M or N, like how far into the alphabet? We did A to Z. We did, we did complete A to Z, you know, and, and this is, and you mentioned different methodologies. You know, there's, there's waterfall, you know, the other popular one recently is agile, you know, and scrum. So we, we were primarily waterfall in telecom. We were, for the most part, waterfall in the healthcare, trying to transition more to be more agile when, when I left there. So in terms of me working with less experience or, or maybe inexperienced project managers, that wasn't evident to me, especially when I was in healthcare. I now work for a much smaller company and the, the project managers I work with were such a small and tight-knit group, were all pretty experienced, except we have one associate PM, who believe it or not, when I came aboard in this company, he wasn't a project manager, and he sought to become a project manager based on how I ran my projects. I kind of influenced him to want to pursue it as a career. And so he's, he's probably the only person that I've really dealt with that isn't really an experienced project manager, and, and I've often wondered, you know, if I didn't start off trying to be a project manager, as I mentioned it, you know, I kind of evolved into that role. And I think it would be very difficult for someone to come straight from college and become a project manager without, you can, you can get the book knowledge of it, you know, you can understand the principles of it, but, you know, so much of the, you know, project management discipline is really people interaction, right? You know, there's times where sometimes I feel like I'm a conductor of an orchestra, you know, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm a therapist, you know, I, I, I, I, I have an engineering background, right? So sometimes I'm, I'm a bit of a solution architect. But I gotta, I have to go in and help kind of guide and steer, you know, different things and, and I am where I am today based on the wealth of experience I accumulated over the last 20 plus years of being a professional. So I, I think it'd be very difficult for someone to come in and, and take on, you know, being a project manager. You can get a, definitely a degree in project management, but, uh, yeah, I, I think it's almost like, uh, if you take, uh, you know, like a plumber or, or, or, you know, an electrician, they have the apprentices, right, that you have to have years of experience and you build up and you work your, your way up. You know, it's, it's definitely not the same type of work, but I still think it, it's very much the same process to get you to really become, you know, a true project manager, let alone, you know, a, a good, a great project manager, you know, yeah, there are some jobs that I think, you know, I call it putting on the uniform. So there's, there's some roles where you can put on the uniform, you can put the shoes on, um, you can iron your jersey, you could put the pants on, you could look like you're doing the thing and there's times where you can fake your way through it. If you're trying to do that, for example, in football, you can put on the jersey, you can put on the pants, you step out on that football field, you're going to get hurt. And plumbing, I think, you know, we've hired people, um, we do a lot of real estate, we've hired people that have definitely put on the uniform and, you know, they just, they get hurt. And PMs, what, what I've seen in my industry is that a lot of PMs will put on the uniform, but they don't get hurt, what, who gets hurt is other people around them, right? So projects go off the rails or project managers don't do their basic things. They, um, they don't understand the difference, like for example, between projects and programs and they do things like so. I think it's one of those fields where, you know, you almost have to gain their respect and you have to tell people, like, look, I went through years of certifications, I went through years of understanding this stuff, just to call myself a PM. You can't just walk in, you can't just put on the uniform, you know what I mean? No, and that's, that's an excellent point because I, I think it is, as I mentioned early on in my professional career, it was almost taboo to call yourself a project manager because I think a lot of ways everybody felt that they could do, they can just be a project manager, you know, but it's, it's almost like not everybody cooks, it comes off the chef, right? And it sometimes, especially early on, I think it was difficult for people to understand that, but, uh, but, you know, you raise an excellent point, you know, when you start to see, you know, uh, cost overruns, you know, or, or project, you know, a sculpt creep, right? And, and, you know, you know, things spinning out of control, you know, not meeting deadlines, you know, those are the true costs of not having good qualified project managers in place, you know, and I think the industry has learned to respect that and, and value it. And, and you see it, you see it in terms, in terms of pay, but you also see it in two in terms of, uh, you know, when I, when I was leaving healthcare and, and trying to, you know, venture off and see what other industry I could get in is, uh, the rigorous process to get hired as well, you know, they really, you know, challenge you and put you to the gamut and, you know, have you walk through scenarios of, of success, but more importantly, scenarios of failure. You know, how did you fail, you know, how did you handle failure? What did you, you know, what, what did you do to get back on track? Or, you know, what did you learn, or, you know, navigating through the turbulent times, you know, that, that's, that's really where, where you see the value, you know, one of your experience, you know, and, and just to, you know, what you can bring, uh, to, you know, to, to work through the, the storms, because there's going to be storms in every project, you know, to me, if everything worked as, as written on paper, you would need a project manager, right? And, and that's, that's the, the key benefit that we do bring. Yeah, so the project managers, the best ones that I've worked with are the ones that kind of, you know, been there, done that, uh, they respect the other crafts and they pull everything together and they kind of, they keep everybody on track, but it comes from experience. So do you think you can ever get good, or, or actually, I'll rephrase it. Will you ever be on a project that doesn't fail in some way throughout the project? You know, I don't think so. I don't think so because there's, there's, and I know you and I, obviously, we're friends on a, on a personal, we talked about the knowns and unknowns, right? It, and then the unknown, unknowns, and, and it's the unknown unknowns that inevitably are gonna creep. And, and, and even if you have all your bases covered, COVID hits, right? That, that impacts everybody. Oh, yeah. In some way, shape, or form, and, and so, uh, you can do all the planning in the world and then, you know, a global pandemic hits, right? And, and so that's why I, I say, there's always challenges in, in every project. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to fail, but, um, there are gonna be failures, there's gonna be setbacks, you know, there's gonna have to be, uh, re-planning. It, it, it, it, it's inevitable. If you can learn to accept it, and, and also, you know, look for opportunities out of it, you know, that, that's where you can really benefit, uh, from, from, uh, I'll call them setbacks, not necessarily failures, but for, for the sake of, of this show, you know, you minor failures along the way. Minor failures. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome, dude. Um, well, thank you so much for sharing. Really appreciate you taking the time to come back and talk to us about your day job for anyone listening out there. If you want to reach out, uh, please send us a note, podcast that I feel to learn.com. If you want to know more about Ramon, please, uh, feel free to reach out as well. Uh, Ramon, thank you again for, uh, joining us. You too. It was my pleasure to be back on, Izzy. Thanks. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]