Hello and welcome to the Becker Private Equity and the Becker Business Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger. Today I'm excited to speak with Liz Hudson, Principal Consultant and Owner at EGH LLC, who joins us today to discuss how to create project plans that are ready for anything. Liz, thank you as always for joining me. Great to talk with you, Chanel. Thanks for having me today. Of course. Well, could you get us started out by briefly introducing yourself to listeners that may not be acquainted with you yet? Absolutely. So my name is Liz Hudson. I am the founder and the principal consultant of EGH LLC. We focus on healthcare products and services. We're a consulting fund that focuses on change, mostly in the private equity space. Thank you so much for the introduction. Now to start us off, can you give us a broad overview of what effective project planning looks like? Absolutely. So in specific, I mean, there's lots to cover with regards to project planning, but today I want to focus in on planning for the worst case scenario, but aiming for the best. So when you're working on any kind of a project, both the team and the project manager, they always want good things to happen, right? They're very excited. The team starts excited. The outcome looks clear. The path looks very obvious, very clean as to what we need to do. but experienced project leaders, they know something very important. And that is, it's not, if something unexpected is going to happen, it's when is that unexpected thing going to happen? So strategic planning, that project manager that knows what they're doing, isn't just building a perfect plan. They certainly aim to do that, but they're not just doing that. They're building the plan for when the crazy thing inevitably happens. So today, Chanel, I thought we'd talk about three areas to consider when setting up that plan. First things first, we want to build a plan with the right people. That's really important, and it's not something to be brushed over. And you don want to include just leadership not just the project manager but you want to involve the entire cross team and the subject matter experts You want to get both a top-down view and a bottoms-up view of this. A top-down view that's looking at strategy and deadlines and business priorities, something that maybe the CEO or the business unit leader is looking at, right? That's the top-down view, but you also really need to look at the bottoms-up view of what does it actually take to execute this, and you marry those two things up together. So, you know, an example of that might be you have a leader that is laser-focused on that, and they've got to have this done by May 15th. But you have a conversation with your microbiome subject matter experts and says, hey, the bugs need 10 days to grow, and that's just what it's going to take for that to happen. And so we can't make that May 15 date happen. Science is going to win in that. You just can't compress that timeline. So you don't want to include those experts really early on. You're going to start to build unrealistic timelines that fall apart later. So you want to think about the clearest path to go from here to there. And then pressure test the timeline with the people that are actually doing the work. And that's how you're going to build into your plan how you avoid preventable chaos. Absolutely. And now that we've built out the plan with the right people, where do we go from here? Yeah, I think important here is something that gets brushed over quite a lot, and that is conducting risk planning sessions. And sometimes we think about risk as sort of an aside or we're like, oh, yeah, we'll pull that out when something bad happens. But no, you want to do this not just once at the beginning of the project, but throughout the entire project. You want to think about, you know, what could go wrong. You want to think about where the detours might be. And a lot of times when I'm working with teams on this, I'll say, well, let your imagination go wild. Ask, like, you know, what could delay us? What are some of the external forces that could hit us? Where are we very vulnerable And then after we kind of identify these are the potential risks these are some of the problem areas then we want to think back how likely is it that that going to happen And if it does happen, how severe would that be? And when you have those two things, what the thing is, how likely is it, what's the severity, then you want to start to build out your mitigation plan. What would you do if that thing happens, if that crazy thing happens, what would we do? And then you want to add that cushion to absorb the deviations. Because here's the thing, we do always say we should plan for risk. That's a good idea. But a lot of times, myself included, we secretly hold, we assume everything's going to go perfectly. But I can't think of a single thing where something goes perfectly. It almost never does. But the teams that do make those plans, that they do have those risk planning sessions, they're going to look calm in a crisis because they've already rehearsed, they've already planned for that response. Perfect. So we've got our plan laid out. We've surrounded ourselves with the right people. We've conducted risk planning sessions. Now, how do we bring it all home to make sure our project is ready for anything? Yeah, this is where I think it's important to really just make sure that you manage communication, manage communications. And I always think of this in terms of two audiences, two segments here. The first segment or the first audience is the team. They're the ones that help build the project plan. They know the risk. They know the mitigation plan. And we're going to focus there on pushing towards the best case scenario. We're going to do everything we can to execute aggressively. But we're going to keep our eyes open if there are some things that start to bubble up, early warning signs. And if everything goes great, smoothly, then wonderful. But if surprise hits, then we basically activate the risk mitigation plan or the contingency plan. There's no panic. We just move into execution mode. So that's the first group, that's the internal team that kind of knows all the bottoms up of this. The second audience or the second segment is the outside the team folks So this is your leadership this is your stakeholders These are teams that are dependent on the work that you doing And a phrase that I use all the time with my team with my clients just across the board is this phrase that is under commit, over deliver, under commit and over deliver. And I'm not talking about sandbagging, right? I'm not talking about, you know, put something crazy out there and significantly beat that. It's really about managing your buffer, You want to add cushion to things like your timelines, your deliverables, your resource estimates, etc. Because you'll know. It's not if. It's when something unexpected is going to happen. You just don't know what that thing is. So if you present the perfect no-issue scenario to the outside team, to leadership, to stakeholders, etc., and you keep missing them, Even if it's for reasons for things that are outside your control, you're going to lose credibility. But if instead you build in a realistic cushion and you deliver ahead of that commitment, and no one's going to complain if you're done early, right? And you're building credibility. So that third one, managing communication, under commit, over deliver, I think is a really important thing to incorporate into project planning. Got it, got it. Thank you so much for walking us through that. But now, Liz, before I let you go, is there anything else that listeners should know? Yeah, no, just to sum it up, I guess in project planning, you know, we always want to create very thoughtful, very meticulous plans, but surprises are going to happen. Not if, but when. So the three things just to sum that up is one, you know, plan with the right team, that cross-functional team. Two, plan for the unplanned and build that cushion into the project plan. And then three, communicate with the right level of buffer. under commit over deliver. And I don't think that's being pessimistic. And I don't think that's sandbagging. I think that's leadership. I love it. Well, Liz, I want to thank you as always for joining me today and for sharing your insights on the Becker Private Equity and the Becker Business Podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks, Chanel. Good to talk with you.
