 And thank you for joining us on the cyber underground where our mission is to dig deep to find out how cyber security touches all of us on our everyday lives. I'm your host Dave Stevens and with me today we have again our exceptional co-host Mr. Andrew Lanning, Andrew the security guy. Aloha everybody. Welcome back and we got a great guest for you today, Dan Yauzy from the PMI Honolulu chapter. And what's PMI? No accurate names. We got to use PMI for now. So everybody I got to do some due diligence here. This is a spinoff show from Hibachi Talk. So Andrew Lanning here is the co-host here and we're going to do a shout out to Hibachi Talk and Mr. Gordon Bruce. And you guys had a show this Wednesday. Heather Patterson was on talk and she does happiness talent like development, right? So if you got to work you might as well be happy and how to make it happy. And she works with one-on-ones but she also does teens and kind of that 360 view of why I like you, why I don't like you, whatever it may be. And helps people work on being happier at work because that's where we spend a lot of time. That is so important. The productivity must be fantastic when she comes in and helps people out because if you're depressed at your job, you're horrible at your job probably. Sure. And 70% of people are disengaged. Oh I would imagine. Yeah and now that we add the internet at work it's even worse. Disengager. That's how we have to have project managers to re-engage us to get our work done. There's that plug. See I brought that right back. That is good flow. I like that. Bring it right back to Dan. Now Dan you're the president of Project Management International Chapter in Honolulu. Can you tell us a little bit about Project Management International? What's its history and a little bit about its mission? The Project Management Institute is a national organization. It's a not-for-profit. We have about 2.9 million members. And we really espouse the benefits of project management in the organization and the project management profession. So of those 2.9 million there's about 650,000 accredited PMP certified project managers. The local chapter here in Honolulu we actually have over 600 members. So a good portion. And we have a number of events every month. We've got breakfast, lunch, tahanas. And in August we actually have our annual professional development day which is a full day event. We have speakers come in from the mainland and talk about project management and the principles. Tools, techniques to use to effectively manage projects in an organization. Now before we get into cybersecurity and security in general. Why is project management important to a company? Just in general. Why would I as a company owner want a project manager to come in and manage a project? When I think I've got this handled. I know what needs to be done. I made that mistake. So Andrew owns, he's the co-founder of Integrated Security Technology. He's a security company here. He has physical security, right? So you've made the mistake. When we moved our offices and did the build out. I used to do construction for I went in the Navy or anything. You got this handle. Oh my gosh, if it wasn't for a wonderful GC who put up with me. And it's still repermitting took three times as long as you ever plan, right? So you need a project manager. So project manager, what's your value? What's your added value to an organization? Okay, so let's start out with the definition of a project, right? So a project is temporary endeavors. You've got to define start date and end date. So you know exactly what your scope is going to be. And so what we try to do is manage projects with the triple constraints. So you have your scope, you have your schedule, and you have your cost. So scope is what you're going to do. Exactly. And outside of those boundaries is not included in your project. That's called scope gap. Scope creep, right? That's creep if you do it. It's gap if you identify it before you do it. Exactly. So the reason organizations undertake projects is, you know, a new service, a new product, they want to make a change, right? So project managers ultimately are change agents within an organization. And so it's either to bring a new product to market, a new service to market, or to actually accommodate a strategic goal of the organization. So project managers in general really have to be attuned to dealing with dynamic environments, lots of change going on. They have to be the advocate for the project. And they have to be able to communicate with different people, you know, all the way from your C-suite down to the lowest level technician is working on the job. C-suite to the chief operating officer, chief executive officer, all those, those C. So in Honolulu though, we have a lot of LLCs. So you might not see a lot of those C-suite people, but they'd be directors and principals in a company, right? And they're the people that they're your stakeholders in the project and also the champions, right? So you have to have their sign off to get them going, right? They sometimes act like champions. Sometimes the changes they want to bring to you in the stream, right? Or they don't understand the impacts of that. They're the dreamers oftentimes. So you get to be the champion of change management. I like how he said he advocates for the project. I think that's really important because the project needs someone that has that starting end date in mind. And when you run a project without proper project management or someone that understands that, that's how you get craziness. You've got a final delivery, right? You've got a date that you must deliver a project on. And some change gets made that's going to push that deadline out. Absolutely. You've got to inform those people, hey, this is not going to work. Or if it does, here's the result. And that's exactly it. And when I mentioned the triple constraint, right? So if midstream the project sponsor wants to extend the scope and add new functionality to the system, you need to throw more money at it. So you have to affect your budget or you need to put more people on it. So that affects your resources and your timeline. So the role of the project manager is actually to navigate that kind of mind field and work with the project sponsor and the stakeholders to really message that out and say, okay, you want to make this change? Here are the impacts. If you're okay with those impacts, let's do the proper change management procedure. Get it signed off and we'll move forward. An important thing he said there was that it's going to cost more. They don't hear that part. And they're like, they want to know right now, right? They want to make the change. So there's this speed and you're like, well, we need to estimate it. And so, okay, give me a ROM, right? So give me an idea. What do you think a ROM is in your experience? 60, 70%? Something like that. It might be 80, but man, you know, you say, what's between a million and two million? They're like, that's not a good guess. Actually, it might be. ROM is usually a plus or minus, 20 to 30%. What was the ROM stand for? The rough order of magnitude. Rough order of magnitude. So there's different, you can get closer and closer to a more precise number, but the ROM is usually pretty loose. Exactly, right? It's your first wildest guess. Well, like when people say you could do X past square footage, right? So if we want to add a 50 square foot, we ought to know what it is, but maybe there's a concrete wall in the way. You know, sometimes there's constraints that make it. Exactly. So typically the way it'll work is when you initiate the project, the very first phase, you're kind of going through and defining the high-level tasks and it'd be done. What are the deliverables and the milestones you want to accomplish? And that's where you come in with your budgetary estimate. You're wrong. Right? And then once the project sponsor, you know, signs off and that says, okay, we're good with this. That's where the project manager kind of steps in with the technical experts, breaks it down task by task as granular as we can. We assign, you know, what are the resources needed? What are the materials needed? And that's where you have your hard cost. You can kind of hone in on what your actual cost is going to be for the project. And when it comes to execution phase, that's where you're tracking against, you know, here's the schedule we set. Here's the budget we set. And you're really working to monitor and control that throughout the project to make sure you actually do satisfy the project. I like that you mentioned navigation because I picture doing a project without a project manager, especially when it's a big project, it's not kind of like taking your ship out of the open ocean and saying, I kind of want to go to Fiji. But I'm not going to navigate. I'm just going to go, I know kind of where it is. I've been there before. That's called drifting. Hopefully the currents take you there, right? But once you get there, you're out of food. You're, you know, you're starving to death. You've maybe eaten a couple of members of your crew. I don't know. Bad things can happen without a project manager. Yeah. And there's some good stats here, too, actually. The PMI has been working with the U.S. government, actually to work on some legislation. And the end of last year, they passed the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act. And what the government actually recognized was for every one million dollars spent in U.S. programs and projects, there's about 97 million that's in waste. Wow. So it's a significant amount. You're talking 10% there. So really what this act did is set up a progression path for, you know, program and project management through the U.S. government. So there's actually career development tracks now. And buying for government executives who are leading these programs and projects to actually be certified through some professional organization. I'm glad you brought that up. So you guys are mostly talking about the PMP, Project Management and Professional Certification, that the PMI is the host of, right? I know a couple of DOD contractors that I'm working with now, they have to have a PMP to do their next project. Otherwise, they cannot do the next project. It is a requirement now. Just like DOD professionals that are on the network, you know, NMCI, something like that, the secure networks, they have to have a Security Plus or CISSP certification from ISC2 or CompTIA. Now to do a project, you need to have the PMP. Why is that so important? What does the PMP give us? You know, that's a great question because, you know, really that's the foundation of PMI. The PMI actually comes with the standards and guidelines, tools techniques to use for project management also established as a common vernacular. So project manager or project manager, you can speak the same language. So we're talking about the project management body of knowledge, PMBOK, PIMBOK. He's got all kind of acronyms in there. He's got all the stuff. Good job. Well, I got the PMP. Good job. So you read this book, the PIMBOK, which by the way is better than a sleeping pill. You really got to take it in little chunks. It's just... Two pages and don't wham. Yeah, it's not the most entertaining reading in the world. But when you consume it and apply that knowledge, it's fantastic knowledge. Especially when it comes to the communication between, say, you're hosting the project, you're my champion, you want this project done on the project manager, my communication with you becomes infinitely easier if I follow these processes. So can you talk about how the PMP is broken down and what would I have to do to get a PMP? What do I have to know? Okay, so to obtain the PMP certification, you actually have to have some boots on the ground experience working in projects, not necessarily as a formerly named project manager, but at least working with different sections, right? So they have different knowledge areas which they look at and say, okay, you spend some time in these areas. You also need some contact time. So 35 contact hours with a recognized education provider about project management. And then once you meet those two guidelines, then you basically apply to take the exam and once you're accepted to take the exam, you can sit through the PMP exam, which is always fun. Going to your point about the PIMBOK, I wouldn't necessarily recommend people just trying to read the PIMBOK paper cover to cover and trying to sit and take the test. Yeah, warm piece. Yeah, warm piece. But really it's sitting for the exam. It's more contextual based. So they provide you scenarios and you have to pick the best answer. And so going through some kind of boot camp or PMP preparation course is infinitely better than trying to read the PIMBOK because it actually puts everything in context. The PEMBOK are the tools and technique. The training, the courses and the reason that 35 hours are required is because it puts everything in context. It gives you those scenarios where it would be appropriate to use these tools and not necessarily these other tools. Right. So now that's 35 contact hours can be a number of different ways you can get those, right? You can get those online. There's certified vendors, right? And college courses. I know when I went for the PMP because I'd taken a course in project management as a 16-week course, there was 36 contact hours. So it qualified me as that part of the qualification for the exam. Can you break down the knowledge areas and maybe how those are broken down into the PMP? What are the different pieces of the puzzle? So there's a number of them. So you have the initiating, communications. It goes through all the different things. What are those called? There's five of those, right? What are those called? So you have the process group. Process group. So you're initiating, you're planning. You're executing. You're monitoring, controlling. And closing, yeah. Okay. And under that, you have knowledge areas. And each of those, you apply your knowledge areas and you're going to give me a PMP exam. You're going to pop a question. There's over a hundred of these. Oh, wow. When you're prepping for the exam, maybe you put those five at the top and then you have to put all the knowledge areas underneath. You have to hand write them to make sure you know them. And one of the tricks in the test, you get to go in there with a blank piece of paper and you get a quick brain dump. Sure. And write down as many as you can so then you know some of the questions on the exam. And there's formulas, right? So I used to teach cost management for the PMP prep. That's one of the worst cost management. You have to memorize formulas. What's this going to affect down the road pretty much? That's cost management. What is it that you've been teaching at PMP prep? You've done the PMP prep courses. Do you know anything about how the PMI promotes this in Honolulu? No, absolutely. So the PMI Honolulu chapter actually has three to four different PMP prep exams each year. And basically we sit down and we have volunteers actually teach the course who have recently sat through the PMP exam. So they know what it's going to look like. They know what it's going to look like. They've been through the test recently. And it's a win-win for everyone because to maintain your certification you need to earn PDU, professional development units. And so for every volunteer hour you get one PDU. Otherwise you're going to take the test every three years. That's nice as a giving back though. It's giving back to the profession, right? And that's one of the key tenants of PMI is volunteers. And that's what they're trying to promote. So basically you have these instructors go through the different knowledge areas and basically teach what you're going to see in the exam and make sure that students can understand and apply those concepts. You also the way the PMI Honolulu chapter structures it when you become a member of PMI in the chapter you actually get that amount of discount off of the PMP prep course. So it's win-win. You become a member, it's a great organization, 600 members so we have a lot of networking events. Right. And you get exposure to all those tools techniques and you're able to set what you do. I know also knowing all those other PMPs if you build your network within the PMI you have visibility into many different companies in the IONS. You know how those companies are doing business and most importantly and we'll talk about this after the break you have exposure to their lessons learned. So you don't have to necessarily make all the same mistakes to learn the lesson. You can go get it from them. You did the similar project here's where we ran into and we'll talk about that after the break. So we're going to pay some bills. We'll be right back. You can go a long way because it's all about having fun on game day. I'm the guy you want to be. I'm the guy, say good morning. I'm the guy with the H2O and I'm the guy that says let's go. Hey Andrew the security guy here with the cyber underground Dave and Dan in the house. I wanted to talk about something real quick that I keep seeing in town. Listen if you're not a retail organization there's really no reason for your doors to be unlocked to the public. So take a look at your organization, take a look at the traffic that's moving around and see if there's not a vulnerability there that you can protect your employees from by adding some access control to that front door. I know you don't want to use a key all the time. I know it's inconvenient. So maybe some electronic access control but more and more of these incidents that we see people are just walking in and wreaking havoc and you don't want that to happen to your staff. So that's my security minute. Take a look at access control to help keep your employees safer. Back to project management. Back to project management. That's a good tip keeping your front door locked if you don't have to deal with the public. Yeah, why? Why would you do it? I walk in doors all the time. So anybody can walk in good and bad. You can get flowers delivered or you can get some pain. We're such a trustworthy, you know, state. That's the whole hallway. We just don't think about that. Things are changing. Now wait a minute. When you grew up Kentucky, did you lock your front door at night? No. It just wasn't the thing you did. I grew up in California. It was the same thing. We didn't start doing that until the 80s or the 90s when crime started getting kind of bad. Yeah. It's a different culture now. It's probably like high school or something. So yeah, definitely like in the 80s. Yeah, early 80s. I remember like being worried about locking your car. We didn't always care. Yeah, you just throw the keys in the front floor by the car seats. You always remember where they are. Yeah. Yeah, and the culture changed on us. We just shifted all of a sudden. Now we got to lock our car doors. The crack epidemic just changed. Star face, all that stuff. Everybody went crazy. We wanted to be a gangster. Cheaper, better drugs, and now better crime. I guess actually a lot of drugs. We just didn't manage it well is what I think we might find out. Had we brought that stuff in and managed it a little better, we might have made some money and not had such a crime way out of it. What do you think, Dan? Way in from a management perspective. From a management perspective. We just didn't get enough to help manage this process. That's right. We needed guys like you. It got out of hand. So what were we talking about? We got to get back to project management. What were we covering? We got to get back to a couple things. We're navigating your project. I'd like to talk about how valuable it is to have a project manager on a project to keep costs in line. It was one thing we as company owners are terrified of dumping a whole bunch of money into a project and A, not completing it, or B, completing it late and nobody wants it then or getting your project to market too late and just spending all that money, it's useless. So when you dedicate some money to a project, why is it so much more valuable to bring a project manager in? How do you help that process? Actually it's twofold. Let's take it one step back. If you've identified a need, you're really talking about business analysis. The PMI actually offers the PMI-BA, the Project Management Business Analyst Certification as well. That really goes to looking at what are the driving factors? What are the requirements? What's the concept here? Let's go through and document what the business requirements are and then we drive into the technical specifications. That really helps define what the issue is and what the value to the business is. Then the project manager comes in and actually goes and says, okay, this is a good plan. The project sponsor says we want to go with this and now it's time to execute. So we plan it out and execute. By and large, recent statistics say projects that have a project manager assigned to it are about two and a half times more successful than those without. Since being on time and on budget. And hopefully under budget and delivering early. If you're a really good project manager, maybe you could make that happen. That's rarer in my experience. So project managers have the tendencies of tasks and tandem. They realize that two tasks can happen at the same time. When you do some really good analysis, you realize these two things don't have to be in sequence. They can be at the same time. Well, so I have some experience with that. So we're a low-voltage contractor, right? And oftentimes we're well down the totem pole on a large project, say a build out of a facility. And if the project manager's not familiar with perhaps the tasks that a low-voltage contractor has to perform and hasn't come up in the weekly meetings or whatever meetings they're having, he'll schedule us in there to do our work the same day flooring's going in. Well, you can't have ladders out. So things like that occur. When you're dropping in a frame, for example, into a wall, we need to get our wire into that frame that day, right? Or if we're not there, the guys will put the frame in and clip the wire off, so now it's cut. Because he doesn't know our particular industry, for example. So it's not really a failing. It's just that you've got to have that vocabulary. You've got to know from your subs what's going to happen if you're like the overall PM. Sometimes there's multiple PMs on projects, but it's interesting. So we solved that problem with subject-manner experts. So you would call in a subject-manner expert, hopefully, if you didn't know the industry as well as you should. Exactly. And so that's really an important distinction that was brought up here, because when you look at projects, if you're executing a project in an LLC, a small company, chances are the project manager is really risen from the technical rank. They were promoted into management because they were the subject-manner expert and because the company is really trying to execute a narrowly-focused solution that's well within the auspices of what that subject-manner expert understands. But when you deal with complex projects like construction, the project manager is not necessarily an expert in construction. In those scenarios, the project manager really needs to be more focused on bringing in who the subject-manner experts are in a collaborative fashion to actually orchestrate, okay, here's what we're going to do in order. It's two very different skill sets, and it really depends on the size of the company as well as the projects that you're trying to accommodate. Yeah, and there's, if you get a chance to look at what Hart has mapped out, the Gantt charts for the rail. I would imagine those are changing. Our beach here looks, well, it was a beach. I don't know, it's a digital, but this studio, it's huge. They have 60 linear feet of wall space covered from floor to ceiling, API with Gantt charts. It's stunningly complex. Really? Whoa. I would imagine that changes a lot too, right? That might even just be phase one. Exactly, right? Well, what's the hush? What did the H3 take 20 years? I don't know. Yeah, I shudder to think of what it was like to work on that project. Me too, I was a kid. What it was like to work on that project. But I think the rail's going to end up being something like that too. You know what I see, unfortunately, is in the technical field, so I did 20 years of IT contracting before I went into teaching, and then what I find out is that IT project managers are rarely from the IT ranks. Is that right? Rarely. And they depend heavily on business analysts who usually come up specifically from those IT ranks. So if you're looking for business analysts and databases, there's somebody who's done Oracle for 10 years. Oh, I see. And can give you an exact cost. We need this many cores, this licensing. We need to implement it this way. We can do these many things in the cloud, but these can't be cloud. And here's our backup rotation. All those things that the project manager needs to know, but they don't know. Because they didn't come out of the IT field. And I think mostly because I'm one of the few guys in the IT field that ever went for that certification. Most of us find that a little boring. But until you actually do some project management, you're not going to know how challenging project management can actually be. It can be a mind twister. And here's the worst part about my project management experience. Lessons learned. I had to make all these mistakes over and over and over. And every time I did, we'd have a little after action report. Here's a lessons learned. Let's not do that again. Let's put that in our next project. But I didn't build my network so I could learn from other project managers. Whereas we have over 600 project managers in the state, right? So we could network those lessons learned. How do you bring lessons learned into your projects? So really the lessons learned, the historical knowledge, can demonstrate the maturity of an organization. Because if you go into an organization and you see that there's no lessons learned in their project management practice, then typically they're an immature organization. They really need to work through that. Whereas more mature organizations have that documented lessons learned database from multiple project managers. And so now you can search through it and say, okay, I'm going to do a project this size in scope, these technologies. And look at the lessons learned so you don't have to repeat those. And speaking to the networking abilities of our chapter, it's really not uncommon for people in the different fields. So construction versus IT versus hospitality. Talk to one another and say, hey, I'm working on this project. I have these concerns. What do I need to look out for? And that's where that networking really comes to play in the organization is sharing those lessons learned and sometimes even templates, tools and techniques too to say, look, for this construction portion, even though you're working on an IT project for this construction portion, here's what you need to watch out for. That's where all your networking events come into play and your professional development day. What day exactly? I thought it was in September. In August this year? Typically it's September, but we moved it up to August 17. So doors open at 7 a.m. Okay. Just to wrap up the last minute, how does the PMP certification differ from, say, the new CompTIA project plus certification? Which just came out. I mean, it doesn't have... You came out in the 80s, early 90s. Not Dan himself, but no. Didn't you come on the 80s? You're a young guy. So how does this differentiate from the CompTIA certification? So as a professional organization, we really focus on the different core tenants. We have a code of ethics. We have the different practices, the standards, the common vernacular. So we really established all of these things as an organization. If I'm not mistaken, I'd have to look through my notes, but I think it's 1967 is when PMI was actually initially founded. And then 1997 is when the Honolulu chapter was actually founded. That's a long time. So whereas organizations like CompTIA, they really come out with... They try to make it step by step. Do this, then this, then this. It's like PMP light. PMP is one of the hardest tests you can take. It was a four hour test. It was a couple hundred questions. Shouldn't scare you off. It's worth it. So the cyber security, the reason I call this a cyber superpower, the projects in cyber security, the offensive test, you go through the five attack phases. You have to recon, you have to scan, you have to gain and maintain access and then cover your tracks. Especially with covering tracks. If you're not putting down lessons learned, you're going to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. So it's really important to have someone like you in the organization. How long did it take you to study for and gain your PMP? So I actually got my masters and then I got certified in about 2007-2008. A little bit of time. Hey, thanks for being here guys. We're going to have to wrap up your show. Dan, thank you so much. Aloha, sir, and I will see you soon. I'll be here next week, Dan. Thank you for joining us. Aloha, everybody. Stay safe.