The One Problem Interview: Tetyana Dudnyk, Director, Technology Project Management Office

In this episode of The One Problem Interview, Tetyana Dudnyk teaches you how to manage a large project.

My name is Avil Beckford, and I am the host of The One Problem Interview. I started this because it's something that's near and dear to my heart. My interview guests talk about one problem, not a million, just one. And they'll offer their solution in about five to eight minutes. This is a way for us to learn. Today, here's another Ellevate Network sister, Tetyana Dudnyk, and she is on the leadership team of the Toronto chapter, most of you know that I'm a Torontonian. So over to you, Tetyana.

Tetyana Dudnyk

Thank you Avil, it's great to be part of this series. And I'm super excited to share one problem that I often come across with everyone, and hopefully my tips and tricks will help others to tackle the same problem. So my problem,  you know, in my everyday life, I run tons of projects. I work full time, I'm actually director of the Technology Project Management Office for one of the banks in Canada.

And I did projects for a living, but also I do a lot of projects at home. I'm a mom of two, I volunteer, and I'm part of the leadership team for Toronto Ellevate. And of course there are tons of stuff to be done and there's only twenty four hours a day. And you're only one person and sometimes we get frustrated that we cannot actually achieve every thing we want to. There's so much going on, we commit to too much. And at the end of the month we realize we haven't even moved the needle.

Interview With Tetyana Dudnyk: How to Manage a Large Project

Tetyana Dudnyk

So what I've noticed that works, whether in the large projects or programs, and sometimes they have multi-million dollar initiatives. And I have a small initiative like creating a garden for myself. If you go slower and smaller, you actually achieve more. It's a very counterintuitive thought. But what happens and when you are overwhelmed with a lot of things that needs to be done on the large initiative, you just need to pause and say, OK, what can I realistically commit to between now and let's say, next week?

When I meet with either my team or I meet with other people that I want to run a project or initiative or to just look at what have I done for myself. It's kind of my milestone and commit to one or two things. Yes, you have 15 to do and you think it's going to take forever. But trust me, and it's been proven, if you just commit to one or two, you somehow find a way to accommodate it in your calendar. You put everything else outside and say outside of your mind box, you just say between now and next week those are the things I'm doing and put them in your calendar.

In over a month, you will notice if you continue using this discipline, you'll actually achieve much more and you achieve a much larger scope and you're going to be happy with yourself. And you also create a sustainable pace of change, because if anything, I know about the projects is like continuous  effort and continuous revision of the milestone,  what gets you to the finish line. That's all for me today.

Avil Beckford

Well, as you were talking, I was thinking back to when I worked in an organization and usually when I had a large project, the best way that I found to approach it was to break down this project into manageable chunks and deal with one chunk at a time. And as time progresses, you know, I finish the whole thing, so it makes a lot of sense and it may be counterintuitive to some people, but a lot of times a big project can get you overwhelmed.

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Tetyana Dudnyk

It's true. And you get the large team and say, how do we go about this, especially if it's something new and you haven't done before. So you have no idea how to do it. And what people tend to do is come up with things that need to be done. Right. Right now, it might not be necessary even when you take that discipline in for a week or two in the beginning, especially a very large new initiative that happens all the time. There's a lot of Mayhem, there's a lot of ambiguity.

People are running around to meetings, meetings after meetings because they're trying to come up with how to move forward. And while you're trying to break it into chunks, you're still trying to get your hands around what those charts are. And some things, what I do with the team deliberately, I'd say team, there's a lot to be done. Understandable. We don't have a full picture yet to be able to break it down.

But what can we do? What needs to be done between now and next week? OK. Can we actually accomplish that? And sometimes you would be wondering, do we even need to meet? Because perhaps the tasks that we need to accomplish cannot be broken into smaller chunks. It's going to take more than one week, maybe two weeks, or people tend to say we have to meet every other day to see the progress.

Tetyana Dudnyk

But the truth is, sometimes you can't get to that progress within two days, you need a little longer. So it actually helps you to look at this and say, OK, team, who's going to take what? Does everybody have something to do? If not, maybe you don't need to attend the next meeting. And it really helps  remove that ambiguity, at least for the short period of time, until you have a full understanding of the scope. A full understanding of what you need to do.

Avil Beckford

Thank you so much, Tetyana.