HE MAY BE better known for his golfing and business allegories, but Frank Ryle also has some words of advice for the Government when it comes to figuring out where to locate the new National Children’s Hospital. For him, it comes down to simply opting for one decision and then “making it work”.
“The amount of money you’re spending in the planning phase shouldn’t be more than the hospital should cost,” he says, adding that a typical project management effort should spend no more than 5 per cent of the total budget in this phase. “Otherwise you’re eating into money that could have been available for equipment and expansion.”
He suggests that the Government should have a “beauty contest”, whereby a group of experts are asked to vote on a shortlist of three or four locations, noting that Tallaght seems like a good prospect, given its accessibility.
Ryle himself has dealt with some tricky decisions regarding locations in the past. During his time with Cadbury in the mid-1990s, he worked on opening the confectionary firm’s first factory in Russia – one of the first Western firms to do so. However, for Ryle, the process did not have the best outcome.
“Ironically, we probably made the wrong decision, but there was no right decision available at the time,” he says. The team charged with the decision, led by Sir Dominic Cadbury, looked at 50 sites and made the decision within six months.
In this regard, his advice for the Government would be to just live with its decision. “You have to make a decision and move on – there is no perfect outcome.”
Pointing out that in most projects, you need an “objective measure” – or to put it less euphemistically, someone to blame if it doesn’t work out – Ryle concedes that, in this regard at least, a political project is very different to a private one.
A resident of Princeton, New Jersey, Ryle has now lived outside of Ireland more than he has lived in it, having left in 1982. For him, however, the emigrant experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
“Travelling the world has helped me to see things on a larger scale than existed in Ireland at that time, and also gave the opportunity to work with people from different cultures. It gave me ideas for design and thinking, and especially allowed me to meet Vivian, my Colombian-American wife, in Russia,” he says.
He left Ireland to move with engineering consultancy firm Arup to Russia, where he was responsible for project management, and from there went to Australia, back to Ireland, on to the UK and then the US. But following his role with Cadbury in the mid-1990s, he turned 40 and decided to go out on his own.
“I think when you turn 40 you decide what you want to be,” he recalls, so he set himself up as a business/project management coach, training professionals in companies around the world.
He still returns to Ireland every year, maintaining a small house in Tramore, Co Waterford, and notes that having strong family connections and friends in Ireland is important. “The opportunity to balance the external experiences with the local ‘wisdom’ at home was always – and continues to be – valuable,” he says.
A keen golfer – he played in the first Russian Open in 1996 – Ryle saw an opportunity to use golf analogies as a way of getting attention and motivation from his trainees.
“Golf seems to have a way of getting both from senior managers and team members alike,” he notes, later developing the concept to find further parallels between the sequence of the project steps and the sequence of nine golf holes.
“Also, the par of the golf hole helps to represent the amount of work required to complete that step by the project manager,” he says.
In his new book, Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros, he distils the complexities of project management into nine key steps – aligned with nine holes of golf – and imparts his take on business coaching.
“Primarily, it is a philosophy of shared experience, understanding and empathy. A secondary consideration is a desire to be able to simplify complex concepts without making them dumb,” he says, adding that an underlying theme in his work is to incorporate as many advances in science as appropriate.
Ryle has three tips for effectively managing any project – or indeed any team: the goal for the project (and team) must be clear (preferably measurable);
the team must feel capable of achieving the goal (resources, skills, time, distractions, etc); and each team member must feel personally rewarded either during the project or at the end.
For Ryle, who has considerable experience of companies through his consulting work with the likes of UBS, Ernst Young, SAP and Murex, the most successful are those that have been “assisted by a large share of luck as much as any unique skills of the leadership or employees”.
But beyond external, uncontrollable factors, Ryle does note some differentiating factors, such as those companies that create a positive attitude and a “capability to manage change”; those that balance the needs and abilities of younger and more experienced employees; and those that “retain, package and share the recent knowledge and lessons learned in a useable format”.
He also has some tips for those who have been particularly badly hit by the recession, and urges those who are looking for work to take a project-management approach to the process.
This should involve creating a base away from the “chaos of home life”, and using a rolling timeline for three weeks out with “deliverables, milestones and deadlines” – all of which need to be measured.
“Don’t change your routine from what you did at work. Get up early, take a lunch break and try to turn off at night,” he says, adding that it’s important to stay positive by taking the opportunity to visit the local library, museum or a different part of town. “Look for connections and opportunities outside your comfort zone.”
And going back to his passion for golf, his advice for Tiger Woods in his efforts to make a comeback could ring true for both a project and a personal challenge. “Change what you can, accept what you cannot and alter your approach to suit.”
