Project Management: The Skills Nobody Teaches You

Ep #36 | 16:59

Description

After years of being thrown into the deep end and successfully leading complex projects in the medical device space, Nicki Budnicki shares some essential skills that can only be learned through experience.

When DI Labs CEO Carl Douglass met Nicki Budnicki, MBA, PMP at a medical device networking event, they discovered a shared interest in problem-solving, relationship-building, and the challenges of managing complex initiatives. Their connection led to an invitation for Nicki to join Carl on the Solutionology Stories podcast.

Nicki is the founder of Axim LLC , a project management consulting business, with extensive experience in the medical device industry, including at Medtronic. She is also writing three books on project management, drawing on lessons from her career to help others develop the skills needed to lead projects successfully.

Their conversation explores a profession that Nicki believes is often misunderstood, along with practical advice for people who find themselves responsible for managing projects, whether or not project management is their primary role.

Project Management Is More Than Tasks, Timelines, and Deliverables

Project management is often viewed as a function of organizing work, tracking progress, and keeping projects on schedule. But as Carl observed during his conversation with Nicki, there’s much more to the role. “Project management isn’t about the tasks and the doing and the scheduling,” Carl noted. “It’s about managing the people and the relationships and expectations.”

Nicki’s experience reinforces that perspective. She specializes in complex initiatives, including troubled projects that have sometimes been underway for years. The challenges aren’t always technical. They often involve competing priorities, strained relationships, and teams struggling to work together. Nicki has even found herself acting as a mediator between teams experiencing significant conflict. Her goal isn’t simply to get the immediate project back on track, but to help people build stronger working relationships that will benefit future projects.

Learning the Soft Skills: “Sink or Swim and Figure It Out”

Nicki developed many of her project management skills through experience. While working as a supply chain analyst at Medtronic, she was asked to establish a team responsible for standardizing hospital consignment contracts across seven business areas. The assignment quickly expanded into unfamiliar territory, including hiring employees, securing IT funding, and negotiating contracts with hospitals.

When Carl asked how she learned to navigate so many different responsibilities, Nicki explained, “Genuinely, it was figuring it out as I went.” She described the experience as being dropped into the deep end, where it was “sink or swim and figure it out.”

With no formal training to prepare her for every challenge, Nicki learned to ask questions, build relationships, and navigate organizational dynamics along the way. Those experiences shaped her consulting approach and inspired her to share what she’s learned through three books she’s currently developing on project management.

Four Practical Lessons for Anyone Managing a Project

When Carl asked Nicki what advice she would give someone responsible for managing a project, she offered several straightforward recommendations.

1. Define the scope. Write it down.

“The number one thing I say is write down scope,” Nicki emphasized. Project leaders often describe an initiative in a single sentence, assuming everyone shares the same understanding. But different people can interpret that sentence in different ways. Her advice is to document the scope, share it with the team, and establish agreement on what the project is intended to accomplish.

2. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

“Even if you’re worried about looking dumb, just ask the question. You never know where it can lead.” Nicki believes asking good questions is a skill that improves with practice, even if it sometimes feels uncomfortable. She acknowledged that she still experiences that hesitation herself, but asking questions is essential to understanding unfamiliar situations and establishing alignment. As she explained, “It’s so much easier to manage a project on the front end if everybody’s aligned.”

3. Prioritize relationships for the long term.

Nicki emphasized the importance of building trust, particularly when entering projects with established challenges or conflict. Rather than focusing exclusively on immediate deliverables, she considers how the people involved will continue working together after the project is complete. That long-term perspective influences how she approaches difficult conversations, competing priorities, and disagreements between teams.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of visuals.

“I feel like in corporate, people underestimate visuals and visuals making sure to get alignment,” Nicki explained. She described situations where teams were discussing the same issue but struggling to understand each other’s perspectives. Sometimes, her solution was as simple as creating a PowerPoint slide to illustrate what each team was trying to communicate. She recalled seeing the “light bulbs” go off when people could finally visualize the differences in their understanding.

A Family Culture Built Around Problem-Solving

Nicki’s interest in project management has deep family roots. Her father was a program director at Medtronic, where he began working when Nicki was just three years old. She remembers attending Take Your Daughter to Work Day at age seven and, years later, working at Medtronic herself—even recreating a photograph from that childhood visit shortly before her father’s retirement.

“It was never my intention to end up in the same world that he was in,” Nicki shared. “But the thing is, I just love it so much.”

Nicki credits her father with influencing her approach to problem-solving, particularly the importance of remaining even-keeled, asking questions, and anticipating challenges. One lesson she learned from him continues to guide her work: “The easiest way to deal with problems is to prevent them from ever happening.”

For Carl and the DI Labs team, Nicki’s perspective connects naturally to the challenges of supporting complex projects in medical device, where alignment, communication, and strong working relationships are essential.

Watch the full podcast episode of Solutionology Stories to hear more about Nicki’s career, the lessons she’s learned, and her practical approach to managing projects and people. Nicki is also sharing her expertise through her consulting work, LinkedIn content, and three books currently in development.

Find her on LinkedIn: Nicki Budnicki, MBA, PMP

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: Meet Nicki Budnicki
00:45 Founding Axim and Writing Three Books
02:15 Learning Project Management at Medtronic
04:30 Sink or Swim: Learning Without Formal Training
05:30 Why Project Management Is About Relationships
08:35 Lesson 1: Define and Document the Scope
09:15 Lesson 2: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions
12:15 A Family Legacy of Problem-Solving
14:50 Lesson 3: Align Early and Use Visuals
16:00 Closing Thoughts

– Welcome to the Solutionology Podcast. I’m here with a great guest today, Nicki Budnicki. Nicki is an expert in project management, but it’s not what you think. There’s so much more to project management than what that name implies. We’re gonna learn about that. Nicki’s working on a book, actually three books, but one that’s coming out first. We’re gonna talk about that book. And Nicki’s gonna share some of her life experiences, working most recently in the medical device industry. Project management is the focus. So thanks so much for joining us today, Nicki, and look forward to the conversation.

– Thanks. Happy to be here.

– Nicki is founder and consultant at Axim, and we’re gonna learn a lot today about Nicki’s experience and career journey, mastering, program, and project management. There’s probably a more official title that we’ll learn about there. But Nicki, I’d love to hear about, you know, your background. What are you doing today at Axim? Tell us about that and your background with respect to your career.

– Great. Thank you so much. Yes, I started Axim in June, so I left my corporate job in May, started it in June.

– Of this year?

– Of this year. So this is new, new.

– Wow.

– So it’s been very exciting and quite the journey. It’s been a very busy summer overall of getting my first client, starting consulting. I’ve been working on three different books actually for quite some time now before I even started Axim. And then my goal is for one of the books to be, I start approaching publishers this year with it. Overall, I do project management consulting. I’m currently working for a company within the R&D space, between R&D and sourcing, within that world, of working on launching for multiple different countries and then also working on what are we doing from a sourcing standpoint.

– And they’re focused on R&D, but this is medical device or healthcare?

– Yep, this is within the medical device capital equipment space.

– Okay. So what has your career journey been leading you up to Axim?

– I moved into Medtronic as a supply chain analyst. So I worked in the pacemaker, ICD, defibrillator space, moving inventory between the warehouse, the sales reps, and the hospitals. Those were the three areas. So moved into that. Then I was tapped to lead a team and that was when I really got my first taste of, like, the world of project management. So it was a brand new team. It never had been established before, so I had to hire the team and manage the project. And we were essentially getting contracts established that we hadn’t before with consignment. So if we were placing inventory with hospitals, then the customer was required to sign a contract. And that had been across seven other teams before and it had never been established.

– Wow.

– So that was my first taste of taking seven different areas and standardizing them into it. And that was one of my favorite parts of that role was the project management side of, like, all the different pieces. And then working on the IT platform, the IT platform was brand new. So it was a internally created system. And so I actually, as we grew and established this team, there had to be developments within the IT platform. And I didn’t have a budget, so I would go to the different business units that I was working across with CVG and I would try and get funding and sell them on, you know, obtaining funding because it was several hundred thousand dollars just to open up the coding and have the third party in India actually do the updates to the platform that we had. So typically, the fundraising I did was between a half a million to two million each round. And I was doing, like, six months rounds or every six months I did a round of trying to get funding and making enhancements to the platform.

– Did you get training? How did you learn how to navigate all these different dynamics, from managing the project, to then funding for that project from the VPs?

– Genuinely, it was figuring it out as I went. It was new territory. There was no training. In addition to all this dynamic going on was because of these contracts, we thought originally that there wasn’t gonna be heavy negotiating. And it turned out once we got into it, there was a lot of negotiating with the hospitals. And so I needed to learn contract negotiation and I needed to teach my team members contract negotiation and I didn’t hire for that background. So that was also going on at the same time. It was really dropping me into the deep end and it was you sink or swim and figure it out. Relationships are really important, especially when I’m jumping into initiatives that have previously not gone as planned. That is something that I specialize in. If an initiative’s been going on for years, sometimes upward of five years, people are going to be very upset. There’s gonna be a lot of history tied to that. And especially stepping into programs like that where there’s all these, like, established challenges and conflict, the relationships are huge. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been focusing so much from a consulting standpoint versus in corporate with being established within the corporate area, people get to know me and then I’m on different initiatives and they might have seen how I work and there’s that trust built there. I knew with moving into the consulting space, every time I’m working with a new client, I need to figure out how to build that trust as soon as possible because we’re starting from scratch and it’s all new and, you know, working to establish it I think it’s really important.

– That’s one of the things I appreciated in our first discussion when you were sharing your approach to project management. You focused on the relationships and managing the people, the dynamic of different roles and how they see the project or the challenges and navigating those relationships rather than the project tasks. And it’s like one of the things that came out in the conversation that was subtle is that project management isn’t about the tasks and the doing and the scheduling. It’s about managing the people and the relationships and expectations.

– Yes, yes. I’ve actually seen it where two teams are having such conflict that I have to be a mediator for those team members. And then usually it’s not… I would say worst case scenario is being a mediator. But then when I’m stepping into situations like that where there’s just so much conflict that the team members can’t even talk and have a constructive conversation, my goal is not just within that specific initiative, that’s what I’m there for is that specific initiative, but I’ve had multiple jobs where I’ve managed team members. I know long term, this is setting up those team members and that dynamic for success. So I wanna make sure that we’re leaving those dynamics as best as possible even when I’m not there anymore.

– It’s a pretty unique outlook.

– Yeah, yeah, so it’s looking at, I would say more of the bigger scope than just, you know, here’s this one initiative. It’s like what’s the bigger picture that’s going on? Because, like, long term I want, even though I’m on one initiative, I want the next one that those teams are working together on and I’m there to work better long term.

– What’s one piece of advice that you can share?

– The number one thing I say is write down scope. At a minimum, have it in an email and email it out and make sure everybody is on the same page. What I see is that leaders will give, here’s a one sentence of what the scope is. And the problem is, is if you’re only looking at that one sentence and not the bigger picture, there’s different ways to typically interpret that one sentence.

– You ask a lot of questions. That can’t be part of the approach, is it?

– Yes, that’s a big portion of the book is people need to be asking more questions, even if it makes them uncomfortable. It’s a learned skill. It’s something that I’ve learned over the years to ask more questions. Even if you’re worried about looking dumb, just ask the question. You never know where it can lead. And that’s a big portion of the book that I have for each chapter written quite a bit of like, here’s some general questions that you can ask that should be applicable to a lot of people. And it’s like, here’s the list, at least ask a portion of these questions and they should help you out getting to an aligned scope statement, for example.

– Sounds simple, but putting that into practice isn’t simple.

– I think part of the challenge is that the asking the questions and digging deeper isn’t where do we learn that from a skillset standpoint? Like, I never learned that in school, you know, growing up or in college. I don’t think it’s something that it’s typically taught. So that’s just something where people need to just practice it and try and get those questions out and see where it leads because it’s so much easier to manage a project on the front end if everybody’s aligned versus in the middle of the project or on the back end of the project and all of a sudden you’re scrambling and potentially having to do rework. I know a lot of people get really frustrated when they have to do rework. And if you have that alignment on the front end, you’re not gonna completely avoid the rework, but it’s gonna help minimize it so much.

– Sort of neat thinking about the questions and the resistance to asking questions. And to me, it somewhat goes back to the dynamics of the people and their roles and their relationships. Sometimes I’m hesitant to ask a question because I may fear what you think of me. You may think I’m dumb if I’m asking a question to you that seems basic, but it all comes down to managing the relationship. It’s like full circle, it seems like.

– Yes, I would agree. The funny part is, like, I mean, even to this day, sometimes I worry about looking dumb when I’m asking question and I just know from, like, my values, I just need to push through and ask the question because I might worry about looking dumb, but I will say the amount of jobs I’ve been in that people actually think I have that background is very complementary where I end up having, because I’ve asked so many questions, I have that knowledge where I’ve had questions about, like, or questions on, like, am I an attorney? Do I have a software background? Do I have an engineering background? So I haven’t gotten the question yet on do I have the R&D background? But that’s my goal eventually with consulting and within this space is eventually get the question of, like, do I have, like, an R&D engineering background?

– As I understand it, your father had a similar career. He was a project or program manager in medical device space as well. Is that true?

– Yes. Yup, he was a program director at Medtronic.

– Okay.

– So he started there when I think I was three. And I really grew up with the influence of the medical device space, which I think really influenced me on being passionate about this industry since I spent most of my career within the medical device space. I went to, like, the first ever bring your daughter to work day at Medtronic when I was seven.

– Oh, wow.

– And then actually we ended up working… I worked in the same building that he worked in, and before he retired, we went back to where his office used to be. It had been changed at that point, that floor, but we went back to the same spot and took similar pictures right before he retired. And so the picture from when I was seven and the picture from when I was working at Medtronic myself. It was never my intention to end up in the same world that he was in, but the thing is, is I just love it so much and we’re very similar personality wise. We have very similar Myers-Briggs actually. It’s very close to each other. And one of the ways that he’s influenced me over the years where I’ll tell him like, “Oh, you know, I hit this bump in the road.” And he’s always the optimist and very even keeled of like, “How can you figure this out? How can you get on top of it early?” Which is where I think a lot of my questions of, like, ask lots of questions come from, is that influence from him of making sure to get on top of problems early. And the easiest way to deal with problems is to prevent them from ever happening. So if you can establish what the initiative’s doing on the front end early on, that helps the long term of that initiative before launch.

– What a gift to have those sorts of insights through your entire, basically your entire life as a child growing up and then having some of that influence as well through your career. What is one thing that you would leave the audience with, one piece of advice that is like, “If you do one thing, this is the thing you should do.”

– Can I give two pieces of advice?

– Please.

– One is making sure to align on the scope, write it down, ask lots of questions. The second piece is I feel like in corporate, people underestimate visuals and visuals making sure to get alignment. So if you’re dealing with challenges and you’re in the middle of a project and it’s stuck and at this point you’re not talking scope, you’re in the middle of it, start putting down visuals onto like a PowerPoint and write that down. That can help a lot when it comes to getting alignment together. I’ve had so many different situations where people are discussing an issue and I can just tell the two teams are not aligning and not fully understanding. I will bring up a PowerPoint slide and create a visual about this is what this team is talking about, this is what this team is talking about, and, like, the amount of light bulbs that go off in that moment. So if people are struggling with that, I would say leverage, you know, PowerPoint and writing things down into visuals.

– Well, Nicki, it’s been a ton of fun and very insightful and I know that there’s a whole lot more that you have to contribute to the conversation of project management. We couldn’t cover it if we spent all day on it. So if you’ve got the chance to connect with Nicki, whether it’s on LinkedIn or in person at the medical device networking event, please do. You’re an awesome person and clearly very passionate about solving problems and project management. So thank you for sharing so much wisdom. Talk to Nicki if you get a chance.