269: Get the Job Done with Kevin Torf

Kevin Torf, Managing Partner of T2 Tech Group, is driven by a passion for getting the job done, transforming IT liabilities into valuable assets, and delivering success through innovative project management.

We learn about Kevin’s journey from founding T2 Tech Group to becoming a leader in technology consulting, particularly in the healthcare sector. He explains the PROJECTS Framework—Planning, Reflection, Organization, Juggling, Empowerment, Communication, Transparency, and Standards—a comprehensive methodology designed to manage large-scale projects effectively. Kevin also shares insights on balancing traditional project management with Agile principles, empowering teams to succeed, and the importance of market research and iterative development in entrepreneurial ventures.

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Get the Job Done with Kevin Torf

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast and my guest today is Kevin Torf, the Managing Partner of T2 Tech Group, a technology consulting firm in Southern California, transforming IT liabilities into valuable assets for clients in a range of industries, primarily healthcare. Kevin is also the author of Getting the Job Done. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Steve. I’m excited to be part of your podcast and looking forward to having some dialogue and learning from each other.

Yeah, well, me too. I’m also looking forward. So let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why,” Kevin, and what are you doing in your business to manifest?

I’d say to start with, I got to use the book as my statement, it’s getting the job done. The question is why, what’s so important about getting the job done? Well, I enjoy it. I take a lot of pride in what I do. I enjoy the success that comes with it. I’d say many athletes run because of the adrenaline or what gets them motivated and winning and the things that an athlete does on a daily basis when they compete. I try to practice that in business. And in most cases, you’ve got to get the job done first, meaning you’ve got to achieve something that you set your mind out to. In my case, it’s mostly a lot of big large-scale projects. And then the success that comes with it, the feeling of doing something maybe other people haven’t done or couldn’t do or you were able to bring value that some other people might not have, it’s great. That makes me feel good. It makes the business today what it is, and I enjoy it.

Sounds like you’re a competitive person who likes to show things that other people couldn’t achieve.

I am competitive. I’m not going to shy away from that statement. I don’t use that to judge myself. I think I’m my biggest competitor myself. When I set out to do something, I make a commitment to myself first and foremost. And it's being able to execute on that. Share on X When I have the opportunity of working with other people, I like a lot of competitive fun. You got to be careful how you manifest competition. You don’t want it to get in the way of your success and the success of others. You want to bring the best out of everybody. And I do like that. It’s a lot of fun.

Okay. Well, you’re certainly very methodical about how you do that. In your book you talk about the framework that you call PROJECTS, which is an acronym of how you actually get the job done. So can you tell a little bit to our listeners about the project framework and what it does and how it does it?

Yes. T2, the group, the company, for many, many years has been working on projects and those projects range mostly technology, but they range in relocating a corporation’s data center or transforming their technology or helping them install new applications to enable them to do other things that they might not have been doing. And those projects require a lot of coordination and a lot of planning, a lot of resource management. And as we’ve evolved over the years, we’ve played with different methodologies in how to get that done and how to execute and complete this.

Other methodologies have evolved through a lot of the software development and technology industries, which are referred to as Agile. And what happened was, unknowingly, we started practicing little pieces of each methodology and kept adding to them ourselves. And when it came down to it, we were building out how we go about doing things and it was just convenient that the word PROJECTS came about and we said, well, let’s see if we can build this into our pillars of what we do today. And it worked out really well because it really is encompassing when you look at each letter you assign it to what we were trying to message and communicate, P for planning, R for reflection. And we’ll go more into each one of those. But that’s what drove the wording and the acronym. And I think today, when you look back at it with hindsight, wow, it was quite smart that we did it. We didn’t think that way initially. It was more by accident.

Sounds like you’re drinking your own Kool-Aid because before we started the recording, you mentioned that you’re just about to do a strategic planning session with your leadership team and you talked about planning and reflecting on the year and seeing what the organization can achieve. So it sounds like it’s following the sequence of your PROJECTS acronym as well. So let’s dive more into it. So you said planning, reflection? What are the other items?

Yeah, so organization for O, juggling for J, empowerment for how to work together with teams, communications, transparency in how we work day to day, and then standards, which make up the word PROJECTS.

Awesome. So tell me a little bit about organization and juggling. So what do you mean by organization and how is it different, how you organize things? And what is this juggling? Juggling sounds like the opposite, like you’re not organized enough and you have to juggle things.

Probably there’s many elements to it, but the one that comes to mind is just time management. A lot of people don’t know, and myself included, how to limit the time you spend on things to be purposeful and to be meaningful to what you’re doing. Many times we get into conversations and we go other places that maybe we never intended and that sometimes will take longer than what we had anticipated. So it’s reminding ourself of the purpose of why we’re doing something and allocating the right amount of time needed and being responsible to keep within that framework. Juggling is actually an interesting one. We’re all very proud of the fact that we can do a hundred things at once, but after doing a hundred things at once, you learn very quickly, you’ll do none of them really well. And to really focus on the items that need attention and try to keep it limited to only one if you possibly can.

Luck doesn’t allow us always to do things like that. Things come about where we got to deal with other factors and we’ll end up juggling because it’s a matter of trading because you can only do one thing at a time. So if you’ve got four things to do, the other three are going to wait while you’re doing the one. Even if you have a team, it becomes a lot harder to organize and structure. But the goal is try to keep it simple if you possibly can and do one thing and do it well.

So juggling is an intentional part of this sequence or it’s just an accidental thing that we cannot avoid?

We cannot avoid it. So we need to plan for it and we need to organize around it because it’s going to happen. And in the types of work that we do with big, large-scale projects, it’s very often you’ll get distracted by other projects or business changes or other priorities that take place that now people want, that you need to rally around. And instead of adjusting, you sometimes juggle more than what you should. And usually it has an impact. It usually impacts productivity mostly.

Okay, so we talked about planning, reflection, organization, juggling, and then empowerment. So how do you see empowerment? How do you create empowerment? How does that help people be successful in managing projects?

So, empowerment is probably the biggest lesson I’ve personally had to learn over my life. When I started managing projects, I always felt that the goal of a manager was to tell everybody what to do and make sure they did it. And when they weren’t doing it, follow up and put pressure on them to do it. And when they all weren’t getting it done in time, telling them that they needed to find a way to do it faster and that there was a deadline. And over the years, I learned that’s not the best way to be the most effective. Empowering people and empowering the team to do what you're looking to accomplish can be much more effective. Share on X

So a good example, instead of setting a deadline for a person and saying to the team, I want this finished by next week, ask the team, when do you think you can finish it by. That subtle difference of, there’s a saying in the book, we call it pushing and pulling. Instead of pushing onto them a date that they might not even believe in, but rather pulling from them what they are committing to. You can achieve multiple things. One is now they’ve made a commitment to you. You didn’t force a commitment onto them. For them to now feel that they were empowered in making that decision, they become a little bit more responsible in fulfilling that responsibility as well. So there’s lots of examples about how to empower, but I think that’s one of the ones that I know definitely I’ve changed over the years as I’ve matured and I try and be more effective and what I do and that’s to allow people to make their own mistakes and allow them to decide how to tell you what they’re capable of doing and what their capacity is.

That really helps. I mean I recall in my business which was about 15 years ago and the way we managed projects every Monday morning we would sit down with the team and ask okay what do you want to get done and how much can you get done? And people would volunteer to get certain things done and we put it on the calendar and we asked them, how long is it going to take you? And they estimated that and that was their commitment. So if they couldn’t get that work done in that time, it was up on them to stay later and to finish it or work even in evenings or the weekend. And it worked pretty well actually. They would want to commit to something that is meaningful.

Steve, it’s very empowering with the book and when you look at some of the items and topics, it’s finding that right balance because business unfortunately doesn’t allow for some of these methods and approaches to how to do things. As an example, when we get a big project, someone decided that they needed to do something strategically for the organization. Someone costed out that project sometimes even before the project team gets engaged, which means they had to come up with a budget. That budget was not based on maybe what it’s going to cost, but what they can afford. They looked at strategically when they needed to get this done by that day. There might have been no rational reason to it other than everything else going on in the business at that time. So outside of what the team was doing, someone else decided on the budget and someone else decided on the timeline. So that’s the answer to what we believe where we’re now going to empower people and ask them how long it takes them. And then obviously how long it takes them would determine what the budget needs to be because time and money work together. So how do you do it? How do you balance that? And it’s finding that you’ve got to factor in the formal side of project planning, management budgets, but you want to empower the team to be able to use it in the most effective way.

Yeah. Okay. So empowering the team is important so that they weigh in, then they buy it and it becomes their commitment rather than you forcing them to do it. That’s great. So the remaining letters in the PROJECTS acronym are communication, transparency and standards. So tell me about these. Tell me about, what is it about communication that you need to see in order to get the job done? What kind of communication are you thinking about?

The type of projects we work on, there’s multiple people usually involved. They could even be multiple teams. There’s a lot of subject matter experts that might have to be engaged. And keeping everybody on message and making sure everybody understands what everyone else’s responsibilities are and communicating in a very clear way. Many times we fail just because we didn’t clearly articulate what our needs are or what a person was required to what their objectives were and then many times they’ll fail because of it unfortunately. So really being very clear in how you communicate. And today it’s hard with all the different forms of communication. Many years ago, we got in a room and we spoke about things and we all agreed. Today, we barely are in rooms anymore. We work remotely, we use these tools that we’re using today for video conferencing and with this email. And a lot gets lost in all those different forms. And there’s an expectation that the person you are communicating with understands you. And sometimes that’s wrong unless you really take that extra effort to make sure that message is well defined and done in the correct manner. And most important, the recipient of the message acknowledges what the expectations are, because there’s no better way of verifying what your expectations are if you ask the person to communicate back to you what they believe their responsibility is.

I think when we try to keep the information siloed or try and decide who should know what and when they should know it, we ultimately lose a lot of everybody’s ability to really align with each other very well. And being able to just be open about how we do things, it’s just something we practice in the company, is if you want, if there’s a team and you’re always emailing everybody on that team and everybody’s on that distribution list, people think, ah, that’s too much information. Well, then the recipients will tell you if it’s too much, but include them when you’re not sure or when you feel that you can. And then, everything’s always open for everybody to see. The challenge comes if you don’t do that. And then all of a sudden, you send someone a message with now everybody copied on it. The first thing getting the message might now be offended. Well, why did you copy everybody on it? Now, you did something that you don’t normally do. Was that intentional? Did you try and send a message? We just let everybody know everything all the time to begin with and you’ll make it a lot simpler in life on how you do things and how you go about doing things. And then standards, a little bit like organization, but it’s trying to find things that are more repetitive that you can have quality control measures around that will allow you to be successful. So with especially large scale projects, there’s a lot of checks and balances that you need in order to validate what you do and is done correctly. It’s like a pilot. Every time they go fly a plane, they’ll go through the checklist, even if they’ve done it a hundred times, 200 times. It’s not relevant. Having the same structure and organization, but defined down into that standard form, which is repetitive and you can look at it and utilize it to validate what you’re doing, will help you bring a level of quality to your work that will allow you to be number one productive and to achieve your objective.

Got it. Okay. So it’s very elaborate framework, projects, planning, reflection, organization, juggling, empowerment, communication, teamwork, and standards or transparency and standards. So let’s switch gears here. You mentioned that some of what you do is based on Agile, especially the software development part. So can you share with the audience very briefly, what is Agile and what do you like about Agile? How does Agile help your company, T2, to develop software?

Yes, so we use Agile in a very different way than typically Agile was introduced to developers, software developers. So you got to go back some 20 years ago where software developers, where the code they were writing was buggy, you would have problems with it when you utilized it. It wasn’t meeting the business needs. And it was determined earlier on by the big tech conglomerates that the methodologies they were utilizing wasn’t adapting and evolving to the business needs. Some of them got together and built an Agile framework and they wrote a manifesto around this which sets out some guidelines for how to adapt and how to be able to pivot and change when business needs change. So a lot of the book even about reflection and things of this nature are tenets of Agile. We’re not a software development company, but we like the Agile framework that we took elements of it. But again, not all of it is ideal when we’re dealing with big organizations that need maintain budgets, have boards that you need to report to, have governance committees that need to know what projects are being executed on and how they’re being done. And a lot of those communications are very anti-agile in many ways.

A team together can be far more successful than any one individual. And it’s exponential, it grows. And finding out how to maximize that level of productivity from a team can be very effective if done in the right way. And Agile and some of the Agile framework allows for that in a way that many other frameworks don’t.

Yeah. So it allows people to share their priorities and align around them and get the job done, basically what your mission is. Okay. So the last question I want to ask you is, you being a managing director, managing partner of the T2 Tech group, you’re an entrepreneur, really. So what do you see from your perspective, what is the most important question that any entrepreneur should ask themselves?

It’s an interesting question. I’ve been fortunate to start several companies and a lot of the companies I’ve started were based on needs I believe other people had. And I got excited about that prospect and I went out and built those products or brought together what I thought was going to be a winner and hit a home run. And what I learned very quickly was, you need to do a lot more market research and you need to really understand what people need and learn a little bit more before just embarking on some of these initiatives because you think they were really a great idea. I’m not saying some of them aren’t successful and there’s many people that have probably had a great idea and have been extremely successful from it. I’ve had a few successes but I’ve also had a lot of failures. So what I’ve done today is just don’t forget the idea, bring the idea, but go learn a little bit more about what people want and what their thoughts might be and how that idea might evolve before making that huge big investment in it. That doesn’t necessarily mean money. It could just be time. Do it in a very iterative way, very much like Agile.

And the idea will probably change as well as you learn and you’ll be a lot more successful. At least it’s worked for me. It’s allowed me to deliver a lot more on some of the ideas that I’ve had.

Yeah. I mean, they say that fall in love with your customer, not your product. What is the customer’s problem and fall in love with that and focus on that. And it’s very easy to get attached to our own product and be proud of it and think that it’s going to be better than other products. But if it doesn’t do the job, then it’s not the right one. So I love that. The other thing I would say is I’m just reading a book about this idea of logical things and psychological things. So not everything is logic that is a good idea. And you don’t know the illogical things only if you experiment with them. And that’s why the testing is so important. All right, so Kevin, thank you for coming on the show and sharing your framework, which is the acronym PROJECTS. So planning, reflection, organization, juggling, empowerment, communication, transparency and standards. So it’s a good way to run projects following this framework. So if people would like to learn more about your book, getting the job done and they want to connect with you, where should they go?

They can come directly to our website. It’s t2group.com and there’s a place for them on the website where they can actually download a copy of the book. They can go to the Amazon store and get one as well. If they want to message me, they’re welcome to do that as well through the website. They can put their contact information in details. My email address is kevin.torf@t2group.com. They’re welcome to email me. I love to share what we’ve done and I believe it makes us better when I hear other people’s opinion and again, that’s part of reflection.

Yeah. Well, Kevin, thank you for coming. So do check Kevin Torf, managing partner of T2 Tech Group out and download his book. I browsed it already and it’s a good one. Get the job done. You’ll get more information about the acronym and how to manage your projects well. So, Kevin, thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

No, Steve, thanks for inviting me and I’ve enjoyed your book as well and I look forward to reading all of them actually, but I appreciate the conversation and thanks for taking the time.

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