Projectball: PM Lessons from America’s Game (Part 2)

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

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It was heresy. It broke with conventional wisdom. It was an affront to the scouts who had created that conventional wisdom with decades of experience and expertise. It was a radically new way of thinking about and evaluating baseball talent. But for Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team, it was the perfect solution to the problem of not having enough money to replace his first baseman, Jason Giambi. Instead of buying one player to replace him, he would buy three.

How do you think your project sponsor would react if you went to her with a similar problem and said: “Look, I know our budget is tight, and we’ve just lost a key resource that’s going to put our project completion date in jeopardy. But I’ve just worked out the best way to solve this. We go out and we hire three new resources to replace the one we lost…”?

That would be a very tough sell to make. Yet Beane was not only able to make the case for doing that, he also demonstrated that it was exactly the right thing to do by the results it yielded for his team. The old way of solving his problem didn’t work. So he found a new way.

In Projectball: PM Lessons from America’s Game (Part 1) we saw how Beane and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, overturned conventional scouting wisdom by replacing it with statistical analysis to find …

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