The Grand Management Illusion, Part I

 

As ProjectManagement.com transitions from its October theme – leadership – into its November theme – data management – I can’t help but notice that the two have something in common: they fail utterly when they become dependent on polls.

British Prime Minister extraordinaire Margaret Thatcher once said “To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.” She could not have been more prescient, for if the role of leader could be readily accomplished through a pure democracy, then Rome would have never conquered Athens.

But what, pray tell, does this have to do with data management? Well, a few things. Recall my oft-asserted proposition that the bottom 20% of managers who have access to 80% of the information they need to obviate a given decision will always out-perform the top 80^th percentile of managers who have access to only 20% of the information so needed. Now, here’s the second piece of this central puzzle.

All valid management information systems are predicated on this basic structure:

·         Raw data is gathered based on some type of discipline.

·         It is then processed into usable information based on some type of methodology (for we PM-types, this is almost always Critical Path or Earned Value, but that’s a different discussion).

·         This information is then made available to decision-makers in both a timely and intuitive fashion, so that it’s readily actionable.

Graphically, these three steps can be represented as three sequential events.

Conversely, invalid management information systems will often assume the structure of a spider. They appear as a central data repository, surrounded by input/output nodes – essentially, polls, masquerading as legitimate information systems. These are often named action item lists, or milestone performance systems. But make no mistake – they are structurally invalid, and any usable information that comes from them is purely by coincidence, the way a broken clock is accurate twice per day.

These polls are as damaging to leadership as they are to informed management decision-making, if not more so. Leadership based on consensus at least has the quality of representing the desires of the followers, though one has to wonder if, reduced to being directed by polls, Patton’s Third Army would have stormed across the Rhine or have gone back to France for a little extended R&R. On the management information side, though, the backward effects can be even more insidious, since the poll-based systems invariably displace their legitimate cousins. After all, why go through all the trouble of setting up a Critical Path Methodology-capable baseline for a project’s schedule, when taking a survey of the task managers on whether or not they felt they would achieve the milestones they were responsible for can do just as well?

Let’s now return to the desk of the Prime Minister, and that of the Project Manager. The politician has access to opinion polls, the manager can tap into a so-called management information system that is, in actuality, a compilation of the opinions of the team members. In what way are these two decision-makers different? Are they not both presented with a basic choice, of simply selecting the path that the consensus indicates, or else choosing to implement a specific approach to solving the problem(s) before them, regardless of the opinions of those who are – let’s face it – not in a position of leadership?

Next week, in Part II, we’ll discuss feed-forward management information systems, and the level of chicanery that comes in to play with them.