Knowledge Transfer on the Down-Low

 

Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous character Sherlock Holmes was known for being able to tease out vital information from people and events he encountered based on the slightest clue, the fastest of interactions. He knew within an instant of meeting Dr. Watson that Watson was an M.D., had served as an officer in the British Army, and had suffered a gunshot wound  (and in which theater), none of which Watson had verbalized.

Are there similar “tells” in the project management profession? I believe there are, but, much like Watson’s frustrations with Holmes’ fascination with and focusing on what would normally present as minutia, these indicators of sub-standard analysis or inadequate management science adherence may strike my readers as trivial, or unworthy of serving as the basis for usable conclusions. I would argue to the contrary, and will go further – if you, my dear readers, are doing any of the following, you might want to seriously consider stopping.

The first tell involves writing skills. From e-mails to variance analysis reports, real PMs will not escape having to, at some point, convey vital information through the written word. One dead giveaway of a writer’s cluelessness is the misspelling of the impersonal  possessive pronoun. Yes, it’s “its.”

When I’m teaching the variance analysis report prep class, I make it a point to take a moment, and write on the white board the word “theirs.” Then, I’ll call on one of the students, ask them to read the word, and ask if it’s misspelled. I do the same with “his,” “hers,” and “ours.” Then I’ll write the word “its.” By this time, everyone sees my point, and will even start to laugh that I’ve gone there.

“You laugh” I begin, “but I can guarantee you that, if I look through ten of your VARs, at least two of you have made this error.” The laughing dies down, and ceases. “Y’all have to understand – this stuff will get a seventh grader’s paper marked down. ‘It’s’ is a contraction, short for ‘it is.’ ‘Its’ is the impersonal possessive pronoun, and, when you mix them up, it betrays a lack of professional awareness or effort.”

The second tell I want to cover: the expression “the proof is in the pudding.” This is idiocy. The saying that is being alluded to is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,”  One acceptable near-adaptation is, after discussing something that has proven its intrinsic value despite questionable methods to develop it, that the object being discussed is “the proof of the pudding.” But “the proof is in the pudding” is simply dopey. How did the proof get into the pudding? Did somebody put a Venn Diagram into the pudding as it set? And wouldn’t it be difficult to read afterwards? The mis-use of this cliché is a clear indicator that the person uttering it is not to be trusted with anything resembling advanced information analysis.

The third tell has to do with a management information technique that is common among the asset managers, but is a clear sign that PMs who do it are neophytes. It’s the tactic of comparing budgets to actual costs. This comparison yields usable information the same way a broken clock is correct twice per day – on a purely coincidental basis. In fact, the only time it’s supposed to be used in the accountant’s version of quantitative business analysis is in the calculation of depreciation. Other than that, it’s a useless number. As any real PM can tell you, a cost variance is not budget compared to actuals. It’s earned value (percent complete times budget-at-completion) minus actual costs. And performing the budget versus actuals comparison at more and more detailed levels of the basis of estimate and line items within the actuals accomplishes exactly nothing, even though it does present as being a more sophisticated analysis. It’s profoundly flawed, at any level, and its practitioners are the very opposite of prescient.

Should you come across a self-described expert in the management sciences in general, and project management in particular, who commits one of these tells, don’t react overtly, lest you commit a tell yourself. Instead, simply smile, appear as if you value the “analysis” given – and then completely disregard it, and you will have saved yourself (and your organization) significant time and money.

And don't bother to scrutinize this blog for correct usages of "its" and "it's." I did that five times already.