Been There, Done That

 

There’s a very irksome characteristic of the management sciences that involves the re-introduction of established ideas, but with new names. Of course, if those ideas were all that in the first place, they wouldn’t need to be re-packaged and sold to the same people who had either tried them and found them wanting, or else rejected them out of hand in the first place.

Two examples pop to mind. In 1997, Eliyahu Goldratt published The Critical Chain, a novel about a business school professor who presents as a new and insightful tactic the idea that resources assigned to non-critical activities in a Critical Path Methodology (CPM) network can be temporarily re-assigned to the critical ones, and help shorten those activities, thereby compressing the project’s overall duration. Clever, no? The problem is, it’s an old and familiar tactic, better known by pre-1997 practitioners as “crashing the schedule.” It’s not even that novel a tactic. Anyone familiar with Critical Path Methodology would probably recommend it the first time their project’s end-date needed to be moved up.

There are other problems with critical chain (such as the added costs of assigning non-expert personnel to activities that just happened to be on the critical path), but that didn’t stop the novel’s protagonist from winning out in the end (wouldn’t you just know it?). But “critical chain” sounds so much cooler than “crash the schedule,” doesn’t it? “Crashing the schedule” is how those old guys, staring into their slow-phosphor-burning terminals and mumbling about the proper number of start-to-start relationships in the network would put it. “Critical chain” is how young, thin, hip students of young, thin, hip professors would articulate the concept.

It is, however, the same idea, with the same issues as before.

Another example is the “Life Cycle Costing” craze that hit in the 1980s. All of a sudden, estimators and cost baseline creators were being admonished to consider all of the costs a given project would incur, including post-delivery to the customer. The main example I remember from the trade magazines at the time had to do with buildings, and how important it was to take into account their predicted life-cycle energy costs and water consumption over theirs planned existence. The Life Cycle Costing push had the same two problems that critical chain had: the ideas were hardly new, and they were plagued with problems.

First off, the idea that a construction company would fail to take into account the heating and cooling costs of a building prior to selecting its design and materials is just plain goofy, if for no other reason than the accountants would want to know the basis for amortizing its depreciation. Of course the projected future costs of the projects were taken into account – otherwise it would have been impossible in almost all cases to procure funding.

Secondly, it’s really quite impossible to quantify the future of anything, and that includes the end-result of projects. Referring back to our sample building, other than commodities speculators, who believes that energy costs can be accurately priced going in to the future? And, if our building is in California, who would have believed back in, say, 1997, that water prices would spike eighteen years later, and usage controlled by the government? And those are relatively mild fluctuations compared to the chances of the building being consumed by wildfires, or earthquakes. The assertion that a given building’s “life cycle” can be accurately quantified should be considered as sound as the claims of a tarot card reader, who makes similar statements on the predicting of their customers’ “life cycle.”

Which brings us back to April’s theme, sustainability/green project management. When, in the history of business, has completing a project with an excess of wasted resources been considered a good idea? The answer is never. For example, the plastics industry was furthered from an abundance of the compounds left over from the petroleum cracking process. In economic terms, the very existence of leftover resources that even might have an economic use in a different venue is an automatic signal of a missed opportunity.

Don’t get me wrong – “sustainable” or “green” PM is a great idea, but it’s hardly new. I guess the re-branding of long-established concepts is what we have to do to stay young, thin, and hip.