“To the Moon, Alice!”

 

I think that one of the funniest bits from the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (misnamed) trilogy involves a scene where Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent are getting a ride on a ship populated by 1/3 of the people from their home world. The backstory is that they were told their planet was about to be destroyed cataclysmically, and so the population was loaded onto evacuation ships and divided into three groups:
•    Those who actually produced food, goods, and materials;
•    Those who actually produced building designs, literature, computer programs, and other intellectual properties, and
•    Those who served as middlemen, such as advertising agency employees, or phone sanitizers.
Ford and Arthur find themselves with this third group, when it becomes apparent that their home world wasn’t in any danger – the other two groups of people simply figured out a clever way of ridding their world of, essentially, non-productive people.

In my previous two blogs I discussed the dichotomy between two types of project management practitioners, whom I labelled Processors and Effectives. Since the August theme is Business Project Management, I thought I’d take an opportunity to evaluate some of the distinct disciplines within PM, to see which ones are of more value to the overall enterprise management information feed, and which, well, are not. In short, I want to make the case for which PM sub-groups we ought to put on their own starship and send them away. Okay, that might be a little harsh, but I have to admit that, now that it’s written down, it might not be such a bad…

Just kidding! From an overall business point of view, the most valuable PM-type is the one who knows which kinds of work ought to be managed as a project, and which should not. Much harberdashery exists here, with accountants trying to provide insight on project performance, critical path schedulers being asked to perform staff allocation, and risk managers pretending it’s all about Gaussian Curves. 

On the question of whether or not some element of work ought to be managed as a project or not, one simple question represents the litmus test: what percent complete have you accomplished? If asked of legitimate project work, a usable answer can be provided. If asked, say, of the document preparation organization, as an organization, there can be no sensible response. These ought to be managed as an asset, and not a project. Besides, if you were to ask them to develop a critical path methodology baseline, it would just be a series of constrained activities, yielding no usable performance information.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the least valuable PM-types are those whose analyses provide little or no value when it comes to bringing the project in on-time, on-budget. Among these I list:
•    Accountants (bookkeepers, yes – the project team has to know how much it has spent. Accountants – no. They keep pretending that comparing budgets to actuals on a line-item basis or the return-on-investment calculation creates usable project management information – they also dress funny.)
•    Risk Managers (yeah, I know, I keep banging this gong, but someone has to point out that these guys do nothing more than counsel institutional worrying, tripped out in statistical jargon.)
•    Human Resources (how many organizations claim that their people are their most valuable asset, or resource? This capability, valuable as it may be, does not belong as part of project management. Don’t believe me? Invoke the litmus test: “Hey, HR director, what percent complete have you accomplished?”)

These are the ones I recommend putting on the epistemological starship, and sending away from planet Project Management. Also, I understand that recent developments on an electromagnetic drive could power a ship to the Moon in four hours…