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A regularly recurring premise in this blog has to do with my adaptation of the Pareto Principal, that the top talented 80% of managers who have access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be out-performed by the least talented 20% of managers who have access to 80% of the information they need. Add to this the fact that you can put fifty project managers in a room and they will not agree on the color of an orange, and the task of “managing” PM talent quickly approaches an insurmountable attempt to bring order out of chaos.
So, how to recognize the top management talent, since actual performance involves far more parameters than can possibly be captured, let alone quantified and compared? It’s been my experience that the truly talented among the PM ranks will throw off clues that their lesser acolytes won’t, and I’ve developed this little guide to help my readers more readily differentiate between the two.
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Schmoes |
Pros |
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Elicits the opinions of accountants when setting up the project’s charging structure. |
Hands the accountants the Work Breakdown Structure, shows them the reporting level, and informs them that that’s how the project’s actuals are to be captured. |
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Cites internal procedures when introducing the project plan. |
Cites ProjectManagement.com material when introducing the project plan. |
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Performs a full-up risk assessment… |
What’s a risk assessment? I mean, what does it actually accomplish? |
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…but is willing to “manage” the schedule using a milestone list. |
Knows how to manually perform a forward and backward pass on a schedule network. |
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Articulates expectations of the project team. |
Indicates interest in each member of the project team. |
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When things go well, accepts the credit; when they go poorly, shifts the blame. |
Attributes success to the project team; failures to herself.
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Insists that Control Account Managers prove that they use “proper” Earned Value data to make their decisions. |
Doesn’t really care to get inside the heads of the CAMs, as long as they are on-time, on-budget. |
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Consistently adopts internal procedures to new project problems or issues. |
Consistently finds the best technical approach to new project problems and issues, whether they’ve been tried previously or not. |
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Processor. |
Effective. |
Notice that I am not engaging in the sort of eat-your-peas hectoring that so many other PM writers use. If you’re a schmoe, you’re a schmoe, and there’s really very little point in trying to egg such a one on towards acting better.
However, there’s still my application of the Pareto Principle! If you’re a schmoe, you can perform like a pro if you can only get your hands on the cost and schedule performance information you need to obviate the decisions before you! Ah, but there’s the rub – unless your organization’s internal project management procedures say stuff like “cut all of the procedural corners you need to get a basic Earned Value or Critical Path information stream into the hands of the decision-makers,” you schmoes have been hoisted on your own petard. No Processor in the universe would write such a sentence in an internal procedure.
The best bet for the lowest 20% of talent? Get contentious about the “proper” utilization of published PM principals – it seems that’s where all the low-talent PMs I’ve encountered go.
Posted on: September 07, 2015 08:45 PM |
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