Having Difficult PM Conversations

 

Much as holiday get-togethers with family and friends will bring people with disparate ideas into close proximity, so, too, does the creation of a new project team bring together people with different views on how that project work should be managed. Since PMI® came into existence in 1969, project management has become a rather big deal (there are over 500,000 PMP®-certified people around the world). As in any field of endeavor that attracts a lot of adherents, many enthusiastic practitioners have embraced some PM-related ideas that are, shall we say, of marginal usefulness in the field of actual management science, much like Keynsians, while useful to politicians, really have little to add to the realm of macroeconomics. 

Take Work Breakdown Structures, or WBSs. Even those with a fleeting knowledge of PM basics know that the development of a WBS is a critical early step in setting up the information systems needed to manage the project, and therein lies a problem: to admit to not knowing how a WBS works, or is properly set up, is to essentially reveal to the team that you don’t know the first thing about project management. So, in the event the genuine practitioner is assigned to a project team that has an obviously flawed WBS in place, how should that very difficult conversation take place?

Well, don’t do what I did. I told the head of the project’s Project Controls Team that his WBS was invalid, and would need to be reworked prior to any workable Critical Path or Earned Value system being put in place, much less a usable Basis of Estimate. He listened politely, thanked me for my input, and then had me taken off the project team. In my defense, I was in my 20s, and didn’t suffer fools gladly. From a management point of view, the project would end up being a fiasco – cost overruns and delays were rampant, as well as showing all the symptoms of a management style immersed in reactionary mode, flailing at every unexpected event. But I did try to have the conversation.

Then there are those discussions within organizations whose business model was set up by and is dominated by its accountants. Such organizations are readily identifiable by a reluctance to set up the project’s accounting system based on the aforementioned WBS. Accountants, being the lead soldiers of the asset managers’ army, are more likely to insist on setting up the chart of accounts to track charges by organization, or OBS. Of course, the inability to collect actual costs by the reporting level of the WBS essentially disables an Earned Value Management System, the very core of the PM’s ability to manage cost performance. I was once e-mailed by a military officer who was encountering this very problem, and asked me for advice as to how to overcome it. When I responded that there was no way he could set up a valid EVMS without the actual costs collected by WBS element, he actually became angry with me, as if I had some kind of an obligation to remedy his project team’s accountants problem.

Then there are those who believe that all the tasks on the critical path of a CPM network are innately important outside of schedule logic. Activities on a schedule network’s critical path are important because, if there is a delay in any of them, the whole project is likely impacted. However, I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a Cost Account Manager say something along the lines of “this activity is too important to NOT be on the critical path!”, meaning that someone is going to have to have the difficult discussion about how activities on the critical path are there due to schedule logic, not priority or visibility, and asserting to the contrary is revealing a profound lack of basic PM understanding.

If everyone at a PMI® Congress is going to act politely to one another, perhaps these discussions should be avoided in casual discussions. However, if you are on a project team and one (or more) of these PM pathologies makes an appearance, it might be time for a difficult conversation.