The Ministry of (Project) Magic vs. Stanley T. Raspberry

 

I found myself in the docket, in a room that looked very much like the courtroom scene at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In fact, the people assembled in the gallery were dressed similarly to the characters from that movie.

“Stanley T. Raspberry, do you know why you are here?” said the fellow in the judge’s seat, in a sonorous voice.

“Sure. I received this rather formal-looking summons to be at this place at this time. I did a quick internet search – you guys aren’t a branch of law enforcement, are you?”

“We’ll ask the questions here!” the “judge” stormed. “Were you or were you not involved in a case recently, where an Information Technology firm hired you to look in to why they were consistently overrunning their software projects, and finishing late?”

“Define recently. That stuff happens all the time.”

“On or about April 17.”

“Let me think … oh, yeah, that was the O’Malley case. Pretty simple solution, really.”

“And did this ‘solution’ of yours involve issuing a stop work order on the subcontractor firm performing risk analysis?”

“Yeah, of course. Conventional risk analysis is almost always useless in project management, but it’s especially so in IT projects.”

A collective gasp went up in the room, and one woman cleared her throat in a way as to suggest she was attempting to gain everyone’s attention.

“So silly of me” she began, “but I thought I heard you say that risk management is useless.”

“On IT projects, yes, absolutely, and probably everywhere else, too.”

The several dozen or so people in the gallery suddenly began talking amongst themselves in earnest at this point. The judge slammed some sort of metal sphere the size of a tennis ball against a sound block on the desk in front of him. The gallery quieted down.

“And did another part of this so-called solution involve a suspension of formal baseline change control processes?”

“Yes” I said emphatically. “Look, in extremely fast-paced projects, some of the more traditional and formal aspects of PM must be de-emphasized, or abandoned altogether, in order to improve the odds of project success, and change control is near the top of that list. For cryin’ out loud, haven’t any of you people ever heard of Agile, or Scrum?”

Again the gallery exploded into side conversations, and again the judge pounded the steel tennis ball on the sound block.

“Have you no appreciation for proper PM techniques at all?”

“Sure” I began. “But what all of you have to understand are the effects of hybrid project management. When a management science hypothesis appears to be effective in improving actual project performance – like the introduction of Agile/Scrum in IT projects – such ideas are often modified and tested in analogous project situations. That’s how PM theory is advanced in the real world.”

“These ‘hybrid’ ideas, as you call them” the sonorous-voiced judge began, “we refer to them as ‘muddles.’ And it’s one of the jobs of this ministry to eliminate all muddles from the project management world. They’re simply too impure, too far outside the existing codex.”

“Interesting” I responded. “And how, exactly, do you plan to go about doing that?”

“We will reveal that you do not have our approval as a licensed project management investigator.”

“You didn’t license me in the first place.”

“A minor detail.”

My secretary met me outside the courtroom on the steps leading to street level.

“How did it go in there?”

“Pretty weird. The short answer is that they’re going to recommend revocation of my PM investigator’s license.”

“That’s sounds terrible!” she cried. “Can they do that?”

“Well,” I began, as I caught up on my smart phone messages, “they can make any recommendations they want, though they’re clearly not associated with PMI®. Hey, check this out: three large clients have dropped us, but 17 others are asking about my availability. I think we’ll do fine.”

Meanwhile, back in the courtroom, a dark figure emerged from the shadows.

“Everyone performed well” the Monolithic executive stated in a guttural voice.

“What happens, lord, if he continues to defy us?” asked the judge.

“Then we’ll just have to find another way of setting him back.”

At this, the room erupted in a sound that can be best described as what happens when someone tells a really funny joke at a Darth Vader impersonators’ convention.