How To Tell If You Are Working For A PM Android

 

Several science fiction works have addressed the concept of robots or androids being made so similar to actual humans that they are unaware that they aren’t real, living people. Movies (Blade Runner), and television series (Star Trek, Twilight Zone) have explored the concept, and I believe that the fascination with the premise has to do with the idea that we may not know ourselves very well, and, if we were to be confronted with our “real” selves, it might be a shocking experience. Meanwhile, back here in the real (PM) world, there are many software packages that claim to be able to provide any project manager with the information needed to keep a handle on their projects’ scope, cost, schedule, configuration, risk, communications, portfolio and strategic management…

Hmmm… that list is most of the whole PM enchilada. Some would have us believe that the capacity for computers to dramatically outperform humans in quickly and accurately collecting and processing data is a good thing. Add that to Hatfield’s Axiom #12, that the 80^th percentile best managers with access to only 20% of the information they need to obviate a given decision will be out-performed by the 20% worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed, and we have a truly chilling corollary: a given computer only has to be as good as the worst 1/5^th of managers to believably replace us in the workplace.

Personally, I don’t believe it will ever happen, and here’s why: Hatfield’s Axiom #11. It states that, for project management information systems to have any kind of value, they must be (1) accurate, (2) timely, and (3) relevant. Computers have accuracy down pretty well, and they process large amounts of data so much faster than their human counterparts that #2 is covered; but they will never be able to crack #3, determining which information bits are relevant, and therefore worthy of being used for decision-making, and which are not. Quantitative Analysts, known as “quants,” are professional data-scourers, who review large amounts of data in order to tease out some form of pattern, a repeatable observation of correlation that might point to a previously-unknown causation. But they don’t manage projects, they advise financial market brokers. Projects are a whole ‘nother animal. But that doesn’t stop Gaussian-curve lovers (risk analysts) and asset managers (accountants) from asserting that major project decisions can be reduced to an algorithm, based on the availability of knowable facts that produces winning decisions on a consistent basis. They have, in fact, been asserting some variant of this absurd idea since before robots (by definition, portable computers) knew how to run. Many industrial robots in Japan are so life-like that they’ve begun to assume jobs formerly handled exclusively by real people, such as receptionists. Since it’s a sure thing that, should an organization develop a true PM android, they wouldn’t be eager to advertise it excessively, for fear that real people would tend to avoid being led by a machine. The conclusion: there may be androids in the PM realm, indoctrinated in some truly irrelevant project management techniques, who are currently in charge of major projects. If this is the case, how would we know?

As fate would have it, I have a couple of tests that will determine if your PM is a real person, or an android. Test #1 involves whether or not your PM insists on keeping risk analysts on the project well past the creation of the original cost and schedule baselines. If the answer is yes, you should be concerned. I’ve previously defined “risk management” as institutionalized worrying, tripped out in statistical jargon. Here’s another definition: the results of risk analysis is a lazy thinker’s attempt to quantify relevance. Since relevance can’t be quantified, the best a robot PM could do is to have statisticians continue to guess the odds of bad things happening to their projects. So, if your PM is such a one, he may be a machine.

Test #2 is based on the extent that your PM has embraced the idea that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” My regular readers know that I’ve mocked this notion previously, but here’s a new angle of attack. Whether or not a given decision actually maximizes shareholder wealth is usually calculable, with the notorious “return on investment,” or ROI, being the go-to formula. But remarkably little of PM, past cost and schedule performance, can be readily quantified. A real person PM has a bit of decision-making-from-the-gut that inferior (strikethrough) mechanized managers can never duplicate.

Now, if you have come to the realization that you are, in fact, working for an android, don’t panic. All those science fiction movies about how human-like androids really want to kill us all off are probably extreme. Just the same, you might want to re-watch The Terminator series, just to re-familiarize yourself with how to overcome them…