My Project Is Sagittarius – What’s Yours?

 

Hatfield’s Rule of Management Number Ten is that in order for a piece of management information to be of any value, it must be timely, accurate, and relevant. If it is not all of these three things, it’s not only useless, it’s hurting your organization. But where quantifiable criterion for information’s timeliness or accuracy can be developed and used, solid bases for evaluating relevancy is a trickier matter, and yet a business analysis issue that the PMO must get right, or risk the organization’s own relevancy.

Does Relevancy Even Matter In Pick-Up Lines?

Take, for example, one of my favorite targets for the irrelevant label, the comparing of budgets to actual costs. This has value only in the asset management arena, specifically:

• Depreciation, and
• When performing an analysis of how accurate your estimates are

… and that’s it. However, since such a comparison is a critical part of managing a household budget, a natural assumption is that it’s important to evaluating project performance. It’s not, and a simple thought exercise can demonstrate this clearly.

Suppose a $100,000 (USD) construction project. To keep it simple, let’s assume that the original estimate included $75,000 in labor costs, and $25,000 in heavy equipment. At the end of the project, the final costs were $20,000 in labor costs, and $70,000 in heavy equipment. According to the “analysis” of comparing budgets to actual costs by category, this represents a monumental failure, even though the project came in under budget by 10%! Further, for each reporting period that this analysis was performed the resulting information was inaccurate inasmuch as it portrayed a performance issue with the work.

It Actually Gets Worse

This technique can be critically wrong in the opposite direction, as well. Let’s say our $100K project was actually spending at the 75%/25% split of labor-to-equipment at the 2/3rds-spent point of the project (i.e., $49,500 in labor, $16,500 in equipment), but the project is only half-complete. The comparison of the budget to actual costs by category (or even at the line-item level) indicates no problem, when even a simple earned value analysis would readily indicate that the project is on a path to a $32,000 overrun.  A broken clock, as they say, is right twice a day, but comparing budgets to actual costs, even at a detailed level, is right only by coincidence. It’s far more likely to be profoundly wrong, indicating problems where none exist, and portraying smooth sailing when the project is in deep trouble. If there were a toolbox of the exact opposite of valid Business Analysis techniques, then comparing the budgets to actual costs (no matter the level) would have to be near the very top of the set. Yet, I can almost guarantee that the majority of PMOs will engage in this form of analysis, and treat the illusory variances as if they were legitimate cause for concern.

The problem is actually worse than even this. Management Information Systems require time, effort, and money to design, set up, and maintain. Another quick thought exercise: why would any manager pay for information that’s already readily available? Obviously they will only spend money and staff time chasing information streams (a) that are not already available, and (b) that they are convinced are relevant. It follows, then, that should those resources pursue irrelevant information, they do so at the expense of the relevant info streams – a prime example of opportunity costs. For example, your business analysts can be assigned to either set up a basic earned value system for the projects in the portfolio, or else you can ask them to perform whatever skullduggery they need to do to uncover the zodiac signs of the competitor’s project managers. A comically extreme example, to be sure, but irrelevant is irrelevant, and having your business analysts pore over projects’ initial baseline estimates, line item by line item, and compare them to the actual project costs in the general ledger, again, line item by line item, is just as futile (if not more so, since it’s not inevitable that knowing the competition’s zodiac signs will lead to a singularly erroneous conclusion the same way that the budgets-to-actuals comparison will).

You Didn’t End Up Marrying That Person, Did You?

The budgets versus actual costs at the line-item level comparison is not only common, but I know of at least one PM guidance-generating organization that mandates it. If your organization is committed to this silliness, it’s committed, and that’s unfortunate, since there’s no telling what other irrelevancies they have embraced. But, if that’s the game being played, perhaps you can convince them to stop performing that particular analysis by asserting that a Feng Shui expert has established it’s damaging to the organization’s invisible forces.