Why Chess Teams Don’t Need A Human Resources Department

 

Why does any organization need a Human Resources department? Yes, I know they set policy, the ground rules that any repeated gathering of people need to have in order to perform their functions properly, and that these rules apply to virtually all aspects of our professional lives, from how much we’re paid to what constitutes appropriate dress. But for those people who have been paying attention, these rules are almost never uniformly and consistently applied across the organization. High-performers and members of the top executives’ families can (and do) incur at least mild infractions of the rules with relative impunity, while poor performers and those with no connections can be subjected to harsh enforcement of the exact same rule set. Are there any organizations where this is not the case?

Well, yeah. Chess teams. Wanna know why?

Organizations of chess players in general, and chess teams in particular, are set up in such a way as to determine who’s best at playing the game. To this end they will usually set up a point system, almost always mirror-images of the ones used by the United States Chess Federation (USCF), or the Federation Internationale De Eschess (FIDE), where points are awarded for winning sanctioned tournament games, deducted for losing them, all adjusted for the relative strength of the opponents. Your value to such organizations is equal to your current score. Nothing more, nothing less.

The system is as beautiful as it is uncompromising. You could be the direct descendant of Jose Raul Capablanca, and be of no use to a chess team; or, you could be Phiona Mutesi, from the slums of Uganda, and be of extreme value to the same team. Your USCF or FIDE chess rating does not know or care about your background, the color of your skin, your religion or your social-economic status. It simply reflects your ability to play the game of chess, and groups of people who want to win in tournament play will base their decisions on organizational placement on that number alone. It’s an infallible indicator of capability, and vastly outweighs any other consideration.

Meanwhile, back in the project management world, the ability to precisely quantify any given project team member’s value to accomplishing scope on-time, on-budget is a bit more elusive. Most project teams include personnel from a variety of specialties, any of which, if done poorly, could utterly wreck the project. Each of these specialties requires a varied set of talents. Even if a particular person possesses these talents – at a high level – they may still not be much of a contributor if they are unwilling to work hard. As is the case with so much else of the so-called management sciences, there are simply too many parameters to capture and evaluate, and many (if not most) of those parameters are impossible to quantify.

Which lands us back into that swamp of subjective business analysis, the very bane of legitimate management science.

The inability to structure, much less enforce, a more pure meritocracy in the way in which project team members are hired, fired, promoted, demoted, assigned or reassigned has to be one of the most dangerous PM hazards out there, right behind scope creep in its potential negative impact while presenting as something completely innocuous, due to its familiarity, no doubt. By this I mean that many management pathologies have crept in to the typical decision-making process when it comes to matters human resources, such as whether or not the candidate appears to be a “good fit,” or other such subjective evaluation criterion. So, is there a “tell,” an indicator of which project teams are probably comprised of winners, and which are likely to be besotted with marginal talent? Sure there is. Consider these more objective measures:

• College degree(s)
• Professional certifications
• Successful experience
• Previously-held leadership roles
• Ability to deliver

When these form the basis for who gets assigned and promoted within the project team, you may have a winner. Conversely, the more subjective measures, including:

• Close relationship with executives
• Previous project failures
• Inability to perform

…combined with an absence of the objective measures, means that the project team is probably not based on a meritocracy, and therefore, likely to fail.

If only we all had a PMI®/ProjectManagement.com equivalent of a USCF rating…