The Self-Driving Project

 

As I continue with December’s theme of Human Resource Management, my attention was grabbed by the stories of the self-driving cars, and their progress in being introduced to major metropolitan areas. They make some mistakes, sure, but so do human drivers. I’m sure this question will be hotly debated for generations, but what criterion should be invoked to decide if the robots driving cars are superior to their average human counterparts? And, if the question is relevant for robot versus human automobile operators, can an analogous question be asked of robot versus human project management?

Yes, I know that the job of project management is largely one of dealing with situations and circumstances that no one could have foreseen (not even risk managers), meaning that we PM-types largely laughed at all the headlines warning the professionals in the more mundane fields that their jobs would some day be taken over by machines, and that day would come around sooner than they thought. We were immune! No machine could manage a project!

Well, let’s take a look at that. Just as a broken clock is right twice per day, so, too some of the people who consider themselves better-than-average project managers prone to making poor decisions most of the time. Since a Magic 8 Ball could be expected to only return good decisions on a random basis, relatively simple robots could replace the poorer project managers right away.

Consider also that some PM decisions are fairly automatic, and could be reduced to algorithm. Check the following table:

Think of PM capability as a continuum, with purely random right answers on one end, and ingeniously insightful project decisions at the other. Hatfield’s Rule of Management #11 is that the 20% worst managers who have access to 80% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will out-perform the 80^th percentile best managers who only have access to 20% of the information so needed. This being the case, if the appropriate Earned Value and Critical Path methodology systems are in place, robots would only have to better the lowest PM quintile to become a viable alternative! Let that sink in for a moment.

As for me, I hope the robot that I’m replaced with is less like C3P-O, who comes across as a bit fussy, and more like Robot B-9, from the television series Lost In Space. At least he could project electric shocks from his hands/claws, which could come in handy with respect to interactions with other project “professionals” (see my blog Should We Use Electric Shocks on the Risk Managers?).