Will The Next Enemy Please Sign In?

 

In my previous PMO-themed blogs for January, I focused on common problems in setting up and staffing the Project Management Office. While taking the wrong approach in addressing these problems will certainly lower the chances of the PMO being successful, doing all of them right by no means guarantees success. There’s still more enemies out there, and young PMOs will often make mistakes in dealing with them.

For the sake of this discussion, I would like to make some classifications. The previous blogs’ points concerned issues internal to the PMO. There are two other types of problems – (1) those that are external to the PMO itself, but internal to the organization, and (2) those that are external to the organization. This week I’ll address problem type #1.

Keep Your Head On A Swivel

“Just a minute on those classifications, Michael!” I can hear my readers say. “Are you implying that there are people within my organization – my very company – who represent an existential threat to the attainment of the PMO’s objectives?” My answer: no, I’m not implying it. I’m stating it out loud, directly, even screaming it from the rooftops. In an organization of, say, 100 people, there will be at least five who are happy, if not eager, to see your PMO fail, and be replaced with their pet management information stream.

It’s not (necessarily) personal. From The Godfather movies, if you will recall, two axioms make multiple appearances: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” and “It’s business, not personal!” As for the first quote, it has a certain intuitive value to it. But consider: why would anyone want to keep their enemies “close”? Certainly one reason is that, if your enemy does not consider you to be a threat, you will be in a much better position to harm him or his agenda when the time comes to do so.

Not All Your Opponents Lurk In Shadows

Now back to your organization. Very few business schools teach Corner Cube Theory, which holds that Asset Management, Project Management, and Strategic Management are different by type, and not by degree. They use different methods to attain different goals, and make use of very different information streams to do so. Rather, most business schools teach that the point of ALL management is to “maximize shareholder wealth,” with the main (if not exclusive) information stream to be utilized originating in the general ledger. There are even project management advocates who believe this tripe, and it’s a forgone conclusion that most “educated” business-types believe it uncritically. Then along comes your little PMO, generating schedule and cost (gasp!) performance information, steering decisions and influencing executives, and the only thing they need from the general ledger is the monthly actual costs. That’s it?! What about depreciation? What about return on investment? What about the make-or-buy formulae? What about…

All useless to the PMO. Well, that’s not what their business professors told them the real managerial world would be like. Going through business school they may have never even heard of the utility of Earned Value or Critical Path Methodologies, and now these PM-types are on the brink of an epistemological take-over? Not on their watch! So, they’re going to be opposed to your agenda, but they really can’t come right out and articulate that fact. Instead, they will make the following assertions as you roll out your implementation plan:

• “Doing” PM is too difficult and onerous (if these critics have a point here, go back and re-read my previous two posts). Done right, of course, PM is neither. Indeed, the formula of dividing the estimated percent complete into the cumulative actual costs delivers an Estimate at Completion figure with an accuracy level the accountants can only dream of, and that formula is about as simple as it gets.
• If you get past the “It’s too hard” argument, next comes the “If it’s as easy as you say, it can’t possibly be valid, or valuable.” This argument has some on our side to blame for it, since the risk managers will insist on a rigorous risk analysis (difficult and irrelevant), the communications specialist will insist on “engaging all stakeholders” (difficult and dangerous), the quality engineers will want to do fishbone diagrams (difficult and subjective), and even the cost estimators themselves will babble on about master resource dictionaries and confidence intervals (difficult and just plain dopey, respectively). Once your PMO begins to generate usable Variance at Completion (VAC) information for both cost and schedule, and it’s proved to be accurate, these arguments will fade.

And This Is Just The Beginning

Unfortunately, it doesn’t end here. However, if your PMO continues to feed its client PMs and other key decision-makers the vital information they need to make the best decisions, your organizational enemies will need to go further and further out on that management theory limb in order to discredit you.  So far, in fact, that they may well simply do themselves in by exposing their needlessly adversarial agenda.

Then, the next enemy steps up, and we start all over again.

Lagniappe

I’ll be doing a webinar for ProjectManagement.com, on the topic of Game Theory (one of the comments on a previous blog suggested it, and I’ve been trading communications with ProjectManagement.com about getting on the webinar calendar). It’s currently scheduled for March 16. Keep visiting the website for details.