Hey! They’re Not Wearing Different-Colored Uniforms!

 

To wrap up January’s theme of Project Management Office stuff, I want to discuss the third category of enemies who can (and often will) retard your PMO’s implementation progress, if not derail it altogether. The first two blogs this month dealt with opponents within the PMO itself, and last week took a look at adversaries outside the PMO team, but still within the organization. Now I wish to direct my hypercritical gaze upon belligerents outside your organization – and, like all the others, they are not going to offer up any outward signs that they oppose you and your mission.

Remember The Character Wormtounge, From Lord Of The Rings?

Indeed, these will almost always present as desirous of helping you, which makes them all the more dangerous. I’m talking about the various Project Management organizations that push agendas or narratives that recommend – or even mandate – certain practices or techniques that really have little to do with bringing in a project on-time, on-budget. I’ve previously made the distinction between those I call “performers,” whose main objective is to bring in projects on-time, on-budget, and “processors,” or those who think that optimal project management is a matter of following the processes they deem a legitimate part of PM.

One of the earliest battlegrounds between these two camps happened when the software project management techniques of Agile and Scrum came about. Software projects were (and are) notorious for coming in late and over-budget at a higher rate than, say, capital projects, and seemed to be the perfect candidates for more rigorous project management. More rigorous, yes – more formal, absolutely not. Software development is so dynamic and fluid that the original scope is rarely the exact eventual outcome. New techniques and technology are constantly arriving, and to ignore them is to condemn the project to putting out an obsolete product on the day it becomes available. To compensate, some way needed to be developed to adjust the scope on-the-fly, while still being able to capture the fast-changing circumstances in a cost/schedule performance system.

Are We Cheating, Or Not?

Ah, but there was the rub. If the scope baseline was fast-changing, and a formal change control process was impossible to accommodate, didn’t that mean that the mirror cost and schedule baselines would quickly become either irrelevant, or rubber? The solution was refreshingly revolutionary: do away with formal change control. In its place, schedule meetings where certain project team members were to participate in very specific roles as the day’s modular scheduling was addressed and modified (or not).  How was cost performance to be done?  I actually did a webinar on this very subject, entitled “Stop Those Divorce Proceedings! How Agile/Scrum and Earned Value Can Co-Exist In IT Projects.” The short answer here is: due to necessity, Agile/Scrum did away with the cumbersome, delay-inducing practice of setting up Baseline Change Control Boards, and having them evaluate every single change to the project, and approving or disapproving, and then having approved changes formally entered into the baseline documents…

It Depends On Whom You Ask

Enough! It was a waste of time and energy, time and energy these projects didn’t have in reserve. So they did away with it. I can almost still here the grinding of the teeth of the advocates of formal change control. It must have caused them fits. But this is just one example. The numbers of procedure-generating organizations that insist on inflicting their versions of “proper” PM behavior on the rest of the globe are vast, as vast as their ideas are insipid. From insinuating that comparing budgets to actual costs at the line-item level of the basis of estimate has something to do with Earned Value, to insisting on an “80% confidence interval” from the risk register, these external enemies slather on the irrelevancies, larding down legitimate project management in a naked attempt to not improve project performance, but to force a certain pattern of behavior in practitioners. And these, dear reader, comprise an entire category of external enemies to your PMO.

Lagniappe

It’s official! ProjectManagement.com is sponsoring a webinar for me, to be transmitted on March 16. The title is “Getting Ahead With Practical Game Theory: Modelling The Paths Of Career Advancement,” and I’ll be covering material from books two and three. Hope a lot of y’all can tune in.