Global PM – The Tactics Vary, But The Problems Remain The Same

 

I believe that one of the most fascinating things about history is that, while technology advances in amazing and utterly unpredictable ways, human nature tends to remain the same. Exhibit A for this assertion is the fact that, at the beginning of the 17^th Century, physicians believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of humours, a concept considered so utterly absurd by today’s medical professionals as to represent an embarrassment. It’s also a fair bet that 24^th Century physicians will look back at today’s medicine and consider it barbaric. Conversely, the author of Shakespeare’s plays (I’m an Oxfordian, myself) penned insights so profound that those works are considered masterpieces to this day, and probably will be for some time.

I think something very similar occurs in project management space. I remember back in the early 1990s using a robust Critical Path Methodology (CPM) software on the just-becoming-commonplace desktop computers. If your schedule network had more than a couple hundred activities, in order to have the software perform the forward pass, backward pass, find the critical path and compute float, you would have to give it the command to do so, and then pretty much just go to lunch, since it was going to take about an hour (particularly for the resource-loaded versions). These days, those calculations for a several thousand activity network can be accurately performed virtually instantaneously.

However, even as the robust PM software platforms become easier to use, and the traditionally easy-to-use ones become more robust, some problems remain intransigent, and these problems involve human nature. Consider the following (by no means exhaustive) list:

• Managers who fancy themselves experts at PM refusing to set up a legitimate Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
• So-called project controls specialists putting Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS) elements into the WBS.
• Accountants refusing to set up the project’s chart of accountants so as to collect actual costs based on the WBS.
• Executives refusing to employ Earned Value or Critical Path methodologies, even on their larger projects.
• Accountants (again) claiming to be able to perform cost performance without Earned Value, based only on the information available from the general ledger.
• Administrators claiming to be able to perform schedule performance analysis based on a list of milestones, and polling those responsible to see if they believe those milestones will be completed on-time.

Don’t think for a nanosecond that these human nature-based difficulties in attaining peak PM performance are confined to the uninitiated. The so-called experts, who present as if they are on our side, can be even worse, to wit:

• The insistence that all work – even scope that should not be managed as a project – be managed as a project.
• The imposition of absurdly brief time spans as the maximum duration an activity (or even Work Package) can be planned, or scheduled.
• Requirements for a risk register, risk management plan, Decision Tree or Monte Carlo analysis, etc.
• Imposing – as audit standards, no less – analysis techniques that involve comparing the time-phased budget to their direct counterparts in the actual costs from the General Ledger. This problem, of comparing budgets to actuals and claiming the result to be some form of cost performance analysis, is as old as it is pervasive – even among the so-called experts.
• Demands to “engage stakeholders,” even if these stakeholders are potentially hostile to your project’s outcome.
• Imposition of unrealistic quality control standards.
• Insistence on an extreme level of detail or granularity in project status reporting.

The real irony here is that the latter group – the so-called “experts” – are easily as damaging to the widespread acceptance of project management as a school of thought as are those who oppose it from ignorance, or intransigence. Both groups resist “doing” PM, the former because they don’t understand it, the latter because it’s not being done to their unscientific standards. The uninitiated maintain that even very basic project management information systems are too onerous, while the “experts” will assert that even advanced, capable systems aren’t onerous enough. The net impact is the same and, in my opinion, probably universal: project management, as a discipline, is frustrated in its attempts to gain more widespread acceptance.

And this frustration isn’t technological. It’s rooted in human nature, and will therefore probably remain the same. Hey! I wonder if some 24^th Century project manager uncovers this blog, and shows it to his friends, will they will laugh at how backward it is, or say something like “things really don’t change that much, do they?”