Announcing The New And Improved Digital Snake Press!

 

Think back to what you’ve read about traveling “medicine men” in the United States, circa 1870 to 1900. These men made a living by being able to mimic the true medical professionals of the day, and selling concoctions that looked, smelled, and tasted like how they thought medicine should look, smell, and taste. Of course, they could not be honest about their compounds’ true ingredients if they were to extract money from gullible audiences.

But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

As an aside, I’ve always wondered: doesn’t the alleged existence of “snake oil” – the clichéd main ingredient of these concoctions – imply the presence of a “snake press,” much as the existence of olive oil implies an olive press? And, if so, how hard would you have to press a snake to extract oil from it?

Meanwhile, back in the PM world…

A self-appointed guidance-generating organization recently issued a document (I don’t want to name the organization or guidance document directly, ‘cuz then I’d have to scale back the tone of my condemnation, and where’s the fun in that?) on Earned Value Management Systems, and one of their legitimate-sounding diktats ideas is that the Estimate at Completion (EAC) should be derived by re-estimating the project’s remaining work, and adding that figure to the cumulative actual costs. I simply have to ask: is this legitimate management science, or is it quackery?

The alternative method for deriving the EAC is to calculate it, with the most common formula being to divide the Budget at Completion (BAC) by the Cost Performance Index (CPI), so:

EAC = BAC / CPI

There are other formulas, but we’ll use this as the basis for comparison. Is it accurate, and can its accuracy be shown scientifically? Yes, and yes. Dave Christensen, Ph.D. has written several papers on the topic. Pulling data from real-life projects, Dr. Christensen has established that the calculated versions of the EAC are consistently accurate to around 10% of the projects’ final costs. For the record, one professional society has published data showing that a detailed cost estimate, produced by a professional estimator using off-the-shelf software, is accurate from 25% to 15% of the projects’ final costs. At this point it must also be noted that calculating the EAC is far easier than having to create a detailed re-estimate the remaining work. For those who object that the estimate of the activities’ percent complete – the basis of the CPI figure – is subjective, I would counter that every single line item of the new estimate is at least as subjective. In addition, the calculated EAC feels no pressure from upper management to make their at-completion forecasts palatable, unlike the re-estimated version. To sum up:

So, what gives?

Why would the more difficult, less accurate, and politically-prone version of a critical project performance parameter get the nod over its clearly superior alternative? When one considers the history of how poor hypotheses become embedded in a body of knowledge, the management sciences appear to be particularly vulnerable with regard to this very sort of issue. I will also point out that, once a profession begins to base their standards on this sort of expert speculation rather than methods that have established their superiority in multiple real-life projects, it virtually invites an invasion of poor guidance.

But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

Perhaps the experts pushing this kind of management science hypothesis can also let us know the exact pressure needed from the snake press to produce usable snake oil. I mean, if we're just speculating, why not?

Lagniappe

My webinar on the 16^th could have gone better. My stupid computer crashed three times, and needed a few minutes each time to re-boot and get back to the chat room. In a way, it was a left-handed blessing, in that it forced me to focus my ideas into a suddenly-reduced time frame. The gracious and professional Stephen Strickland (the host) said it went well, but I’m not looking forward to the attendee evals. Next time will be better, I promise.