Stanly Raspberry And The Procedure Conspiracy, Part II

 

When we left our hero last week, the secret conference room full of PAIN operatives had just erupted in a sound that can be best described as what would happen if somebody told a really funny joke at a Darth Vader impersonators’ convention. In the middle of the laughter, a man disguised as a waiter leaned over to my side.

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

I looked up into the eyes of Cameron McGaughy, ProjectManagement.com’s managing editor.

“Cameron?! What are YOU doing here?”

“ProjectManagement.com has its ears open to these kinds of things. Anyway, the theme for March was supposed to be global communications. So, let me ask again – what are you doing here?”

“Well…” I whispered, “This kind of guidance issuance has an impact on how PM techniques are transmitted around the world, so there’s that.”

“You’re on pretty thin ice here, Raspberry, but carry on. We’ll see how this ends.”

As the laughter died down, the chairman continued.

“As we continue to insist on these line-item comparisons between budgets and actuals, the original baselines will be turned to rubber, engendering endless debate about supremacy of policy preferences. The confusion emanating from these debates will cloud the issue for years!”

I held up my hand.

“Do any of these documents you’re issuing actually add to the practical use of Earned Value techniques?”

Gasps again erupted from the participants, this time moving enough air to disturb some of the papers on the table before them.

“Why would you ask that, Max? Aren’t you on board with our true purpose?”

“Oh, yeah, sure I am. It’s just that I was told that we had to maintain some sort of veneer of valid management science advancement.”

Again the room began murmuring, with an occasional “Oh, yeah” and “he’s right, darn it” becoming audible.

“That’s true” the chairman responded, “but highlighting the divide between practical application and what we’re presenting as true goes too far.”

He continued “So we are on an acceptable pace to attain our final goal.”

I hoped someone would pipe us and ask “That being?”, but nobody did. However, another attendee did ask “Okay, boss. But once we’ve attained that goal, who’s going to maintain the ‘you’re doing it right’ versus the ‘you’re doing it wrong’ ledger? Our friends over in software development blew up our previous attempts when they came up with that incredibly practical ‘agile’ and ‘scrum’ business, and it’s taken this long to get back to where we are now.”

That’s when it hit me: the purpose of this little council was to create a codex of project management rules and regulations that would provide these so-called experts with the ability to demand adherence to process, and eschew practicality in application.  If it worked out, they would be empowered to forever say “you’re doing it wrong,” and point to some part of this codex to back them up.

In short, they wanted to entrench process over actual performance as the key to “proper” PM.

Along about this time I felt a small gap in-between my upper lip and fake mustache. Fearing that my disguise was beginning to fail, I decided to speak up one last time.

“We should arrange for Monolithic Corporation to make that determination.”

“We all agreed to not mention any company names” began the poorly-shaven fellow next to me. “Hey! What’s this?”

He then grabbed my fake mustache, and pulled it off my face. This time, the attendees gasped so loudly that loose papers leapt off of the table and were plastered onto their faces.

“Raspberry! Get him!”

In the time it took for the attendees to get their loose papers off of their faces, I sprinted down the hall and up the secret staircase. Charlie Gumshoe was waiting in the car just outside.

“Did you get it? Do you understand what they’re up to?”

“Yes, and yes. And you’re never gonna believe this…”