Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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Like stand-up comedians who spend too much time ridiculing television commercials, I don’t want to fall into the trap of making fun of consultants too often. True, they’ve been known to be wrong.
And can be arrogant towards the existing project team members.
And usually waaayyyyy overpriced.
And, if they stick around too long, become ipso facto evidence of executive ineptitude.
Some also have the unfortunate tendency to describe their time with your project team as one of their saving a woefully backward organization from ruination, due to their timely expertise, don’t you know.
But other than that…
Now that I’ve written the previous paragraph out, I’m not so reluctant to fall into the making-fun-of-consultants-too-often trap.
I’m not really worried that my friends who make their livings as consultants will be upset with me. They generally do not read this blog – they’re too busy consuming guidance-themed drivel that can be translated into eat-your-peas-style hectoring, on those occasions where they deign to stay current with PM literature at all. That’s how they make their money, generally speaking. I’ll explain.
Of course there are real value-added consultants, but there’s also the mock-worthy variety. How do you tell the difference? Check the following table:
|
Problem |
Value-Added Consultant |
Mock-Worthy Consultant |
|
Surprise overruns |
Sets up a simple Earned Value system that predicts trouble |
Prattles on about the process of doing PM “right;” insists that any EV system be extremely robust, requiring much training, time, and effort. |
|
Surprise delays |
Sets up a simple Critical Path schedule, and shows how to pull status. |
Sets up a milestone list, and polls project team members about whether or not they think they will attain the milestones they are responsible for. Alternately, insists on a robust Critical Path network, with limits for things like start-to-start relationships. |
|
Projected overrun |
Compares the earned value figure to the actual costs, and conducts a query into why either performance is down, or actuals are up. |
Compares the basis of estimate to the actual costs at a line-item level, and throws a fit over any differences. |
|
Projected Delay |
Drills down in the Critical Path to discern the proximate cause. |
Has no idea what the difference between proximate and material cause is. |
|
Scope Creep |
Finds the source, and either gets the customer to admit that it was their idea and BCPs it into the baseline, or puts a stop to it. |
Ridicules the project team for allowing it to happen. |
|
Project is over budget. |
Isolates offending Control Accounts, seeks to transfer resources from other parts of the project. |
Prattles on about the percentage of Level-of-Effort EV techniques used. |
|
Project is late. |
Performs Critical Path analysis; crashes the schedule if possible, arranges to update the baseline if not. |
Whines about the number of start-to-start relationships in the schedule network. |
|
Executives want to keep them around, long-term. |
Lays out the Management Information Systems which will allow the organization to perform without them. |
“Umm, sure, okay.” |
Also consider the function your consultants fulfill. Anybody can sit around and offer up criticisms of the management decisions that have gone before. Hindsight is, as they say, twenty-twenty. It’s so easy, in fact, that people outside the project team should have to pay the PM for the luxury of doing so while everybody else pretends to listen to what they have to say.
But the ultimate consultant acid test will reveal the real deal, if you have one. Recall Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management #11: the 80th-percentile best managers who have access to 20% of the information they need to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20th-percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information they need. This being the case, the consultants worth their weight in budget underruns will seek to set up and maintain such systems, without an iota of excess cost or difficulty.
And that’s how you tell the pros from the consultants.
Posted on: April 10, 2017 11:16 PM |
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