“I’m Here To Put You Back On Schedule”

 

In last week’s blog, I pointed out the consistencies in the consultants’ approaches of Jon Taffer and Yoda. Alert reader Ken Bradshaw commented that, essentially, if Yoda’s approach to providing consulting services could be evaluated, what did that imply for other major characters in the Star Wars universe, specifically Darth Vader?  The short answer is, well, a lot.

Here’s the longer answer

The notion that an advancement in project management capability can be attained by leveraging organizational power is as old as PM itself. I actually had a rather heated e-mail exchange with a person who fancied himself a scheduling expert who took exception to a Variance Threshold piece I wrote back in the day which challenged the so-called Critical Chain theory. This person – who continues to make himself a spectacle in the PM writing world – went ballistic on me for asserting that schedule float, ummm, existed. I swear I am not making this up. His basic criticism boiled down to, if a manager told someone to execute an activity, then, by golly, that person had to obey. I suppose this fellow presumed that instantaneous obedience to managerial guidance completely negated the concept of float in Critical Path Methodology-based schedule networks, which is, of course, astonishingly ignorant.

Initially unwilling to believe that anyone who presents as an expert in project management in general, and scheduling in particular, could possibly be that uninformed, I assumed he meant that re-assigning resources to critical and near-critical activities within the network could shorten the overall schedule’s duration (the core of critical chain theory), and I responded to him in that vein. His counter-response doubled down on his original fallacy: the notion of schedule float was wrong, on the grounds that proper management could demand that the start of a given activity happen as-planned.

Like I said, it’s astonishingly ignorant.

But it’s not that far removed from the managerial approach to many organizations when it comes to advancing a capability in project management.

Meanwhile, Back At The Empire’s PMO…

Which brings us long, long ago and far, far away, to the scene where Darth Vader is striding on board the second Death Star, and uttering the line in the title to the immense space station’s overly stressed PM. If memory serves, the PM responds that he is doing all he can, and that he needs more men. Vader replies that the emperor himself, who apparently has an even worse sense of humor than Vader, is due to arrive, implying that some extremely bad things will happen to the PM’s ability to breathe should the emperor have to read a Variance Analysis Report that indicates any significant schedule slippage (as an aside, would the Corrective Action paragraph of such a VAR include “Use the force to choke the PM to death, and then find someone to take over this high-profile project, and restore the schedule while keeping this person either unaware of the possibility or unafraid of being choked to death by the Force.”).

This approach flat doesn’t work, generally speaking. Oh, you will have the occasional project team amp up their production based on short-term fear, but as a standard approach, leveraging organizational power to advance a capability is a sure loser. That’s not to say that rank doesn’t have its role – it absolutely does. It’s just that using rank to lean on a project team to execute a given technical agenda is profoundly susceptible to the tactic of the Silent Veto, or, as the brilliant and irreplaceable Bud Baker puts it, the Slow Roll. This is where the cooperation of the members of the project team is verbally agreed to, but doesn’t seem to materialize in the event, or at least not in time for the successful execution of the technical agenda being pursued. Another symptom of having been Slow-Rolled or Silent Vetoed is that it’s nearly impossible to pinpoint the exact person responsible for, or moment of, technical agenda roll-out failure. And by the time you’re falling down thousands of feet of power coupling shaft, it’s really irrelevant if it’s specifically due to your main go-to guy having pangs of regret for the heavy-handed style he’s been forced to use all this time, or a failure to appreciate the martial abilities of a bunch of teddy bears.

The bottom line (which also happens to be Hatfield’s Rule of Management #1) is this: You cannot advance a capability by leveraging organizational power. If that’s the approach your consultant is recommending, check to see if their eyes glow orange.