Perry Mason’s Initials Are “PM”

 

My oldest son graduated Magna Cum Laude from a fairly prestigious law school, and works as a prosecutor. On those occasions when he visits home and gets into conversations with me, I sometimes like to tweak him by deliberately mis-using legal terms when I want to take exception to an assertion he’s made. A recent example went like this:

“Objection, your honor! Facts not entered as evidence!”

“You realize” he replied, “that what you just said is almost literally gibberish.”

“Not according to the television law shows I’ve seen.”

“Then you need to watch a higher caliber of law show.”

Later, when talking about that exchange with my wife, I admitted that I should stop doing that, lest I increase the odds of my son skipping trips back home in order to avoid such face-palm moments. But I hastened to add that, if there were television shows about Project Management (similar to “Law & Order,” would ours be “Cost & Schedule?”), and some of the terms we use on a regular basis were to seep into the common lexicon, I would be more tolerant of their modified, hipster connotations than our legal professional counterparts.

And then, almost as those words were leaving my mouth, I realized that they were utterly false.

In fact, it drives my face directly into my palm when I hear project managers misuse terms with which they should be completely familiar. It’s particularly cringe-worthy when the speaker has some sort of PM certification. A quick list includes the following. NOTE: all of these are actual quotes that I have heard in my time in PM.

“This task is too important to not be on the critical path.”  While not almost literally gibberish, it is extremely goofy, as any entry-level scheduler can tell you. Whether or not a task in a schedule network appears on the critical path has nothing whatsoever to do with its profile, or perceived “importance.” Its presence on the critical path is solely determined by its duration and schedule logic (e.g., which tasks have to be completed before others can begin). Now, I will concede that, once a CPM-capable software package has performed the forward and backward passes on the schedule network, and has identified the critical path, your typical PM will place more importance on the performance of the activities that are on it. But to assume that high-profile or perceived-to-be important tasks must therefore be on the critical path is a sure sign that the person who is asserting so has no idea what they’re talking about.

“There’s an 80% confidence interval that this project will not exceed (N) dollars.” Yeah, and there’s a 100% confidence interval that the person or persons who have performed the “analysis” that supports such an absurd position have absolutely no way of knowing that for certain. How do risk managers and analysts come up with the 80% confidence interval figure? Typically, it’s based on the following data points:

• Original estimate, in both cost and duration (at the level of the Work Breakdown Structure where the analysis occurs),
• Estimates of the odds of the task experiencing unplanned events,
• Estimates of the impact that such events may have,
• A calculation of the odds of occurrence, multiplied by the estimated impact, and then subtracted from the original budget in order to isolate the cost or schedule contingency amount.
• If a Monte Carlo analysis in used, the risk analysts will also pre-select a type of leaning-bell curve with which the artificially-generated “events” should conform. (Did I mention that the result, represented graphically, of the artificially- [or “randomly- “] generated events, is pre-selected?)

Okay, so what’s wrong with all this? Consider the steps, in order:

• Subjective data.
• Highly subjective data.
• Obscenely subjective data (can we even really call it “data”?)
• Statistical analysis of obscenely subjective data.
• Further analysis of obscenely subjective data, where the results are already established.

Need I say more?

“We’ve spent more than we budgeted for the month, so we have a negative cost variance.”

I can’t even.

So, if you hear these phrases spoken aloud, and it’s not a case of a father exercising his right to irk his children, you will know that the speaker is not an authentic project manager.

Or else he just needs to watch a higher caliber of PM shows.