“Are You A Good Witch, Or A Bad Witch?”

 

When Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, makes this inquiry of the newly-arrived Dorothy in the movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy responds with alarm. Apparently, all witches in Kansas at the time could be readily identified by certain visual ques, most of which would be on display when we meet the Wicked Witch of the West a little later in the scene. Dorothy is completely unaware that, in Oz, there are good witches who present much more like, well, Glenda. But since Dorothy’s appearance is somewhere in-between Glenda’s and the Wicked Witch’s, Glenda is unsure, and has to pose the question.

Meanwhile, Back In the PM World (including Kansas)…

There’s a lot of churn in the PM industry these days about the features that must accompany a “good” Project Management Information System, or PMIS. The primary value of PM information systems lies in their ability to provide critical performance information to the projects’ decision-makers so that they can increase their odds of bringing in their scope on-time, on-budget. While the previous sentence is undeniably true, it does carry with it some rather prickly implications, the primary one being that any PM information stream that supported a provably successful project was just fine, and any – any – ex post facto analysis to the contrary is, well, wrong.

What About The Projects That Don’t End Successfully?

But it does not follow that any PM system that supports a failing project is automatically invalid. Consider the following payoff grid (for those of you who aren’t fans of payoff grids, I remind you of the title of this blog, and how game theory aficionados love these things):

I propose a simple two-step filter to test if a given PMIS is “good,” or “bad.”

• Was the project successful?
  • Yes: the PM system is fine.
  • No: Did the Cost/Schedule System accurately document the project’s performance issues at least three reporting cycles prior to the actual overruns or delays?
    • Yes: the PM system is fine.
    • No: in this circumstance – and ONLY in this circumstance – should we assume an actionable deficiency.

But the fact that PM experts rarely, if ever, follow this common-sense approach points to one of Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rules of Management, that you can put fifty Project Management experts into a room and they will not agree on the color of an orange. Why so much disagreement? Because the standards being employed have veered away from objective, verifiable parameters.

Finally! A Valid Use For Risk Management!

I believe that a sure-fire tell that the people bestowing “good” or “bad” labels on Project Management Information Systems are unaware of the existence of good witches is if they threaten to identify a system as “bad” for its mis-application (or just missing) risk management program. Such a “finding” would represent ipso facto evidence that the evaluators are relying on epistemological ques that aren’t really relevant.

And, once these ques are misidentified, can simply handing the ruby slippers over to the Wicked Witch of the West be far behind?