Are We Playing Chess, Or Writing Comedy?

 

As I discussed in my second book, tournament chess players have memorized the series of moves they use to begin a game. These chess openings have names, and their variations have names as well. Even at the junior high school level it is a rare player indeed who does not have committed to memory at least one opening to use as White, and two openings to use as Black (as a response to 1. P – K4 or 1. P – Q4), from the first five to fifteen moves of the game, with two to seven variations for each. When I was playing in tournaments, my favorites were:

• Giuoco Piano (as White, though I did not care for the Max Lange attack variant)
• Sicilian Defense (Najdorf or Dragon variants, as Black against 1. P – K4)
• Queen’s Indian Defense (as Black against 1. P – Q4)

…and, should I come across an opponent who was unaware of the traps and pitfalls inherent in the variation I was playing, I almost always won.

In a way, the memorization of chess openings is analogous to the advantage PMI® gives its members, especially the certified ones, when it comes to successfully managing a project. Project Managers don’t just arrive on-site, with a vague idea of the desired outcome. They know to capture the scope as accurately and completely as possible, decompose it into a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), and begin to estimate the resources (Cost Baseline) and time (Schedule Baseline) needed to achieve the scope. It’s a moderately structured way of approaching the management of the project, and those who have a competent understanding of these structures will have a nearly insurmountable advantage over those who do not when it comes to successfully completing projects.

Now, for those of my readers who were not so geeky as to be involved in tournament chess, a quick side note about chess notation: when the moves are recorded, either by the players themselves or for publication and analysis later, three punctuation marks are used. A dash (“ –“) means “to,” as in “P – K4” means “pawn to king 4.” Then come the commentary marks: a question mark indicates an error, and two question marks indicate a blunder. An exclamation mark indicates a good move, and two exclamation marks indicate a brilliant one. These two can be combined, as well. An exclamation mark in front of a question mark (“!?”) means a bold but risky move, and the opposite order (“?!”) indicates a wild, perhaps even reckless move (well, as reckless as chess players can get, I suppose).

At the opposite end of the intellectual and entertainment spectrum, we have comedy. Really good stand-up comedians can be funny on a highly spontaneous basis, with very little pre-planned structure to their stories. Sketch comedy is a bit more structured in that the players are following a script, but even here the more hilarious instances come about when the comedians deviate from the original text. But what of those instances where deviating from the original script is called for, not to make people laugh, but to successfully manage a project? Here’s where the management sciences quickly lose efficacy, since, by definition, circumstances are unfolding in such a way as to preclude the lifting of solutions from other, highly analogous situations. The PM finds herself breaking new ground, often in circumstances where the wrong decision can have significant consequences.

In highly volatile project management environs, I’m often reminded of Dwight Eisenhower’s quote “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”[i] More often than we are perhaps ready to admit, the original plan has to be modified (not abandoned – that would mean we’re working off of a “rubber baseline,” a distinct no-no in PM space), occasionally dramatically, sometimes rather quickly. So, how to know when such immediate, dramatic baseline modifications are needed to save the project? I recommend using chess scoring notation!

Think about it: in the Variance Analysis Reports (VARs), the common template indicates the Schedule and Cost Variances in both dollars and percentages, along with the Cost Performance Index and Schedule Performance Index (CPI and SPI). If a variance breaks threshold, there are blocks of text discussing the problems’ causes and impacts, and corrective actions. Simply put the corrective actions into a bulleted list, and leave space for the program managers or customers to insert punctuation, as in:

Along those lines, I would like to arrange to have the following Project Management “Opening” named after me:

• Do the whole WBS thing, yeah yeah yeah, but then…
• Get rid of the Risk guys,
• Relegate the accountants to relaying actual costs at the reporting level of the WBS, and then offer no additional advice,
• Don’t budget more than the bare minimum for the communications and quality specialists,
• But make sure you are fully staffed with the Earned Value, Critical Path, and configuration management support.

With any luck, the “Hatfield Opening” in PM will become more famous than the other associations most often attached to my name, which include two train wrecks that happened 100 years apart, and a little misunderstanding with some people named “McCoy.”

[i] Retrieved from https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/dwightdei164720.html on October 2, 2017, 12:44 MDT.