PM Technology Is Advancing – Are We?

 

From an article entitled “Less Work For Mother,”:

In the early 1960s, when synthetic no-iron fabrics were introduced, the size of the household laundry load increased again; shirts and skirts, sheets and blouses that had once been sent out to the dry cleaner or the corner laundry were now being tossed into the household wash basket. By the 1980s the aver- age American housewife, armed now with an automatic washing machine and an automatic dryer, was processing roughly ten times (by weight) the amount of laundry that her mother had been accustomed to. Drudgery had disappeared, but the laundry hadn’t. The average time spent on this chore in 1925 had been 5.8 hours per week; in 1964 it was 6.2.[i]

Meanwhile, back in the PM world of the 1980s…

I’m old enough to remember a time when, for contractors working for the United States Department of Defense, our cost and schedule performance reports would be typed (on an IBM Selectric®, no less) onto a printed form from the Government Printing Office. Of course, all of the calculations for the time-phased budget (Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled, or BCWS), the Earned Value (Budgeted Cost of Work Performed, or BCWP), and actual costs (Actual Costs of Work Performed, or ACWP), as well as the associated indices and percentages, were done by hand, calculator (no, not the kind you had to hand-crank – don’t be ridiculous) or, on occasion, on one of the new-fangled spreadsheet programs (Lotus 1-2-3® was the favorite, although Quattro® was coming on strong. Microsoft Excel® wouldn’t become the go-to application for another decade[ii].). It was, obviously, somewhat time-consuming, but we consistently delivered our reports on-time, and somehow managed to bring in our projects (mostly) on-time, on-budget.

Fast forward to the 21^st Century, and the very idea of using a typewriter is absurd, much less for generating formal project performance reports. Both desktop computers and Project Management software applications have advanced significantly, so we’re all processing more and better PM information, right? Well, much like the change in clothes-washing technology meant more clothing was being cleaned, the new hardware and software capabilities are processing much more data.

But is it better information?

Meanwhile, back in the PM world of 2017…

Certain guidance and procedure-generating organizations that I won’t name keep sending out missives on the subject of what constitutes more advanced PM information, much of it silliness. A few examples include:

• In the Critical Path Schedule, one of them actually proposes a limit (a very low limit, at that) for the number of activities that can be logically linked via a start-to-start relationship. What if the nature of the project work is such that that’s the most appropriate way of logically linking those activities? Tough.
• A similar limit is mandated suggested for finish-to-finish relationships.
• There’s also a lot of churn on the amount of float in the schedule network, again regardless of the match of the specific project’s work with the logical links among its activities.

Each of these is asserted due to a supposed vulnerability of project schedules that have multiple start-to-start, finish-to-finish, or high-float elements to hiding or camouflaging negative variances. I have never – and I do mean never – seen any hard data supporting this assertion. It seems to always based on hypothetical scenarios.

Then there’s the ultimate data collecting and crunching waste, that of comparing the project’s time-phased budget to its actual costs. There was a time when anybody asserting that this is an appropriate (much less necessary) PM analysis technique would have been immediately recognized as a hack. But now, some guidance-generating organizations are actually calling for it to be performed, and even amped up: this analysis must now be executed at a level of granularity all the way down to the line-item level in the original basis of estimate as it compares to the line-item level in the general ledger. The reason why this analysis is provably useless at higher levels, but suddenly takes on the patina of legitimacy when it’s performed at a sufficiently detailed level, is not provided.

Now back to the 1980s…

It’s analogous to our 1930s American housewife, having access to 1980s clothes-washing technology, electing to run the exact same clothes through the washer to the dryer, and then simply loaded them back into the washer, without expanding the amount of laundry actually being cleaned. In order for the act of cleaning clothes to have any value whatsoever, the clothes in question must actually need cleaning. Similarly, in order for all of this advanced data processing capability to have any significance whatsoever, the resulting analysis must be relevant. Using advanced data processing capacity to deliver irrelevant data isn’t advancing Project Management science. It is, in fact, wasting time and energy when so many of the existing techniques, which have been shown to work (like the calculated Estimate at Completion), are being elbowed aside.

Rather than embrace these “advanced” techniques, we would be better served making more use of the IBM Selectric®.

[i] Retrieved from http://www.americanheritage.com/content/less-work-mother, November 3, 2017, 20:36 MDT.

[ii] Microsoft Excel. (2017, November 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 02:43, November 4, 2017, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_Excel&oldid=808192493.