Your Organization’s Very Own How-Hard-Is-Program-Management Scorecard!

 

In last week’s blog I asserted that the supply and demand curves for Program Management are cyclical, and the sine wave-shaped curve of the demand side led the supply version. By necessity I wrote in generalities – this week I’d like to get a little more specific. Since I’ve been convinced by Douglas W. Hubbard’s excellent book The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), that the use of ordinal scales in scoring, well, pretty much anything in business analysis space, renders the ensuing analysis speculative to the point of uselessness, my scoring will be Boolean. Well, to an extent: the scorecards will be yes/no questions, but the points awarded will be based on my experience. This being the case, feel free to tinker with the points awarded/subtracted, with one caveat: change the points prior to filling out the scorecard for your particular organization. Otherwise, you’re cheating the same way the risk managers do every time they perform their “analyses.”

Okay, let’s start with the demand side.

Next up is the supply side. This scorecard might be a bit more difficult to answer honestly, so take a deep breath before you start. (Breathe in, breathe out.) Ready?

Here’s the simple part. Compare the scores. If the level of demand is higher than the total score of the supply difficulty, you, the Program Manager, have a real shot at establishing an organization-wide center of excellence, if you play your cards right.

If, on the other hand, your supply score is higher than your demand one, then some potentially painful evaluation is in order. It’s next to impossible to influence the demand curve – organizations will come to recognize the need for better and more advanced PM techniques at the same glacial pace that teenagers come to recognize that the High School disasters they experience will have virtually nothing at all to do with their adult lives. But you can do something about the supply curve. Show flexibility. Recognize that these PMs have a difficult job in front of them, and complying with your Program Management expectations does not present as attractive to them. Sell your analysis techniques (the valid ones, anyway) on the merits, rather than resort to scolding, and they will respect that.

But, most of all, do not show them this scorecard. If you do, the naysayers will know how we make Program Management initiatives harder for ourselves, and will engage those tactics (“Shouldn’t we have a far more proscriptive set of procedures?”).