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One of the most noticeable changes in Project Management science over the years has to do with its lexicon. As I alluded to in last week’s blog, a project’s time-phased budget used to be known as its Budgeted Cost of Work Schedule, or BCWS, with the more seasoned practitioners simply referring to it as “S.” Similarly, the Earned Value figure was titled the Budgeted Cost of Work Performed, or BCWP, or, just “P,” and actual costs were the Actual Cost of Work Performed, ACWP, or “A.” This allowed the use of acronyms for acronyms, as in the line chart that showed the cumulative budget, earned value, and actual costs getting the nickname “SPA” chart. In fact, the terms cited above are still on the U.S. Government’s Project Management reports’ official templates.
But the “planned value” people came along and tossed all of that aside. I do not care to debate whether or not the changing terms were a good idea. I simply note that these terms have changed, even though the data items they refer to represent the essential building blocks of conducting cost and schedule performance assessment and reporting. Given the “advancements” in PM science over the past few decades, we’re swerving perilously close to a state of affairs where we curmudgeons aren’t speaking the same dialect, or even language, as those new to the profession. Similarly, the newbies might be having a hard time adjusting to their post-college, professional PM roles, since there’s a bunch of us seasoned PMs out here, trying to get our projects in on-time, on-budget, and tend to not care what academia has to say about the way we do our jobs. So, in the spirit of helping to bridge this generation gap, I submit to my readers the following interpretation table.
|
What Experienced PMs Say |
What They Mean |
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“They’ve got to take ownership.” |
Some manager or CAM is messing up on a consistent basis, but has successfully insulated themselves from the consequences of their mistakes. |
|
“Engage stakeholders.” |
We’re hoping that, if we talk to enough people who may be affected by this project, they won’t keep badgering us about their objections to it, or their expectations we’ll come in on-time, on-budget. |
|
“That risk was classified as an ‘unknown unknown.’” |
Nobody saw our difficulties coming – heck, they may even be due to poor performance – but you customers have to give us more money anyway. |
|
“Just slam a zero-float constraint into the status file.” |
We’re sick of being criticized for projecting a schedule delay. |
|
“Just pull all the zero-float constraints from the status file.” |
We’re sick of being criticized for having negative float. |
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“We’re conducting a bottoms-up Estimate at Completion.” |
We’re hoping that, if you have the impression that we’re pouring massive amounts of time and energy into a far more subjective method of coming up with an EAC, you won’t notice that the calculated version has been predicting an overrun for the past three reporting cycles in a row. |
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“The Quality Management department is preparing an Ishikawa Diagram to evaluate the root cause of the problem.” |
Everyone knows who messed up, but that person is so highly-placed that we need some hardish-looking data analysis before we can confront them. |
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“We don’t believe that this project needs even rudimentary Earned Value analysis.” |
We have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. |
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“Documentation is such a large part of this project that that organization needs its own WBS element.” |
We obviously have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. |
|
“The Chief Financial Officer is estimating a different EAC from yours, based on your spending rate.” |
Not only does the CFO have no idea what he’s doing, but he has more political/organizational clout than you. |
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“The accountants are refusing to collect actual costs at the reporting level of the project’s WBS.” |
Yeah, even the low-level accountants have more clout than the senior-level PM types. |
|
“We need you to write up the procedures covering Project Management.” |
We haven’t had any luck in advancing the maturity of the PM capability here, so we’re going to make you attempt it. If you write a document that actually advances PM, then everyone will hate it, and you will fail. If you write a document everyone agrees to, it will be so weak that it won’t advance anything, and we’ll claim you have failed. Short answer: you picked the wrong organization for Project Management excellence. |
If these so-called translations strike you as being overly cynical, allow me to make an appeal to inter-generational justice. If we had to put up with all of these things, then (a) why shouldn’t the next generation?, and (b) why should any of us believe that the next generation of accountants and PM-resistant engineers are any less sure of the veracity of all that pabulum they learned in academia? Remember how irksome we were when we were the “next generation” of Project Management?
But here’s our consolation: in twenty-five years or so, those who are now new to PM will be the ones looking at the incoming generation, and lamenting the ease with which they dispensed with terms like “planned value.” (Hey! Maybe then they’ll actually revert to BCWS!)
Posted on: March 12, 2018 09:30 PM |
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