Leaving Behind a Legacy of Failure?

 

As newly-minted PMPs® come into the Project Management arena, on fire to bring the ideas that their business school professors told them represented authentic project management, even though those very professors haven’t had to beg reluctant Control Account Managers for a status pull since the second Reagan administration (if ever), we more experienced PMs tend to roll our eyes, sigh a portion of patience, and try to channel their energies towards real-world project solutions. How do we do that, exactly? Well, we mentor them, assign them the task of begging status from reluctant CAMs, teach them to drive Critical Path and Earned Value Method software packages, invite them to Change Control Board meetings and project reviews, etc., etc. But there’s something else we do that, I believe, leaves behind an invalid, backward approach to Project Management, and does so in a way that’s singularly hard to avoid.

Yes to my regular readers who are asking themselves at this point “Is this another anti-guidance/procedure rant?” But this time I have something a bit more solid than the garden-variety frustration with the guidance-generating organizations’ overly proscriptive publications.

Procedures Eliminate Options

From the last two blogs, I have made the point that probably the most significant derivative of the Triple Constraint, or Iron Triangle, is the axiom “Quality, availability, affordability: pick any two.” I pointed out last week that, since most government projects are awarded to the lowest bidder, the option for obtaining an end-result that is both high quality and available soon has been taken off the table. The only options left are (1) low quality delivered on-schedule, or (2) high quality, waaayyyy late, either of which is sure to infuriate some set of stakeholders.

The guidance-generating organizations have done something similar, just against another leg of the Triple Constraint. It’s been my experience that these guidance authors, who recognize each other as “experts,” get into the ballrooms of the hotels where their meetings are held, and basically get into expertise-signaling contests, with the level of perceived proficiency being assigned by the number of mostly speculation-driven scenarios where traditional Project Management Information Systems might, just might, deliver an artificial variance. One never hears how a given experiment was set up, or how real-world data was collected in such a manner as to eliminate bias in conclusions or analysis. It makes Kabuki Theater look like King Lear.

As they amp up the “requirements” for setting up and running cost and schedule performance information systems, they sincerely believe that their work will result in an improved or more mature capability in such systems. But it doesn’t, and I know why.

In most cases, what these organization churn out represents invalid strategies to improve PM in general, and performance measuring information systems in particular. For example, one of the Implementation Guides insists that comparing the Basis of Estimate (BOE), on a line-item level, to that Control Account’s actuals, also at the line-item level, represents some form of advanced Earned Value Management capability. It does not. Indeed, the very raison d’etre of EVM stems from the uselessness of comparing budgets to actuals, level of granularity notwithstanding. But that didn’t stop this particular organization from publishing this deviation from legitimate management science.

But What If They’re Right?

For the sake of argument, let’s say that these guidance documents, either from outside organizations or from within your own company, are full of valid, insightful rules, and all the experienced and insightful managers think it’s just swell. Given such a scenario, what could go wrong?

Plenty.

Referring back to the Triple Constraint, this code of valid, insightful rules will inevitably decide a priori one of the aspects of your organization’s PM implementation strategy. It will mandate a certain level of quality rigor, meaning that anyone who uses such guidance has just been deprived of some latitude when it comes to advancing capability maturity. Your “quality” has to be at level X. That means that it will either be expensive, or it won’t be available in a timely manner, perhaps not until way past the time the project should have had a performance measurement baseline and regular reports generated. Since the projects involved can’t be made to wait, that means…

Yeah, that the “expertise” of these guidance-writers is now in more demand, meaning that they should be paid more for (ironically) less flexibility in delivering the products they promote. It’s all very much outside the manner that results from real management science research should be published, in my opinion.

What Will They Do? What Would You Do?

So, as the next generation of Project Managers enters the workplace, and seek their own ways of advancing PM capability, any general guidance that tries to decide for them which two aspects of the Iron Triangle they must accomplish in their specific circumstances won’t help anything. On the contrary, such guidance only limits the nextgen’s latitude of action, and in a way that’s certainly more fatal to successful project completion than any anomalies coming from the Critical Path or Earned Value analysis. This leaves our newbies with one of two options: obey these guidance documents to the letter, and hope for the best; or else respect these guidance documents as they see fit, and be prepared to abandon certain strictures when the situation calls for it. Which set of decision-makers will have the better odds of consistently bringing in their projects on-time, on-budget?

My money is on the latter.