The Seminar Attendee’s Scoring Guide

 

As Project Management seminar season approaches I think it’s a good idea to be able to readily identify which paper presentations are worth attending, and which are a complete waste of time. Of course, most people make this type of decision based on the presentation’s title and the descriptive blurb that accompanies it in the schedule. If that’s not enough, extra clues about a particular session’s efficacy may be gleaned from the presenter’s short biography. However, I’ve been fooled into wasting between an hour and an hour and a half attending presentations that were basically self-aggrandizing theater, time that would have (literally) been better spent at the beach or pool – or, in some cases, taking a nap. In retrospect, I’ve come to the realization that the waste-of-time sessions had some things in common. So, to prepare my readers for the upcoming seminar season, and with a hat tip to John Baez’s Crackpot Index, I’m going to provide a quick-and-easy checklist that will help score the presentations, based on the materials provided when you check in/register for the seminar, or, if necessary, the content of the presentation within its first ten minutes.

The pathology that afflicts many of these seminars is intertwined with something about which I’ve been complaining long and loud, and that’s the lack of actual science in management science. The development of an hypothesis, advancing it towards theory, and disciplined collection of data or the exact staging of an experiment to either prove the theory or disprove the null hypothesis, peer review of the findings, all leading up to a Project Management paper presentation at one of these get-togethers is distressingly rare. Instead, we get inundated with, broadly speaking, three different types of material:

1. Ideas about how risk/quality/communication (or other trendy type) management should be performed, supported by virtually nothing more than speculation or anecdotal evidence.
2. The “Look What We Did On Our Gee-Whiz Project!” presentation, where no real causality analysis goes in to determining how (or even if) the particular project was successful.
3. The bazillionth eat-your-peas-style covering the basics of or scolding about how everyone ought to be doing Critical Path, Earned Value, or any other aspect of traditional PM.

If you can attend a session that avoids these categories, it’s likely to be worth your while. However, for the remainder, which may or may not belong to one of these categories and is, therefore, possibly a waste of time, use the following scoring to quickly determine the sessions’ worthiness of your attention.

Start with -100 points, then:

1. For every assertion without hard backup data that we’re supposed to accept simply because of the authors’:
   1. PMP® certification (add 10 points)
   2. Other PMI® certification (add 20 points)
   3. Other, non-PMI® certification (add 40 points)
   4. Affiliation with PMI® (add 50 points)
   5. Affiliation with another PM-centered professional organization (add 60 points)
2. Every time the paper presenter mentions his college degrees, add another 50 points.
3. Add 25 points for each piece of anecdotal evidence that “supports” the paper’s thesis.
4. Add 100 points if the paper doesn’t have a clearly articulatable thesis.
   1. Add 200 points if the presenter doesn’t know that the presented paper ought to have a clearly articulatable thesis.
5. If the presenter mentions the project-owning organization’s name as a point of reference, don’t add any points. However, if he keeps referencing it as if the name of the organization itself lends credence to his main assertions, add 20 points for the academic infraction, and 100 points because this is simply very irksome.
   1. Add an additional 100 points if this organization happens to be The Pentagon or a well-known aerospace company.
6. Any statistical inference based on fewer than 50 data points, add 25 eval points,
   1. …unless the inference is based on fewer than five observations, in which case add 500 points.
7. Any reference to a deceased person who “almost certainly would have agreed” with the author’s conclusions adds an automatic 200 points,
   1. …especially if the author claimed to have known the person being referenced, and
   2. … another 500 points if the deceased person reference didn’t publish any findings in a peer-reviewed journal, but just happened to be well-known.

If you can make these determinations without actually stepping foot in the hotel ballroom/conference center meeting room, and a full slate of sessions’ scores remain in negative territory, then you’re in great shape. However, if many are in positive score territory, then you can rank them from smallest to largest to maximize the odds that you won’t be wasting your time. Keep in mind that it’s entirely possible that a whole seminar is being put on by a bunch of people who will lean towards flattering themselves, with precious little true management science being performed. If this happens, it’s not really the presenters’ fault – it’s the fault of the committee scoring the original paper proposals.

Then there are those times where you are actually in the beginning of the presentation when the score suddenly moves from sub-zero to positive territory. When this happens, you should have a measured response, based on the following table.

While some of the Recommended Response tactics may seem extreme, consider that they are most likely in response to expertise signalers whose only true objective is to make themselves look better among their peers, at the expense of wasting your time. With that in mind, I would argue that these tactics are fairly benign!