The Immortal Words Of Miss Teschmacher

 

In the movie Superman (1978), Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) has deduced that a fragment of the exploded planet Krypton has arrived on Earth in the form of a meteorite that landed in Addis Ababa. One of his two assistants, Eve Teshmacher (Valerie Perrine), has the following line: “I know I'm gonna get rapped in the mouth for this, but... So what?” Lex goes on to explain that the meteorite must have the same “specific radiation” as the doomed Krypton, and is therefore lethal to Superman, a conclusion which is somewhat unintuitive to those unfamiliar with the Superman canon. Due to the power of movie magic, however, it is both accurate and relevant (and timely, given the super-caper that Lex is planning at the moment).

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

In this blog I would like to combine two themes I address on something of a regular basis, to wit:

• The PM world can be divided into two camps: Processors, who don’t really care about projects being brought in on-time, on-budget, but care a great deal about people following “proper” procedures; and Performers, who don’t really care about process, but just want to bring their projects in on-time, on-budget.
• Of the thousands and thousands of PM-based software packages out there, the ultimate test of their worth has to do with their ability to deliver information that’s (1) accurate, (2) timely, and (3) relevant. Failure on any of these points renders the whole system invalid, and, therefore, worthless.

Now, there are several organizations/associations that crank out what they perceive as usable insight in documents – procedures, directives, implementation guidance, whatever – but this so-called guidance also must answer to the standards for PM-oriented software. For example, I’m aware of a certain guidance document that demands that an ongoing comparison be made between a project’s Basis of Estimate (BoE) and the actual costs incurred, at the line-item level. This guidance document was produced by a group that claims many supposedly high-level PM professionals in its ranks, and they pretty much expect to be taken seriously. Sadly, I can’t.

One of the very first rules that Project Controls Specialists (and, one would hope, Project Managers) learn is that comparing budgets to actual costs is useless. I would go one step further and say that it’s often misleading. Consider my favorite example, one that I use when teaching basic PM.

You’re the manager of a two-month-long project to produce 2,000 widgets, with a budget of $2000 (USD). You time-phase your budget to $1000 in Month 1, and $1000 in Month 2. At the end of Month 1, your accountant comes to you and says your have spent $1100. How are you doing?

If you said “I know I’m gonna get rapped in the mouth for this, but if I don’t know how many widgets I made, why is the amount I’ve spent relevant?” go to the head of the class. The seemingly intuitive conclusion that something has gone wrong because you’ve spent $100 more than planned, is rendered completely irrelevant if you have, in fact, made, say, 1300 widgets. In basic Earned Value parlance, you are not only not in bad shape, you are actually performing well ahead, enjoying a 18% positive cost variance, as well as a 30% positive schedule variance. If you had mistakenly presumed that spending $100 more than budget was a bad thing, you would have blundered in any action taken based on that so-called analysis. And yet, here’s an organization pushing the idea that such an analysis produces usable PM information simply because it’s happening at a more granular level of detail. Guys, it’s irrelevant! And, by pushing such an assertion, it kind of makes your organizations look, well…

Who’s Behind This Massive Criminal Conspiracy?

So, who, exactly, is pushing this narrative? I seriously doubt their numbers include a significant population of Performers. Performers don’t think that way. It has to be the Processors, who churn out this stuff blithely unaware of any duty they have to relevancy, nor of the fact that not even movie magic can make the budgets versus actuals analysis reliable or insightful. As long as they can push out “guidance” that compels a certain analytical behavior, they’re happy as clams, regardless of whether or not such analysis yields any usable management information. It’s almost as if they were assigning tests to the PM world, to see if they can make its adherents accept the predicate that such useless analysis must be performed in order to lay claim to “doing” legitimate Project Management. Naturally, to call into question the basis of their assertions, much less their motives, is to incur their wrath, and invite being rapped in the mouth.

But I’ll take that chance, because much as I would hate to see California fall into the Pacific Ocean due to nuclear weapon-induced cataclysmic earthquakes, that can only happen with large doses of movie magic. Conversely, furthering the idea that comparing budgets to actuals is a key aspect of legitimate Project Management doesn’t require any movie magic at all. It just needs PM’s current practitioners to become fearful of these criminal masterminds Processor-style PMs