Project Management: Art Or Science?

 

During my recent vacation, I was in a large Museum of Art located on a major University’s campus. More than one of the pieces on display was, essentially, a blank canvas. When I read its description plate, the verbiage began “While this may appear to be merely a blank canvas, it is actually…”

That’s when I stopped reading. It was a blank canvas, and no fifty-word assemblage on a brass plate was going to convince me otherwise. But there it was, hanging in a prominent place in an otherwise reputable gallery. I’m sure my experience is not unique – what is currently praised as art would not have passed for practical jokes 500 years ago (“Hey, guys, did you see that blank canvas Rembrandt revealed the other day? Isn’t he a gas?”).

But that’s the thing with art – it’s virtually impossible to define it in such a way as to encompass all that claims to belong to it, kind of like listening to risk analysts attempt to define what all is involved in risk management.

Science, on the other hand, is easy to clearly define. It’s the method by which theories are overturned or affirmed by repeatable, observable phenomena, preferably via reproducible experiments in a laboratory setting. Exhibit A has to be a piece (get it?) that award-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times on the topic of when the stock markets would recover from the 2016 United States Presidential election, saying “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”[i]

Oooops. I guess that wasn’t a very good example of successful Management Science based on projections stemming from verified theory (or even a half-baked guess), since in the 12 months following the 2016 election the markets added 35% to their value. Indeed, if we cut Mr. Krugman a bit of slack, and, by “never recovering” he meant a 5% retreat that stayed there, then his “never” scenario was off by a whopping 40 points within a year of his analysis. In contrast, the old PM device of predicting the future, of calculating the Estimate at Completion by dividing the Cost Performance Index (CPI) into the Budget at Completion (BAC), has been shown to be accurate to within 10 points. In other words, the lowliest Project Controls analyst is wayyy better at predicting the future than award-winning economists, which, I suppose, points to the vastly more truly scientific nature of PM over modern economics.

While Mr. Krugman’s analysis probably should not be used to make financial decisions, it is an excellent example of the kind of silliness that passes for usable Management Science, and this silliness isn’t confined to the New York Times. It’s all around us, and Project Management isn’t exempt. But, as in economics, it’s possible to push out volumes of documents and guidance that has no basis in actual scientific findings and still receive accolades from the community at large. Ah, but that’s where the “art” aspect of PM comes in. Think of Project Management as the generator of an information stream, one that feeds basic business needs (cost and schedule performance), but also fuels irrelevant or extraneous curiosities (the difference in contingency budget dollars between the 80% and 90% confidence intervals). Like art, those who imbibe in this information stream will develop their preferences for the kinds of data they believe to be crucial, must-have elements, and those they can do without. And all that’s okay by me. It’s only when third-party “experts” weigh in that the silliness proliferates.

Let’s go back to the art museum. There were several rooms in the galleries that featured works that would inspire people walking into that particular room to stop and exclaim how beautiful was the piece they were observing. I hung around the blank canvas room for a few minutes to conduct my own little survey. Nobody – nobody ­­– commented on how lovely the blank canvases were. They were, at best, curiosities. People wondered aloud how they came to be considered works of art in the first place. So, why were they there? I believe it's because a third party – neither the artist nor a person who saw the work and thought “Wow! This belongs in our museum!” – thought that paying museum customers ought to think of the work as, well, art.

Which returns us to the art of Project Management. When actual PMs select the information products they prefer to increase their odds of bringing in their projects on-time, on-budget, they communicate to the community at large which information streams are essential, and which are extraneous. It’s when third parties, those who do not pay for nor generate the information streams themselves, nor are they on the hook for completing work successfully, weigh in to inform everybody what they ought to use that quackery proliferates.

Put another way, I wonder if risk managers have framed blank canvases hanging on the walls of their homes.

[i] Krugman, Paul, “The Economic Fallout,” retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/paul-krugman-the-economic-fallout on August 20, 2018, 14:42 MDT.