Spider-Man, Or The Fly?

 

When discussing hybrid Project Management systems (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for September), I think it’s very important that we be extra careful about what two PM approaches we’re combining into one. Consider two movies portraying human hybrids, Spider-Man (2002), and The Fly (1986). The former features teenager Peter Parker having his DNA altered by the bite of a genetically-modified spider, making Peter much stronger, more agile, and able to ascend walls with ease. With these powers Peter becomes a superhero, saving people from crimes, certain-death collisions or falls, and, naturally, supervillains.

Conversely, scientist Seth Brundle has his genetic code altered when he tests his teleportation device on himself, and a housefly happens to be in the transmitting chamber as Brundle is translated into energy. When he is re-constituted in the receiving chamber, he has housefly DNA encoded into all of his cells, which causes him to gradually transform into a nightmarish human/housefly hybrid and land the movie about him in the Science Fiction/Horror genre.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

Back in the first half of the 20^th Century, when what we now know as Project Management was first gaining attention as Product Management, there was no talk of “hybrid” anything (at least not that I could find). You simply had a manager who was in charge of a specific product, and oversaw its life-cycle, from development through to delivery onto store shelves. Freed from the Asset Management aspects of the other managers’ responsibilities (fuel costs of the plant, promotion/demotion decisions for the staff, etc.), these Product Managers began to realize a need for different types of information streams, as in which tasks had to be completed prior to others starting (Critical Path Methodology), and, at the current rate of performance, how much would a given production run cost (Earned Value).

The term “hybrid management system” did not appear in the literature in the early days of the Cost/Schedule Control System Criterion, or C/SCSC, the (United States) Department of Defense guidelines for how their contractors should perform cost and schedule performance measurement on major projects. From my review of the literature (and enduring the word salad definitions – how, exactly, does one “recycle” a management structure?) the term “hybrid management” is almost exclusively confined to Information Technology (IT) projects and Quality programs, the latter having the characteristic of demonstrating attempts at complying with quality management standards without using excessively robust or expensive tools and processes. Each of these has profound PM implications. Let’s start with IT.

Have These Guys Ever Even Watched Australian Rules Football?

Agile/Scrum PM came about to address the highly fluid and dynamic nature of Scope Management within IT projects. The traditional aspects of change control, of setting up a Baseline Change Control Board, establishing cost and schedule change control thresholds, scheduling regular meetings of the BCCB and processing Baseline Change Proposals – all of these practices were far too moribund and constricting for a change that had to be either rejected or accepted and implemented within hours, if not minutes of its inception. Since IT projects are notorious for coming in late and over budget, the entire codex of PM couldn’t be abandoned, so some form of hybrid was clearly appropriate. By replacing the traditional scope management practices with “sprints,” which combined to form “epics,” which could be managed with far more latitude than other types of management approaches, a true hybrid management approach was born. The progress of the development of Agile/Scrum Project Management has to be considered a success, if due to nothing else than its widespread acceptance and utilization.

Conversely, the attempts at developing a hybrid Quality Management approach appear to have been uneven, at best. In previous posts I have recited the old business axiom of “Quality, affordability, availability: pick any two.” The Quality Managers seem to either be unaware of this truism, or reject it, since an improvement in quality of any product or service is usually presented as an indisputably desirable goal. For those organizations whose parameters of availability and affordability are already set, an improvement in quality, with its concurrent subtraction from the other two characteristics, is simply not an option. So, how do you get the Six Sigma guys to give you a break? Lay claim to doing all that quality stuff, just not at the level they want it! Hence, a “hybrid” management system is born, but, in this case, there is a far greater likelihood that whatever emerges from the teleporter receiving module is going to give first-year MBA candidates bad dreams rather than something that verifiably improves quality.

So, what’s the litmus test for which kind of hybrid management scheme introduces superheroic powers to its practitioners, and which kind translates them into six-foot-four biped insects? It is this: if the hybrid approach actually helps deliver project scope on-time, on-budget, it’s good, even if it appears to interfere with the projects’ ability to recreate an audit trail. If the hybrid approach is designed to keep Processors at bay, it’s monstrous.

Since we’re doing management science here, keep in mind that it is entirely possible – even probable – that we have our own version of the “mad scientist” archetype. And these aren’t plotting to make themselves super-strong by altering DNA sequences. They’re dreaming up hybrid management schemes. Let’s make sure the movie version doesn’t land in the Science Fiction/Horror genre.