Attack of the Fake Superheroes

 

The Girl In My Life was an American television show that ran in the 1973-1974 season. It featured a person whose life had been bettered by a specific woman, who was in attendance in the audience and would join this person on the stage and receive a gift package. I was pretty young when this show aired on ABC, but the one episode I saw made quite an impression on me. It featured a fellow who came out on the stage to announce – I swear I’m not making this up – his status as a superhero, and he was dressed for the part. He appeared to be wearing tights and a cape, with some odd symbol on the middle of the costume’s chest area. The thing was, though, that he had essentially the same body build as (American actor) Jack Black – pudgy, and not very muscular at all. But he was all-in to the part: he announced his superhero name, enthusiastically asserting that his mission was to fight crime and protect the innocent, complete with little hops and uppercuts thrown at imaginary foes. In my estimation, had he actually encountered a hardened street criminal his life expectancy could probably be measured in nanoseconds.

Then came the really funny part: he announced the name of The Girl In His Life, confidently claiming that he could have never attained his superhero status if not for the support he received from her. The announcer calls this poor woman up on stage to ask her a few questions prior to actually presenting her with the modest gift package. I have to admit she held up quite well, considering the only genuine superpower being exhibited was her ability to not die of embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

In the ongoing discussion of hybrid management systems, how to evaluate them to know which are useful and which are probably bogus, I’m struck by how many assumptions are blithely accepted as true without any real evaluation against basic standards of management science. This is particularly ominous because of the prevalence of management systems (or information streams) that grossly over-sell their efficacy. Just as one does not become a superhero by putting on spandex, a management information system does not become valid by making a claim to “hybrid” status, or pushing out a piece of information with a certain name or title.

Specifically, our friends the accountants are really good at extracting from the general ledger the information asset managers need to perform their duties. I’m not arguing to the contrary. However, they fail utterly when they make forays into Project Management space, which they tend to do on a regular basis. Here’s a couple of incontrovertible facts: comparing budgets to actual costs does not generate a cost variance, and extrapolating spend rates and projecting them forward does not create an accurate or reliable Estimate At Completion (EAC). Adding insult to injury is the notion that the previous two assertions become false if only the “analysis” is performed at greater and greater levels of detail, or granularity. I’m sorry, but that’s just dopey. And yet, the practice of ascertaining cost performance based on this very comparison is so widespread that I’m fairly confident that it has attained near-universal acceptance.

Then we have another one of my favorite targets, the risk managers. Here are the two incontrovertible facts I would love for them to recognize: Gaussian curves can’t be used to predict the future (being willing to place a bet on the outcome of future events, which is what insurance providers do, is not the same as reliably predicting what’s going to happen to a given project), and stochastic ranges based on ordinal scales represent utterly useless pieces of (dis) information. Some management writers (with whom I am entirely in agreement) have gone further, arguing that such analysis is worse than useless, in that it is often genuinely misleading.[i] In the risk managers’ and accountants’ cases, they attempt to generate what are admittedly extremely valuable information streams from systems that simply can’t support them. What they end up sending up the reporting chain is the equivalent of corpulent delusional non-combatants inserting themselves into environments where they not only do not belong, but their presence is comically inappropriate.

Ah, but they have those wonderful superhero names titles, such as an estimate that’s in the “80% confidence interval,” or the “time-phased Estimate to Complete” (Hey! I wonder if that fellow from The Girl In My Life had a superhero name of “80% Confidence Interval Man”!). The reality is something very different when it comes to PMs attempting to acquire a greater amount of relevant management information, the data they’ll need to increase the odds of bringing in their projects on-time, on-budget. Standing in the epistemological breach against the monstrous spikey-mawed opponent of ignorance, the last thing they need is for a Jack Black-esque character, clad in spandex, to jump in and assure them of success.

Even if they do receive a modest prize package from the risk managers and accountants at the end.

[i]Hubbard, Douglas W., The Failure of Risk Management, Wiley and Sons,2009.