The Whippersnappers’ Main Deficiency: They Don’t Recognize When They’re Standing Next To A Flying Monkey

 

In last weeks’ blog I discussed one of the advantages that PM’s new practitioners (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for January) have, that of being more likely to recognize a simple, direct solution to a complex problem should one be available, analogous to the Scarecrow realizing he can use the Tin Woodman’s axe to discombobulate the Wicked Witch’s castle guards in The Wizard of Oz (1939). But there are two sides to every coin, and the flip side of this one represents a real disadvantage to the new practitioner: They tend to believe the other members of their organization are automatically on their side.

A lot of the material presented in PM coursework, PMP® preparation classes, and PM-themed seminars can be rather sterile. Yes, yes, I know I’ve been advocating for a return to more, well, science-based analysis here in the management science arena, but I also freely admit that there’s a side to what Project Management practitioners do that defies quantification, let alone valid, logical analysis. And the quicker the new practitioner comes to a working knowledge of these more subjective factors, the better off they (and their project teams) will be.

Of course, not all PM curriculum are excessively or unrealistically sterile. Exhibit A is the use of Michael Maccoby’s excellent book The Gamesman[i] , which I have referenced in this blog before. Maccoby posits four archetypal behavior patterns among workers, so:

• The Craftsman is interested in his output and its quality, but not so much for whom he works.
• The Company Man tends to assume the persona of the macro organization.
• The Jungle Fighter gets ahead through deceit and calumny, and
• The Gamesman tends to see his pay and benefits not as food on the table or a roof over his head, but as tokens in some grand game. Because of this, he tends to have an advanced mastery of the “rules” of this “game,” and is more willing to take risks.

One of my main takeaways from Dr. Maccoby’s work as it applies to the PM world specifically is the working assumption that, in project teams of any significant size, there is going to be at least one Jungle Fighter. The new project team leader can count on it. The implications here include:

• At least one of your team members will be engaging in office politics, usually egregiously so. My personal definition of office politics includes those activities that are designed to help the practitioners personally, but at the expense of the team or organization. The primary tactic here involves harming (or even destroying) the meritocracy elements of the group, and substituting a structure that benefits the Jungle Fighter specifically.
• If this approach to satisfying ambition is allowed to succeed, the Company Men archetypes will see it, and tend to emulate it, given the fact that this type tends to assume the persona of the group anyway.
• Once a sizable percentage of the project team recognizes that merit is not the exclusive – or even primary – vehicle for advancement, the odds of that project team realizing its objective on-time, on-budget decreases significantly.

Another landmine that I’ve encountered multiple times in real-life but have never seen addressed in PM literature or paper presentations has to do with the business model pathologies stemming from the teaching of the asset managers’ narrative, that the point of all management is to “maximize shareholder wealth.” Even though this assertion is in sharp contrast to the Project Managers’ goal of completing the customer-defined scope on-time, on-budget, I have yet to read other writers’ work pointing this out. The real-world difficulties that come from this clash of visions is probably most often manifested the first time the new PM approaches her organization’s accounting department with the request to collect actual costs at the reporting level of her project’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The ability to collect actual costs based on the WBS is critical to the creation and maintenance of an Earned Value Management System, the only method for accurately gauging a project’s cost performance. Many of the accountants I’ve encountered, however, will be inclined to (a) maintain that cost performance is performed by comparing actual costs to budgets (which is false), and (b) collect actual costs based on the Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS), which is, after all, an ordering of the company’s assets. By pushing the asset management narrative, whether through a genuine belief that that’s the way things are done, or due to a more vindictive motive, the information streams that the PM needs in order to make informed decisions are eroded or even prevented outright.

I am, however, at a loss as to how to articulate these two new-PM-practitioner traps without sounding cynical or even paranoid. I mean, “Welcome to the company, new PM practitioner. You should know that at least one member of your project team is going to advance their agenda at the rest of your team’s expense, and the most powerful single group within the company, Finance and Accounting, has been educated to believe that the information you need to succeed is the wrong way of doing business” is hardly a rational-sounding introduction. I suppose I could be a bit more circumspect, as in “beware the enemies within your project team, and those external to the project team, but internal to the company,” but that version is so vague as to sound even more psychotic.

I think I’ll settle for a Wizard of Oz reference.

[i] Maccoby, Michael. The Gamesman: The New Corporate Leaders. New York: Simon and Schuster,1976