My Book Report on the EVM Practice Standard

 

My Book Report on the Project Management Institute® Practice Standard for Earned Value Management

Exposure Working Draft, Preface, Chapters 1 & 2

Way back when I was firmly ensconced in the Project Management Institute’s (PMI®’s) stable of contributors and writers, I was asked to help write the Practice Standard for Earned Value Management. The team had some of the most brilliant minds in project management, including Gary Humphries and James Wrisley, and working with them was a blast. However, some of the others on the team made the overall project very frustrating for me, and, when I was asked to review the Exposure Working Draft’s Preface and first two chapters, it showed.

Many of the issues I took on would, I discovered later, manifest in other parts of PMI®’s codex, which made several parts of the PMBOK Guide® easy pickings for (Marlin Perkins alert!) my new book, Game Theory in Management (http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=1751&pageSubject=312&calcTitle=1&priorityone=1&title_id=11616&edition_id=15149). But when I swerved across my long-ago book report, I discovered it was illustrative of some of the reasons why PMI® has, in my opinion, abandoned the role of thought leader in the field of project management. So, without further ado, here’s my critique:

There was a comfortable finality in the way the old C/SCSC documents were written.  DoD 7000.02, 7000.10, and DOE 2250.1D laid down the law, and that was that.  One gets the impression that the authors of those works did not care in the least if the practitioners of Earned Value Management wanted to debate the categorization of EV measurement techniques or whether or not Project Management was “primarily a matter of” planning, doing, checking, blah, blah, blah.  They simply stated what they expected of anybody wanting to do project work for them and, whaddayaknow, it worked.

Now, flash forward about 35 years, and the PMI® is trying to assemble a Practice Standard for Earned Value.  After reviewing the Exposure Working Draft, I realized that this document suffers from an ironic malady – its scope was insufficiently defined.

I have been involved since the early days, when (a leader in the EV community) was put in charge of the original outline, and we all had input pertaining to this document’s purpose.  My suggestion was that this document be written so that an amateur EV practitioner could use it to set up a valid EVMS.  Others wanted it to promote their version of “best practices,” while still others wanted it to be so broadly applicable that third-world engineers could put every last word to maximum use.  Each of these agendas was pushed to the exclusion of the others so that, by the time the first meetings on actual verbiage were held, these meetings quickly degenerated into contentious bickering bonanzas.  I was the only author to have actually generated serious output, but this output was under enormous pressure to be watered down to the point that everybody agreed with it.  With all of the competing agendas, that was impossible.

(Another key leader of the project) then elected to employ a “ghost writer” to do the entire document, and the Exposure Working Draft is that document.  However, it’s plain to me that we still have not settled the question of purpose.  Why are we doing this?  The impression I get from reading the Exposure Working Draft is that we are still mired in the mode of writing to avoid the maximum amount of criticism and, if that’s the case, it is going to be impossible to produce a product that meets my expectations.

For example, the tone of the syntax is in instant MEGO flavor (P.J. O’Rourke coined that acronym, for “My Eyes Glaze Over”).  Most of the sentences are in the weak passive voice and, even when this document musters enough energy to strongly assert anything, it only rises to the level of eat-your-peas hectoring.  Paragraph 1.2 commits the error of “showing machinery,” which would get the author an “F” grade if it were part of a sophomore English paper at UNM.  But the “showing machinery” error does reveal an interesting influence:  the author(s) anticipated a tsunami of criticisms, and wrote in such a way as to attempt to internally self-justify.  That explains why you get such constructions as “Project Management is primarily a matter of …” all over the document (emphasis mine).

This brings us to the matter of conceptualization.  In the version that I wrote, I stated directly that Project Management and Asset Management were different, how they were different, and what tools applied to each.  I also stated rather directly that Project Control is to Project Management what bookkeeping is to accounting – in short, I furthered a highly structured conceptual model, and described what EV did within that framework.  No such framework appears in this Exposure Working Draft.  As such, EV appears to meander from being the answer to questions about project performance to being a resource management tool (it isn’t).  The lack of a structured conceptual design is best revealed by this author’s predilection for driving the story by asking rhetorical questions, and then asserting that EV is the answer to these questions.

I’ll stop being a curmudgeon long enough to address your original question, on which strategy to use in this process.  I like (the senior management team) way too much to just throw up my hands and say “It’s a bad document, and I’m sick of trying to make it better.”  On the other hand, I am getting tired of trying to weed out the personal agendas of some of the people who appear to have a lot of influence over this document.  At this point, I think we’d be lucky to get rid of some of the more egregious assertions in the Practice Standard (page 7, 3^rd paragraph – EVM does NOT “require” a basis of estimate with resources at the line-item level.  It can be performed with time-phased straight dollars) and replace them with the right answer.  If we get enough comments from the others on the team, and they all appear to head in the same direction, we could probably make a case for a little more broad modifications.

But I doubt we will ever be able to introduce the elements that would make this a truly usable document – and that’s a shame.