How Far Away Are We From PM Robots?

 

As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, much of the Project Management codex describes techniques and strategies that have been tested many times and found to be effective in circumstances both common and rare. Of course, many decisions facing PMs are not specifically addressed in this codex – otherwise, a robot (perhaps resembling the B-9 robot from the original Lost in Space television series) could be programmed with the PMBOK Guide®, (we would all be out of a job) with verbiage including:

• “Placing Organizational Breakdown Structure elements in a Work Breakdown Structure does not compute.”
• “By rejecting Earned Value analysis techniques, you are a quack.”
• “Warning, warning! Spending budget on a risk analysis is counterproductive!”
• …and the ultimate, “Danger, Will Robinson! The accountants are attempting to generate the cost performance reports based exclusively on data from the general ledger!”

Fortunately for we PM practitioners, the actual performance of the PM function can only be reduced to a series of canned strategies on a highly abstract and uneven basis – hence the need for creativity (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for February), often in large doses, in order to bring in our projects on-time, on-budget, on a consistent basis.

I would like to take a moment to look at “creativity” from the perspective of a PMBOK Guide® --fluent robot. In Game Theory there are whole series of canned strategies available for use in various scenarios, or games, viewed as analogous to real-life situations. Whenever the situations varied significantly from their recommended strategies, though, the practice of alternating the use of different canned techniques is known as a “mixed strategy.”

Referring back to that bedrock of Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, the use of mixed strategies makes computing the equilibrium very difficult. Since it’s been awhile since I’ve defined it, here’s one definition, from Dictionary.com:

(in economics and game theory) a stable state of a system involving the interaction of different participants, in which no participant can gain by a unilateral change of strategy if the strategies of the others remain unchanged.[i]

Ah, but that’s the rub with mixed strategies, isn’t it? If the PM were to find herself in a project that presented as a “stable state,” (highly unlikely, but let’s continue with this), but did not adhere to one given strategy, then Thomas Nash himself proved (mathematically) that there would be at least one Nash Equilibrium. More specifically, “Nash proved that if we allow mixed strategies (where a pure strategy is chosen at random, subject to some fixed probability), then every game with a finite number of players in which each player can choose from finitely many pure strategies has at least one Nash equilibrium.”[ii] The other players could not know for certain beforehand if changing their existing strategies would result in a superior payoff, or not. Now let’s throw in the fact that, with extremely rare exceptions, no projects will present in stable states. Even the most cookie-cutter of efforts, performed over and over, will be subject to forces and circumstances that all but eliminate the very notion of a completely repeatable environment. Also consider that the strategies of not just the members of the Project Team, but members of the organization outside the Project Team, members of competitors’ organizations, and just plain random players who become involved for a multitude of reasons ranging from geographic proximity to owning shares in vendors’ companies – all of these people’s strategies come in to play, and cannot possibly be quantified, much less compared on an objective basis. And make no mistake – as Metcalf’s Law (a.k.a. “The Butterfly Effect”) makes clear, very small perturbations in some (or even one) nodes of a complex network can have a cascading, cataclysmic impact on a large number of nodes on far-flung aspects of that network. In other words, that one, lowly person who’s involved in your project simply due to geographic proximity? If he happens to be the chairperson of the Neighborhood Association that brushes up against your project’s job site, things could get dicey, and fast.

What should become clear from such an analysis is that creativity is arguably the essential element of Project Management. I’m not discounting the value of the codex of PM research – far from it. Instead, I’m arguing that we, as PM practitioners, have a very long way to go before we can program our robots to fill in for us.

Unless, of course, like the B9 robot from Lost in Space, there’s actually a person inside of it, and that person is very creative.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=nash+equilibrium on February 15, 2020, 21:52 MST.

[ii] Wikipedia contributors. (2020, February 9). Nash equilibrium. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:03, February 17, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nash_equilibrium&oldid=939985159