The Dark Side Of The PM Force

 

“It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”[i]

--Alan Shepard (American astronaut)

We business writers usually don’t like discussing it, but it’s an ubiquitous factor in what Project Managers do: our contracts are, generally speaking, awarded on the basis of who had the lowest plausible bid at the end of the Request for Proposal cycle, even if the project being contracted out involves safety-critical work. Recall my oft-repeated business model axiom—Affordability, Availability, Quality: pick any two. With the lowest-bidder model in place, one of these factors – Affordability – has already been established. Since virtually all projects have a contractually mandated start date, Availability has also been spoken for, leaving Quality as the de facto element receiving the proverbial short straw. This being the case, the PM game has been largely set up to encourage those putting together the best and final offer (BAFO) package to interpret the project’s scope in a minimalist fashion, and create the cost and schedule estimates around that. What happens if the PM finds herself in the middle of the awarded project, and the customer isn’t okay with such a minimalist interpretation? This dichotomy is the source of no small amount of conflict in the most common PM business model, and I intend to take a peek behind its curtain.

Way back when I was taking Psych 101 and 102, my particular University’s Psychology Department was dominated by Behaviorists, a school of thought attributed to the early works of B.F. Skinner. All of the classes I took from this department were taught by Behaviorists, and they absolutely loved to tell the following story on the first day of class.

Some unnamed early-adopter of Behaviorism would find himself in a class taught by a different school of thought (usually Freudians), but with a sizable percentage of the students who were also Behaviorists. Prior to the second class, these got together in the Student Union Building, and agreed to an experiment: each time the Freudian instructor walked towards the door/hallway side of the classroom, the students would pretend to lose interest, break eye contact, feign daydreaming, doodle, etc. However, whenever the instructor was on the windows side of the classroom, they would pay rapt attention to him, writing down whatever he said, smiling and maintaining eye contact. The result, it was said, was that this instructor planted himself on the windows side of the room within fifteen minutes of the beginning of the session, and did not leave. Reconvening at the SUB afterwards, they schemed to see how far they could take their little experiment. To hear their telling, by the end of the term this unfortunate instructor was exclusively teaching from the windows side of the classroom, assuming a specific posture, tone of voice, and affecting a style of speech that was otherwise entirely foreign to him.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

I would argue that, in a sense, the population of clients that employs the lowest-bidder strategy in selecting their contractors have established a business model that’s at least somewhat analogous to the students in the story above. Contractors engaged in a bidding contest against others will avoid proposing the high-quality solution to fulfilling the proffered scope, since that approach is almost guaranteed to be a more expensive option. In this model, contractors are rewarded with wins for offering Affordability and Availability, while making a minimal number of quantifiable claims in the Quality arena. Equally as important, the same population of contractors putting in bids are punished with losses for taking any other approach. Even first-year graduate school students at a State University given to telling tall tales on the efficacy of a favored psychology school of thought can predict the outcome of long-term engagement in this particular business model, and it’s not good for the Quality crowd.

Such a structure puts pressure on the PMs to complete the existing scope as economically as possible as they target the minimally-acceptable standard. It’s the twin of another highly damaging Project Management pathology, Scope Creep, except, rather than having the project absorb informally-changed scope with no change to the budget, the Project Team is rewarded for producing the most basic-while-acceptable output, which drives the Quality aficionados crazy. The depiction of this condition is shown in the Game Theorists’ favorite tool, the payoff grid, so:

Just as experienced PMs will be on the lookout for the conditions common to Scenario A, seasoned project sponsors will be wary for hints that Scenario D is unfolding. To be fair, the people I’m talking about here didn’t come to behave in this manner out of a deceitful nature, a desire to engage in subterfuge, or because they thought it would be really cool to join the Dark Side of the PM Force.

Whether they know it nor not, the prevalent business model trained them to act this way.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/alan-shepard-quotes on November 8, 2020, 19”42 MST.