Let’s Not Be Un-Philanthropic

 

According to antonymsfor.com, antonyms for philanthropy (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for December) include:

husbandry, injury, frugality, conservation, economy, … brutality, self-seeking, selfishness, greediness, meanness, saving, …, scraping, malignity, illiberality, thrift, hurt, harshness, malevolence, unkindness, inhumanity, Skimping, Pinching, barbarity.[i]

When addressing this theme last December, I pointed out that Project Management was performing an extremely valuable service by its very nature, that of significantly improving organizations’ ability to deliver projects on-time, on-budget, and just generally advancing quality of life. But is there an aspect of PM as currently practiced that represents the opposite of philanthropy?

Recall my oft-cited axiom of Quality, Availability, Affordability: pick any two. Now consider what would have happened in, say, the restaurant industry if the self-appointed experts, via guidance documents, standards, and even regulation, mandated a certain level of “quality” for all places that served prepared food. That which we now know as the fast-food industry would have never been allowed to enter the marketplace, since its very foundation was and is based on the idea that they would offer affordable food, available relatively quickly. Prior to the opening of the first White Castle hamburger restaurant in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921,[ii] dining out at a restaurant was simply not done by a sizable percentage of the population, and a rarity for the majority of the rest. By the time McDonald’s had sold 15,000,000 burgers in 1955, [iii] that had all changed dramatically, and the restaurant industry would never be the same.

But imagine if an association of restauranteurs had gotten together and decided that, in order for any food service establishment to be valid, it would be required to provide:

• Tables with tablecloths,
• Attended by wait staff,
• With meals that had to be consumed on the premises,

…in order to stay in business.  No plastic eating ware, no customers placing their own orders, no leaving to eat your food, obviously no drive-through windows – and no $570 billion (USD, 2019 figures) industry.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

I would like to turn GTIM Nation’s attention to the impact that certain academic or professional organizations have on the Project Management Industry as a whole. Every time one of these guides comes out, strongly advocating some technical-sounding rule like a specific type of estimate underpinning the Cost Baseline, without any supporting evidence and causality established, I would argue it actually harms the PM world. These assertions are almost always made a priori, with zero evidence offered, or even asked for, as to their validity. Usually, all it takes for one of these rules to get incorporated into some form of official guidance is the unsupported assertion that, failing to prohibit the targeted practice, one or more of the following will inevitably ensue:

• Creation of false variances
• Deterioration of cost-schedule baseline integrity

• Unraveling of cost and schedule baseline integration (as distinct from the previous bullet, which points to the reliability of the baselines, this problem insinuates that the cost, schedule, and scope baselines are inconsistent with each other)
• Hide or obfuscate real variances in the reporting system.

Since it’s impossible to disprove a negative logically, attempting a defense of the targeted PM practice by disputing the original charge is futile. The optimal (if not only) manner to counter this version of the begging the question fallacy, dressed up as an appropriate method of rule-making, is to ask to see the data supporting the assertion. Does someone wish to introduce and formally implement a rule that mandates detailed estimates down to a specific level of the Work Breakdown Structure? Fine. Can this person provide a list of projects that experienced inaccurate reporting, poor baseline integrity, lack of baseline integration, or real variances being hidden that used the more generic Budget Estimate as the proximate, or even material cause? If the answer to the previous question is “no,” which I suspect would be the case in the majority of times if it were asked in the guidance-generating industry, then what is happening and has been happening is clearly outside the realm of management science, a place I don’t believe we PM-types want to find ourselves.

Besides, it would be unphilanthropic to do so.

[i] Retrieved from http://www.antonymsfor.com/philanthropy on December 13, 2020, 10:34 MST.

[ii] Retrieved from https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/fast-food3.htm on December 13, 2020, 17:46 MST.

[iii] Retrieved from https://www.mashed.com/148375/the-truth-about-how-many-burgers-mcdonalds-has-sold/ on December 13, 2020, 17:50 MST.