Resilient … Information?

 

When I saw ProjectManagement.com’s theme of Resiliency for the month of January, I assumed it was meant primarily to encompass human resiliency, particularly since we appear to be required to continue to operate under less-than-optimal conditions in the PM world for the foreseeable future. But harken back to one of Hatfield’s Irrefutable Rules of Management, that the 80^th percentile best managers with access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20^th percentile managers who have access to 80% of such information. This being the case, rather than point out and encourage the human factors that make up a resilient personality, I’d like to focus on something a bit more objective: which Project Management Information Systems are more resilient, or robust than others?

We can dispense with one of my favorite targets, risk management (no initial caps) right off the bat. Besides its inability to deliver information of any relevance, it is absolutely devoid of accuracy or precision, as demonstrated by the following thought exercise. Immediately prior to the flip of a fair coin, everybody knows that the odds of its landing one side facing up is fifty-fifty. Of course, after the flip, the coin has done one or the other, raising the question “Could a more precise prediction have been made?” Perhaps, if the one doing the predicting knows, with a high degree of precision, which side of the coin was facing up at the time of the flip, how much pressure went into the flip from both the thumb and arm motion, the precise points (I mean, like in microns) of the coin that were resting on the thumb and forefinger of the flipper, air density, temperature, weight and surface area of the coin, hardness or elasticity of the surface upon which the coin lands, exact height of the hand doing the flipping, etcetera, etcetera. Note that the absence of even one of these parameters immediately returns the predictor to the 50/50 call. Naturally, none of these data points are known at the time of the coin flip, or are even knowable to the level of precision needed for a greater than 80% accuracy, which is, ironically, the level of exactness called for in the infinitely more complex exercise of establishing a project’s contingency budget. Now, all that having been said, I suppose one could make the argument that risk management (no initial caps) is highly resilient, since its output is never held to any kind of an ex post facto evaluation, along the lines that, say, anyone could have predicted a 50% chance of a fair coin flip resulting in heads.

I’m not even going to touch Communications Management, since it doesn’t deal so much with information content as much as the manner and vehicles by which said information is conveyed to the people who need it to make informed decisions. I do, however, want to spend some pixel ink on our other friends, the accountants. I do not believe that double-entry bookkeeping can be said to be resilient. I think “brittle” is a better term, based on the myriad rules and guidance that goes in to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. If any of those rules are violated, or an incorrect amount is entered into the General Ledger, then all subsequent output is thrown off by that amount. It’s why balancing the books is so critical to the month-end closing process. A balanced General Ledger passes my three tests for valid Management Information Systems (accurate, relevant, timely), but resilient? Not so much.

“So, Michael” I can hear GTIM Nation ask, “which MISs are resilient?” Well, the one that pops to my mind is Earned Value. EV has a remarkable self-healing capability. For example, let’s say that your project’s estimator provides you with a wildly optimistic cost baseline of $100,000 (USD) over ten months, and you begin work not knowing how comically low this figure is in reality. At the end of the first month, with the time-phased portion of the work worth $10,000, and the actual costs coming in at $10,000, everything seems to be going okay, right? Except your project controls analyst is showing only 5% complete, therefore $5,000 earned. The PM could be forgiven for believing the accountant’s take that everything’s on-track, even as the project controls person is predicting an Estimate at Completion of double the original cost baseline; however, after Month 2, with cumulative budget and actual costs figures at $20,000 each, but Earned Value still lagging at $10,000, the red flag is inescapable. The original estimate was disastrously low, the project is in real trouble, and none of the other information streams could have quantified, or even predicted the problem so early in the project’s life cycle. In an epistemological sense, the EV information stream was hit by the adverse event of a poor initial estimate, yet continued to provide an essential function without a hitch.

And that, GTIM Nation, is what I call a resilient information stream.