Do PM My Way, Or I Will Hit You With A 5,760 Megaton Explosion

 

In the Star Trek (the Original Series, or TOS) episode The Changeling, the starship Enterprise is struck by an explosive device fired from the deep-space probe Nomad in the opening scene. Nomad is apparently responsible for the deaths of over four billion inhabitants of the Malurian star system, and Science Officer Spock reports that the device that hit the Enterprise had the explosive equivalent of over 90 of their photon torpedoes. As a point of comparison, the energy yield from such a blast would be around 5,760 megatons, enough to power New York City (at its current rate of consumption) for approximately 1,677,768 years[i]. After several more hits, Captain James Kirk manages to communicate with Nomad, and discovers that it is actually a combination of an alien and Earth-originating probes. Its re-formed identity has led it to believe that it must eliminate anything it finds to be “imperfect,” primarily “biological infestations” (i.e., life) that it encounters, and it is headed to (where else?) Earth in order to carry out its twisted, horrific mission.

Of course, Captain Kirk manages to talk Nomad into destroying itself (fans of Star Trek are aware of the good captain’s talent for doing so), but before he accomplishes this we are treated to many lines of dialogue from the supposedly perfect thinking machine. One line that Nomad repeats several times is “Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated.” A non-sequitur, of course, is a conclusion or statement that does not logically flow from the previous argument or statement.[ii] In other words, Nomad is alerting the speaker that they have offered up something irrelevant. The irony in this comes about when Captain Kirk informs Nomad that its belief that Kirk is actually Nomad’s creator, Jackson Roykirk, is itself in error and that, in order for Nomad to fulfill its programming, it must destroy itself. Heckuva price to pay for uttering something irrelevant, but then again Nomad was responsible for an awful lot of fictional alien deaths.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management Galaxy World…

Fortunately for we PM-types in the 21^st Century, offering up irrelevancies in the name of advancing management science in general, and PM science in particular, does not result in getting hit with a 5,760-megaton explosion, or even, it would seem, any condemnation at all. But management science is not advanced by chance interactions with extremely powerful alien probes combining elements of other management types’ techniques or practices. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that the entirety of Project Management can be summarized as the quest to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant information to the people responsible for delivering a set piece of scope on-time, and on-budget. Whether or not a certain information stream is accurate can be objectively evaluated, and whether or not it’s timely is mostly objective, with a bit of subjectivity thrown in. But relevance? That’s a whole different probe animal. What’s relevant to one manager might be entirely superfluous to another, meaning that coming up with a single litmus test for relevancy is difficult in the extreme, if not impossible.

Muddying the waters here is the dual nature of Project Management Information Systems. Their primary purpose is to put into the hands of the aforementioned responsible decision-makers what they need to bring in their projects on-time, on-budget. Unfortunately, this perfect thinking machine deep space probe perceived itself to be incomplete, and had a chance encounter with the alien notion that PMISs exist in order to provide an audit trail for third parties to come in after the project is complete and criticize decisions with which the reviewers disagree. The terrifying conflation of these two management science notions has led to a state of affairs where four billion a whole lot of small projects that would have otherwise employed simple and effective PMISs, such as Earned Value-based ones, instead eschew them, dramatically lessening the odds of these projects reaching a successful close.

Fortunately for the PM Galaxy GTIM Nation, I’m around to point out the clear logical breakdown of the notion that PMISs exist primarily as a tool for ex post facto criticisms of the Project Team; however, I haven’t observed the spontaneous self-immolation of the opposing concepts, at least not yet.

Maybe I need to hit that idea with a blast equal to ninety photon torpedoes.

[i] Based on the yield of a single photon torpedo, from Memory Alpha (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Photon_torpedo) , and the rate of energy consumption of New York City, from The Leonard Steinerg Team, (https://theleonardsteinbergteam.com/2012/04/how-much-electricity-does-new-york-use/), and lots of unit conversions and number crunching.

[ii] https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=non+sequitur+definition.