Mr. Mom, Lt. Commander Data, and Canned Management

 

In the 1983 movie Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton’s character Jack Butler has been furloughed from his job as an automotive engineer, but after some time is invited to re-interview for it with his former boss and three other executives. Rather than an interview, however, the three execs demand that Jack answer for the fact that, after he had left, production in his former department dropped by 23% while expenses increased 19%. The very availability of these figures leads me to believe that Jack’s former organization had some elements of a Project Team, since had he headed a functional group (or even a purely Level-of-Effort-based Control Account or Work Package) there would have been no way of measuring precisely the drop in production. Since “production” is clearly being quantified and compared to some sort of baseline, we know that some version of a time-phased budget (the Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled, or BCWS) exists, as well as the ability to capture performance (Earned Value, or BCWP). Of course, all registered corporations have a General Ledger, but it’s not clear from the dialogue if the Actual Costs (ACWP) are available in the PM sense of the term, since the GL would have to be set up to track costs based on a Work Breakdown Structure, as opposed to an Organizational or Functional Breakdown Structure. I believe Actual Cost collection by WBS can be safely inferred, based on the following.

Let’s assume a cumulative time-phased budget of $100K, since, for the sake of this exercise, the precise dollar amount of this parameter isn’t really relevant, as the stated data points are given in percentages. Let’s further assume that the previous production performance was acceptable, meaning that this previous Earned Value figure (cumulative) would have been roughly equal to the prior time-phased budget (cumulative). Based on a production schedule baseline of $100K, in order for “production” to have dropped by 23% against the current time-period figures, the Earned Value number would have to have been $78K, with the corresponding Cost Performance Index being 0.78. I’m going to do a little more reverse-engineering/inferring, and assume that when they said that “expenses” increased by “nineteen percent,” they meant for the same amount of production, as opposed to, say, a similar passage of time (or, if they did mean over a period of time, that their expected production rate was relatively steady). To arrive at that figure, the Actual Costs (cumulative) would have had to have been $96,296.30 (USD).

As an aside, and in further confirmation that some form of an Earned Value Management System is in place in this fictional scenario, had the performance figures been based solely on the General Ledger, the comparison of the $100,000 budget to $96, 296.30 would have yielded a positive cost variance of $3,703.70. The only way to quantify the drop in production and relative increase in expenses is by capturing the output, or production – the very essence of Earned Value.

Back to Mr. Mom. Jack’s answer to the executives, after reminding them that he doesn’t actually work for their company any longer, is to assert the glaringly obvious: the proximate cause of the poor performance experienced was the decision to furlough Jack and his two key associates. Yes, it’s all fiction, but I believe it points to a common condition in …

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

If the decisions facing PMs in the real world were readily reducible to formulaic responses or canned strategies, we could all be replaced by computers or robots tomorrow (though, if I am to be replaced by a machine, I would like it to have super-strength, like Lt. Commander Data from Star Trek, The Next Generation). In scenarios like those experienced by the fictional Jack Butler, if a corporation sees decreased production and increased expenses after having furloughed specific people, it signals that those people were exhibiting a high degree of resiliency (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for January) in their decision-making. It’s an unfortunate but ubiquitous aspect of Project Management that true managerial resiliency seems to only get noticed when a PM makes decisions that are inconsistent with the owning organizations’ canned strategies, and something either very good or very bad happens. Consider the following payoff grid:

My takeaway from this payoff grid is that, since the whole demonstrative management resiliency game appears to be set up to reward those who stick to familiar decision-making templates, not to those who easily adjust to adversity or change, it’s a wonder that that capacity is seen as often as it is. Also, resilient managers knows when to abandon canned strategies, and show that they can’t be easily replaced by robots.

Even Lt. Commander Data.