Wait…Into What, Exactly, Are We Being Digitally Transformed?

 

While on vacation in northern New Mexico, my wife, younger son, and I walked into an art gallery in Arroyo Seco, and almost immediately I saw a piece that I found fascinating. It was a landscape of what could be a southwest United States town at dusk, done with deep blues and brilliant oranges, and I was determined to have it. I don’t know, I suppose there’s just something about well-done artwork that has a calming, psyche-healing effect on people, and this piece certainly had that effect on me. I knew just where I wanted to hang it, too, on one of the longer walls in my house. When I asked the gallery owner about the piece, I mentioned that I could wish the painting was a little bit larger.

“How much larger?”

“Why?”

“We can print it out for you in almost any size you want.”

The image had been captured digitally, and, with some fairly advanced (and large) plotter/printers, the quality of the output made it indistinguishable from the original. I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been. I listen to my share of music, for example, but can think of only one time that music was produced from a non-digital source, and that was only after having run into an old friend of mine whose dad had run an audio store in the 1970s, who really wanted me to hear a recently-purchased vinyl album.

Of course, the movie industry has been profoundly changed by digital transformation (ProjectManagement.com’s theme for February). The movie Titanic, featuring a digital version of the titular ship, cost more to make than the costs associated with the original’s loss (excluding the lives lost, of course). Also consider that, according to Wikipedia, George Lucas makes an appearance as the director of one of the fifty most successful movies of all time (Star Wars: Episode 1, The Phantom Menace, at #42[i]). Lucas is probably most famous for his seminal work in introducing large amounts of Computer-Generated Imagery, or CGI, into his work. However, Alfred Hitchcock has two entries in the top fifty “best” movies, according to the IMDB (Vertigo at #11, and Psycho at #12[ii]), neither of which (obviously) had any CGI whatsoever, while Lucas does not appear on the IMDB list at all. I believe a reasonable inference is that, while CGI has undoubtably contributed an amazing number of backgrounds, settings, devices and even characters to cinema, the actual gauge for excellence still lies with the quality of the script, the performance of the actors, and their directors’ guidance, both during shooting and in the film editing room.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

I’ve lost count of the number of software packages that started out as PM programs that have made the attempt to become program, or even portfolio management systems. Some have pursued this capability by increasing the scale and breadth of its Work Breakdown Structure capacity, or by pulling in certain aspects of resource management (as an aside, using PM software to, say, level-load resources across activities is a legitimate PM function; trying to poach capabilities that truly belong to the General Ledger [e.g., timesheets] is not). While in many cases this expansion has advanced the abilities of Project Management Information Systems (PMISs) to both reliably predict at-completion times and costs as well as create a more reliable audit trail of PM decisions, there is scant evidence to suggest that these advances are actually helping bring more projects in on-time, on-budget. Ironically, the very projects that are most notorious for coming in late and over budget – Information Technology – are the same ones that exist square in the middle of the digital transformation phenomena. It must be stated and re-stated: a numeral is not a number, a CGI Titanic can’t actually float, and gee-whiz, sparkly “portfolio management” information systems can’t change project performance by themselves. That can only be accomplished by real-life PMs.

Before any members of GTIM Nation remind me, yes, I still hold to the Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management (HIROM) that states 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 worst managers who have 80% of the information so needed. This  HIROM, however, pertains to relevant information, not the Gaussian speculations listed in the risk register, or the Estimates at Completion derived from re-estimating the remaining work, and tacking on the actuals.

So, I’ll re-ask the question: these advances in PM coming from digital transformation – are we becoming better performers, or are we just looking better?

[i] Wikipedia contributors. (2021, January 29). List of highest-grossing films. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 01:53, February 1, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_highest-grossing_films&oldid=1003635060.

[ii] IMDB, “Top 100 Greatest Movies of All Time,” https://www.imdb.com/list/ls055592025/.