“Thanks, Captain (Strikethrough) Lt. Commander Obvious!”

 

In the television series Star Trek, The Next Generation (TNG), one of the main characters throughout its run was Lt. Commander Deanna Troi, played by Marina Sirtus. She was half-human, half-Betazoid, a species with telepathic abilities. As “ship’s counselor,” she occupied a chair on the bridge of the Enterprise, right next to Captain Picard, opposite First Officer Riker. With such prominent placement on the bridge of The Federation’s flagship, one would think she had an awful lot to contribute. And one would be mistaken.

Just as the Star Trek, The Original Series’ (TOS) character Commander Spock had the familiar line “most illogical,” or “fascinating,” Lt. Commander Troi is probably best known for her phrase “I sense he’s hiding something, Captain,” usually when such an observation could have easily been made by any of the non-telepathic members of the bridge crew, and almost always when the subject of her remark was obviously obfuscating. To be fair, there were a couple (at least) of episodes where her telepathic abilities provided an insight as to the true motives of that particular episode’s antagonist, but for the most part I found her intuitions to be clearly redundant.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Management World…

While not telepathic in nature, there can be no doubt that we PM-types have access to information and insights completely foreign to those outside our clan. For example, consider a grand assembly of the principals of a given organization, meeting to ascertain, well, the usual question on everybody’s mind: how are we doing? Of course, each specialty will interpret the question, technique for deriving an answer, and appropriate response very differently, so:

• Our friends, the Accountants, will want to answer the question by providing information from the general ledger, specifically the profit-and-loss statement. If they do foray into project performance space, it will be to project an Estimate at Completion predicated entirely on the rate of spending, by project.
• Our other friends, the risk managers (no initial caps) will turn to the risk register, add up the previous risk events that they had guessed foreseen that actually came about, summarize their collective costs, and compare that to the total time-phased contingency budget across the projects in the organization’s portfolio to see if risk-event-related costs are out-pacing their budgets. In the alternative, they will compute the approval rate of all of the Baseline Change Proposals submitted due to the occurrence of any risk event, on the risk register or not, to gauge the individual projects’ ability to compensate for said events and that are likely to come in on-time, on-budget.

Just kidding. Expect them to assert a judgement on organizational health based entirely on the projects’ willingness to pay them to set up a risk register.

• Our still other friends (GTIM Nation makes a lot of friends, don’t we?), the Communications Managers, will gauge organizational health by performing an assessment of the ability of all “stakeholders” to weigh in on key decisions in project space. They’re always searching for that one overlooked stakeholder who has the answer, but hasn’t been asked nicely to interact with the organization’s principals.
• Expect the Quality Managers (we can’t be their friends, due to their high standards) to proclaim acceptable (or not) organizational performance based on customer perceptions of the organization’s output, regardless of whether or not this output is consistent with the original scope baseline.
• The rogue estimators (make no mistake: if the estimators don’t belong to the PMO, they’ve gone rogue) will appear to come closer to the relevant information for this meeting by re-estimating the work remaining in the projects in the portfolio, adding on the cumulative actual costs, and proclaiming reliable Estimates at Completion. (Narrator: the numbers they generate are not, in reality, reliable.)
• Finally, we have the Project Management-types, who can predict with unmatched accuracy which projects in the portfolio will overrun, underrun, come in late or early, or any combination thereof, and by how much. Even the most basic of Earned Value Management Systems (EVMSs) can do this, and, when combined with Critical Path schedules the information becomes all the more accurate. But, since EVM/CPM systems are germane to we PM-types, none of the other specialties can come even close to the relevance and accuracy provided by these information streams.

Which brings us back to Lt. Commander Troi. If you have the ability to know that the Romulans are getting ready to double-cross you, step up and make that known, and sooner rather than later. Similarly, if you, as a PM-type (and member of GTIM Nation) know, based on your EVMS, which projects are doing okay, and which are failing to disclose probable overruns, step up and point it out, even if your assertions run counter to the other “experts” in the board room. Your cost and schedule performance information is accurate and relevant, theirs isn’t.

Otherwise, all of your PM expertise is analogous to sitting in a bridge chair, not connected to an actual station, and bleating “I sense they’re hiding something, Captain.”