How Reading The Data Will Help You Read The Room

 

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once commented to Dr. Watson that a person should be able to conceive of vast oceans teeming with life from simply observing a glass of water. Of course, had Victorian England’s favorite fictional detective had access to an electron microscope, he would have realized that the glass of Victorian-era well water was a vast ocean teeming with life.  And so it is with the main information tools of the PM trade, Earned Value and Critical Path Methodologies. Well, perhaps not exceedingly large environments teeming with life, but certainly much more useful information can be gleaned from these information streams than just that which appears named in a column heading of a Cost Performance Report (CPR), Format 1. The basis for gleaning this bonus information has to do with the fact that, while Project Management theories, techniques, and practices may come and go, many of the human elements remain the same. And, since PM will always have to do with actual people, these aspects of human nature will be having an outsized influence on cost and schedule performance for far longer than the theory-generators will be around.

Meanwhile, Back In The Project Reviews Conference Room…

Imagine participating in the next round of Project Reviews as a member of the organization’s Project (or Program) Management Office, or PMO. For this particular mental exercise, let’s posit that the portfolio is comprised of around twenty projects, each in the $1M to $5M range, and represented at this Review by its PM and Project Controls Analyst. To get through the entire portfolio’s performance and complete the meeting within a couple of hours, each project has five minutes to present (1) its current and cumulative cost and schedule performance, (2) a brief variance analysis if things are going badly, (3) planned corrective actions (if necessary), and (4) at-completion estimates, both in cost and schedule. Prior to the pandemic, the act of reading the room was fairly straight-forward. According to lifesize.com, between 70 and 93 percent of all communication is non-verbal.[i] With the PMs and Project Controllers actually in attendance, all the PMO staffers had to do was to note things like how people were dressed, how they carried themselves, their tone of voice and body language, etc. But with the advent of widespread virtual meetings, the act of reading the room to glean additional insights of the true health of the projects in the portfolio became much more difficult. If the attendees are using Zoom filters, it can get even harder, and even stretch into the realm of the unreal (“I am not a cat!”). Add to all of this a few tenets of basic PM human nature, such as:

• The PM rarely likes being there. He’d rather be off doing that PM stuff rather than explain to his superiors how he’s been performing, especially if there are problems (and there are always problems),
• The PM is usually convinced of his ability to correct his issues, and would rather not have any outside interference while doing so,
• Based on the first two bullets, few PMs have any incentive for early reporting of aspects that could threaten cost or schedule performance, even if the EVM and CPM systems have provided early detection of the same,

…and the PMO staff members find themselves at a distinct disadvantage. What’s a PMO to do?

Fortunately, a good deal can be gleaned from the Earned Value information, as shown in the following table.

I could go on (and often do), but GTIM Nation sees my point. The data tell a story, one that was formerly enhanced by direct interaction with the principals, but can now be gleaned from the values in the CPR.

Even if the presenting PMs look like cats.

[i] Retrieved from https://www.lifesize.com/en/blog/speaking-without-words/ on July 12, 2021 16:20 MDT.